Mother Nature’s Way
I
was recently flipping channels, and I came across an interesting story. A fair
size Canadian town near the Rocky Mountains had an unusual problem. Someone had
released several pet bunnies, and wow, pretty soon there were rabbits
everywhere.
Well. I know about
rabbits first hand. When I was about 15,
I took some of my hard earned paper route money and bought a pair of rabbits, a
doe and a buck. For us rabbit raisers, that’s a male and female rabbit. The man
who sold them to me said, “You’ll have a litter of rabbits every thirty days. Let
‘em get ‘bout six weeks old, dress ‘em, and you can sell ‘em for a buck
apiece.” I swallowed the spiel hook, line, and sinker. It was one of my early
get rich schemes.
My dad and I built
a rabbit hutch, I bought a sack of rabbit pellets for food, and I was in
business. When my doe had 8 kits, I could[1]
see dollar signs. Six weeks later I skinned 7 of those little rabbits and sold
them for a dollar each, and the money kept rolling in, ‘cause my first female
rabbit had another big litter, and a week later the female I kept from the
first litter had a litter, and that was the start of my rabbit raising.
In only a couple
of more months I had four females each having a litter every thirty days, and
daddy and I had to build another hutch. Well, I was becoming almost a full time
rabbit skinner and door to door rabbit hawker, and for about a couple of months
it went pretty good, but you know, Norphlet ain’t very big, and not everyone
likes fried rabbit, and even some of my best customers started telling me they
had eaten enough rabbit to last a lifetime. It kinda came to a head at the
supper table, when I announced, “Guess what? I had three litters of rabbits
born today...twenty-seven in all.”
Well, my daddy
looked at me and said, “What are you going to do with another twenty-seven
rabbits? You haven’t sold all of the last three litters?”
Yeah, that was a
real tough question, but I had the answer.
“I’m going to cut
the price to fifty cents.” I said, and I did, and sales picked up, but then I
had another four litters about the time the last three litters were big enough
to sell, and I couldn’t sell them even at fifty cents. Finally daddy stepped in
and after separating the bucks from the does, it slowed down what was about to
become a huge rabbit problem, but I found out in about two weeks that five does
were already pregnant ‘cause that week I had another 32 more rabbits to get rid
of.
It took me nearly
two months to get rid of all those rabbits, and momma threatened to switch me
if I brought another one to cook. It got to where my former customers wouldn’t
even take a free dressed rabbit, and some wouldn’t even open the door when I
knocked. It finally got down to give ‘em away, and I even paid some of my paper
route money for a kid to take the last two. Yeah, I know that’s is probably
more than you want to know about my rabbit raising, so let’s get back to the
Canadian town and their rabbit problem.
&
Pretty soon there
were rabbits everywhere in that Canadian town, and these were big tame rabbits
that would take up residence in your yard just like a dog, and as more and more
rabbits popped up folks started talking about trying to get rid of them, and
that caused a problem because a lot of folks thought they were cute. But Mother
Nature came to the rescue, and big, slow-moving tame bunnies started becoming
lynx, fox, and coyote food. They were a lot easier to catch than wild game, and
that really reduced the town’s rabbit problem.
Well,
what does that have to do with Arkansas? Think, instead of bunnies, insert
feral hogs. Will Mother Nature come to our rescue? Yes, if we will just let
her. Back when I did the cougar survey, I received a call from a Canadian, who
is one of North American’s cougar experts. He said and I quote, “Of course you have cougars in Arkansas.
They are coming along the Arkansas River from the Rockies because you have
abundant prey; whitetail deer and feral hogs.”
As
you might remember, using the sighting from around the state, I estimated 125
cougars in 35 counties are roaming the woods in Arkansas. Just this week California,
which has an estimated 200 cougars, put a moratorium on cougars. You can’t
shoot a cougar in California even if it carrying off little Fluffy. I know,
here in Arkansas we don’t just jump at following California politics, but this
is one time we should follow their lead. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission
should put a moratorium on cougars in Arkansas. That is if we want some help in
controlling the runaway feral hog problem, the Chronic Wasting Decease (CWD) in
deer, which is spreading like wildfire in Northwest Arkansas, and bring back
the quail. Introducing predators will help.
Arkansas’s apex
predators were eliminated by the Game and Fish Commission starting in the 1920s
when they put a $10 bounty on wolves, cougars, and bobcats. The last wolf was
killed in 1962 and the cougars were eliminated about the same time. The cougars
in our woods today are new comers, and if we want to ever see Arkansas’s
ecosystem return to a balance, where we don’t have feral hogs by the millions,
a deer herd without chronic wasting disease, have bobwhite quail to hunt, and
see a 50% uptick in the wild turkey population (yes feral hogs destroy turkey
nests), there is only one way to do it, and that is to protect the predators
still here and restock predators into our ecosystem. The United States Wildlife
Service has designated parts of the Ozark and Ouachita National Forest as
excellent habitat for the restocking of the red wolf, and Game and Fish should
be the first in line to restock red wolves. (Contact me for a “Bring back the
Wolf” bumper sticker)
Anyone
who looks closely at our broken ecosystem, will understand that our wildlife
management mistakes in the early settlement of our state has heavily
contributed to the problems we have today. Sure, Game and Fish has been doing a
great job in our state; they have restored the deer herd, built hundreds of
boat landings, and creating some of the best fishing in the Mid-south. However,
today, we have dark shadows over several parts of our game management, and those
shadows could eventually destroy our deer herd and shrink our turkey population
just as it has disseminated our quail.
We can continue to
plod along doing the same wildlife management as we have been doing since the
1920s, or turn the page and follow the example of California by putting a
moratorium on apex predators and restocking the red wolf.
No comments:
Post a Comment