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Did man's presence improve or destroy our ecosystems?
Large predators can destroy game herds in short order.
A mountain lion craftily covers its kill
February 8, 2010
*Scroll down for Updates:*
The left has a new crisis! A photograph of Sarah Palin
*Update:* I posted this video for a little bit of light entertainment. The idea that a former governor of Alaska would write a note on her hand and a portion of our society would go insane over it. Yes, I criticized President Obama for using a teleprompter in a sixth grade class setting. No, I never said Obama shouldn’t be using a teleprompter. All presidents do but dare we say Obama has carried a bit too far?
Anyway, the video is intended to be on the lighter side of things, to show the silliness of the whole thing.
Regardless, those who have viewed this video at the YouTube site, it seems a handful of viewers are afflicted with Sarah Palin Derangement Syndrome. That and what appears to be a lack of vocabulary.
*Update 2*There were two things I made assumptions about and now seem to be coming true. The photo of Sarah Palin with “Hi Mom” on the palm of her hand was evidently taken at a later time while campaigning for Texas Gov. Rick Perry. I didn’t say in the video this picture was taken at the same Tea Party Convention. I said it was taken later. I just didn’t know when at the time. (Yes I could have been more explicit about that.) Why is everyone missing one of the points that Sarah Palin is having a lot of fun with this, knowing full well, the media would now have magnifying glasses on her hands and who knows where else. She was right and got in a “shout out” to her mom.
The second thing has to do with the 5 items on her hand. This too appears that these she did to assist her through the question and answer session. And, yes, for all you whose undies are in a wad, it was announced during the televised part of the question and answer, that Sarah Palin agreed to do a question and answer and that the questions were selected ahead of time. Yup! 3×5 cards would have worked as well and would have also brought on the same hysterical response from the media.
My God!!!! Allahpundit thinks also that this is all a bit too silly and that there is hypocrisy in the reporting when compared to something like President Obama’s “corpse man” gaffe, which I learned today he has mispronounced on other occasions prior to the latest. Oh, my! So what’s the deal? Has his staff not informed him he’s mispronouncing this word? Do they know the difference? Or maybe, he just has trouble with that word….kind of like someone we all knew who said, “nucular”. So that must also make Obama stupid.
Tom Remington
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February 8, 2010
Snow storms dumped ample amounts of the white stuff on parts of the mid-Atlantic states over the weekend. Unfortunately, some town’s leaders either have never heard of a U.S. Constitution or Bill of Rights or somehow they think, like what happened in New Orleans, that just because the town declared an emergency, all of a sudden people give up their God-given and constitutional rights.
Other restrictions include a ban on the sale or purchase of any type of firearm, ammunition, explosive or any possession of such items off a person’s own premises.
I guess they thought they were doing everyone a favor ALLOWING them to possess a gun on their own property. Uh, uh, uh! This cannot be allowed.
Tom Remington
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February 8, 2010
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February 8, 2010
Milt Inman Photo
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February 8, 2010
Dear Friends,
We can summarize matters pertaining to the presence of hydatid disease as follows. As expected, following some time after the spread of wolves, there was the entry of sylvatic hydatid Echinococcus granulosus disease into said wolf populations and associated prey. Earlier on fox tape worm, E. multilocularis had spread into the NW United States and I understand that it is still spreading. This dreaded parasite has been reported from foxes and coyotes. Since E. multilocularis has been reported from wolves in Europe, and since wolves may be avid “mousers”, opportunity permitting, it is likely that E. multulocularis will be reported in American wolves as well. As you are aware E. multilocularis cycles primarily between canids and rodents (mainly voles). Moreover, since the pastoral type of E. granulosus is found cycling between domestic sheep and dogs further south, it is likely that, in time, stray wolves will pick up this variant of hydatid disease. Consequently, we expect wolves, eventually, to be carriers of sylvatic, pastoral and alveolar hydatid disease.
You may have noticed that there is some discrepancy in the accounts of hydatid disease emanating from wildlife agencies as opposed to accounts by clinicians. My understanding of hydatid disease, which I have carried with me ever since my student days over 40 years ago, matches that of the clinicians. It is a silent disease, difficult to diagnose, with little specificity in symptoms, gradually developing worse over 10-20 years, and, depending on the location and number of cysts, ranging in effects from benign to lethal. It is particularly dangerous to anyone engaged in an active, sporting lifestyle, since blows to the body can lead to rupture of cysts with dreadful consequences, and prolonged, costly treatment. Alveolar hydatid disease in particular is likely to be lethal.
It is well known that domestic dogs play a very large risk factor in hydatid disease. Unlike in Northern Canada or Alaska, in the West one is dealing with much greater densities of people, dogs and carrier species such as deer or elk. High incidents of the parasite in wolves and coyotes and a high infestation rate with cysts in lungs and liver of deer and elk, put at risk the ranching, farming and rural communities. In winter time deer and elk will frequently be found on ranches close to communities. Dogs from ranches, farms and hamlets will have access to winter killed carcasses of deer and elk as well as to offal left in the field during the hunting season. Once infected with dog tape worm, the ranch and house dogs will contaminate the yard, porches, living rooms etc with hydatid eggs. There is no escape from this! Ten to twenty years down the road, hydatid disease will raise its head, in particular in persons who as toddlers crawled over floors walked over by people and dogs carrying in hydatid eggs from the outside. Please inform yourself what this is likely to mean in terms of prognosis, suffering and costs!
We know that in the past there were attempts in Finland and in Russia to eliminate, or at least control hydatid disease. In Finland the eradication of hydatid disease was accomplished by diminishing wolf numbers and treating domestic dogs with antihelmithic drugs. I am suggesting that eliminating hydatid disease be discussed, and suggest the following approach.
1.) Assuming the number of wolf packs can be reduced so as to retain a vibrant, abundant prey base, that developmental studies proceed on how to create bait stations that are accepted by wolves, with bait containing anti-helminthic drugs that are readily eaten by wolves. I am aware that this will not be a quick project. Rather I expect that wolves will accept bait stations, let alone the bait, only very gradually. It will take time, experimentation and sophisticated know how to make bait stations operational. However, once accepted by wolves, the bait stations will break the hydatid cycle between wolves and ungulates. Over time, this will lead to diminished infections of deer and elk, and this with re-infection with the parasite by wolves and coyotes.
2.) Unfortunately, under moist and cold conditions hydatid eggs remain viable for months and may even infect after three and a half years. Under dry, hot conditions the eggs die quickly. Burning the under story in forests will not eliminate the dangers from hydatid eggs, but will certainly reduce such. It’s a policy worth looking at.
3.) Simultaneously, a thorough campaign must be initiated to regularly de-worm dogs in danger areas as well as encourage specific hygienic measures. Here it means winning the ears and the trust of the rural communities.
Finally we have to look to history. Wolves have been exterminated from lived in landscapes universally because they, or their diseases, posed a serious threat to affected people, livestock and wild life. The lessons from history are that we can at best live with wolves if such are relatively few, the abundance of natural prey is high, and the risk from diseases non existent. We have the means and intelligence to achieve such.
Sincerely,
Val Geist, PhD., Professional Biologist
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science
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February 5, 2010
Obviously Stewart’s not talking about the Black Bear Blog!
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February 5, 2010
Our friends at Gray Ghost Productions are at it again. Hang on for the March 27, 2010 release dates followed by screening scheduled for April. The Good Life is fishing from Florida to Labrador and stops in between.
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February 5, 2010
It was Thomas Jefferson who once said, “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” How true! Evidently in Jefferson’s wisdom, he understood people of good conscience. It was perhaps a bit of a rallying cry to the people that remaining silent on issues was good recipe for tyranny, spelled out as loss of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
People of good conscience had an agenda foisted upon them when wolves were released into the Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho. Foisted because I believe that the entire notion was fraudulent, keeping valuable information from the people and misrepresenting the ultimate goals of those behind the debacle.
I read some place recently that it is part of the character of good conscience people to politely sit by, having no desire to take up opposition or make public spectacles of themselves through protests and verbal combativeness. And as such, one has only to ask, how far can these people of good conscience be pushed before they begin to push back?
When the grass roots Tea Party movement began, most on the left couldn’t rationally deal with it. It must have come as a big shock to many when the Tea Party activists took to the streets in copius numbers, rallying fellow Americans to their cause. After all, street protests are the fingerprint of the liberal left. Still, the left cannot and will not come to grips with the concept that those good conscience people will push back when pushed too far.
After 8 years of George W. Bush, Americans wanted something different. They swallowed the campaign rhetoric of Senator Barack Hussein Obama and yet refused to listen to the facts of the man’s past. One year later, eyes have begun to open to the realization this isn’t the change they wanted. They are pushing back. We became witnesses to this thrust in New Jersey, Virginia and most recently Massachusetts. The people, good conscience people, revolted against what is being crammed down their throats. Remaining silent appears to no longer be an option.
It is acutely insulting when the good conscience people’s president appears before the nation and essentially tells them they are too stupid to understand what the health care reform bill is about. His excuse was he failed to explain it to you and me.
The good conscience people also see with their own two eyes when there is hypocrisy and double standards. When George W. Bush was president and the opposition party dissented, it was declared one of the grandest exhibitions of American patriotism. With that same opposition party now in control of the White House and both Houses of Congress, dissent is wicked and evil, very much unpatriotic.
The good conscience people may be passive and difficult to motivate but they are not so stupid that they cannot see what is before them. Today, Charles Krauthammer writes about a great peasant revolt, pointing a finger at those on the left for ignoring what the people want, citing the push back by voters in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts.
Today, dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice. “They made a decision,” explained David Axelrod, “they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed, that the country failed” — a perfect expression of liberals’ conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the country’s, that their idea of the public good is the public’s, that their failure is therefore the nation’s……………………….
For liberals, the observation that “the peasants are revolting” is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.
Good conscience people don’t care if it’s a liberal or conservative issue. When something strikes them beside the head, if it’s large enough to cause a big enough impact, they will push back.
Fifteen years of water under the bridge, the wolf debate in the West is no closer to a resolve. There is however, a pushing back, a peasant revolt, if you will, far from reaching a “great” peasant revolt. It was nearly one year ago that I warned of “wolf wars“. The wars would be the result of the wolf advocates refusing to back down from their unreasonable demands about protecting the gray wolf, cramming down the throats of people the impacts from too many wolves they didn’t want nor thought they were getting.
Much of the political and social atmosphere that exists in wolf reintroduction country can be attributed to the actions of an unrelenting group that cares nothing at all about what the good conscience people of the area want. These wolf advocates have destroyed their support in the battle for public opinion by representing themselves as the authorities that know better what the people need than the people.
Where once they had their way, the good conscience people are pushing back. The quiet and hard working people have had enough. More and more people are seeing before their eyes the results of too many wolves, far more than the good conscience people were promised.
Groups are organizing to fight back. The good conscience people were willing to have a few wolves in their woods but not at the expense they are now realizing. It didn’t have to be this way but this was the decision the wolf advocates chose. It’s the path they now must walk.
We are also now seeing actions being taken by the border states around the wolf reintroduction area. Utah wants a law forbidding wolves anywhere in the state. Why is that? Has that state’s attitude been influenced by what they can see going on in their neighbor states? They are pushing back. Had the wolf lovers backed off and listened to what the people wanted, it might not have come to this. For wolf advocates, this is a serious blow to their efforts and a somber loss of what little respect they had.
With the refusal of the wolf advocate groups and wildlife officials to listen to others, to hear what the people want, the good conscience people, they face a rude awakening. To scoff at the good conscience people telling them the only way to contract diseases from wolves is to eat the wolves feces, is a direct insult of their intelligence. The good conscience people will not tolerate this kind of tyrannical rule. They are pushing back. They will tell them to “eat wolf scat and go howl at the moon”!
Tom Remington
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February 4, 2010
I’m not sure under what category I should list this. It’s either “stupid human tricks” or “the absurd”. Regardless, can anybody tell me what means, “corpse man”? Obama stated the word twice in his “prayer” breakfast speech. And does he sound a bit slurry in this audio bite?
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February 4, 2010
The January 2010 issue of The Outdoorsman is out and full of tons of information about the ongoing debate in the Idaho, Montana, Wyoming areas where it has been found that introduced wolves are infected with tapeworms that can cause cystic hydatid disease. These worms can result in troubles with wild ungulate populations, they can be carried by domestic dogs, sheep, foxes, etc. and eventually end up causing health risk problems for humans, possibly resulting in death.
In this latest issue, editor George Dovel wrote an article titled, “IDFG “White Paper” Response to Concerns About Wolves Introducing New Strain of Hydatid Disease”. This addresses the fact that Idaho Fish and Game officials ignored warnings from the Centers for Disease Control, as well as evidence on the ground, and played down any possible serious health risks from this disease.
Fish and Game Regional Supervisor Chip Corsi emailed employees that he directly supervises and said:
“Some of you may have seen the latest from George Dovel’s “The Outdoorsman”. Based on Mark’s (IDFG veterinarian Mark Drew) assessments (attached), human health risk is quite low, provided you avoid consuming things like canid feces and uncooked organs; and I think suggests Dovel’s interpretation is more than a bit sensationalized. If you are handling wolves or coyotes, wear gloves. Risk to humans does not appear to be any greater than with other parasites found in wildlife that we, and hunters/trappers, routinely handle.”
It is highly laughable that a paid professional would in his attempt to scoff at Dovel’s concern for human health and safety, state that Dovel was being “more than a bit sensationalized”. This comes right after telling his employees, in his own being “more than a bit sensationalized”, that the only way you can be at risk of contracting hydatid disease is to eat “canid feces”.
This is of course absurd and should be exposed for what it is. For more on the disease, the risks and what you can do to reduce chances of infection, follow these links, here, here, here. I also plan to cover this issue more at a later date. Stay tuned.
Back to George Dovel’s column. He states that he has received numerous emails from veterinarians about Corsi’s comments about eating wolf scat and they want to know if Idaho Fish and Game biologists are that dumb? That’s a good question. Are they?
Maybe Dovel answers that question in a separate article in the same January issue. As is Dovel’s signature of writing, he goes to lengths to present readers with the facts about hydatid disease, covering some of its history, actual cases, how they were treated and on and on, supplying also links to where readers can get more facts and information.
His frustration begins to show as he points out the wildlife officials efforts to, not only downplay the potential risks to humans but efforts to cover up the facts. Does any of this make any sense? Are wildlife officials really that dumb?
Interestingly, Dovel includes a brief “editor’s note” at the conclusion of his article.
(NOTE: A comparison of these statements from medical doctors whose agenda is to protect private citizens from disease, with the statements from wildlife officials whose agenda is to protect wolves and their parasites from private citizens, is revealing. – ED)
As I said, I think Dovel answered the query of the veterinarians in making that statement. One would assume (arguable) that dumbness would not permit a wildlife biologist to land a job or perhaps even get a degree. From that perspective then it must be mostly about agendas, the agenda to protect the wolves at all cost.
But let’s not point a finger at just Chip Corsi and IDFG veterinarian Mark Drew. Even Ed Bangs, head wolf recovery person for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has made every effort to protect his valuable wolves, seemingly at the expense of public safety. He’s gone so far as to scoff at and demonize those who are attempting to educate the public about the presence of disease, that happens to be carried by introduced wolves.
I personally find it revealing the actions taken by the collective “wolf advocates”; very defensive while downplaying the risks and demonizing those like George Dovel. I have covered this story since it first came to light about two-thirds of the wolves found to be laced with worms in Idaho and Montana. I’ve communicated with George Dovel, Dr. Valerius Geist, Dr. Charles Kay, Will Graves, as well as others, and done a lot of reading and research. Not one of these people or the heads of several sportsman’s groups have, from what I have seen, used this opportunity to exploit wolves and demand they be killed to solve the problem.
To copy Dovel’s comment, let me say that a comparison of statements and actions by wildlife officials and those of scientists and outdoor sportsmen groups, is very revealing.
Dr. Valerius Geist said it this way.
The pro and contra machinations pertaining to wolves are of little concern here. What is important is that people living or recreating in areas with hydatid disease take precautions, while steps have to be undertaken to eradicate the disease.
Would you rather listen to Dr. Geist’s advice or that of a Idaho Fish and Game supervisor saying there is no danger unless you eat wolf &^@#?
Yes, it is quite revealing!
Tom Remington
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February 4, 2010
*Update* There will NOT be a public meeting that was scheduled for Feb. 9, 2010. But please contact your rep. on this. It’s very important that fish and game decisions be left in the hands of fish and game experts not political experts.
The New Jersey Fish and Game Commission is working on a black bear management plan that would include a hunt in the fall of 2010. According the the U.S. Sportsman’s Alliance, a meeting is scheduled for Feb. 9, 2010.
The new management plan is to be heard at the February 9 meeting of the FGC being held at the Central Region Office in the Assunpink Wildlife Management Area in Robbinsville. According to one of its main authors, Council Member Len Wolgast, the plan would allow for a bear hunt to take place this fall.
If passed, the plan must then go to the acting Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for final approval.
I reported a couple weeks ago about a new bill, Assembly Bill 181, which if passed, would take away the lone power of the director of the Environmental Protection Agency in New Jersey, to be able to cancel a hunt or plan approved of by the Fish and Game Commission. Previous EPA Director, Lisa Jackson, now head of Obama’s EPA, arbitrarily canceled all bear hunts and ignored a court-approved bear management plan.
New Jersey sportsmen are encouraged to attend this meeting if possible and show your support for the management plan and the Fish and Game Commission.
Tom Remington
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February 4, 2010
Milt Inman Photo
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February 3, 2010
Rep. Merrick has introduced HB 2620, the Kansas Firearms Freedom Act.
This brings to 22 the number of states with introduced FFA bills, in addition to the two states with bills enacted (Montana and Tennessee). Two more states and it will be a majority of states onboard this effort to challenge the authority of D.C. Idaho, West Virginia, New Mexico, Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia and North Carolina are reputed to be working on FFA bills. See:
http://www.FirearmsFreedomAct.com
(to be updated with Kansas ASAP)
Gary Marbut, president
Montana Shooting Sports Association
http://www.mtssa.org
author, Gun Laws of Montana
http://www.mtpublish.com
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February 3, 2010
Does that sound like too harsh a comment to make about a radical animal rights/environmental group that does anything to steal your money? Would you tolerate it if you gave money to the Red Cross thinking it was going to go to help the needy in Haiti and you found out the Red Cross was just using Haiti to play on your emotions to get your money? Of course you wouldn’t. Would you stand for it if you found out some other group that depends on your donations to exist deliberately lied to you just to play on your emotions to get your money? Of course not!
Anybody that would do this is the lowest form of life on this planet. Any organization that utilizes such tactics should not only be put out of business, but should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Such actions make honest people nauseous.
Well, I’m more than nauseous over Defenders of Wildlife’s latest pack of lies to get your money. Defenders wants to stop a bill in Utah that would not tolerate wolves in that state. Defenders has every legal right to pursue that. This is a free country and the First Amendment gives them the right to fight such a law.
But Defenders goes beyond that. They lie. On their website, where they are attempting to steal your money, they say:
This anti-wolf bill could pass as soon as this week and is backed by the misleadingly named Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife — the very same group whose Idaho chapter has been holding wolf-killing derbies to raise funds for anti-wolf litigation.
This is a fabricated lie and for Defenders to do this makes them probably lower than pond scum. The only place wolves can be legally killed by anyone other than government agents, is in Idaho and Montana, during their sanctioned legal wolf hunting seasons. These hunts are controlled by permits. To state that anyone is holding wolf-killing derbies is suggesting that Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife sanctions poaching and doesn’t adhere to federal laws protecting gray wolves. It’s absurd and Defenders should immediately issue a public apology and a retraction of this insane accusation.
But they won’t because they are pond scum. They resort to lies in order to play on the emotions of ignorant people, those too lazy to actually ask a couple of questions and find out if wolf-killing derbies are being held. Defenders lied in order to steal your money. This is fraud as well as fund raising using fraudulent practices.
I generally do not say much or get involved with these radical groups. They are all alike. They are disgusting and make me sick. But his time this is just so blatantly wrong. They need to be exposed and put out of business.
And for the record, Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife have done more for the real conservation of our fish and all wildlife than Defenders can ever do. All hey want is your money to pay their big salaries. They defend nothing. They get federal funding to use to sue the same federal government they got money from so they can stay in business. Do you really want to give one dime to this crooked outfit?
Tom Remington
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February 3, 2010
Oh, if only we could return to the days before man got into our wilderness areas and destroyed everything. Imagine how wonderful it must have been. Nature doing a fine job all on its own and then all of a sudden man expands his reach and destroys it all.
This is what I hear all the time. Even our education factories teach our kids this inaccurate history. Few have ever heard of what it was really like. I know I have had many discussions with people about the Lewis and Clark Expedition. I admit I was one of those who dreamed about how wonderful it must have been. What could be more exciting to a man who loved the outdoors than to be a member of the Lewis and Clark troop? This would provide a participant the opportunity to see the forests, the plains, the rivers, the valleys, the birds, deer, moose, elk, bison, mountain goats, wild sheep, tons of beaver, muskrat, mink, lynx, bobcat, mountain lions, coyotes, wolves, oh, my. What am I forgetting. I might have been in for a rude awakening had I been there.
Lewis and Clark mounted their expedition from around 1804-1806 and their journey was quite well documented. We know that they took along “professional” hunters and trappers to provide food for the members. Logs show Lewis and Clark spent much of their time trading with Indians for dogs to eat because there was no game.
During the years of 1825-1860, Jedediah Smith, Peter Skeen Ogden, Milton Sublette, Joe Meek, John Fremont, Charles Preuss, Captain J. H. Simpson, and Howard Egan, explored all over the West, both on foot and horseback. They kept diaries and logs of their adventures and these accounts describe a much different picture of what it was really like before man moved into this region and settled.
Jedediah Smith is believed to be one of the first explorers of this region. In 1827, Smith and what was described as two of his best men, set out up the American River, through Central Nevada and ending up at Lake Lake, Utah. Smith’s log describes this trip accordingly.
After traveling 22 days from the east side of Mount Joseph, (Sierra Nevada’s) I struck the Southwest corner of the Great Salt Lake, traveling over a country completely barren and destitute of game. We frequently traveled without water, sometime for two days, over sandy deserts where there was no sign of vegetation and when we found water in some of the rocky hills we most generally found Indians who appeared the most miserable of the human race. When we arrived at the Salt Lake, we had but one horse and one mule remaining, which were so feeble and poor that they could scarcely carry the little camp equipage which I had along. The balance of my horses I was compelled to eat.
This expedition originally began with 14 men and 28 horses.
In 1828 Peter Skeen Ogden led an expedition into North Central Nevada. In an area that is now near Winnemucca, Nevada on the Humboldt River (Marys River), what was seen is described this way.
From clumps of sage on the hillsides, scrawny, brown-bodied men peered out upon their passage. Down in the Valley, now and again, the Indians scurried into the brush ahead of them. They were clothed, if at all, in twisted rabbit skins; They had no horses. They lived on seeds, and what wild fowl they could bring down. Ogden had never encountered a race of animals less entitled to the name of man.
The following year Ogden returned to the same area to do some trapping on the river. He describes the river as being very “unwholesome” and says the antelope, which during this time would be near the rivers are scarce. He declares, “woe to them who depend to them for support”.
In 1832 Milton Sublette led a group of trappers into the Marys River (Humboldt). There was no game and the trappers had to eat the beavers they had been trapping. His reports stated that there was not much for what wild animals there were to eat and that they were forced to eat wild parsnips, which poisoned them. The group had to leave this area and head north where they hoped to find something to eat.
Because of this it became necessary to at once abandon the river, and strike across the country towards the North, where after being four days with almost no food, and several weeks in the state of famine they reached the Snake River above the fishing Falls, they were forced, as they passed through the country, to subsist upon ants, crickets, parched moccasins, and the pudding made from the blood, taking a pint at a time from their almost famished animals.
Joe Meek recalls holding his bare hands in an anthill until they were covered with angry ants and then licking the ants off and eating them like a hungry animal.
Joe Walker later traveled through this same Marys River area and continued on into California near the Truckee River down the West Slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Having left Salt Lake and traveling 14 days into California, the expedition had not seen any game to eat and instead lived off horses they were compelled to kill to ward off starvation.
One man killed a deer, which he carried to camp on his back. The animal was dressed, cooked and eaten, … in less time than a hungry wolf would devour a lamb. This was the first game larger than a rabbit that they had killed since leaving the Salt Lake two months ago. For fourteen days they had lived on nothing but horseflesh …twenty four horses had died in crossing the mountain, and seventeen of these had been eaten.
1825 and 1826 found Ogden covering much of what we all know as Oregon today and not only did his group not find any game but the horses were starving because they couldn’t find even any decent grasses for the horse to feed on. It wasn’t just the explorers finding these wastelands. Ogden relates a story told of an Indian woman in Oregon.
The winter before had been so severe, she said, that her people had to resort to the bodies of relations and children. She had killed no one herself, but had fed on two of her children who died.
Things are pretty harsh when anyone has to resort to cannibalism but to first have to kill somebody to eat them, is unfathomable.
John Fremont and Charles Preuss covered areas of Southern Wyoming west toward the Bear River and then South toward Salt Lake. Things were tough. Game was missing and grazing grasses for the horses were non existent as well. Explorers tried trading with the Indian for food but soon discovered the Indians were starving to death themselves. It was only upon finding the Shoshone camped out along the Snake River, were they able to find a tribe living well from ample supplies of smoked Salmon.
Fremont’s party traveled the Columbia River north into Vancouver finding much the same. They even had to buy firewood from some of the resident Indians. Heading south toward Nevada, local tribes warned Fremont there was nothing for his horses to feed on. They were right.
… They had found nothing but dry, shallow basins, their way “broken by gullies and impeded by sage, and sandy on the hills, where there is not a blade of grass.”
Later Fremont would find Pyramid Lake and gorge on trout.
In all of the travels that are documented by many of these explorers, in what is now the state of Nevada, only one time is there mention of someone sighting an elk, but it is believed the person saw a mule deer and mistook it for an elk.
The Indians in this region mostly lived terrible lives, with little clothing, food or sufficient shelter. They ate mostly rats and insects and what few other birds or small game they might be fortunate to find and kill. We have visions of Indians having access to ample game animals and utilizing the hides for clothing and shelter. Such was not the case in most of the Great Basin.
Howard Egan, Sr. was the first Mormon explorer into the region of the Great Salt Lake. As a matter of fact he traveled there with Brigham Young. Egan covered much of the area between the Salt Lake and west into California as he was in the business of driving cattle there.
Egan recounts for us how the Indians crafted these remarkable corrals they would use to trap antelope. The entire episode of putting on a drive required all the men, women and children of the tribe. One had to question whether the effort put into the building and driving was worth the 24 antelope they trapped in twelve years. But when you’re hungry, some antelope is better than none.
The Indians did a similar thing conducting a cricket drive. No, I’m not kidding. Trenches were dug of about 1 foot wide by 1 foot deep and covered over with a thin layer of stiff grass. All the tribes people would begin pounding the ground with tufts of straw in a concerted effort, to drive the black crickets toward the trenches. Once the trenches contained all the crickets they could drive, they set the grass they had placed over the trenches on fire, killing the crickets. They then used the crickets for food, mostly grinding it up and mixing it with other things to make a concocted kind of flour.
These and more accounts certainly paint a far different picture of how things actually were than what we are often taught about how balanced and bountiful our forests and wilderness were before man arrived. Man certainly made his share of mistakes in being good stewards of the land but in time we figured out what we had to do to sustain game populations and to control the predators that destroyed those.
With the presence of man and bringing with him agriculture and the knowledge to plant and grow crops and tend the land, this began to create a better habitat that would support a heartier and healthier crop of game animals. We controlled the predators so people could harvest the game to feed their families and over time devised a pretty decent wildlife management plan that many around the world now envy.
Sorry, but Mother Nature didn’t really give us a “balanced” ecosystem, at least one that is the most productive. These accounts above I believe more accurately depict Mother Nature’s idea of a balanced ecosystem. There’s nothing wrong with that but I don’t think it is in the best interest of humans to have it that way, nor is it what I think people really want or are thinking about when they speak of “natural” wildlife management.
Tom Remington
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