Wildlife and People

Who Are the Real Predators?

Note: The following is excerpted from “It’s Time for Elected Officials to Take the Blinders Off and Admit Their State F&G’s Real Agenda”, the lead article in The Outdoorsman, Bulletin Number 41, Sept-Dec 2010. The entire issue is [here]. Back issues are available at Idaho For Wildlife [here].

By George Dovel

States’ F&G Lobbyist, IAFWA, Abandons Hunters

State F&G Directors in both Wyoming and Idaho insisted “the public” wanted them to provide opportunities to enjoy watching species that were not harvested by hunters and fishermen – but that was not the truth. The truth is, in 1990 the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (IAFWA) in Washington, D.C. hired bird watcher Naomi Edelson to run nongame programs in the 50 States and changed its #1 priority from providing wild game and fish for hunters and fishermen to harvest, to promoting non-consumptive wildlife recreation.

Twenty or even 10 years ago, anyone who dared to tell the truth about this was branded a “conspiracy theorist” or an “alarmist” by our state wildlife managers. Nearly two years ago, after I had carefully documented the step-by-step process in several Outdoorsman issues, Idaho F&G Commissioner Tony McDermott admitted they did what AFWA (formerly IAFWA) told them to but said even if my claims were true I couldn’t do anything about it.

My Challenge to Elected Officials

If you are one of several hundred elected officials in several states who receive this publication, you have internet access. I challenge you to take five minutes and “get it straight from the horse’s mouth” [here]:

The paper titled, “Finding Our Wings: The Payoff of a Decade of Determination” was written by Edelson and presented to a national convention of bird watchers in 2003. It is also Forest Service General Technical Report PSW-GTR-191 dated 2005, and spells out how the IAFWA priority was changed and how millions of dollars have been diverted by Congress from perpetuating game and fish harvests to promoting the nongame agenda beginning in 2001 with what is called “State Wildlife Grants”. …

The next step in the state F&G Agencies’ alien agenda, dictated by the IAFWA and the powerful Nature Conservancy (TNC), was to use sportsmen’s license money to help “Teaming With Wildlife” lobby for passage of CARA (the Conservation and Reinvestment Act). Passage of this Act would have provided a billion dollars from offshore oil drilling fees to support the non-consumptive agenda, and would have given wildlife managers authority to implement the radical UN Convention on Biodiversity (”Wildlands”) that was never ratified by Congress.

It would also have bypassed the legislative and judicial branches of both our state and federal governments and allowed both state and federal wildlife bureaucrats to condemn and acquire $450 million worth of private property each every year. With its massive federal “pork” money for every state, the 2000 version of CARA easily passed the House and was approved by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources 13-7.

But thanks to private property rights advocates and Western senators who continued to oppose CARA, it was never sent to the floor for a vote by the full Senate. President Clinton strongly supported the UN Wildlands Agenda, so the Teaming With Wildlife (TWW) activists were desperate to get something passed implementing that agenda while Clinton was still in office.

Radical Wildlife Agenda Added to Funding Resolution

They attached it to a multi-agenda funding bill (HR 5548) which passed Congress with no debate and nothing but a voice vote – yet it enabled state and federal wildlife agencies to implement the provisions of the 1992 UN Biodiversity (Wildlands) agreement without it ever being ratified by Congress. Although it had the same authority as CARA to allow agencies of the executive branch to condemn private property, it lacked sufficient long-term funding so it was often referred to as “Light CARA”.

Like “CARA”, the term “State Wildlife Grants” does not appear anywhere in the bill or in its amendment to the Pittman-Robertson Act – which existed for more than 60 years to restore and preserve continued supplies of wild game and fish. That historical Act was the cornerstone of America’s bountiful wildlife populations and harvests during most of the 20th Century but it was changed by the radical extremists without even a public hearing.

Constitution Ignored – Legislative Oversight Removed

The changes gave state wildlife agencies, using information from non-governmental organizations*, full authority to determine what species shall qualify for special protection and what lands shall be set aside to achieve that alleged protection. It also gave these agency bureaucrats the authority to condemn and purchase private lands that are “suitable or capable of being made suitable…as feeding, resting or breeding places for wildlife.”

(*Yellowstone to Yukon, Spine of the Continent, Wildlife Conservation Society, TNC and American Wildlands)

Since 1990, when state wildlife agencies followed IAFWA direction to de-emphasize harvesting game and make non-consumptive wildlife recreation their top priority, they relied on obtaining CARA or other nongame funding from Congress to offset lost income from declining license sales. Because so-called nongame “management” is really about restricting human use of land, the agencies whose duties were still limited to providing harvest of wild game and fish were instructed to assume management of plant species as well. …

Congress “Let Rabbits Guard the Cabbage Patch”

A 1999 GAO (General Accounting Office) audit turned up widespread misuse of both hunting and fishing excise tax dollars but no criminal charges were filed. In 2000, to address a complaint that FWS gave dedicated Sportsman Excise Tax funds to an anti-hunting group, Congress passed the “Wildlife and Sport Fish Restoration Programs Improvement Act.”

This Act amended the Dingell-Johnson Sport Fish Restoration Act and the P-R Wildlife Restoration Act to allow up to $6 million of the dedicated tax money paid by fishermen and hunters to be given to agencies or groups each year. Called “Multi-state Conservation Grants” (MCGs), non-governmental groups receiving a grant must now declare they will not use the grant to advocate against regulated hunting, fishing or trapping.

Congress allowed the States’ Wildlife Agency Lobbyist (AFWA) to administer both MCGs and SWGs (State Wildlife Grants) and to work closely with FWS to “address” the widespread misuse of sportsmen excise taxes. In other words it put the rabbits in charge of guarding the cabbage patch and virtually guaranteed the ongoing misuse of both license income and excise tax dollars at the state level as well as the federal.

MCG Funded Biased Survey of Nonhunters

The next step of the AFWA/FWS agenda was for IDFG to prepare a 15-year plan called, “The Compass”, which made this agency the accepted authority on all flora and fauna in Idaho. Selected supporters were given the opportunity to provide input into the Plan but once a draft version was available, it was soundly rejected by legitimate sportsman groups.

So the WAFWA (Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies) then legally used sportsman excise tax funds as an MCG to hire a survey which asked urban housewives loaded questions to produce predictable answers supporting the nongame agenda. Then more than 400 wildlife communications specialists from 49 states attended a seminar at the FWS/TNC facility in West Virginia where they were told the following:

“Instead of being the decision maker on trivial decisions like deer seasons, our primary responsibility must be to be the trusted source to the people, media and political decision-makers on incredibly important decisions like land use, water quality, biodiversity and global climate change.” …

State game agencies were also told to emphasize to Congressmen, state Governors and others in a position to influence funding, that the Plans would prevent wildlife species from being listed under the ESA and save the states millions of dollars in expense associated with listing.

None of these claims were true but they were made at the time in order to secure additional funding so state wildlife agencies could continue to advance the Wildlands agenda that has replaced science-based natural resource management. The massive propaganda program originating in the TNC/FWS facility in West Virginia was designed to change the public image of state wildlife biologists from desk-bound game managers who rely on theory and computer models rather than field observation, to experts at mitigating human impacts on re-created “native” ecosystems.

“Conservation Biology” is Activism – Not Science

Back in 1985 a handful of ecosystem-worshipping radicals who could not find true science to support their extreme beliefs formed the “Society for Conservation Biology” (SCB). These included disciples of Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 book, “Population Bomb,” predicting massive worldwide starvation during the 1970s and 1980s.

And along with Ehrlich, these prophets of gloom and doom made and continue to make dire predictions of irreversible damage to the earth’s ecosystems and diverse populations unless we follow their scheme to limit any human use of our land in about half of North America. According to their original plan promoted by Earth First! founder Dave Foreman, with help from SCB co-founders Michael Soule and Reed Noss, we must restore native vegetation and large carnivores to mythical “Wildlands” they pretend existed before Columbus arrived.

Noss’s Wildlands Project model was identified as the design for biodiversity protection in the United Nations Global Biodiversity Assessment in the 1992 U. N. Treaty that was eventually signed by President Clinton but never ratified by Congress. See map presented to the U.S. Senate on Sept. 30, 1994 in Outdoorsman No 24 and read how ratification was halted (or for more detail see [here]).

Their Own Private Fanatical Religion

In 1992, environmental historian David Takacs interviewed 23 leading figures in Conservation Biology, including Soule, Noss and Ehrlich. After also researching the significant impact of native people on ecosystems hundreds of years before Europeans set foot on this continent, Takacs published a book in 1996 titled “The Idea of Biodiversity: Philosophies of Paradise”.

In the book he quotes the SCB members saying that maintaining biodiversity in ecosystems has a broad appeal like motherhood, but none of them were willing to define exactly what biodiversity means. Although all described an intense feeling of awareness of nature that Takacs likened to born-again Christianity, most of them vigorously denounced any belief in western religions or worship of nature.

According to Takacs, they used “biodiversity” as a scientific term to separate themselves from being described as “nature worshippers”. Their goal was not recovery of individual species but rather to use the vast system of Core Wildlands Areas connected by Wildlife Corridors to prevent humans from “interfering with nature’s diversity.”…

Governors Deceived About Corridors

In February 2007, The Western Governors Assn. (WGA) unanimously approved Policy Resolution 07-01 “Protecting Wildlife Migration Corridors and Crucial Wildlife Habitat in the West.” It did this after being assured in writing that the system would protect the states’ annual income from hunters, fishermen campers and wildlife watchers and the “corridors” it referred to were migration corridors between summer and winter range – not the Wildlife Corridors free of humans promoted by the Wildlands Initiative.

The fact that Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal strongly endorsed the resolution at the same time he was suing FWS for trying to force Wyoming to manage for excessive wolf numbers indicates he had no idea where this Policy Resolution was leading. …

F&G Biologists in Idaho and Montana were told to continue working with TNC and American Wildlands, and to also seek help from the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, Spine of the Continent Initiative and Wildlife Conservation Society to blend their individual Wildlife Corridors into a single system. Like these two state agencies, each of these five NGOs strongly supports the elimination of human activity in a network of Core Wildlands habitat connected by Corridors where wolves, grizzlies, mountain lions and even jaguars will be free to roam without human interference.

The Truth about “Spine of the Continent”

Those with net access can view the Spine of the Continent [here] and also see it described as “a coordinated international conservation action that will protect, connect, and restore a contiguous network of private and public lands along the spine of the Rocky Mountains and associated ranges, basins, plateaus, and deserts from Alaska’s Brooks Range to the Mexican Sierra Madre Occidental.” It is 5,000 miles long, includes tens of thousands of square miles, and is meant to exclude most human activity.

That is exactly what IDFG Big Game Manager Jon Rachael was describing when he referred to “a natural human-unaffected landscape.” Yet during the past several decades, legitimate scientists have discovered that, contrary to destroying the fragile soils by clearing the rainforests as we have been told by countless biologists, ancient civilizations cleared land and built up the soils providing immense benefits to humans and flora and fauna.

TNC Chief Scientist: “No Conservation Organization Can Honestly Claim it is Halting Extinction”

Though Wildlands Chair Michael Soule continues to preach the necessity for more “Connectivity” (removing even more land from human use and energy development in the “Spine” to protect wolves and halt species extinction), TNC’s Chief Scientist Peter Kareiva is being somewhat more truthful. In a series of articles and interviews, he admits that publishing lists of threatened species is a good fund raising mechanism (in other words –a scam) but continues to state: “No conservation organization can honestly claim it is halting extinction.” …

Creating “Wildlands” with Protected Wolves Destroys Healthy Wildlife Populations

TNC is now minimizing the impact of so-called “species hotspots” found in the tropics and claiming it has locked up millions of acres worldwide to benefit humans as well as large predators. Its new theme, “protecting nature, preserving life” is intended to make us forget that it has forced millions of native people off the land and into crowded unhealthy refugee camps in places like Africa, despite hard evidence they were the true conservationists.

There is zero scientific evidence that removing humans’ influence from the land and replacing them with large carnivores creates healthy wildlife populations. There is overwhelming evidence to the contrary in national and provincial parks where large prey species either become extinct or remain in a permanent predator pit, and the average life span of wolves is less than five years.

TNC and SCB Use Class Warfare to Gain Support

The Society for Conservation Biology directly ties the affluence of a small number of Capitalist countries to the abuse of native ecosystems. There are 195 countries in the world, of which 192 are members of the United Nations. According to the World Bank, 180 of those are “developing countries” based on per capita income.

In 2006, as a partner to SCB, TNC began funding the cost of providing SCB’s expensive publications free of charge and provided many other benefits at reduced rates to SCB members in any of the 180 developing countries. The message in the publications is that the United States is destroying natural biodiversity and should be forced to share its wealth and use of the earth’s resources with “less fortunate” countries such as China, Iran and Mexico.

There is little doubt this propaganda program is a major factor in recent opinion polls reflecting the widespread belief that the U.S. should contribute more and have far less control of the nations it is helping. Coupled with our disadvantage in the various carbon trading schemes, this will destroy our free enterprise system and our status as free citizens in a world dominated by dictators who rule the masses.