Nev. Legislature guts elk bill, then targets predators
By Benjamin Spillman, Reno Gazette-Journal
There’s an adage in politics that says if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.
During Nevada’s recent legislative session, that message applied to coyotes and mountain lions as much as it did to lobbyists, at least when it came to Assembly Bill 78.
The bill started life in late 2014 as a request from the Department of Wildlife to authorize the Wildlife Commission to increase by $5 a fee that’s applied to elk hunting tag applications.
Cash from the increase would have been used to beef up a state program that repays farmers and ranchers for damage elk sometimes inflict on private property.
By May 27 when Gov. Brian Sandoval signed it into law, however, the elk tag fee was long gone and replaced by a mandate to dedicate at least 80 percent of another fund to pay for lethal predator control. Revisions also called for reports from state wildlife officials to county-based wildlife advisory boards whenever the state officials act contrary to the advice of the county-level boards.
This approach to wildlife management has been tried and has failed over and over again. Don’t the mistakes of the past mean anything to Nevada? The science of wildlife management has advanced light years ahead of the past. This is 2015 not 1915.
Here is a different way to look at the depredation of predators: By having an aggressive depredation program focusing on predatory animals, you increase the risk of having large populations of prey animals much higher at risk for disease by virtue of no thinning that takes place in a natural ecosystem. Now that may not seem like a big deal until one of those diseases that already are enzootic in the environment at generally low levels may run rampant in an unchecked population and turn out to be a disease such as West Nile Virus, Plague, Hantavirus, or Lyme Disease, just to name a few that most people are aware of, cable of transmission to humans by a competent arthropod vector.