Free: Contests & Raffles.
I'd go to the meeting but I've got scouting and hunting to do. This is a bad time of the year to be sitting in meetings. But I'm sure glad some are able to go!
mulehunter is being a little hard on the WDFW. Overall, they are not "anti-hunting". There's no way they could be, that would go against their whole purpose of being. Many of the employees are hunters. My feeling is that they don't want the wolves here anymore than we do. But what are they going to do? They have to follow the laws and all the proper politically correct procedures. I'm pretty sure they know that a good portion of their funding comes from us hunters, but they also have the pro-wolf groups pushing for the wolves, and those groups have money and they are more organized than we are. So I really think what the WDFW is doing is trying to come up with a plan that will be acceptable to both sides. It's a compromise. No matter what they do, hunters are going to demand less wolves and pro-wolf people are going to want more.
tomorrow meeting for Elk/deer plans??. Are they gonna reduce harvest in future. Mulehunter
I feel I'm really more even keeled about the WDFW than most of you. That being said, I'll now contradict myself. Rocky put a slide up that said hunting is an effective tool to manage wolf populations. When questioned about this, he admitted that hunting can't control a wolf population. When asked what other tools will we have, he responded with "trapping". Yet that method has not proved effective either. There is no management plan once we have wolves and that's one of the major concerns from everyone. The point is, that is one example of a handful I can cite that leads me to believe or come to the conclusion that Nathan and Rocky are trying to deceive us with the current proposed wolf plan. Instead of being neutral, they are acting as advocates and trying to convince and sell us on it. When they get caught speaking in mistruths or putting information that is misleading on a slide to convince us to adopt this plan, it makes me think I'm being deceived and now I am skeptical about everything they say. I'm sure they are good at what they do, but advocacy is not one of them. Scary to think what a skilled advocate could do if they led a project like this. Giving facts that support your position but are untrue or misleading is a common tactic to use but it's very risky. If you get caught by someone that is smart enough to know better, the tactic fails miserably.
