Opinion/Editorial
HOW DOES THIS HAPPEN IN WISCONSIN?
How is it that Wisconsin has become the place where outside hunters, from Kansas, Wyoming, and more, are coming to kill our animals? Do we have that many wild animals in this state? Forty-two hundred bears and about 1200 wolves but, no matter, they have been and are coming for all of them. Of the one point four million deer living in the state, following the hunting season in 2020, there were only a million left. The wolf hunt is allowing almost twenty-five percent of the wolf to be taken and the bears about twenty-five percent of them too. Why is this going on?
There are some nuisance complaints about deer, wolves, and bears, but nothing anyone at any time would consider serious. There have been no deer, bear, or wolf attack deaths against humans over the last one hundred years of record-keeping. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources gave out almost ten thousand tags for the killing of bears last week. You get one tag, and you can kill one bear, it does not matter the sex of the bear or the age (oh, they have to weigh at least a hundred pounds, so it is currently believed that all bear hunters are carrying portable scales into the woods). The DNR only expects about 25% of the bear tags to be used. That’s only ten percent of the bear population in Wisconsin, though. But these ‘hunters’ can kill all ten thousand if they can find the bears to do it.
How do they find the bears? Oh, they are very artful and skilled hunters! They use teams of hunting dogs. When the bears are properly run down and trapped somewhere the hunters come on their snowmobiles or ATVs and shoot them. No, bears do not make for very good eating, for the most part, so the ‘hunters’ skin them, and then keep their heads and pelt as fireside souvenirs. The hunters can set out food all winter long to feed the bears so they will be pacified to shoot when the hunters are ready. You may not interfere with a hunter in that pursuit, by the way, or mess with the ‘bait’ he puts out, or even stop him from coming onto your property supposedly in pursuit of a wounded animal. These acts are all against the law in Wisconsin. These totally protective laws are some of the reasons that out-of-state hunters all want to come to Wisconsin to hunt.
We call them hunters in Wisconsin, and there are probably some of them who actually hunt to kill the game, dress it, and then store and eat it, but there are tons, like the ones who killed twenty-five percent of the entire Wisconsin gray wolf population in two days last week for sport, and they aren’t done counting yet. Seems that Mr. former President Trump made sure to have the gray wolf taken from its protected status during his last few days in office.
By the way, there has never been, in all of Wisconsin’s written history, a human being killed by a wolf. Not one. But here are these supposed hunters, out there to kill the wolves while they are carrying their babies at this time of year. There’s no limit, and none on bears either, so you can kill the females and the cubs too. For ‘sport,’ that is.
What is wrong with these people? When can private property owners defend their own properties from trespassers, who include these hunters among them? Why are hunters exempt from trespass laws when in pursuit of game? At what point can property owners start setting up booby traps for these hunters? You can’t do that under Wisconsin law, however. By the way, if you kill a wolf in a pack, many times the pack does not survive, as the members are that closely linked together. It is a shame that Wisconsin is becoming a target for these out-of-state hunters and our animal life is paying the price. How about out-of-state hunters paying two or three thousand for the privilege? That might change things substantially.
