"PEACE IN OUR TIME"

[Tim Nunan]

"PEACE IN OUR TIME"

No, this isn't about thinking the UN Peacekeepers in Lebanon are anything but excuses to let the bad guys put their stuff back together for the next push on Israel. Nor is it about thinking the UN or "Europeans" can dissuade Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Nor is it about Senator McCain and the White House agreeing on workable prisoner interrogation methods or a workable fence between us and all those workers we are told we need. No, this is about hunting and our friends that look out for us. They are looking out for us like Neville Chamberlain (the British Prime Minister at the time) "negotiated a "peace" agreement with "Mr." Hitler after the Czechoslovakian invasion and just before the Polish/French Anschlauss by the German Air Force, Panzers, and associated infantry and SS Troopers. When Chamberlain got off the plane, waved a piece of paper and trumpeted how he had obtained "Peace in Our Time".

Negotiations to have any chance of success require equals, each
committed to attaining a level of accommodation satisfactory to them
when certain losses are balanced by certain gains. These conditions
rarely exist in nature, only in the heads of dreamers and those with
hidden agendas. Show me a person who says such negotiations gave
satisfactory results and I will show you a man who worships, lives, and
speaks differently than his mother and father. But I digress.

The Neville Churchill award for 2006 (is there a "Conservation"
Organization out there to sponsor this say with Bass Pro or Cabelas?)
goes to the managers of the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the US
Department of the Interior staff and managers that oversee them. (Many
copies of the award will need to be printed, framed, and signed by either the Executive Director of the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies [the "renamed" lobby group of the State Fish and Game Departments] or an Executive of say the Defenders of Wildlife or perhaps PETA).

Here is the write-up for the Award.

Earlier this year the Fund for Animals, a group known for their concern
for animals when it can eliminate hunting or trapping or fishing or any
other renewable use of natural resources, sued the US Fish and Wildlife
Service to stop all hunting where it is taking place on National Wildlife Refuges because "the Economic Analysis for Hunting on National Wildlife Refuges did not consider the System-wide effects of hunting, only the effects on individual refuges".

Now as we all know effects of things on the Refuge System (or Park
System or Forest System) are as real as the necessity of predators in
"Thuh Ecosystem" or the effect of the magic wand by which Mickey Mouse
made mops dance in Fantasia. Nonetheless the US Fish and Wildlife Service and all their anti-use and anti-management types (from the
Management Authority and "Scientific" Authority to all of the scattered
hires of the past few years) said that rather than going to court they would "negotiate" with the Fund for Animals. (You know, they will come
to "love" us and "understand" us once they see how nice we are).

As did Hitler, the Fund for Animals gladly entered into "negotiations" with all the commitment of Iranian "negotiators".

So here is where the award comes in. Not only did the US Fish and
Wildlife Service agree not to open any new refuge hunts until they reach
an "agreement" (everyone knows this to date) but they have recently
decided (everyone doesn't know this yet) to not open 7 other Refuges to
hunting that were not part of the suit originally and were already slated for hunting this fall as part of their "negotiation strategy". The announcement is being "wordsmithed" even as you read this. To quote
a once famous but now forgotten bureaucrat "to make omelettes, you must break eggs".

If this Administration and the Republican Congress and a House Resources Committee and a Senate Environment and Public Works Committees with Chairmen like Pombo and Inhofe let bureaucrats perpetrate this sort of thing, is there any hope? If the US Fish and Wildlife Service can sell out hunters and hunting like this and the National Park Service can close State highways and the US Forest Service can turn itself into one massive Wilderness/Fire System under this Administration, what hope is there under Democrats or the "moderate" Republicans lining up for the Presidency at this time?

Ask yourself about "your" conservation organization lobbyists in
Washington or your State Fish and Wildlife Agencies that have been AWOL
through all this. Hunting, like pet ownership and fishing and ranching and logging and the common sense basis of out future are each dying of a "thousand cuts" delivered one at a time.

If this US Fish and Wildlife Service Director doesn't get a big job with some animal rights or environmental outfit when he "retires" it won't be
for lack of trying. All he needs is a video of him getting out of a plane and grinning wildly as he shakes a piece of paper in the air.

Jim Beers

26 Sep. 2006

- This article and other recent articles by Jim Beers can be found at

http://jimbeers.blogster.com (Jim Beers Common Sense)