France is one of the few countries that has not adopted a no-hunting day. A petition has been launched demanding a fairer ‘sharing’ of the countryside between different groups
29 October 2021
Morgan Keane, 25, was shot by a hunter while chopping wood in his garden. The shooter “mistook” him for a wild boarPic:CHUYKO SERGEY / ShutterstockByJane Hanks
The death of a 25-year-old man shot by hunters as he chopped wood at his home has sparked a petition calling for tighter controls on when hunts can take place.
Morgan Keane (pictured right) was shot dead in Calvignac, Lot, last year.
David Knowles·Senior EditorThu, October 28, 2021, 1:51 PM·3 min read
The hope that world leaders will reach a broad-reaching climate change accord inGlasgow, Scotland, to keep global temperatures from crossing 1.5 degrees Celsius of rise over preindustrial levels has continued to dim in recent days.
China, by far the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases, announced Thursday that it would not go beyond previous commitments to achieve net-zero emissions by 2060 and to reach peak levels of carbon emissions by 2030. That means that at a time when scientists have warned that nations must commit immediately to reducing greenhouse gas emissions or suffer devastating extreme weather consequences, the world’s biggest atmospheric polluter plans to continue apace for nine more years.
China’s defiance ahead of theU.N. Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, comes days after U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres issued a personal appeal to President…
Leaders from around the world are gathering in Glasgow, Scotland, to hammer out new pledges to fight climate change. The stakes are high. Scientists warn that heat-trapping emissions must fall dramatically by 2030. Otherwise, the world faces more extreme hurricanes, floods and droughts, likely displacing millions of people. Still, negotiations at the COP26 meeting are expected to be tough. Here are four reasons why.
#1 The world is not on track to avoid extreme climate change
Countries havealready made pledgesto cut their greenhouse gas emissions by moving away from burning fossil fuels. But added together, those pledges don’t reduce emissions enough to avoid the worst damage from climate change. Current policies put the world on track for around 4.8 degrees of warming by 2100, compared with global average temperatures in the mid-19th century.
State regulators push to make it cheaper and easier for some people to hunt and fish in North Carolina.RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) — State regulators push to make it cheaper and easier for some people to hunt and fish in North Carolina.
The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission said it wants to make it easier to hunt and fish worry free.
To do so, they’re offering lifetime licenses to North Carolina residents between the age of 50-69 for a new reduced price.
Each lifetime license now costs $265 (and $358 if you want to fish along the coast). Those prices are half of what they used to be.
“We are constantly identifying ways for North Carolinians to take advantage of our states wonderful fishing and hunting opportunities. After careful review, we determined offering a segment our lifetime licenses at a more affordable…
Six Ojibwe tribes hope to put a stop to Wisconsin wolf hunt until a biologically-sound management plan is put in place.
Six Ojibwe tribes are heading to federal court Friday morning in hopes of stopping a Wisconsin wolf hunt from taking place this fall.
They’re represented by Earthjustice. Senior attorney Christopher Clark said the legal team will argue the proposed hunt is not grounded in sound biological principals and violates the tribes’ treaty rights.
Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa wildlife specialist Abi Fergus commenting during Natural Resources Board special meeting about wolf hunt last January. Bad River is among the six Ojibwe tribes now challenging the Wisconsin hunt in federal court.
“It’s important to note that our claims in federal court are on behalf of tribes who have treaty rights under the United States Constitution. Treaties are the supreme law of the land, and so they trump anything that’s going on with respect to the state law issues that are being litigated in Dane County,” Clark said.
Wisconsin’s fall hunt was slated to kick off Saturday. But it’s already at a standstill after a circuit court judge ruled the DNR must update its management plan, including how it sets harvest quotas.
Clark said the six Ojibwe tribes want to make sure that update happens.
“We are concerned that the injunction that is in place from the Dance County Circuit Court by an appellate court, or during the pendency of an appeal, the state or perhaps or another party could seek and obtain a stay of that injunction, which basically puts the wolf hunt back on,” Clark said.
The attorney said his clients don’t want to see a repeat of the hastily-organized and what critics say was an ill-timed harvest last February. It took place after the wolf was delisted a month earlier by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“In February, at the time of the hunt, that was the wolves’ breeding season. So in addition to the wolves that were killed by hunters at the time [the hunt] also had a devastating impact on reproduction rates [among] the wolves. There were pregnant wolves that were killed,” Clark said. “The fact that adult wolves were killed means they were unable to breed.”
The defendants in the case are the secretary of the Wisconsin DNR and the members of the Natural Resources Board. A spokesperson said none of the defendants was able to comment.
State law requires a fall and winter harvest whenever the wolf is not federally protected.
Advocates for the hunt maintain it is an appropriate wolf management tool, and it is the right of hunters who wish to engage in it.
Have an environmental question you’d like WUWM’s Susan Bence to investigate? Submit below. (If the module isn’t appearing, please refresh the page.)
Bear cubs who were unaccompanied by their mothers were fair game for this hunt, a dangerous practice that disregards the importance of family structures for wild animals. Eric Faulknor/iStock.com
Any time an animal is gunned down by a trophy hunter, ecosystems are disrupted, and families are torn apart—yet such killings happen all the time, across the country and throughout the world. So, it’s a particularly sad predicament that those of us who seek to protect wild animals from trophy hunting are in the unusual situation of being somewhat relieved when fewer animals are killed than we expected.
This week, the Missouri Department of Conservation announced that trophy hunters had killed 12 black bears, far short of the state’s allotted quota of 40 bears, in the first bear hunt in the state since they were nearly extirpated decades ago.
These 12 bears each represent a family disrupted, a genetic line broken and, possibly, orphaned cubs who are unlikely to survive. Each of their deaths is a tremendous loss. Yet it could have been so much worse.
This low number relative to the allowed quota hints at a paradox behind allowing this hunt in the first place: Missouri is fortunate to have any bears at all, since populations around these regions were nearly wiped out by the early 1900s due to market hunting and the overlogging of their forest habitats. But the state seems to have learned nothing from its past, because even as a small number of bears surfaced in recent years, the agency proposed a trophy hunt on this tiny, but virtually uncounted population; the agency had only an estimate of between 600 and 1,000 bears. Last year, the four-member Missouri Department of Conservation Commission, hardly a representative body, ignored widespread opposition and voted unanimously to approve the hunt. The state also permitted trophy hunters to kill cubs who were unaccompanied by their mothers.
One of the contentions we have made all along is that Missouri opted for a trophy hunt without even bothering to sponsor a proper count of bears. The Missouri Department of Conservation’s black bear population research was partially funded by the Safari Club International Foundation, a sister organization of Safari Club International, the nation’s largest trophy hunting industry group, and its affiliate, the Hunter Legacy 100 Fund. This research is likely biased and was conducted for the purposes of justifying a trophy hunt. According to the Safari Club International Foundation’s website, these two groups have together contributed $82,000 for “research” on the “Missouri Black Bear Project” since 2011.
But this small faction of Missouri citizens has the support of well-funded trophy hunting groups, all of which lobby heavily in states to open hunting seasons on native carnivores like wolves, grizzly bears and black bears.
It is shameful that the Missouri Department of Conservation and the commission chose to pander to these special interests, while ignoring the substantial benefits that bears bring to Missouri’s forest ecosystems and the wishes of the state’s residents to see their beloved bears protected and flourishing in their natural habitat.
On the 11th August 2021, the Namibian Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism (MEFT) confirmed the sale of 57 elephants from two commercial farming areas in the Kunene Region, home to an isolated population of unique desert-adapted elephants. In that statement, the MEFT confirmed that there were three buyers and that 42 of the 57 elephants to be captured would be exported outside the country. To date, neither the names of the buyers nor the final destination or destinations of the elephants have been disclosed, although it is widely rumoured that a zoo in the United Arab Emirates is one of the buyers.
According to international regulations under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), Namibian elephants should only be exported with their natural range (sub-Saharan Africa). However, concerns were immediately raised that the southern African country would sell the elephants using a controversial interpretation of CITES regulations which would allow the elephants to be exported outside of Africa. Namibia has exported elephants beyond Africa using this interpretation before. In 2012 and 2013, twenty-four elephants were sold to Mexico and Cuba respectively.
On the 27th September, in a media statement, the CITES Secretariat confirmed that Namibia would indeed export beyond Africa using this interpretation in spite of the issue being currently under review at the CITES Standing Committee.
Wiping out the last remaining desert populations
Yet, even with this interpretation, Namibia may still be in breach of international regulations.
CITES Article III, which lays down the conditions for trade, states that the exports must ‘not be detrimental to the survival of the species involved’. The removal of just a handful of these desert-adapted elephants may in fact threaten their future survival. Namibia’s desert-dwelling elephants represent one of only two such populations in Africa (the other being the small Gourma population in Mali).
A fixed-wing and helicopter aerial elephant population survey, including both sampling and total counts along rivers, of the entire Kunene Region in 2016 provided an estimate of 1173 elephants; but this estimate was notably imprecise, with wide confidence intervals and a lower confidence limit of 416 elephants. In the core area and river beds, only 334 elephants were estimated. The survey revealed that there were very few bull elephants – only 22 of the 334 in the core/ river bed areas were bulls. Ground observations of the commercial farms earmarked for captures during an investigation in May 2021 revealed little elephant presence. Interviews with farmers, private lodge staff, and other stakeholders in the area all noted that elephant sightings were rare. One lodge manager said elephants had not been sighted for two years.
Elephant-Human Relations Aid (EHRA) currently conducts foot patrols in the Ugab River, which is included in the area of the proposed captures, recording direct sightings of elephants. The EHRA Annual Report for 2020 shows extremely low numbers of adult cows and adult bulls. Here are their findings:
Herds are small (6-12 individuals), with a total of 112 individuals recorded.
The western sector of the Ugab River showed a drastic decline of female elephants. Since 2003, sixteen female elephants have died. Only five remain.
In each year since 2014, the Ugab West population has had few births of elephant calves and a mortality rate of 100%. The last surviving calf was born in June 2014, with the subsequent nine dying at or shortly after birth. The last new-born death in the Ugab River West population occurred in January 2020, while in the adjacent Huab /Aba Huab resident population, the last new-born death was in October 2020.
Severe droughts have been prevalent in this area for the past five years, a likely contributing factor to the high calf mortality.
Numbers of bulls are very low (23 adults and sub-adults).
Since 2017, three adult bulls over the age of 25 years were shot, two of which were destroyed as ‘problem animals’ and one as a trophy. Another young male of 19 years was shot as a problem-causing animal. One male over 30 years of age remains. The lack of breeding bulls is of major concern.
Neighbouring Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) conservancies show a similar trend in low elephant counts. This is evidenced in their respective annual game counts. The latest figures are found in the annual reports from the past decade, all list elephants as ‘very rare’.
These ground observations and surveys indicate that elephants are so few in number that the entire population in the Kunene Region is extremely vulnerable to potential collapse and any removal will likely have severe impacts on the future survival of the population.
Captive cruelty
Elephants in all parts of Africa share a common trait: they are always on the move in search of key resources. However, the desert elephants of both Mali and northwestern Namibia, perhaps more so than other savanna elephants, are adapted to covering vast distances in search of food and water. They are also extremely wary of people in the Kunene Region, due to decades spent navigating a landscape increasingly dominated by human interests and potential conflict. To remove any of these elephants from their natural habitat and confine them for public display in a foreign zoo is to deny these basic biological characteristics at a fundamental level.
Radiotracking studies have shown the Kunene elephants to traverse annual home ranges of over 10,000km2, making regular treks of hundreds of kilometres during rainy periods in search of ephemeral forage. Evolution over thousands of years has given them longer legs and slimmer bodies than their counterparts in moister savanna regions, allowing them to move more efficiently over the great distances – in mountains, river beds, arid shrublands, and deserts – that they must cross. Countless lifetimes of searching and discovery of key seasonal food and water sources has tested and honed their abilities for cognition and spatial memory, allowing the oldest adult females and males to build up data-banks of essential knowledge that can lead them and their companions to the sorely-needed resources, in the right places at the right times. Such abilities also help them avoid many of the hazards posed by the people sharing the land.
Confining such naturally mobile creatures to tiny enclosures of some few hundred square metres is to frustrate all their inbuilt motivations towards movement. It is widely observed that elephants in zoo compounds all over the world spend hours of every day in stereotypic bobbing and rocking, a symptom of suffering, of deep traumatic stress and psychological damage. This is a coping mechanism that attempts to relieve the intense frustration built up when the normal behaviours of movement and foraging are suppressed. Close proximity to human visitors, who are avoided in a natural environment, on a continuous daily basis adds to the stress of these captive environments. Physical ailments also abound; when elephants cannot move their limbs and transfer their weight, they develop chronic foot, joint, muscular and cardiovascular dysfunction.
The pathologies resulting from the suppression of natural behaviours are pronounced in African elephants taken from any savanna region, but they are even more extreme for desert elephants who have deeper adaptations and experiences, and thus stronger need for, movement and freedom from disturbance.
In summary, taking desert elephants to a captive life in zoo exhibits is undeniably cruel and, as a consequence, deeply immoral.
Conclusion
Ultimately, any export of wild, live elephants beyond their natural range in Africa, and in the case of Namibia’s desert-adapted elephants, beyond their desert environment could have immediate and permanent implications both on their mental and physical health (for those exported) as well as their overall population survival for those left behind.
If the UAE are indeed intending to import such elephants, they must be urged to seriously reconsider. The irreparable harm of their actions may never be undone.
Adam Cruise is an award-winning investigative environmental journalist, academic and author. He has a PhD in Philosophy specialising in environmental ethics from Stellenbosch University in South Africa.
Keith Lindsay is a conservation biologist and environmental consultant with over 40 years of experience in Africa and Asia.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Yesterday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) released an advance copy of a court-ordered revision to the rule guiding Endangered Species Act recovery for the Mexican gray wolf that fails to safeguard these wolves per conservation groups and the recommendations of leading wolf scientists in two key ways.First, the rule fails to expand the arbitrary and politically motivated geographic boundaries, bounded by interstates and defined by livestock interests, which fail to account for wolf habitat. Second, it continues to support an antiquated, 22-year-old decision that the entire U.S. wild Mexican gray wolf population is “non-essential” to recovery.Yesterday’s proposed rule responds to a court order from 2018 in which the judge wrote, “By failing to provide for the population’s genetic health, [the Fish and Wildlife Service] has actively imperiled the long-term viability of the species in the wild.” Further, the judge stated the rule only ensures the short-term survival of the species and specifically called out the [2015] rule’s territory boundary as an “insufficient geographic range” for the wolves. “The USFWS was handed a golden opportunity in the court order to make significant improvements to further the conservation of Mexican gray wolves,” said Emily Renn, executive director of the Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project. “By not addressing the I-40 boundary issue, the agencies involved continue to tie their own hands, delay, and hinder the recovery of these critically endangered wolves in places where people will actually welcome them.”“The Service continues to treat lobos like a zoo exhibit: Scientists call for more habitat, conservationists sue the Service, and the Service expands the boundaries and claims the wolves don’t need more room. Only this time the Service kept in place the old boundary and still will trap and remove — possibly injuring or killing — any wolf who can’t read a map,” said Peter and Jean Ossorio, lobo supporters since 1998.The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could have used this revision as an opportunity to expand the geographic scope of the recovery area to include suitable habitat for Mexican wolves north of Interstate 40. Conservationists continue to call for expansion of the recovery area and an end to limiting the recovery of this rare species based on political desires to restrict where wolves can roam. “At a time when we are losing species to extinction at an alarming rate, we cannot afford to gamble with the lives and futures of Mexican gray wolves,” said Erin Hunt, coordinator for Lobos of the Southwest. “We nearly lost them to extinction once already. We need to designate them as essential, giving them the full protection of the Endangered Species Act.”Groups applauded some aspects of the proposed rule, describing them as small improvements over the 2015 plan, including preventing “take” by state fish and game departments concerned about wolf impacts on deer and elk populations. “Although there are a few bright spots in this proposed rule, it fails to include evidence-based best practices to prevent conflict and promote conservation,” said Michelle Lute, PhD in human-wolf coexistence and national carnivore conservation manager for Project Coyote. “Proactive actions like releasing bonded mates with pups and reforming livestock husbandry practices are essential to recovery of this essential lobo population.”The USFWS proposal is expected to be published to the Federal Register (docket # FWS–R2–ES–2021–0103) on Friday, Oct. 29, at which point the public will have 90 days to review and comment on the proposal. USFWS will hold a virtual information session on Nov. 18 to answer questions. There are two additional virtual information sessions, followed by public hearings with comment opportunities, on Dec. 8 and Jan. 11.Concerned citizens can read the proposed rule and register for the sessions and hearings on the USFWS website.###
Hunters will be required to test for chronic wasting disease over the opening weekend of the firearm deer hunting season in regions where the state has tracked the deadly illness in deer.Written By: Dana Ferguson | 1:44 pm, Oct. 27, 2021
A whitetail buck in the final stages of the always-fatal chronic wasting disease. Contributed / Warden Micheal Hopper, Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks & Tourism
ST. PAUL — Minnesota Department of Natural Resources officials said they’re gearing up for the fall 2021 firearm deer hunting season and urging hunters to make a plan to test for chronic wasting disease before they go out into the field.
Less than two weeks before opening day for the firearm hunting season, DNR Wildlife Section Manager Kelly Straka on Wednesday, Oct. 27, told lawmakers that hunters in some regions of the state will have to prepare for mandatory sampling for the fatal brain…
