Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

EDITORIAL:

Unregulated trophy hunting not only cruel but also bad for the environment

In Alaska, generations of indigenous peoples and rural residents who hunt to survive have employed tactics that would be considered barbaric in any form of recreational hunting.

But now, the Trump administration is allowing trophy and sport hunters to use the same methods, which in this context are disgustingly cruel. They include: hunting caribou from motorboats while the defenseless animals are swimming; baiting bears with food and hunting them with dogs; killing wolves and their pups in their denning season; and more.

On Tuesday, the National Park Service published new rules reversing an Obama-era ban on the hunting practices. Now, the tactics that once were used by subsistence hunters to survive in a harsh environment can be used by hobby hunters looking for a new animal head to hang in the den or a pelt to throw down in the living room.

It’s revolting, and it’s another thing for voters to remember this November.

There is literally no cruelty that the Trump administration will resist. But since the president wants to ignore police violence against black Americans and turn the military against U.S. citizens, of course he wants to kill animals in sickening ways too. Let’s go kill wolf pups and bear cubs, all in a day’s work for this group of miscreants.

The outcome of the ban’s reversal is that animals will be served up for slaughter by unethical hunters.

It’s part of a years-long push by President Donald Trump to expand hunting rights on federal land, which has been championed by Trump’s trophy-hunting son, Donald Jr.

Trump Jr. is hardly a poster boy for ethical hunting. Among his kills was a rare mountain sheep he shot without first securing permission from the Mongolian government, as reported by ProPublica. By the way, Junior’s precious trophy cost U.S. taxpayers more than $75,000 in Secret Service protection for the excursion, as revealed by documents obtained by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Now, he’s opened the door for other “sport” hunters like him to do things like spotlight and shoot bears while they’re hibernating in their dens.

In Alaska, fish and wildlife officials portray Trump’s action as reversing limitations on survival hunting among native populations and rural residents. But surely, there was a way to do that without tearing up the ban altogether. That’s what hunting licenses, game limits and other regulations are for — they allow policies to be tailored.

There’s certainly an argument to be made on behalf of subsistence hunters, who live in areas where the food supply chain barely exists. In vast stretches of the state, what little outside food is available must be flown in at great expense. For residents of those areas to feed themselves and their families, they must take fish and game.

But other hunting is an entirely different matter.

Meanwhile, there are serious ecological ramifications to throwing open the door to more hunting. Overhunting of predators like wolves and bears disrupts the balance of nature, causing overpopulation of prey animals and a cascade of environmental impacts. The reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone Park helped restore balance to the area in unexpected and remarkable ways — it caused caribou herds to remain on the move instead of overgrazing in certain places, which allowed willow trees to flourish along river banks, which led to healthier populations of songbirds and attracted beavers whose dams changed the hydrology of streams and generated healthier growth of other plants.

In addition, the vile process of trophy hunting poses a specific and perverse threat to the ecology. By definition, trophy hunters seek the strongest and grandest of animals and by killing them, weaken the gene pool going forward. Natural predators and subsistence hunters take, overwhelmingly, the weakest members of the species while the strongest survive to enrich the gene pool.

Allowing more hunting, especially with barbaric tactics, is not only morally reprehensible but threatens to damage the nation’s precious natural lands. The nation needs to replace a president who would steamroll past ethical and environmental concerns just to allow hunters to collect heads and pelts.