Editor’s note: This commentary is by Brenna Galdenzi, president of Protect Our Wildlife POW.
[V]ermont Fish & Wildlife recently had two opportunities to collaborate with wildlife advocates; not surprisingly, they gave their customers (hunters and trappers) what they wanted, leaving the rest of Vermont unrepresented.
The Fish & Wildlife Board considered two petitions: one that sought to propose regulations for the dangerously rogue business of nuisance wildlife trapping; the other was a science-based petition that sought to place a moratorium on fox hunting and trapping in light of recent studies that correlate a greater presence of foxes with a reduced spread of Lyme-infected ticks. To be honest, wildlife advocates did not go into this expecting victory. We did, however, expect to walk away with something, if nothing more than an opportunity to collaborate with Fish & Wildlife on some areas of potential common interest.
The nuisance wildlife trapping petition found here focused on parties called “nuisance wildlife control operators” (NWCOs), otherwise known as animal damage control operators. These businesses have been completely unregulated in Vermont, but now must have some oversight thanks to a new law. As it stands now, NWCOs undergo neither training, licensing or permitting, nor are they required to submit any kind of reporting on the animals they kill each year. And they aren’t required to consider non-lethal methods of control. This presents obvious consumer protection and public health concerns, not to mention obvious animal welfare implications. An example of these concerns culminated into a nightmarish experience for one NWCO customer this past summer. A woman hired a NWCO to trap a skunk on her property. Instead, he trapped an opossum by accident, and when the woman called to ask him to come and release the animal, since she was afraid to do it herself, the NWCO never called her back. The animal was trapped for 36+ hours, subject to heat and other stressors, until the woman was finally able to get a Good Samaritan to release it.
Protect Our Wildlife spent over a year composing a fair and seemingly bipartisan petition to Fish & Wildlife requesting improvements to current policies. We asked for specific training for NWCOs, including non-lethal and sustainable methods of dealing with wildlife conflicts, as well as mandatory, detailed reporting on animals killed. Fish & Wildlife refused to work with us. Instead, they proposed the bare minimum that is required as a result of the passage of bill H.636 last legislative session. Our neighboring state of New Hampshire, hardly a bastion of anti-hunting/trapping sentiment, has a robust NWCO training program in place that their Fish & Wildlife Department supports. Vermont seems to be stuck in a cycle of trap, kill, repeat — marching to the same old drumbeat in an impenetrable trance.
An example of their abrogation of their responsibility to Vermont’s wildlife and Vermont residents is that Fish & Wildlife did not even prohibit the use of snares for NWCO work. Snares are prohibited for in-season trappers per Vermont statute, presumably due to animal cruelty concerns and the dangers they present to non-targeted species, including protected and endangered wildlife.
The second petition was submitted by a Vermont citizen who was very interested in a scientific study that reveals that landscapes with a greater presence of foxes means less Lyme disease-infected ticks. Armed with the information and a host of articles, including one in the New York Times that touted foxes as enemy number one for mice, she submitted a petition to Fish & Wildlife. Her petition sought to place a moratorium on the hunting and trapping of foxes to see if that might impact the alarming rate of Lyme transmission in Vermont.
The most compelling part of her petition is that there’s no downside. Foxes are hunted and trapped for recreation and sport — no one eats them and their pelts are worthless, so why kill them? There are no bag limits on the number of foxes that may be killed, and the smiley-faced photos of trappers standing next to frightened foxes who are immobilized in leghold traps are hardly a reason to uphold the activity. Vermont Fish & Wildlife responded to the petition with a report that cites outdated and irrelevant studies that only sought to justify the status quo. They downplayed the part of their report that pointed to a downtrend in the fox population.
Trappers historically have not submitted their voluntary trapper mail surveys and they aren’t required to have fox pelts tagged, so Fish & Wildlife’s only way of arriving at population trends for foxes is already severely compromised. Fish & Wildlife does not require fox hunters or those who kill foxes in defense of property (think NWCOs and landowners) to report, so when the data is so lacking, one would hope that they’d err on the side of caution. No such luck. Even the biometrician from Fish & Wildlife who led the presentation woefully admitted that she’d love more data on foxes. So why doesn’t Fish & Wildlife require better reporting? A policy of comprehensive reporting may not be preferred by hunters, or trappers, but it would be the right thing to do for Vermont’s wildlife.
In the end, not only did Fish & Wildlife not support a moratorium, they refused to even consider bag limits. But they did leave us with this eyebrow- raising nugget: “The Department does not dispute that a severe reduction of predator populations to the point of ‘rarity’ could influence small mammal populations and potentially other competing predators.” So, is the department suggesting that we should only be concerned when a severe reduction of predators occurs — to the point of extirpation, perhaps? Could small mammal populations be influenced only then? I don’t think one needs to be a wildlife biologist to see some serious flaws in their statement.
Hopefully, everyone is getting the picture here and it’s a bleak one. It does not matter how fair and collaborative your approach is when trying to work with Fish & Wildlife — if you don’t hold a hunting or trapping license, you’re marginalized. When we have nuisance wildlife control operators sitting on the Fish & Wildlife Board who are charged with voting on a NWCO petition that affects them, how can they vote without bias? The same goes for the taxidermist who sits on the board and makes money off of fox mounts – how can that person vote without bias when there are possible monetary implications? We need a new game plan, folks, (pun intended) and that would include changing the entire Fish & Wildlife paradigm.
