A man and his dog hunt ducks in North Park on opening day of the 2014 hunting season. (Denver Post file)
Re: “The many ways hunting benefits Colorado,” Nov. 8 Perspective article.
I found Jerry Neal’s article on the benefits of hunting to be incomplete, unbalanced and self-serving. Neal’s position that hunting is ethical and humane disregards both concepts. Instead, he tries to justify a hunter’s “well-placed shot” at a defenseless animal as being better than the animal being attacked and consumed by wolves. Apparently he does not understand that wolves attacking and consuming animals is one of nature’s ways of controlling animal populations.
Neal states that trophy hunting is banned in Colorado and wasting game meat violates Colorado law, but he does not explain how Colorado enforces laws that forbid those practices. I would submit that quite a bit of game meat is wasted and many trophies hang from hunters’ walls.
Unfortunately for Neal and the wildlife that Colorado Parks and Wildlife is intended to protect, his case is not persuasive.
Bob Davidson, Denver
This letter was published in the Nov. 15 edition.I find much to agree with in Jerry Neal’s article and some things that require comment.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife receives no general taxation funds; therefore, its programs are paid for almost entirely by Colorado hunters. This needs to change. If wildlife management, “including threatened and endangered species programs, wildlife reintroductions and habitat conservation,” is important to us as a state, tax dollars must support the work. We need to fund a state wildlife agency responsible to all of us, not simply to those who pay for its policies through hunting licenses and fees.
I am glad to know that Colorado law requires that animals taken be consumed. In our sister Rocky Mountain states, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana, wolves are killed for trophy in alarming numbers. Myth and misconception fuel the onslaught. Public funding of our wildlife agency, a state intolerance for trophy killing, and education and community dialogue about wildlife management may avoid a similar sad result.
Monica Glickman, Denver
This letter was published in the Nov. 15 edition.Jerry Neal claims that the controversy surrounding the death of Cecil the lion has led to misconceptions about big-game hunting in North America. No misconceptions, Mr. Neal. Why was Cecil the lion hunted and killed? For enjoyment. Why do big-game hunters hunt in North America? For enjoyment. This joy of killing animals is readily evidenced by the photo accompanying the article. A group of five people with broad smiles surround the dead bird that was killed. Hiding behind rationalizations will not change the perverse form of entertainment that hunting truly is.
Lynn Ackerman, Highlands Ranch
This letter was published in the Nov. 15 edition.Traditional justifications for hunting not only take no consideration of a broader ethic of life value, but also completely ignore an important aspect of population biology. The euphemistic term “harvest,” for instance, degrades the killing of sentient, emotional beings to that of the collection of shafts of wheat or ears of corn. Further, the hunting “management” paradigm emphasizes quantity (raw population numbers) in prey animal populations to the complete exclusion of quality (the fitness of animals within a population). Unlike natural predation, human hunting is indiscriminate at best in the choice of the animals killed, and oftentimes, in fact, picks the strongest, most vital individuals for destruction, thus reducing the survivability of populations and species as a whole in the long run.
Ron Abbott, Greeley
This letter was published in the Nov. 15 edition.
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