The Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (DIFW) has launched a management initiative comprised in theory of a wide perspective of Maine citizens and organizations who would confer on a broad range of issues. With bears specifically, it’s the agency’s opportunity to reach a consensus, which could be key to preventing another referendum battle over bear hunting methods that have gone before voters twice in the past 11 years.
But guess what? Virtually all the members of the initiative’s steering committee represent hunting and trapping organizations and not the general public. Why is this important? Because the vast majority of Mainers do not hunt and yet decisions are made on their behalf without their participation.
Other methods of including the public in animal management issues have failed in the past because of the way our representatives and senators are influenced by the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine (SAM), the state’s powerful hunting lobby. The Inland Fisheries and Wildlife Legislative Committee has thirteen voting members, of whom at least nine and possibly more are either members of SAM or highly rated by that organization. Two committee members even serve on SAM’s executive board. Since the hunting/trapping lobby dominates the committee, the result is lots of representation for them, and none for anyone else.
This has to change. Tell the Commissioner to add organizations and private citizens be to the steering committee in proportion to the majority (some 90%) of Mainers who don’t hunt and that the current membership be reduced to reflect the approximately 10 % of the state’s residents who do.
DIFW is quoted as saying that “The public expectation is that wildlife will be managed for the full suite of interests and perspectives.” Unless that happens, we will have the same stonewalling in a new format, sham hoping to pass for substance.
Maine’s wildlife is a public resource not a private preserve, and like the state’s public lakes and roads and land, is held in common by all its people, and all need to be involved in how they are managed.
