Free: Contests & Raffles.
I didn't see anything racist with my post and there certainly wasn't any racist intent with it; but I don't believe that was purpose of calling me a racist was it? I think you simply wanted to shut down that particular line of conversation and didn't want this thread to be about wolves, so you called me racist and tried to shut it down. You don't get to call me a racist and walk away unscathed. My point is the Colville tribe is killing wolves off the reservation in national forest lands which is benefiting Elk, Deer and Moose. It galls me that due to Washington ineptness I cannot do the same even though it's my woods too, just as much as it is theirs. The feds have already delisted wolves, we could hunt them and the feds wouldn't care. We could trap them and the feds wouldn't care. They've turned over wolf management to the state. The feds aren't holding us back, it's WDFW. They need to modify the wolf plan and delist everything east of the Cascades immediately and work hard on documenting everything west of the Cascades. Wolves are replacing all human hunting if we take ourselves out of the equation by limiting hunting or closing GMU's then we'll never see those GMU's reopen without predator control. Look, Washington isn't reinventing the wheel here. Other western states (ID, MT, WY) have already ran this cycle of wolf expansion, they've already dealt with collapsing herds and have built herds back up with wolf presence but they had to kill back a lot of wolves to do it. They also have tools (hounds, trapping) that Washington doesn't have so that only exacerbates Washington's problems. simply put:Any discussion that doesn't talk about predators is mute.
For every action there is a reaction. I have read several discussions on this topic in this forum and I am surprised when it comes to talking about how to help the herd with reducing harvest in one form or another that it rarely comes up that it could be detrimental for a few years down the road. I am not trying to push wolves into the equation alone but it is all predators. We have to manage the predators as a whole, more responsibly, before we look at cutting numbers of harvest. Reality is that people get fat at a buffet. Animals not only get fat and healthy but reproduce greatly and successfully with a buffet. A buffet is what we will be feeding them and as they grow in numbers the number of elk will not likely increase as a person would expect with our reduced harvest but instead slightly increase before decreasing for a period of time until the threshold of not enough starves out a large portion of the predators. Then you will see the cycle repeat itself until there is balance. However, balance that keeps permit seekers as well as what I would venture to say "most" hunters happy will not ever be achieved without extreme changes to the predator management. I may be out in left field on this one, but I think we will see short lived bursts in the population of elk and deer if we were to continue to harvest them with the quotas that we currently hunt them at. This is the quickest way to reducing their predator numbers. Just a thought.
