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The killing fields of Alberta

At the 2010 Alberta Fish and Game Conference, newly-appointed minister of sustainable resource development, Hon. Mel Knight, said absolutely nothing in his speech to the delegates, but did take questions, the answers to which have not received the attention they now urgently require.
Scammell-elk
Shooting tame

At the 2010 Alberta Fish and Game Conference, newly-appointed minister of sustainable resource development, Hon. Mel Knight, said absolutely nothing in his speech to the delegates, but did take questions, the answers to which have not received the attention they now urgently require.

The two main questions involved game ranching and rumoured government legalizing of so-called “cervid harvest preserves,” “hunt farms,” or killing fields, as I prefer. Mr. Knight seemed totally oblivious to game ranching being the source and cause of the spread of chronic wasting disease among Alberta’s wild cervids, deer and elk, but he had obviously already been lobbied about bailing out the sinking game ranching boondoggle.

About hunt farms, the minister had these chilling comments: “cervids belong in agriculture. I have no issue with ‘harvesting’ animals that we raise . . . I am no bleeding heart … I don’t believe Alberta is ready for hunt farms yet, but the issue is not going away . . . We must allow people in that (game ranching) industry to control their own destiny.”

The first step in that agenda is now being fast-tracked through the legislature, Bill 11, the Livestock Diversity Amendment Act, 2011, which reclassifies domestic cervids (farmed elk and deer) as “diversified livestock,” (as bison now are), thus removing them from the protection of the Wildlife Act and sustainable resource development and handing them over to agriculture.

Alberta’s largest conservation group, the Alberta Fish and Game Association, is gravely concerned that Bill 11 will pave the way for game ranchers to charge big bucks for people to shoot the tame animal of their choice, a proposal that was withdrawn in 2001 after a public uproar initiated by the AFGA led then-premier Ralph Klein to declare it “abhorrent,” and that it would not happen on his watch. For the record, since its inception in 1908, the AFGA has opposed to paid hunting and the commercialization of wildlife.

New AFGA president, Conrad Fennema, calls Bill 11 “an outrage. Government continues to go behind everyone’s back to try and bail out a few individuals who made bad business decisions in the first place when they got into the game farm business.”

In fairness, the government of the day, totally ignoring scientists who unanimously warned serious diseases would be the inevitable result of game ranching, encouraged people to get into it.

I have been reading for review Whitetail Nation, My season in pursuit of the monster buck, by Pete Bodo, which, coincidentally, includes the only graphic, gripping and candid account I have ever seen of how “hunting” is conducted on the thousands of “high fence” ranches in Texas.

In Texas, 97 per cent of the land is private, and more than four million acres are now behind eight foot fences. The white tail deer trapped inside are “managed” and fed supplements to produce the huge antlers for which affluent human eunuchs pay by the inch, according to Boone and Crockett score, to kill-harvest. The irony is that killing big game confined by a fence is contrary to the “fair chase” requirement of B&C, so that none of the trophies so taken qualify for “the book,” B&C’s Records of North American Big Game.

Bodo took the best white tail of his cross-U.S.A. season, a seven point “freebie,” that would have cost a paying hunter between three and five thousand dollars, on a 750-acre Texas high fence ranch. He missed the buck four times on two days from a stand located less than 100 yards from a feeder that goes off with a clang twice a day, broadcasting corn and instantly baiting in the deer. After the second last miss, the rancher turned the feeder on again, which called the spooked, but corn-addicted buck back in again, and Bodo finally made a snap shot.

Bodo’s overall impression of game ranches is that “they offer you the best canned hunt money can buy. It’s pretend hunting. . . . It’s difficult not to draw the obvious parallels with paying for the company of a woman.”

So, now in Alberta, the agenda is: first turn cervids into “diversified livestock,” then legalize their abuse, exploitation, and execution by game ranchers and their guests. I have observed and lamented the Californication of Montana and its blue river trout streams. Surely our government is bent on the Texacerbation of Alberta, the Texecution of our wildlife.

Any government that was concerned with concepts like ethics, morality, decency, fair splay, even scientific fact now born out by the continued progress of Chronic Wasting Disease through the wild cervids of Alberta, would long ago have put the remaining game ranchers out of their misery with a compensation package.

Instead, we have a government that is hell bent on compounding its gross stupidity of getting Albertans into game ranching in the first place by the grosser atrocity of continuing game ranching’s endangerment of wild cervids through legalizing the paid, “sporting” execution of penned and baited deer, elk, and probably bison.

Bob Scammell is an award-winning outdoors writer living in Canada.