Hate them. Typo fixed, I’m on mobile and have fat thumbs.
Same thing happens here. To cowtow to the people who don’t want it they have to promise to respect people’s property rights by baring the sharpshooters from entering private land, even with permission. As a result the culls are usually called off early, and take few deer.
Curiously the conservatives who oppose “government operatives” (professional hunters on contract with the Department of the Interior or State DEC) on their land frequently stump for the right to hunt anywhere. Including on private land and at schools and shit, for private/recreational hunters without permission or restriction.
One area by me has been involved with a pilot program from Cornell. Use these feeders that scrape ticks off the deers necks. Food pellets contain antibiotics and drugs to sterilize the deer. Quite cheap and works very well to both control population and tamp down tick born illness.
Conservatives oppose expansion because, I shit you not, birth control is wrong.
Which (in my ever-so humble opinion) is exactly how it should be.
They are awesome, majestic, inspiring, peaceful creatures who survived our very best efforts to exterminate them and (apparently) hold us no ill-will. They are most likely more intelligent than we are, certainly better adapted to their environment, and are some of the largest creatures to have ever inhabited this earth over hundreds of millions of years and happen to coincide with our being here.
I still get excited seeing a harbor seal or grey seal visiting our harbor and live for Orca or other whale sightings. One of the best memories of my life is camping just outside Skagway and waking up to see a pod of whales surfacing and hanging out just offshore.
It makes me sad that someone could see those whales and think they are a threat and call 911. That they would start up their engines when a whale is under the boat (massively illegal, BTW). God help us all if they had had spear guns, rifles, or other items on board.
Hunting great whales was only internationally banned in the mid 80s. It is entirely plausible that an adult whale you see today experienced seeing humans kill their close relatives.
Just how damn rare the big species got by the mid century. It was crazy rare to see anything larger than a Wright Whale anywhere near shore until late in the 90’s and most of your commercial whaling in the 20th century (and now) focuses on much smaller and shorter lived species.
And how much population bounce back there has been.
While there are probably plenty of whales out there that had run ins with whalers. The chances that any given whale you run into is one of those are pretty low.
Yeah its pretty bonkers. It’s NY, jusy 50 miles east of NYC. And we’re one those few counties where Trump had majority support since before he officially became a candidate.
911 isnt just the police. They would dispatch the coast guard if necessary. Just in case the docile, harmless whale accidentally gets too close and capsizes the boat.
But I live on the smaller of 2 peninsulas, jutting off the largest island, in an achepelligo, in the densest population corodor in the United States.
For context I’m currently waiting on the first of 2 ferries I take home from work. The land mass I live on is only 2 miles wide. And my town includes an Island that is only accessible by ferry. A ferry in a town in another state that takes 6 hours to drive to from the rest of the town.
We apparently just don’t have the habitat left to be a good candidate for reintroducing wolves. A couple of our largest state and federal parks (which are tiny compared to most in the region) might sustain small packs. But not neccosarily healthy breeding populations. And not at the level needed to control the deer. And negative interactions with humans would be unavoidable.
Its one of the big reasons the deer are such an issue. They can’t migrate seasonally the way they do on the main land. And they can’t just move into to areas with more space and more food as their population goes up.
Would work great on the mainland though. Think at least a few of the states surrounding us already have wolf populations. Definitely have bears and coyotes.
