I am morally and ethically…

I am morally and ethically opposed to the suggestions within this proposal to hunt cormorants in an open season straight through nesting times. Proposals like this make me lose faith and trust in government and human kind. How can it be justified that an entire species WILL face extinction so that fishermen can have more fish to catch? Be not mistaken, the proposals presented here will cull this species as they are also facing Newcastle Disease which is, albeit more slowly, also killing off large numbers of young birds. The numbers of dead cormorants which this hunt would enable are astromnical and will be species homicide.

If fishers choose to make a game, a sport, of taking life, not because they depend on it to survive, but because it is their "hobby" then I cannot see how we can standby and justify that it's okay to make their game a little easier by knocking out the competition. That is what the cormorant is. A contender in the fishing world. So we are going to forbid its presence because someone doesn't have a great day fishing?!? Are they going to spend less money fishing Ontario lakes and its all the cormorants' fault?

The cormorant is one more piece of the puzzle of Earth's ecosystems and biodiversity which we so desperately need to protect, on the whole. Add to the long list of pollinators, wolves and boreal caribou (read Mowat's Never Cry Wolf and you'll think much differently about how humans scapegoat environmental problems everywhere but to themselves), aspen trees and all the others that we killed off and said "oops" later. We always wait until it's too late before we ask questions about how the creatures that are threatened or on verge of extinction (or worse, already gone), these seemingly itty bitty insignificant creatures, affect whole hemispheres.

We blame cormorants for stripping trees? For their feces polluting our lakes? How many forests and creatures within have died at the hands of road building and developments? How much do people pollute the lakes as they pour emissions into it from their recreational sea-doos? What a contradiction. Blame the birds. What a total joke. How about we stop thinking we own this earth and start taking care of it instead? We can't just put dollar signs on everything and expect that this planet will bounce back and keep providing for us.

The cormorants threaten someone's bottom dollar, they're an inconvenience to business, and so we remove them? Nature will even out cormorant populations. Why can we not view their increase in number over the past years for the positive sign that it is? DDT's effects are finally dissipating enough that life is returning to our lakes.

If the anglers of Ontario cannot respect their contenders and play at their game with at least some semblance of humane ethics, then they can find another hobby because their pastime WILL NEVER justify the loss of yet another precious species. Have we learned nothing yet about upsetting the balance? Soon WE will be the species facing extinction and it will be our own accumulation of decisions and actions like this one that are to blame. Seemingly micro decisions and consequences, killing off, poisoning, polluting our planet with along list of decisions like this one. No one will be fishing or hunting then.

Please. Do not add another item to the agenda of how we annhiliated the only place we're meant to call home. Stop the cormorant hunt from becoming a reality.