Relationships With Fish and Game Departments at All-Time Low

Yesterday in the Missoulian, republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Hill stated, “One of the things I’ve heard everywhere that I go is that the relationship today between Fish, Wildlife and Parks and landowners and sportsmen is at an all-time low.”

Should this come as a surprise to anyone? Do people think that this is something that has happened overnight? No and no! And this seemingly newly discovered phenomenon isn’t relegated to Montana. It’s an epidemic that reaches every state in this Union. Sportsmen and landowners have almost as bad an opinion of their fish and game departments as Americans do of their Congress or the presidency. And why is that?

There once was a day when fish and game departments were constructed with the idea to devise plans that would perpetuate game species so that everyone had a chance to stock up on food and/or sell animal furs to supplement or provide income. These fish and game departments originally were a direct extension of the outdoor sportsmen.

Not anymore! Fish and game departments have become giant government agencies with too many powers and a focus that caters to environmentalism and animal rights and animal protection. Along with this demented change in direction and overreaching power grab, landowners are not only losing rights to use their land as is necessary but in some cases they lose their land altogether. And with this do we really need to doubt what Hill says, that this relationship between sportsmen/landowners and fish and game is at an all-time low?

When fish and game departments functioned as a supporting entity of the sportsmen, there was also a certain degree of ownership and pride in that ownership. Are any readers old enough to remember the day when you could actually talk with a representative from a fish and game department and be treated as an equal, one with respect and an understanding of who paid whose salary? That pride of ownership kept sportsmen involved in the process. They knew their voice would be heard and when it wasn’t, fish and game personnel were out of a job.

Today, fish and game departments pretend they are interested in the sportsmen. Some even masquerade as humans who understand their role and function as that of serving the public. But don’t be fooled. They are a government organization. Governments are not any friend of the people and they certainly are not friends of sportsmen or landowners. This is because sportsmen and landowners are what stand in their way to fulfill their agendas of protecting wildlife, ridding human presence from the forests and fields, relegating us all to concrete jungles and levying control over us all. Get rid of us and they get what they want, or at least think they do.

But the problem that perpetuates this insanity is that government attempts to fix government with more government. It’s what keeps them collecting a salary. Talk is cheap. Words in this case are nothing more than campaign rhetoric, meaningless drivel to placate the masses in order to steal your vote.

Until states regain control over their environmentalism-strangled fish and game departments and change the direction and goals back to game management combined with an understanding and respect for landowners, nothing will change. Actually look for it to get worse.

The people are lazy, brainwashed robots who want government to do their bidding. Why do you think we are where we are now? Government is not the answer to government.

Tom Remington