Editor’s note: This commentary is by Weldon Bosworth, Ph.D., a retired environmental consultant from Gilford, New Hampshire.
[R]eading the commentary by Vermont Department of Fish & Wildlife Commissioner Louis Porter makes me wonder whether he would recognize “sound science” if he saw it. It is indeed unfortunate that the leader of the commission charged with ensuring that populations of Vermont’s public trust resources, its wildlife, are healthy and sustainable, can’t remove his head from the sand when it comes to any threat to “harvesting” Vermont’s wildlife.
I have personally reviewed the trapping data for the red and gray fox and find that Catch per Unit Effort (CPUE), a statistic Vermont’s wildlife managers use to infer the condition of a wildlife population, has decreased significantly over the last several years. For the red fox, CPUE has decreased almost 60 percent since 1999 and the gray fox CPUE has decreased 70 percent in the last nine years.
These data imply a population that is under pressure and should send a warning signal to Vermont wildlife managers. There is clearly a trend of decreasing CPUE for these species and without further explanation of what variables are the primary cause(s) of these trends, any wildlife management decision should be conservative, i.e., err on protecting the species. Instead the department takes a defensive position and concludes that these trends are merely natural variability, an opinion that is not supported by any objective science, and continues the trapping and hunting season unabated.
Who loses if the department’s speculation is wrong? Vermont’s natural environment, since research over the last 40 years has demonstrated the many ecological values of predators. As top-down regulators of ecosystems, furbearing predators like foxes, fishers and coyotes, among other things, help to reduce populations of herbivores and rodents.
Porter also opines that predators like the fox have no bearing on the abundance of ticks, rather suggests that SODDI (Some Other Dude Did It, i.e., global warming, etc.) is the explanation for the incidence of Lyme disease. This departure from deductive reasoning is baffling in an organization that claims to be managed using “sound science.” Since small mammals, including rodents, squirrels and chipmunks, serve as reservoir hosts for Lyme-carrying ticks and these same small mammal species are the primary prey of the red fox, gray fox, fisher and coyote, one would have thought that Porter would have at least given some credence to the possibility that these species of predators do play a significant role in decreasing the abundance of ticks that potentially serve as hosts for Lyme disease. But in an effort to defend his turf, he throws objectivity out the window. Perhaps he should read the latest research on the relationship between these predators and Lyme disease risk at https://www.caryinstitute.org/newsroom/forest-ecology-shapes-lyme-disease-risk-eastern-us
