Letters to the editor | ABQJournal Online

Industry corrupts hunting

RE: MARCH 5 OP-ED from the NM Council of Outfitters and guides

I agree with one assertion from the executive director of the New Mexico Council of Outfitters and Guides: Hunting has become an “industry.” The Council of Outfitters and Guides is a perfect example of a special interest that profits from hunting by promoting it.

Decisions made by the New Mexico Game Commission and New Mexico Game and Fish Department are much more likely to be based on the profits that industry generates than on the needs of nature. It is a vicious cycle. Hunters pay the agency in the form of license purchases and the agency makes decisions that affect how much money they can make from hunters.

Conservation and maintaining the sustainability of the entire wildlife community don’t really figure into it. As that quote says, “It is impossible to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.”

New Mexico bear and cougar hunting quotas are today not based on the best available science. Trapping mid-sized carnivores like bobcats and foxes – with no quotas or bag limits at all – is done to profit from selling their fur.

New Mexico Game and Fish does not know what the populations of these species are or how they are trending. Coyotes are killed in unlimited number without any license purchase needed, so these killers are not even contributing to the revenue stream of the agency. However, this misguided arrangement does please livestock interests, yet another “industry” with its hand in the wildlife pie.

Someday, I hope hunters will return to their conservation roots. Hunters like Aldo Leopold wrote eloquently about “thinking like a mountain” and the importance of all the parts. For now, as an “industry,” hunting is losing its conservation credibility, and it is the money that has corrupted it.

MARY KATHERINE RAY, Winston

Wildlife worth more than jerks

A MAN GETS out of a truck, walks to a cave where a cougar is cornered by dogs and shoots it. And this is called hunting? I hope that serious hunters in New Mexico are outraged by the actions of this creep millionaire Jason Roselius. That cougar was of far more value to the planet than jerks like Roselius, (Larry) Webb and (Scott) Bidegain, all of whom apparently see wildlife simply as a way to make money … .”

RICHARD M. BERTHOLD, Albuquerque

Letters to the editor | ABQJournal Online