Dammit, my state strikes the news again…Wisconsinites really aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, are they?
You seem like a really nice person. I like your careful insight, your respect for other’s ideas, and your propensity to share relevant articles. Keep up the good work.
Your contributions are noted as well. (checks forum)
Maybe take the stick out of your ass. You’ll walk better that way.
OK I have to admit, that was funny. You’re a Brit, aren’t you.
Okay, I’m about the tree-huggingest pro-environment wildlife-lover imaginable and have never killed an animal in my life, but I can’t see what’s so bad about this other than a really stupid-ass miscalculation on the part of the Wisconsin DNR, which it seems they’ve admitted to.
There was a legally mandated gray wolf hunting season, hunters who were legally issued with wolf hunting permits hunted them some wolves, and the DNR didn’t close the season fast enough to stay within the quota. Nowhere do I see any indication that any of the hunters knew at the time that their kills were exceeding the quota, or that anyone was deliberately trying to kill more wolves than the quota allowed.
If I’m wrong about any of that, please correct me and I’ll join the outrage.
The outrage is that there’s a wolf hunting season at all. They’re recovering but not exactly thriving.
The decision to take them off the endangered species list is controversial and yet another of the nigh uncountable politically motivated outrages of the Trump Administration.
In addition to what Great_Antibob said, Kimstu, my two pfennigs from the radicalized state of Idaho is that people celebrate and plan wolf hunts with glee and proclaim their kills with great braggadocio as though they’d done some great act of bravery and self sacrifice by shooting an animal caught in a trap from afar. These are people who employ the same sort of willful ignorance about the impact wolves cause to various wild life and livestock populations as they apply to the presidential election results and election fraud.
I don’t know how Wisconsin Fish and Game works, but last time I had a hunting license here in ID, there was a central computer that tracked how many of what tags and permits for which animals had been issued, so for me, right now, the “accidental” issuance of too many permits to take a wolf doesn’t quite pass the smell test.
They aren’t even the sharpest tools in the marshmallow bag.
I imagine that the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources had issued the amount of permits that they believed would yield the number of killed wolves for which they had planned (since not everyone who is issued a permit, for any sort of hunting, winds up getting a kill).
It sounds like it was an issue of the hunters being far more effective, and more rapid, in killing wolves than the DNR expected them to be.
Thank you Colorado voters that by a slim majority voted in a safe space for wolf reintroduction.
I don’t like Biden but I’ll fist-pump him if he corrects this and soon.
Am I mistaken that it also happened during the Obama administration?
Well, that does sound assholish, although ISTM that if we as a society are going to allow individuals to legally kill wildlife for sport then we can’t really complain if they enjoy it and brag about it. Points taken also about the recklessness and mishandling of the quota setup, so thanks all for fighting my ignorance.
Are you suggesting that Trump removed them from the endangered species list only after Obama removed them from the list first?
No, you’re mistaken in implying any kind of equivalency. The Obama administration delisted 29 species from the Endangered Species List while adding 340 new species to the list. The ones that were delisted were done because of the successes of species recovery.
With respect to the gray wolf, the Obama administration had delisted only the Northern Rockies gray wolf, which eventually affected Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, due to significant population recovery. The Trump administration delisted the gray wolf across virtually the whole of the contiguous US, an action motivated entirely by politics, and which the Center for Biological Diversity called “a death sentence for gray wolves across the country”. TIME magazine suggested the actions risked pushing many species to extinction.
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/correction-gray-wolves-endangered-story-74192466
Well, if that’s how they operate, uh a face palm is in order, I’d think. Not very good management of wildlife. I’ve heard that white tail deer are a real problem in that part of the country, bordering on pest status, if true, this helps explain that in part.
Wisconsin does, indeed, rely on hunting for a fair amount of its control of the deer population (there were 188K deer taken during last fall’s deer season).
They had done several previous wolf trapping seasons over the past decade or so (though this was the first one since 2014), so one imagines that they did have some idea of what the permit-to-kill ratio would be. However, they did it at a different time of year than previously, and that might well have played into the substantial overshooting of their goals.
Well, its difficult to argue with that, objectively.
I used to regularly appear in WI courts. MAN do they take their deer hunting seriously. Just recall initially being taken aback when a federal judge starts shooting the shit about deer kill from the bench. And the #s are phenomenal. But I shortly just kept up on enough hunting lingo to suggest I gave a shit.