So, let me get this straight! According to John Holyoke’s report in the Bangor Daily News, the excuses the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (MDIFW) give for increasing the allotment of “Any-Deer Permits” (ADP) to over 66,000 is because of 10 consecutive years of mild winters. I can say they were mild for me because I was in Florida, but record breaking snowfall evidently doesn’t account for any part of the Winter Severity Index.
We hear also that most of those ADPs are being handed out in Wildlife Management Districts (WMD) in Central and Southern Maine where populations of deer are the highest, and yet ADPs are being issued in zones where there haven’t been any for a few years and where record deep snowfalls occurred.
And if that isn’t enough to start your blood boiling just a tad, read what Lee Kantar, acting deer biologist(?) said (because the former deer biologist quit and moved on): “Kantar said that as the DIF&W continues to work on its next generation of long-range management plans, a subtle shift is emerging. In past years, it was common for biologists to issue population estimates for various big game animals. When asked for a statewide estimate on deer, Kantar said biologists are focusing more on the health of the population than sheer numbers.
“We’re not abandoning the thought of ‘How many critters are there out there?’ but the means for us doing that, we do as part of monitoring health, as well,” Kantar said.”
This “subtle shift” is a convenient new tool that is part of a continued reduction in accountability for wildlife managers. The ONLY way a biologist can honestly determine how many ADPs to issue to meet population goals is to know how many deer are within a WMD. To somehow approach things from the perspective of “I think the herd is healthy in WMD 27, therefore I will increase ADPs,” is a step backwards of about 40 years.
Now, it appears, the convenient excuse will be that managers don’t really have a handle on deer populations and will, with the onset of a new Romance Biological deer management plan, sense the condition of the herd and make excuses from there. In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, this is right in line with the convenience of Climate Change (CC = 33). With Climate Change and managing deer for “health” is there really any reason Maine needs any wildlife biologists?
The third excuse of convenience is now emerging where the issuance of 66,000-plus ADPs is Lyme Disease. Deer are carriers of ticks that spread Lyme disease. With the perpetual effort to scare the living hell out of people over Lyme disease, social pressures will demand that MDIFW kill more deer. Historically when those demands are made, the deer get killed and licensed sportsmen are not allowed to do the job and residents are not allowed to benefit from the resource. Also, understand that where Lyme disease is said to be most prevalent is in areas where land is heavily posted to prevent access for hunting those deer. As with any Totalitarian society, the problem is created by the totalitarians who in turn demand that government solve their problems. And we know what kind of job government does at anything they do.
Maine residents and sportsmen should look of a “subtle shift,” or maybe not so subtle shift, toward a new movement of Romance Biology and Voodoo Science to guide the wildlife managers to wallow in their own brilliance of disease creation and scarcity because they are fully engaged in the effort to “change the way we look at and discuss wildlife management.”
