By JIM MATTHEWS
www.OutdoorNewsService.com
Small game and predator hunting will continue in the Mojave National Preserve.
A federal court in Washington D.C. upheld a decision by the National Park Service to reject a petition from PEER, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, to end small game and predator hunting on the Preserve under the guise of protecting endangered desert tortoises. The NPS rejected the PEER petition because there was virtually no scientific evidence to support the claim, and the court backed up the park service scientists on this issue.
It also said the decision did not violation the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) nor the park service’s Administrative Procedure Act, shutting PEER down on all fronts. The National Rifle Association and Safari Club International also joined the park service in fighting the PEER petition.
Anti-hunting environmental groups have been arguing since day one of Preserve’s creation against a wide variety of hunting that takes places in this part of the desert, often coming up with incredibly tortured reasons for hunting to be banned. This petition suggested that the hunting of small game (cottontail and jackrabbits) and predators (gray fox, coyotes and bobcats), which are shot on the ground rather than flying like quail and chukar, endangered desert tortoises.
The astronomical odds of such an occurrence happening borders on the impossible, but these groups were incensed when the NPS simply didn’t predator and small game hunting as they had requested several years ago. Those initial requests were not based on any scientific reasons, they simply didn’t like hunting, and especially the hunting of furbearers. So they started grasping at straws to waste the time of NPS staff in the court system. Out of their fertile little minds came the idea a tortoise could be accidentally shot by a hunter. The fact it made it all the way to a DC court is ludicrous, but at least the decision was correct.
For the record, there is no evidence of tortoises ever being shot by accident by hunters. Or even on purpose. There was a hue and cry when a tortoise researcher found than some old tortoise shells had bullet holes in them, but when someone actually did forensic analysis of those shells, they did not find any shells where the holes were made before the tortoise was long dead. In other words, the bullet holes were all made postmortem, usually years after the tortoise had died.
Don’t think for a minute this issue will go away with this court decision. Groups like PEER and the Humane Society will likely press for federal legislation banning the hunting and trapping of furbearing animals on all federal lands (using wolves, coyotes, and bobcats as the poster children). They’ll do this simply because they are against hunting, not because there is any scientific or biological reason to do so. But you can count of some incredibly contrived reasons to enact such bans.
Here is the really ironic part of the proposed ban on the hunting of coyotes and bobcats under the guise of protecting tortoises: Those two species eat tortoises. Eliminating the hunter harvest means there would be more predators in the desert to eat even more tortoises – and that would undoubtedly mean far more tortoises would be eaten than would ever get killed by a stray hunter’s bullet.
There have been a number of proposals that would have a positive impact on tortoise numbers. Scientists have identified that ravens have the biggest controllable impact on the tortoise population, and a simple way to bring the exploding raven population back in line with its historic numbers would be to have a hunting season, and if that didn’t reduce raven numbers enough, add a bounty on the birds. No one is suggesting wiping out ravens, just reducing the population. But heaven forbid we’d actually do real management.
