Should this proposal become…

Should this proposal become law it has the makings of a public relations disaster for the hunting community.
On the surface I understand the emotion here. Cormorants are ugly looking birds, sound terrible, make a mess on islands, and, worse still, eat fish. Strong emotions say lets get rid of them.
But on deeper thought lets think of the optics here. Picture this scene. its a warm summer Saturday in cottage country. At 2:00 in the afternoon a boat with three "hunters" motors out to a Cormorant "infested' island. Out come the shotguns and the shoot'in starts. Minutes later out come the cell phones from passers by. The video makes the local news. The public is appalled at the waste. The hunting community receives another black eye.

This idea doesn't have any merit behind it. Its going to make hunters look bad. Furthermore I have yet to see a study that indicates Cormorants are actually having a negative one gamefish populations.

I regularly fish a popular Kawartha lake with a large Cormorant colony on a main lake island. In 30 years of fishing I haven't noticed any decline in panfish or gamefish populations beyond walleye, which declined but are recently rebounding.

This is a proposal best not implemented.