Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. Lynn Fritchman is used to spending time with dead bears. The third-generation Idaho hunter inspects bears for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game after they’ve been killed by hunters. But over the years Fritchman heard […]
Wildlife
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Forget cattle, the money’s in the buck
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. Rancher and farmer Milo Hanson from Saskatchewan, Canada, never imagined that hunting would change his life. That was before judges from the Boone and Crockett Club scored a whitetail buck that he shot near his farm […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
For this hunter, there was only one elk
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. It was mid-afternoon and the bowhunter found himself working up a small knob covered with thick, second-growth lodgepole pine. The knob was part of the north slope of a larger mountain not far from the Continental […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
The politics of hunting creates fluidalliances
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. While nonprofit groups like Ducks Unlimited or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have sharply defined positions on hunting, most environmental groups – composed of both avid hunters and anti-hunters – waffle somewhere in the […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Organizations from ‘Get a gun’ to ‘No way’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. Wildlife Legislative Fund of America: “Our sole purpose in life is to protect the right to hunt, fish and trap,” says staffer Allan Wolter. This umbrella organization for 1.5 million sportsmen was founded in 1978 to […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
I like to hunt, but I don’t like to kill
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. I always edge away from the subject of hunting. I’ve hunted and shall hunt, but I don’t talk about it much – those late-night, throaty recitations of travels and kills make me nervous. It’s miserable standing […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
Why a son won’t hunt with his father
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story, Unarmed but dangerous critics close in on hunting. “You always kill coyotes,” my father would tell me, with a seriousness that both frightened and fascinated me. “Always. They are bad animals. You shoot them whenever you get the chance.” The words rang through my […]
Posted inDecember 11, 1995: Hunting: Its place in the West comes under attack
By the grace of old pines
Fish Creek murmurs to itself in a voice like rustling cottonwood leaves as it curves past Montana’s biggest ponderosa pine on its way to the Clark Fork River. Sunlight animates the tree’s trunk and ripples on the underside of its lowest branch, 30 feet overhead. Its bark is a smooth sheath of gold flakes with […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Watch out for guns
It was killing season again, and in Colorado it might have been safer to romp through the woods in blaze orange than to stay near a hunting camp. A 16-year-old girl in the Uncompahgre National Forest hopped off her four-wheeler while unloading her rifle Oct. 21, only to shoot her father in the leg. He […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Agency leaders need to come out swinging
With a muffled thump, a small bomb ripped through Forest Service offices in Carson City, Nev., in late March, damaging walls and computer equipment. The damages were not just physical; for the men and women whose daily routines were shattered, the detonation had understandable psychological ramifications. There were political reverberations, too: Some public-land managers who […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Jury tackles a question of ethics in Montana
BILLINGS, Mont. – The three-day trial here last month of a man accused of shooting an endangered wolf ran like a morality play about the new American West and small-town Montana culture. This is a place where men enjoy their guns, hunting, beer and trucks, but as the accused, Chad McKittrick, soon discovered, there are […]
Posted inNovember 27, 1995: Saving the ranch
Rare native fish found in Utah, then poisoned by mistake
A project launched by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources to protect a recently discovered population of rare native trout killed almost every fish in the stream instead. The fish, located in Parley’s Creek close to Salt Lake City, were believed to be pure Bonneville cutthroat trout, one of only two varieties of trout native […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Clinton says: Stop logging
President Clinton says he’s distressed because the salvage rider he signed in July opened up the wrong ancient forests to logging. Faced with growing civil disobedience in the Northwest, the president said last month that he wants Congress to change the law. As interpreted by a federal judge, part of the salvage law mandated the […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Guy Pence leaves Nevada
The Forest Service has ordered Guy Pence off of the front lines in Nevada. The district ranger in Carson City has been the target of two bombings this year (HCN, 10/30/95). The agency is reassigning him to a staff position at the regional office in Boise, Idaho, out of concern for his personal safety and […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
The butterfly and the golf course; and the widow’s story
The butterfly and the golf course The Allegation: In a cover story titled “The Butterfly Problem,” in the January 1992 issue of The Atlantic, the authors portrayed an Oregon developer whose lifelong dream of carving fairways on a section of the Oregon coast was snuffed out in the morass of Endangered Species Act protection of […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Writers for Utah wilderness
We are not, of course, in dire need of roads, transmission towers, dams, reservoirs, and gas pipelines. We are in dire need of courtesy. We are in dire need of a broadly intelligent conversation about human fate. We are in need of a thorough and piercing review of our plan for economic development, a plan […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
Helping hand isn’t
Helping hand isn’t The best way to help wildlife live through a bitter winter is to leave them alone, says the Montana-based Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Free food can accustom deer and elk to human hand-outs and erode instincts that protect the animals, says the group. If the ration suddenly disappears, the animals may descend […]
Posted inNovember 13, 1995: Seeing the forest and the trees
The anecdotal war on endangered species is running out of steam
Idaho Rep. Helen Chenoweth stepped up to the podium at the Wise Use Leadership Conference in Reno, Nev., this summer and charged the Endangered Species Act with a series of assaults: Californians lost homes to the 1993 fire because they were not allowed to clear weeds where endangered kangaroo rats live. Snails smaller than a […]
Posted inOctober 30, 1995: Nevada's ugly tug-of war
Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?
WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLF? Ranchers concerned about wolves killing livestock should buy a new piece of equipment – a video camera. That’s the advice in Dealing with Wolves on the Ranch, a pamphlet from the Montana Stockgrowers Association that explains the legal do’s and don’ts of dealing with endangered wolves in Idaho, […]
Posted inOctober 30, 1995: Nevada's ugly tug-of war
Logging deal struck in Southwest
Some timber cutting has resumed in the Southwest’s national forests, Christmas trees and all. An Oct. 19 agreement reached between environmentalists and the Forest Service frees up about 30 million board-feet of timber for harvesting. The negotiations came after a federal judge in August halted logging on national forests in Arizona and New Mexico until […]