Caribou flap stirs hunters

The Nelchina caribou hunt turned into a major snafu this year. If you have been following the situation, you already know that a lawsuit filed by Ken Manning against the Board of Game (BOG) to overturn regulations establishing a community harvest quota of 500 permits for the eight Ahtna communities in the Glennallen area was successful in a court decision this past July.

The judge found that the community harvest program was unconstitutional under Alaska’s equal access clauses. No specific group can be singled out for “privileges” which others are denied. This finding was issued right about the time Fish and Game was mailing out permits to the successful applicants. There was, shall we say, chaos within the Wildlife Conservation Division (WCD) and significant confusion among permit holders as to how, or if, the Nelchina caribou hunt would proceed this year.

When the dust settled, the WCD developed a plan that allowed the hunt to move forward as it is currently happening and temporarily addressed the subsistence concerns of the community harvest participants. I discussed this one-time approach in a previous column.

To attempt to resolve this contentious Nelchina hunting scenario yet again, the BOG will be holding a special meeting sometime around Oct. 8-12 in Anchorage to review proposals submitted to address hunting seasons and bag limits, including subsistence and general hunts; community harvest permits; amount reasonably necessary for subsistence uses; methods and means; harvest tickets, reports, tags, and permits; salvage of game meat, fur and hides; possession, transportation and the use of game; and Tier II scoring questions that are specific to the Nelchina caribou herd.

There was a general call for proposals addressing these specific issues I hope you have seen and responded to. Unfortunately, if you haven’t, the deadline for submitting proposals on the above listed topics for the October special meeting has passed.

Even if you didn’t submit a proposal, if you have an interest in how this situation is handled in the future, I suggest reviewing the submitted proposals when they are posted on the BOG website. You can access that page through the Fish and Game home page. I further suggest you submit written comments about the proposals after reviewing them. Instructions on how to do so are posted on the website.

If you have the time, actually attending the meeting might be the best way to get a good understanding of exactly what is happening, why things are as they are and how the BOG will attempt to resolve them. Being in attendance also allows you to have direct interaction with the BOG through public testimony and personal discussions with individual BOG members. If you have an idea you think might solve this decades old problem, make sure you voice it to those making the decisions. If your idea proves to be a significant improvement over the status quo or outright resolves the Nelchina caribou issue, I can guarantee you the BOG members will become your new best friends!

While we’re discussing hunting issues, I recently received a copy of an e-mail making the rounds from a friend/reader who thought I might be interested. I don’t know if this e-mail is real or somebody’s idea of a joke, but either way it’s a sad commentary on the lack of understanding a large number of people have on the functioning of the natural world, or even the man-made world for that matter.

The e-mail contains a quote from an item supposedly printed in a San Francisco newspaper. The quote goes like this: “To all you hunters who kill animals for food, shame on you; you ought to go to the store and buy the meat that was made there, where no animals were harmed.” My wife’s first reaction after reading this was that it was a joke — nobody could possibly believe that grocery stores “made” their own meat. But then, my wife grew up in a commercial setnet fishing family where her father trapped and hunted seals for additional income in the off-season. She has a very firm understanding of where meat comes from.

Sadly, in my experience, this quote could really have been printed. I grew up in the Midwest and I knew people who thought hunting was cruel and needless. These same people were meat-eaters who purchased their meat from the grocery store. They were totally oblivious to the slaughter houses and processing plants where literally millions of cattle, hogs and poultry were turned from living beings into nicely cellophane-packaged grocery store products every day.

One time, I confronted some folks I knew who were bad-mouthing hunting. I asked them exactly where they thought the packaged meat they bought from the store came from. From among the blank stares I received, one person chimed in that, like so many other grocery store products, the cellophane-and-Styrofoam packaged meat was picked from trees or at least grew on some sort of cultivated plant. Honest! I am not making that up.

My imagination isn’t wild enough to do that.

As the comments in the e-mail state, these same people vote, drive and have probably reproduced. Do you still wonder why our country is in the condition it’s in?

Howard Delo is a retired fisheries biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. You can leave him a message by e-mailing sports@frontiersman.com.