CPAWS has asked me, as a…

CPAWS has asked me, as a regular contributor, to respond to the call for public comment on the Moose Management plan. Actually the title should be the Moose HUNTING management plan. The emphasis is almost entirely on increasing access to moose killing opportunities, including the very calves the Ministry should be protecting in order to slow the catastrophic decline in moose populations.

The recently announced government proposal to increase the hunting of wolves coyotes & other moose predators is so laughably inept and scientifically discredited that if enacted, together with the moose hunting proposals we can kiss both predators and prey goodby in Ontario.

Neither government nor hunters are willing to acknowledge that the insatiable greed of hunters for the thrill of killing a large, herbivorous, edible, and vulnerable animal is one of the proximate causes of its decline.

The other government enabled cause is the wilful disruption of the moose (and caribou) habitats by the various destructive extraction industries, timber, mining, drilling, exploration etc. in search of ever more wealth, and ever less real wilderness.

Both hunters and the government/industrial complex had better haul up their anchors and quit the scene before they create the veritable "dead zone" they seem to be planning.

Every few days we hear of more studies that chart the absolute devastation of wild life, world wide. Insect life is on the decline (thank you pesticides), amphibians, birds, bats etc. that make their living eating insects are also disappearing, no doubt starving. Ocean birds, mammals, predator fish are in steep deline as the forage fish are sucked and scooped up by both legal and illegal factory fishing fleets. When we hear of starving tuna attacking fishing boats off Nova Scotia the mind boggles and goose bumps erupt. In short, we are plundering the planet of all its life - and we expect to escape extinction?

Give your heads a shake!