Bubba Hunt

Recently I had a reader ask if I was concerned about the environment, and If I was concerned about how I would leave the wildlife for my descendants.
Well, the fact about the "environment issue" is the sportsmen are among the most "environment conscious" clan of Americans.
How could anyone who loves the wild critters as much as we do, possibly want to decimate them.
We put millions of sportsmen dollars into developing habitat, and managing wildlife in a responsible manner.
We realize that the future of wildlife depends on proper management.
My Father was a Government Trapper in Northern California for decades. He was paid to keep the predator population in order to protect livestock, and to allow the smaller critters to be able to live.
You will find that in the early 1970's, the poor old mountain lion was in danger of becoming extinct.
Actually the mountain lion had a very healthy population at that time.
Since that time it has been protected, and now has over-populated the Western states. The years since then has produced generations of cats that have lost their natural fear of man to the point of not having much of a fear at all.
Actually the big cats have began to view people as food in many cases.
My Father kept the coyote and mountain lion populations down in Northern California, to a place where sheep and cattlemen could raise their herds, and still make a living.
Today, the coyote population in California is so rampant that they have all but wiped out smaller animals.
There used to be a healthy population of red and grey foxes. Now they are all but gone.
The lands where I could still hunt pheasant, quail and cottontail, are all but barren.
By not managing the predator population has all but destroyed what should have been protected.
The problem came when The California Dept. of Fish and Game gave in to the pressure of special interest "Environmental Groups", and let them influence the management of wildlife in California.
In other words, fish and game management is deeply influenced by people who know very little about managing the fish and game.
Most of them, who don't happen to see the "nocturnal" mountain lion when they are in the outdoors, believe they surely must be in danger.
In fact "they" are the ones in danger when they take their nature walks, thanks to the over abundance of the lions.
I don't usually beat this drum, but it does kind of tick me off when a California Politician, instead of addressing his own issues, tries to make laws to control Alaska's wolves.
I wonder what, do you suppose, would happen to Alaska's moose and caribou population, should we not control our healthy population of wolves and bears?
I also wonder how outsiders would feel watching a cow moose die slowly due to being ham-strung by wolves.
I'm not against wolves, I just have the sense to know that they too, need managed in order to keep the healthy populations of everything else in line.
There's always two or three sides to everything.
I noticed when I was in Hollywood, on the Jay Leno show, that everyone was very interested in ANWAR.
I will say this about that...for some reason they had never heard the truth...when they did, it left them with a lot more questions. Most of them felt that they had been bamboozled by people who had never been there.
I have been there. I have spent two years in the Arctic, and I've been in Alaska since 1969. I know what's there and how the oil companies protect the oil fields with very STRICT rules.
I expect I'll get hate mail from some of these air-heads. I'm a big boy, I can take it. I'm also a former elected member of Interior Alaska's Fish and Game Advisory Board.
I don't claim to know it all, but I do claim to have some plain old "common sense", which seems to be uncommon these days.
Bubba Hunt, oldbearhunter@alaska.net