In the continuing saga of Pete the Moose, only two questions seemed to remain Tuesday after the House approved a bill to return control of the caged cervid to the “public trust” and the Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Neither question had to do with whether the bill is likely to become law. It is. Even Rep. Robert Lewis, the Derby Republican who made the strongest argument against H. 91 when it cleared the Committee on Fish, Wildlife, and Water Resources last week, acknowledged that the Senate would probably pass the measure and send it to Gov. Peter Shumlin for his signature.
Lewis said he wouldn’t even bother to try to persuade senators to oppose the bill.
Instead the questions are: (1) Why did almost all the Republicans in the House vote against the bill even though most of the GOP-leaning interest groups such as hunting and fishing clubs and gun organizations were in favor of it? (2) What will Doug Nelson, the Northeast Kingdom dairy farmer, captive elk proprietor, and current keeper of the moose known as Pete, do after the bill becomes law?
Nelson could not be reached yesterday. In the past, he has threatened to transform the several hundred acres in which he keeps imported elk (but in which perhaps 200 native deer and moose also live) from forest to cornfield. He has also said that if state officials come to shoot Pete, “they might just have to shoot me, too.”
No one is going to shoot Pete. Though as Lewis said, the legislation does nothing to protect the most famous member of the species Alces alces in Vermont, if not the world, both Shumlin and Fish and Wildlife Commissioner Patrick Berry have pledged to let the moose live. (When asked about the state’s most famous cervid, Shumlin, in his presser on Tuesday, quipped: “If you’re named Pete and you have a big nose, you’re going to get some sympathy.”)
“I’ve made it crystal clear,” said Berry. “The bill does not preclude Pete from living out the rest of his days.”
Existing law, Berry said, gives him the authority to save Pete.
“Nobody can own wildlife,” he said. “But the commissioner can allow someone to possess wildlife. I told (Nelson) directly I’d be happy to work with him.”
If Nelson cooperates, Pete will live out those days where he is right now – inside a fenced area at the edge of Nelson’s elk impoundment in Irasburg. If Nelson does not cooperate, Berry said he has arranged for “Plan B.” Another place in state has agreed to take Pete. Berry said he did not want to identify the landowner.
Berry’s predecessor, Wayne LaRoche, had tried to get landowners or zookeepers in other states to accept Pete. But Berry said “no one (in another state) would touch him because he’s been comingling with other cervids.”
Deer, moose, and elk are all in the cervidae family. What scares wildlife biologists about Pete and his cervid associates is that when such animals are confined in unnaturally large population densities, they are more susceptible to disease, including chronic wasting disease. An outbreak of chronic wasting disease in the wild deer herd would devastate deer hunting in the area, with obvious damage to the local economy. In other states, wildlife officials have reacted to CWD outbreaks by slaughtering all deer in a radius of several miles.
So far none of the elk that have been hunted on Nelson’s land (at several thousand dollars a pop) have tested positive for CWD.
As did LaRoche, Berry has another problem with Pete’s situation: It’s against the law. So was his transportation as an abandoned 1-month-old in mid-2009 from where dogs had mauled him and chased away his mother. Transporting and confining wild animals is illegal, or was until Pete, nourished on jelly donuts and bananas, became a Facebook fad, and last year’s Legislature slipped through a bill in the dead of night turning over to Nelson management of all the wild animals on his land.
That legislation, engineered by, among others, then-Sen. Shumlin, overturned at least 1,000 years of Anglo-American legal tradition holding that wild animals are “held in trust” for the public, and are not private property.
The new bill effectively repeal’s last year’s law. Lewis said he agreed with that part of the legislation but opposed sections “giving Fish and Wildlife an awful lot of muscle to enforce this,” including the possibility of heavy fines levied against Nelson should he refuse to cooperate.
“We should be dealing with issues, not dealing with individuals,” said Lewis, who added he discerned some animus toward Nelson among some lawmakers and Fish and Wildlife officials. Nelson is one of Lewis’s constituents, but he said, “I don’t work for Doug Nelson.”
The bill calls for getting rid of the whitetail deer and moose in the compound within five years. That means killing them, perhaps by allowing extra hunting days on the land. Some opponents have described this as a slaughter, though as Rep. Kate Webb, a Shelburne Democrat, pointed out Tuesday, thousands of deer are killed on Vermont highways every year.
In recent weeks there has been some speculation that Nelson might argue that since last year’s law effectively gave him ownership of the animals, the new bill would amount to a “taking,” for which he would have to be compensated.
But Berry said “the language (in the present law) does not give him those animals. It allows him to manage those animals.”
Berry said he “implored (Nelson) not to go down that road. He told me he had a war chest.”
Lewis raised the possibility that Nelson might post his land, a right he has under the Vermont Constitution. If he could do that, getting rid of the wild deer and moose in his compound would be complicated at the very least.
Lewis offered one reason why so many Republicans might have opposed the bill. It was Democrats, he noted, who pushed through the law that they now want to repeal. Some Republicans might not want to help Democrats get out of the difficulty they created for themselves.
Not all Republicans opposed the bill. But 33 of the 39 ‘nays’ (there were 104 votes in favor) came from the 48-member GOP caucus (two Republicans were absent), despite support for the legislation from hunting and gun organizations that usually back Republicans.
But those organizations are not likely to withdraw support from a GOP lawmaker on the basis of this one bill. So while voting against the “hook and bullet” clubs may have been a risk for some Republicans, it was probably a small one.
Besides, members of a small legislative opposition have one instinctive reaction: oppose.
