Animal rights groups stealing money from outdoorsmen

[Tim Nunan]

http://www.doverpost.com/communities/do ... utdoorsmen

Dover, Del. — Did you see your shadow this morning? I’m sure that your prognostications will be as close as any hairy varmint out there. Spring still has a couple months before it will show up, I fear.

This past week I was asked an interesting question. I’m sure it’s one a few of my readers might wonder about (or castigate me over) but it’s a valid question: “Why am I such a radical anti-animal rights person?”

I suppose there are two glaring reasons, with the first being that I know hunters and fishermen are and were the first when it comes to conservation. No matter how these people paint us, they never mention that we advocated the seasons the government sets for us and we support the bag limits their biologists determine. We, alone, pay excise tax on every piece of equipment to use which funds the Pittman-Robertson Act that assures wild places will exist for generations. We impose taxes on ourselves in the form of licenses and stamps to augment that money. You won’t find a single birdwatcher or horseback rider doing any of those things. Neither will you find any ASPCA, PETA or HSUS member donating time or money to further those causes. Yet all of them demand their voices be given priority when we attempt to enjoy the benefits for which we’ve paid.

The biggest reason I detest them is that they are self-serving and they’re stealing money from us. No one wants to hear this, but they play to their members’ sympathies (why else would they show kittens with conjunctivitis and sad looking puppies in their advertising). Yet they operate not one single animal shelter in the world. PETA members were arrested for dumping euthanized animals in dumpsters near their Norfolk, Va. Headquarters in 2005.

They literally steal from conservation every time they launch one of their ignorant lawsuits against the USFWS or states’ FWS. In the last five years, game agencies within states and the federal government have spent nearly a billion dollars of hunting and fishing earmarked funds fighting these lunatics. It’s easy for them to claim that’s money that won’t be spent on building blinds for hunters to kill animals on reserves, but it ignores that the reserves wouldn’t be there to begin with without that money. Nor can they continue to operate when it’s wasted frivolously like this.

I can’t say that I have any animosity for anyone contributing to these causes, but I am puzzled by how they’re being taken advantage of. We are not talking about our local SPCA that subsists on funds from donors to shelter and find homes for strays. We’re talking about the international groups that have more money than the International Red Cross and do nothing but spout vile innuendos about us.

Well, from Sept. 1 when temperatures were in the 80s to February with snow on the ground, it’s been a great ride this year. Only eight months till opening day.