IDA Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Hunting’

Thanks to your letters to the European Parliament concerning  the seal hunt in Canada last year, the European Union (EU) responded with a  landslide vote to prohibit the sale of seal based products.  The great  news is it goes into effective this year!  With that measure in place, we  must now continue our focus on flooding Canadian Ambassadors or High  Commissioners with letters supporting the Harb Bill, which would end the  seal hunt in Canada.  The Canadian government must continue to hear  how much we still want the seal hunt to end.  In order to help push this  bill along, we need to make a concerted effort to educate others to take  similar action as well.

We have the unique opportunity to maximize our  efforts this year as there are other significant factors helping to reduce  overall incentives for sealers to kill.  The price for pelts last year  was terrible ($14/ each) and proved to be reason enough for many sealers to  stay home.  Ice conditions were also poor and provided less than optimal  conditions necessary for sealers to run around beating seals.  Under  similar circumstances this year, if sealers are really interested in the hunt,  they will have to spend more money on fuel to travel further north in order to  find more seals and suitable conditions to slaughtering them.  On top of  those factors to consider, they also now have to contend with an EU ban on  seal products, so there aren’t going to be too many buyers for seal skins.

This year, ice conditions are reportedly lower than they  have been in decades.  While this will deter many sealers from going out  to kill animals, poor ice conditions also have a negative impact on seal  populations.  Harp seals require compacted ice in order to give birth and  nurse their young.  Without ice in their normal birthing range, seals  have to travel farther north to find suitable habitat or give birth on beaches  that can be easily accessible by man.  Others may not have time or the  physical capacity to make an extended journey and will be forced to give birth  underwater where the pups will die.

The majority of Canadians are in  favor of the seal hunt ending, as are so many others compassionate  people around the world. The Canadian government must continue to  receive pressure both from within Canada as well as the international  community if the hunt in Canada is ever to end permanently.

For  more information on how you can help, please go to:  http://www.idausa.org/marine_mammals.html

On March 13, 2010, delegates from 175 countries will take part in the 15^th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Amongst dozens of proposals concerning imperiled species worldwide, they’ll be considering dangerous petitions from Tanzania and Zambia to sell more than one hundred thousand kilograms of elephant ivory and to decrease protections for elephants in those countries. Such “one-off” sales in the past have been disastrous for elephants and led to widespread poaching across Africa. Please read our action alert and send a letter today to Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, your senators and representative, urging them to ensure the U.S. votes “no” on these lethal proposals.

Photo Credit : Nicholas Fevelo for News – NYDailyNews.com

A deer massacre took place over two nights, January 7th and 13th, at a 530-acre farm preserve owned by Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. White Buffalo, Inc., a company of “sharpshooters” hired by Vassar, slaughtered sixty-four deer.

In order to make it easier to lure the deer, they were conditioned with food over a period of several weeks. After gaining their trust, they were shot at night as they returned to the area looking for food. Use of lights, known as deer jacking, was also allowed. Deer jacking involves shining a spotlight on a deer at night, temporarily “freezing” him or her in place (think deer in the headlights), making them an easy target for hunters.

After the first night of killing when 44 deer were killed, Vassar College President Catharine Bond Hill was asked by a local grassroots organization to put an end to the slaughter. President Hill refused, and 20 more deer were killed. This was the first leg of the Vassar-lethal deer management program by which the college plans to kill a total of 85 deer, reducing the population on the preserve from 100 down to 15.

Vassar took its cue from the deer curtailment protocols of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC), which advises that shooting deer is the best method for dealing with deer population control. Vassar was granted a permit by the NYSDEC to kill a maximum of 50 deer but it was revised to allow the college to take more. Vassar claims it investigated non-lethal deer management programs, such as fencing, fertility control, and relocation but opted instead to hire the sharpshooters.

The elite college claims the kill was “humane,” but White Buffalo was exposed in 2004 for placing plastic bags over the heads of deer who were shot but still alive during a cull in Akron, OH. Undercover video footage caught by the group SHARK shows deer flailing in distress for minutes after being shot.

Vassar’s intent was to finish the kill before students and faculty returned to campus from winter break, on January 20th, thereby avoiding public notice and eliminating the chance of any protest from taking place. The school claims it held public meetings informing students and the general public about the kill, but many citizens have complained that they were not notified and had no voice in the proceedings. The student newspaper, The Miscellany News, supposedly informed the students about the kill but was overwhelmingly biased in an article published on December 9th, the day classes ended. The study period started the next day and was followed by exams and the holiday season. Considering there was so little opposition to the deer kill on campus, it seems a near certainty that students were not aware of what it was all about.

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Though California State Flag celebrates their Grizzly bears. . . California's Black bears are in real danger.

A representative from IDA made a statement before the California Fish and Game Commission Thursday in opposition to the expansion of the number of bears who can be hunted in the state of California for the 2010 season. Also in the proposal is an increase in the range of legal hunting territory in the state.

IDA and others opposed to the Commission’s proposal to expand the quota by almost double and the range of legal hunting territory testified that this is unnecessary and inhumane sport hunting. The proposal also allows the use of new technology, such as GPS and “tip switches,” for the hunting of black bears. The approval of such a regulation by the Commission would only compound the current inhumane policy of allowing dog-pack hunting of these bears.

Like millions of compassionate Californians, we at IDA are greatly concerned about the welfare of wild animals that make up this state’s cherished wildlife. We truly can’t imagine the terror these black bears must feel as they are chased up a tree and cornered by a pack of dogs and then — panicked and immobilized — are blasted out of the tree by high-powered rifles.
Managing our wildlife populations should be accomplished in ways that first-and-foremost provide for the humane treatment of the wild animals. We would like to see that the Fish and Game Commission resort to humane ways of dealing with bear overpopulation and resolving human-bear conflict. It should not be accomplished by brutal high tech killing masked as “sport hunting.”  Ultimately, it is not the bears’ fault that we have moved into their space and they should not have to pay the price by being killed with such brutality as by amateur hunters armed with packs of dogs fitted with GPS devices.
IDA will watch this proposal closely, keep our California members up to speed and speak out for the magnificent black bears.

Westchester County, NY, a quiet suburb just north of New York City, has implemented a plan to kill deer using bows and arrows in several county parks.

I attended a meeting last Thursday, November 12, that was set up to explain to county residents why this slaughter is necessary. It seems we have lost biodiversity and now we must kill the deer to regain it.Here’s how it works. Once upon a time, before 1800, we lived in an idyllic landscape consisting of approximately 15 deer per square mile. Then the human species got busy, clear cutting the forests and killing predatory species like wolves and coyotes. Deer, too, were virtually wiped out by 1850.

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