This commentary is by Barbara Felitti, of Huntington.
“Blasphemy” and “sacrilegious” is how a Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department biologist described the agency’s proposed rule change to allow hunters to use a rifle or shotgun to kill antlerless deer as a means of controlling the deer population.
The comments by Nick Fortin were an acknowledgement that, until now, existing hunting rules and cultural norms restricted killing antlerless female deer to the use of bow and arrow or muzzleloader.
The palpable angst on the part of Fish & Wildlife about the ethics of hunting antlerless deer with rifles is at great odds with their position at a House Environment Committee hearing in February of this year against a bill, H.132, which would prohibit the use of bait as an attractant when hunting furbearing wildlife. Despite repeated questions from legislators, Fish & Wildlife would not offer an opinion about the ethics of baiting which is seen by some hunters as unsportsmanlike for providing an unfair advantage over game.
Another reason for prohibiting hunting over bait piles is public safety. Emotional testimony was presented to the committee from people who lost their dog after it was attracted to and shot over a bait pile. Despite this, the response from Fish & Wildlife’s interim commissioner was that the issue is “nuanced” and the onus to address it should not be put solely on people who use bait piles.
To be clear, Fish & Wildlife acknowledged that they do not know how many furbearers are killed over bait piles every year or how many hunters use bait piles as there are no reporting requirements for the practice. Without this information, there is no meaningful way to assess the legitimacy and ethics of using bait piles as a hunting practice. Fish & Wildlife also failed to answer a question about how important hunting over bait piles is to managing wildlife populations such as coyotes.
Nonetheless, Fish & Wildlife sees it as more important to allow use of an unspecified number of bait piles by an unknown number of hunters rather than address the known safety issue of bait piles causing the death of people’s dogs. Fish & Wildlife expressed no problem with continuing to allow people to shoot from their homes out at a bait pile in the daytime or nighttime.
Fish & Wildlife staff claim to “try to deal with the issue of safety and what normal people would, average people would, consider reasonable behavior on the part of the hunting community.” I think the average general public would see it as reasonable behavior to have this unnecessary practice stopped.
In 2022, Vermont passed the wanton waste bill, which bans the intentional killing of wildlife without a useful purpose. It resulted in bans on practices such as animal killing contests. It banned this form of hunting not because there was a conservation issue, but because there was a social values issue that indiscriminate killing of wildlife was offensive to the general public.
Baiting is similarly offensive and unnecessary. At a minimum, Fish & Wildlife could have declined to support the bill or at least not oppose it. Instead, they put their support behind an unknown number of hunters who use bait piles at the expense of safety to the general public and their pets.
Once again, Fish & Wildlife is showing itself to be oblivious to the general public on wildlife issues.
Back in 1984, the name was changed from the Department of Fish & Game to the Department of Fish & Wildlife. Perhaps it is time to revert back to “Fish & Game” so we are honest about whose interests are being served.
