The site:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_exnews/19991108_xex_hunters_oust.shtml
The article:
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THIS LAND IS OUR LAND
Hunters ousted
from public lands?
Danger 'very real' if land bill
passes, whistle-blower warns
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Sarah Foster
© 1999 WorldNetDaily.com
If a major land acquisition bill receives congressional approval, hunters may find themselves booted off federal wildlife refuges and other government-owned lands -- the acquisition of which was made possible by their financial support, according to a Fish and Wildlife Service whistle-blower.
Rep. Don Young, R-Ak., in a last ditch effort to get his "Conservation and Reinvestment Act of 1999" or CARA (HR 701) passed before Congress adjourns at the end of this week, has cut a deal with House Democrats and the Republican leadership.
Since he introduced it in February, Young's bill has been stalled in the House Resources Committee he chairs. Unable to muster support among his own Republican committee members, Young sought help from committee Democrats in return for accepting provisions from a competing bill by California Democrat George Miller, the committee's ranking minority member. Miller's "America's Resources 2000" (HR 798), has been the legislation of choice among environmentalists and Democrats.
Committee Democrats are expected to support the new version, which puts $3.9 billion per year into various conservation and recreation projects.
Both bills are vehicles for giving coastal states a cut of the $4-5 billion in oil and gas revenues generated annually from drilling on the outer continental shelf -- money which at present goes into the nation's general fund. Through CARA, part of these revenues would be distributed to state and local governments throughout the United States and territories for buying private land, developing conservation programs, and funding construction of recreational facilities like tennis courts and Little League fields. Because the bills allow for virtually unlimited land buy-ups by government, they are hotly opposed by property rights advocates.
The merger of the two bills catches the hunting and environmental communities in a moment of rare agreement -- each side eagerly anticipating the spoils it expects to enjoy if CARA makes it out of the House Resources Committee and through Congress -- if not before year end, then early in 2000.
The National Rifle Association, the Safari Club International, a group dedicated to big game hunting, and similar organizations that have actively promoted the bill are looking forward to having their efforts rewarded with more land being made available for sports shooting, trapping, fishing, bow hunting, and similar pursuits.
But new revelations by a Capital Hill consultant strongly indicate that if CARA passes, the taste of victory could quickly turn bitter for the hunters -- due in large part to an increasingly powerful advocacy movement: the animal rights lobby.
Decades ago, groups like the Humane Society declared open season on hunting -- particularly on public lands. Because certain provisions in CARA could be used by such groups to advance their common agenda, hunters may suddenly find themselves and their guns unwelcome in federal wildlife refuges and other government-owned areas, lands whose acquisition they helped make possible through their support.
That's the bottom line prediction of consultant Mike Hardiman, who became alerted to the possibility only last week. While committee staff and the bill's supporters dismiss the notion out of hand or try to laugh it away -- one person who isn't laughing is a former employee with the Fish and Wildlife Service, who retired four months ago after 31 years with the service.
"I think it's a very real possibility," James Beers told WorldNetDaily, when contacted by phone at his Virginia home. "Mike [Hardiman] has raised some very serious issues about the agenda of certain groups, and while that agenda hasn't advanced in the 20 years -- it could now."
Beers achieved notoriety as a whistle-blower earlier this year when he presented devastating testimony to Young's committee on the misuses by agency officials of the Pittman-Robertson fund, which is controlled by the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Now he finds himself frankly on the opposite side of an issue from the Resources chairman.
A long-time congressional aide, Hardiman recently set up his own political consulting firm -- and lists as one of his first clients the property rights protection organization American Land Rights Association, based in Battle Ground, Washington, which has been spearheading a grassroots campaign against Young's bill and its counterparts. WorldNetDaily has presented analyses of these bills.
As originally introduced, HR 701 was divided into three sections, called titles, with Title II quickly becoming the focal point for the opposition. Title II would set up a trust fund of nearly $1 billion a year for land acquisition -- divided between the federal and state governments. Merged with Miller's bill, the new version has eight titles, though Titles I, II, and III remain basically the same.
As Hardiman and Beers see it, the threat to hunting comes not through Title II, but from Title III, under which $350 million a year would be funneled into a long-established federal program, one well known to the hunting and fishing communities though not to the general public: the Pittman-Robertson fund.
The Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937 (the Pittman-Robertson Act) established a special account funded by an excise tax -- about 10 percent on guns and ammunition, with the proceeds to be distributed to state fish and game departments to improve their conservation projects. The money goes for game nurseries, habitat restoration, state hunting education programs, and land purchases for refuges. A similar fund -- Dingell-Johnson -- is financed through an excise tax on fishing gear.
"Pittman-Robertson is about to get hijacked by animal rights activists," says Hardiman, "and here's how. Right now the fund is controlled pretty much by good old boys, because it's money they pay through their excise taxes. When offshore oil money gets put into the fund, that's general fund money and is no longer tied to the hunting community. You've uncoupled Pittman-Robertson money from the hunters and sportsmen -- opening the fund up to non-hunters. That means anybody can start making noise, start making protests, over how the money is to be spent -- and that includes the animal rights activists. They'll be able to buy land from the private sector for the public sector and prohibit hunting on it.
"The first step would be to buy the land -- step two, knock out the hunting," he added.
Hardiman said he found the basis for his theory when he ran across the website for the Animal Protection Institute, during a midnight surfing session on the Internet. The 80,000-member Sacramento-based organization was the primary organization responsible for Proposition 4 that banned trapping in state forests, overwhelmingly approved by voters in 1998.
API is actively engaged in similar campaigns. A full-page ad in the Oct. 13 Washington Times called for a congressional ban on the use of snares and traps in national forests. Sponsored by API, some 39 other groups -- like the Humane Society and Friends of Animals -- signed on as part of a coalition.
"The whole plan is laid out on their website," Hardiman explained. "One of their advocacy campaigns is 'Stopping Sport Hunting.' They say that 'through litigation, API is challenging the expansion of sport hunting on our public lands, including National Parks and National Wildlife Refuges.' They have a fact-sheet page called The Fallacy of Sport Hunting. and they make it very clear what their agenda is."
Hardiman read from the Fact Sheet: "As wildlife advocates, we must work to change the constituency of power within our wildlife management agencies and the funding sources that maintain these government agencies. Only when our state wildlife agencies represent the majority of Americans who do not hunt, will we see a change in wildlife management."
Websites of various animal rights and conservation groups tend to validate Hardiman's thesis. The Humane Society, the Fund for Animals, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals all have active anti-hunting, anti-fishing campaigns.
Such campaigns generally are not conducted at the federal level; an attempt to get a ban on trapping in the National Refuge System attached to an appropriations bill failed this year in the House. The most successful campaigns are waged at the state level, the tactic being to get the public to demand the banning of socially discredited methods of hunting, such as the use of leg-hold traps, snares, and trapping -- or of killing of certain species, like bears, cougars, and wolves.
From Hardiman's perspective, the problem isn't just that operations like API have an anti-hunting agenda, but that the Pittman-Robertson funding, which goes into the state fish and game departments, would help them realize their goal more quickly.
Not everyone shares those concerns. Indeed, most of the people WorldNetDaily contacted for comment scorned the idea that animal rights groups, by getting a handle on Pittman-Robertson funds, could leverage themselves into a position where they could advance their anti-hunting agenda.
"I'm not concerned about their views on HR 701," said Susan Lamson, director of Conservation, Wildlife and Natural Resources at the National Rifle Association in Washington. "I think they (the animal rights groups) have got agendas that they are promoting in a whole lot of venues, but I don't see where the passage of HR 701 -- using outer-continental shelf oil and gas receipts -- would give them a special influence with the wildlife agencies. It's not their money, it is basically money that has for years gone directly to the general treasury, and now under this act would be earmarked for land acquisition and state conservation projects.
"By providing more money [to the state departments], to me it means the states will have the ability to do that much more on wildlife programs and habitat acquisition. So in terms of the animal rights persons pushing an agenda, I don't think that is made a greater threat by passage of HR 701," she observed.
Rudolph Rosen, executive director of Safari Club International, concurred. The Tucson, Ariz., association of big game trophy hunters is alleged to be the real power behind the bill. He, too, seemed nonchalant about the animal rights movement posing a threat.
"The destiny of those funds -- whether from excise taxes or oil revenue -- would be in the hands of the commissions that set regulatory policy at the state level," he said. "There are provisions in the bill clearly allowing for the use of funds for wildlife purposes that include managed harvesting.
"My feeling is that the elimination of hunting, if that were to occur, would create such a plethora of wildlife management dilemmas for the state that it would not last long. I have intimate knowledge from an administrative perspective and experience with how these programs work. And CARA does not change the mechanisms whereby these federal aid funds are granted or administered," he said.
Rosen acknowledged a "potential for abuse, for serious abuse. But it's going to be up to the state agencies and the hunters and everybody else to assure that those kinds of abuses don't occur."
Most outwardly skeptical of the notion was Steven Hansen, Director of Communications of the House Resources Committee, which Rep. Young chairs, and where the bill is currently lodged.
Asked to comment on Hardiman's concerns and the issues raised -- summarized in a flyer for distribution on the Hill -- Hansen dismissed them as "totally wrong" and "out of whack."
Asked for specifics, Hansen said, "We'll take it from the first letter of the first sentence to the period at the end. It's wrong. It [the flyer] says that animal rights groups are going to take over the government and restrict access to public lands. Well, actually I guess that is conceivable, that animal rights groups could overthrow the government."
WorldNetDaily pointed out that Hardiman didn't make such a claim -- that what he had written was: "The Administration's animal rights and environmentalist allies are anxiously awaiting CARA's Annual Billion Dollar Land Grab."
Said Hansen: "Yeah, well I guess you could say the animal rights groups could take over the soccer fields and baseball fields."
Pressed about the growing influence of such groups, Hansen admitted they had "agendas," but that "there's no support for them."
"There are so many groups out there with agendas that I guess you could apply any group's agenda to this bill and say, 'Oh, it's horrible because this group has an agenda. ... Well, if that were the case, we wouldn't pass a bill for anything because every bill could be affected by somebody's agenda."
But Beers doesn't think the issue at all trivial -- and he has seen it from inside the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
After reviewing Hardiman's information, Beers realized the enormity of the problem, which no one involved with the bill had even considered. First, there's the question of match money; and second, a shift in ideology of the people employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and their counterparts in state fish and game departments.
"The hundreds of millions of dollars that go out every year in Pittman-Robertson, Dingell-Johnson funds all have to be matched by the states," he explained, "They don't just get the money and spend it. They have to show enough commitment to various projects to match the funds. It can be in a small sense -- maybe 10 to 20 percent -- but they have to come up with some money.
"Most of the match money comes from licenses: hunting licenses, fishing licenses, trapping licenses. This is standard, and the money pays for a lot of programs that are called non-game, meaning they aren't directly tied to hunting and fishing. Things like trails construction, taking inventories of native plants, and so on. A lot of not-game subject areas have been established over the last 20 years -- there's a lot of non-game areas that people want.
"Where's the match money going to come from with the huge increase of money available added to the Pittman-Robertson? That's the first question," Beers said.
Over 90 percent of the match money is derived from licenses. Unless there's a sharp increase in the number of hunters and a resulting increase in the numbers of hunting licenses sold, fish and game departments will have to turn to the legislature for assistance -- and hunters, while they may control the fish and game commissions, do not control the state law-making bodies.
"There will be enormous pressure brought to bear to try and get the hunting and fishing license money and the Pittman-Robertson funds converted to non-game programs," Beers predicted. "Real strong pressure from certain groups."
Then there's the shift of ideology of those employed by the agencies, away from traditional fields of wildlife management. Indeed, many employees -- particularly those in the non-game programs -- bear an antipathy towards hunting.
Beers said he ran into that within the service itself.
"I found that the service was going down the stream with two feet in two canoes," he remarked. "Employees were telling the state fish and game departments that they supported them and would help them, and at the same time they were having clandestine meetings with groups like the Humane Society and Friends of Animals to undercut those efforts.
"So, to ask how much the animal rights people [are] involved in, say, the issue of non-game funding, my answer would be significantly -- but not in any way that you could find out about it. There are some groups that the people in charge of the service right now are pretty tight with.
"Could their agenda be advanced through CARA? The answer's yes -- it could be, because there haven't been adequate safeguards made to prevent it, and because a lot of the conservation groups -- those not connected to the animal rights movement -- understand that the states need non-game money and want to help the state fish and game departments stay solvent, but want to be regarded as broad-minded and are afraid of being mistaken for as hook-and-bullet type people who are against the environment."
[/quote]
------------------
John/az
"The middle of the road between the extremes of good and evil, is evil. When freedom is at stake, your silence is not golden, it's yellow..." RKBA!
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_exnews/19991108_xex_hunters_oust.shtml
The article:
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THIS LAND IS OUR LAND
Hunters ousted
from public lands?
Danger 'very real' if land bill
passes, whistle-blower warns
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Sarah Foster
© 1999 WorldNetDaily.com
If a major land acquisition bill receives congressional approval, hunters may find themselves booted off federal wildlife refuges and other government-owned lands -- the acquisition of which was made possible by their financial support, according to a Fish and Wildlife Service whistle-blower.
Rep. Don Young, R-Ak., in a last ditch effort to get his "Conservation and Reinvestment Act of 1999" or CARA (HR 701) passed before Congress adjourns at the end of this week, has cut a deal with House Democrats and the Republican leadership.
Since he introduced it in February, Young's bill has been stalled in the House Resources Committee he chairs. Unable to muster support among his own Republican committee members, Young sought help from committee Democrats in return for accepting provisions from a competing bill by California Democrat George Miller, the committee's ranking minority member. Miller's "America's Resources 2000" (HR 798), has been the legislation of choice among environmentalists and Democrats.
Committee Democrats are expected to support the new version, which puts $3.9 billion per year into various conservation and recreation projects.
Both bills are vehicles for giving coastal states a cut of the $4-5 billion in oil and gas revenues generated annually from drilling on the outer continental shelf -- money which at present goes into the nation's general fund. Through CARA, part of these revenues would be distributed to state and local governments throughout the United States and territories for buying private land, developing conservation programs, and funding construction of recreational facilities like tennis courts and Little League fields. Because the bills allow for virtually unlimited land buy-ups by government, they are hotly opposed by property rights advocates.
The merger of the two bills catches the hunting and environmental communities in a moment of rare agreement -- each side eagerly anticipating the spoils it expects to enjoy if CARA makes it out of the House Resources Committee and through Congress -- if not before year end, then early in 2000.
The National Rifle Association, the Safari Club International, a group dedicated to big game hunting, and similar organizations that have actively promoted the bill are looking forward to having their efforts rewarded with more land being made available for sports shooting, trapping, fishing, bow hunting, and similar pursuits.
But new revelations by a Capital Hill consultant strongly indicate that if CARA passes, the taste of victory could quickly turn bitter for the hunters -- due in large part to an increasingly powerful advocacy movement: the animal rights lobby.
Decades ago, groups like the Humane Society declared open season on hunting -- particularly on public lands. Because certain provisions in CARA could be used by such groups to advance their common agenda, hunters may suddenly find themselves and their guns unwelcome in federal wildlife refuges and other government-owned areas, lands whose acquisition they helped make possible through their support.
That's the bottom line prediction of consultant Mike Hardiman, who became alerted to the possibility only last week. While committee staff and the bill's supporters dismiss the notion out of hand or try to laugh it away -- one person who isn't laughing is a former employee with the Fish and Wildlife Service, who retired four months ago after 31 years with the service.
"I think it's a very real possibility," James Beers told WorldNetDaily, when contacted by phone at his Virginia home. "Mike [Hardiman] has raised some very serious issues about the agenda of certain groups, and while that agenda hasn't advanced in the 20 years -- it could now."
Beers achieved notoriety as a whistle-blower earlier this year when he presented devastating testimony to Young's committee on the misuses by agency officials of the Pittman-Robertson fund, which is controlled by the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Now he finds himself frankly on the opposite side of an issue from the Resources chairman.
A long-time congressional aide, Hardiman recently set up his own political consulting firm -- and lists as one of his first clients the property rights protection organization American Land Rights Association, based in Battle Ground, Washington, which has been spearheading a grassroots campaign against Young's bill and its counterparts. WorldNetDaily has presented analyses of these bills.
As originally introduced, HR 701 was divided into three sections, called titles, with Title II quickly becoming the focal point for the opposition. Title II would set up a trust fund of nearly $1 billion a year for land acquisition -- divided between the federal and state governments. Merged with Miller's bill, the new version has eight titles, though Titles I, II, and III remain basically the same.
As Hardiman and Beers see it, the threat to hunting comes not through Title II, but from Title III, under which $350 million a year would be funneled into a long-established federal program, one well known to the hunting and fishing communities though not to the general public: the Pittman-Robertson fund.
The Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937 (the Pittman-Robertson Act) established a special account funded by an excise tax -- about 10 percent on guns and ammunition, with the proceeds to be distributed to state fish and game departments to improve their conservation projects. The money goes for game nurseries, habitat restoration, state hunting education programs, and land purchases for refuges. A similar fund -- Dingell-Johnson -- is financed through an excise tax on fishing gear.
"Pittman-Robertson is about to get hijacked by animal rights activists," says Hardiman, "and here's how. Right now the fund is controlled pretty much by good old boys, because it's money they pay through their excise taxes. When offshore oil money gets put into the fund, that's general fund money and is no longer tied to the hunting community. You've uncoupled Pittman-Robertson money from the hunters and sportsmen -- opening the fund up to non-hunters. That means anybody can start making noise, start making protests, over how the money is to be spent -- and that includes the animal rights activists. They'll be able to buy land from the private sector for the public sector and prohibit hunting on it.
"The first step would be to buy the land -- step two, knock out the hunting," he added.
Hardiman said he found the basis for his theory when he ran across the website for the Animal Protection Institute, during a midnight surfing session on the Internet. The 80,000-member Sacramento-based organization was the primary organization responsible for Proposition 4 that banned trapping in state forests, overwhelmingly approved by voters in 1998.
API is actively engaged in similar campaigns. A full-page ad in the Oct. 13 Washington Times called for a congressional ban on the use of snares and traps in national forests. Sponsored by API, some 39 other groups -- like the Humane Society and Friends of Animals -- signed on as part of a coalition.
"The whole plan is laid out on their website," Hardiman explained. "One of their advocacy campaigns is 'Stopping Sport Hunting.' They say that 'through litigation, API is challenging the expansion of sport hunting on our public lands, including National Parks and National Wildlife Refuges.' They have a fact-sheet page called The Fallacy of Sport Hunting. and they make it very clear what their agenda is."
Hardiman read from the Fact Sheet: "As wildlife advocates, we must work to change the constituency of power within our wildlife management agencies and the funding sources that maintain these government agencies. Only when our state wildlife agencies represent the majority of Americans who do not hunt, will we see a change in wildlife management."
Websites of various animal rights and conservation groups tend to validate Hardiman's thesis. The Humane Society, the Fund for Animals, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals all have active anti-hunting, anti-fishing campaigns.
Such campaigns generally are not conducted at the federal level; an attempt to get a ban on trapping in the National Refuge System attached to an appropriations bill failed this year in the House. The most successful campaigns are waged at the state level, the tactic being to get the public to demand the banning of socially discredited methods of hunting, such as the use of leg-hold traps, snares, and trapping -- or of killing of certain species, like bears, cougars, and wolves.
From Hardiman's perspective, the problem isn't just that operations like API have an anti-hunting agenda, but that the Pittman-Robertson funding, which goes into the state fish and game departments, would help them realize their goal more quickly.
Not everyone shares those concerns. Indeed, most of the people WorldNetDaily contacted for comment scorned the idea that animal rights groups, by getting a handle on Pittman-Robertson funds, could leverage themselves into a position where they could advance their anti-hunting agenda.
"I'm not concerned about their views on HR 701," said Susan Lamson, director of Conservation, Wildlife and Natural Resources at the National Rifle Association in Washington. "I think they (the animal rights groups) have got agendas that they are promoting in a whole lot of venues, but I don't see where the passage of HR 701 -- using outer-continental shelf oil and gas receipts -- would give them a special influence with the wildlife agencies. It's not their money, it is basically money that has for years gone directly to the general treasury, and now under this act would be earmarked for land acquisition and state conservation projects.
"By providing more money [to the state departments], to me it means the states will have the ability to do that much more on wildlife programs and habitat acquisition. So in terms of the animal rights persons pushing an agenda, I don't think that is made a greater threat by passage of HR 701," she observed.
Rudolph Rosen, executive director of Safari Club International, concurred. The Tucson, Ariz., association of big game trophy hunters is alleged to be the real power behind the bill. He, too, seemed nonchalant about the animal rights movement posing a threat.
"The destiny of those funds -- whether from excise taxes or oil revenue -- would be in the hands of the commissions that set regulatory policy at the state level," he said. "There are provisions in the bill clearly allowing for the use of funds for wildlife purposes that include managed harvesting.
"My feeling is that the elimination of hunting, if that were to occur, would create such a plethora of wildlife management dilemmas for the state that it would not last long. I have intimate knowledge from an administrative perspective and experience with how these programs work. And CARA does not change the mechanisms whereby these federal aid funds are granted or administered," he said.
Rosen acknowledged a "potential for abuse, for serious abuse. But it's going to be up to the state agencies and the hunters and everybody else to assure that those kinds of abuses don't occur."
Most outwardly skeptical of the notion was Steven Hansen, Director of Communications of the House Resources Committee, which Rep. Young chairs, and where the bill is currently lodged.
Asked to comment on Hardiman's concerns and the issues raised -- summarized in a flyer for distribution on the Hill -- Hansen dismissed them as "totally wrong" and "out of whack."
Asked for specifics, Hansen said, "We'll take it from the first letter of the first sentence to the period at the end. It's wrong. It [the flyer] says that animal rights groups are going to take over the government and restrict access to public lands. Well, actually I guess that is conceivable, that animal rights groups could overthrow the government."
WorldNetDaily pointed out that Hardiman didn't make such a claim -- that what he had written was: "The Administration's animal rights and environmentalist allies are anxiously awaiting CARA's Annual Billion Dollar Land Grab."
Said Hansen: "Yeah, well I guess you could say the animal rights groups could take over the soccer fields and baseball fields."
Pressed about the growing influence of such groups, Hansen admitted they had "agendas," but that "there's no support for them."
"There are so many groups out there with agendas that I guess you could apply any group's agenda to this bill and say, 'Oh, it's horrible because this group has an agenda. ... Well, if that were the case, we wouldn't pass a bill for anything because every bill could be affected by somebody's agenda."
But Beers doesn't think the issue at all trivial -- and he has seen it from inside the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
After reviewing Hardiman's information, Beers realized the enormity of the problem, which no one involved with the bill had even considered. First, there's the question of match money; and second, a shift in ideology of the people employed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and their counterparts in state fish and game departments.
"The hundreds of millions of dollars that go out every year in Pittman-Robertson, Dingell-Johnson funds all have to be matched by the states," he explained, "They don't just get the money and spend it. They have to show enough commitment to various projects to match the funds. It can be in a small sense -- maybe 10 to 20 percent -- but they have to come up with some money.
"Most of the match money comes from licenses: hunting licenses, fishing licenses, trapping licenses. This is standard, and the money pays for a lot of programs that are called non-game, meaning they aren't directly tied to hunting and fishing. Things like trails construction, taking inventories of native plants, and so on. A lot of not-game subject areas have been established over the last 20 years -- there's a lot of non-game areas that people want.
"Where's the match money going to come from with the huge increase of money available added to the Pittman-Robertson? That's the first question," Beers said.
Over 90 percent of the match money is derived from licenses. Unless there's a sharp increase in the number of hunters and a resulting increase in the numbers of hunting licenses sold, fish and game departments will have to turn to the legislature for assistance -- and hunters, while they may control the fish and game commissions, do not control the state law-making bodies.
"There will be enormous pressure brought to bear to try and get the hunting and fishing license money and the Pittman-Robertson funds converted to non-game programs," Beers predicted. "Real strong pressure from certain groups."
Then there's the shift of ideology of those employed by the agencies, away from traditional fields of wildlife management. Indeed, many employees -- particularly those in the non-game programs -- bear an antipathy towards hunting.
Beers said he ran into that within the service itself.
"I found that the service was going down the stream with two feet in two canoes," he remarked. "Employees were telling the state fish and game departments that they supported them and would help them, and at the same time they were having clandestine meetings with groups like the Humane Society and Friends of Animals to undercut those efforts.
"So, to ask how much the animal rights people [are] involved in, say, the issue of non-game funding, my answer would be significantly -- but not in any way that you could find out about it. There are some groups that the people in charge of the service right now are pretty tight with.
"Could their agenda be advanced through CARA? The answer's yes -- it could be, because there haven't been adequate safeguards made to prevent it, and because a lot of the conservation groups -- those not connected to the animal rights movement -- understand that the states need non-game money and want to help the state fish and game departments stay solvent, but want to be regarded as broad-minded and are afraid of being mistaken for as hook-and-bullet type people who are against the environment."
[/quote]
------------------
John/az
"The middle of the road between the extremes of good and evil, is evil. When freedom is at stake, your silence is not golden, it's yellow..." RKBA!