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Originally Posted by F Mandolin
Makes sence to me as i heard there were wolves up north and then in later years i knew a trapper at Swan Hills and he sais there were moose everywhere and you could shoot cows and calves.
Keg River - that was an excellent piece you wrote. Your father and my grandfather sound so similar it's kind of eerie. He always told me that everytime i had shot half a dozen rabbits or chickens i had better shoot a chicken hawk or great horned owl to keep things even. Times have changed in the last 60 years.
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My dad didn't go quiet that far, but only just. I can recall more then one Hawk or Owl that killed a chicken or two, they paid with their lives.
Times have changed, mostly for the better, conservation wise, at a grass roots level. I'm not so sure our top government people have improved much in that regard however.
Those old fellows knew that game ranching and raising exotic species were too high risk. As we all know, more recent governments have no such concerns.
It seems to me that where we gained in one area we lost ground in another.
Those old guys were gentleman. They took only what they needed and they willingly shared.
This generation takes all it can, even when they have no way to utilize their harvest. And they do not share if they can avoid it, but they demand that everyone else share.
We understand wildlife better then we ever have in the history of man, yet we do more to make life precarious for wildlife then we ever did in the past.
We strip the land of it's forests to build our cities, we fog our planet with a cocktail of man made chemicals that have unknown long term effects.
Our governments put out the most lethal and indiscriminate poison ever known to man to kill predators for man's sake. Sure they claim it's to protect the Caribou but does anyone believe that?
We have Caribou here but they aren't putting out poison here.
We have allowed Wild Boar to escape into our forests and we've made it possible for diseases like Chronic Wasting disease to spread into our wildlife populations via game ranching.
We cut logging roads and cutlines through every square mile of the north and we have shot so much game that everything has to be on draws these days.
I don't think it's that we have lost understanding so much as it is that we have not kept up with the pace of technological development and the exploding human population.
Whatever, the results are the same, for every step forward man kind makes we take two steps backward.
In 1967 Popular Science ran a story about what the year 2000 would be like.
They predicted that wars would be eliminated and crime would too.
They predicted that we would all be driving electric cars and our cities would be spotless.
Much of what they predicted has not only not happened, crime and pollution wise it is far worse now.
Technologically we have gained far more then anyone back then could have imagined. But it seems that we have lost moral and intellectual ground almost at the same rate.