JIM BEERS

Sage Grouse & The Hunting and Fishing Survey

“Geez Beers, I saw more sharptails and sage grouse than I ever have or probably ever will in the rest of my life.” So said a friend who had just returned from an annual lengthy trip to Canada and Montana to hunt ducks, geese, pheasants, sharptails, and sage grouse. He has been hunting the prairies for fifty years and, like me, he is an educated and experienced wildlife biologist. I am hopeful that I might be invited to a dinner featuring some of those grouse this fall or winter. The sharptails he served last fall were about as good as it gets.

After I hung up I thought about Endangered Species scams and the National Hunting and Fishing Survey scam. I have received several requests in the past year to comment on the US Fish & Wildlife Service push to list the sage grouse as Threatened or Endangered. The FWS and their environmental and animal rights sleep partners have been touting doomsday for sage grouse for the last 3 or 4 years. Low populations of sage grouse (like warm summers are to global warming) were the trigger for the usual suspects to murmur the usual nonsense to forward their hidden agenda. The tune went something like this, “sage grouse are approaching extinction because of overgrazing and roads and human activities.” “Sage grouse are true native indicator species that tell us about an environment in need of preservation.” “Sage grouse will need enormous acreages to be set aside and only through the Endangered Species Act can we do that.” I could go on but you get the picture. Suffice to say that even under “pristine” or “native” or “Pre-Columbian conditions sage grouse populations and distribution went up and down and some years Blackfeet and Sioux got belly aches from eating so many one year and other years never even tasted them. Today however such natural changes are legal reasons for Federal seizure of state jurisdiction over these birds and justification for Federal bureaucrats to close public lands, buy more private land, stop public uses like camping, hiking, hunting, grazing, ranching, dog hunting, and probably a whole list of things that you and I can’t even imagine today...

Animal Use Rights

Picture a 2x4 drawn from right to left across a sheet of paper. On the right end you have the animal rescuers and the “barbless-hook, put-and-take fly fisherman” and the old man with a caged bird. On the left you have the dogfighters, bullfighters, trappers, and the game fowl breeders. Going from left to right we have an assortment ranging from bear and cougar hunters to circuses and rodeos to farmers and ranchers to dog breeders, dog owners, meat eaters and fish owners with aquariums.

Picture a large “pac-man” (remember them?) below the line. It is made up of many small words. On close examination we see words like Humane Society of the US, PETA, Greenpeace, SHAC, ELF, ALF, Wilderness Society, NRDC, Animal Protection Institute, Doris Day Animal Rescue League, Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, and many other names purposely obscured to conceal their identity. Like a colony of termites, each name sends tiny pac-men to gnaw at the board where the individual objects of their sect or cult are found. SHAC gnaws at the medical experimenters; PETA gnaws at the hunters, meat eaters and fishermen; the Wilderness Society gnaws at the hunters, rural residents, and public land users, the National Wildlife Federation gnaws at the farmers and ranchers, ELF & ALF try to burn the board. Slowly and steadily the pac-man approaches the left side of the board and begins devouring what is left of the board...