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The main big-game hunting season is not one of my
favorite times of the year. Hunters may talk about how
responsible and ethical they are, but still, every liquor
outlet in town displays a big orange welcome hunters
banner provided by any of several large public-spirited
beer-making corporations.
Then there's the hunting camp I passed along the Marshall Pass road last week -- about half a dozen huge four-wheel-drive out-of-state pickups, a full assortment of plush-looking trailers for field housing (one even had a TV antenna) and a bunch of off-road four-wheelers.
It looked like the staging area for a mechanized infantry assault. It didn't resemble any effort to get into the woods and become one with the spirit of the noble wapiti.
That said, I was still glad to see them, because hunters sure do a lot more toward keeping Colorado livable than I and other non-hunters have ever done.
Their license fees provide much of the budget of the Colorado Division of Wildlife, an agency which, despite its many flaws, does attempt to make sure we have wildlife, as opposed to the rest of the state government, which tries to make sure we have more people.
Hunters also pay federal excise taxes on guns and ammunition which go toward wildlife habitat acquisition and protection. That Congress is reluctant to spend this money for its intended purpose, that our duplicitous state government will use this land for prisons instead of habitat -- that's hardly the fault of hunters.
Hunters and other sportsmen also support organizations like Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited, which work to improve habitat.
And I've discovered another possibly beneficial effect. Thursday's Post had a story from Summit County, an area which in living memory was rather remote and scenic, but is now a fabricated strip mall in the core of the Interstate 70 sacrifice zone.
It seems that hunting opportunities have been diminishing in Summit County because there's been so much home construction in areas that were once open.
If you check the advertising for the parcels where these
folks build houses, you'll often see a phrase like
adjoins public land
or surrounded by National
Forest.
Put a house on one of these remote five-acre
lots, and a prudent hunter will keep his finger off the
trigger of his rifle, no matter how many points on the rack
of the buck he just spotted.
Not all hunters are prudent, of course; Newsweek just carried a lamentation from a woman in upstate New York whose rural dream estate suffers an invasion every fall.
In many respects, those rural dream estates that people build in places like Summit County are one of the biggest threats to life as we know it.
The amount they pay in property taxes generally falls far short of what they demand in services from local government -- they want their roads improved, they want them plowed, they want the school bus to come by, they want the sheriff to patrol and respond immediately to any 911 call. They want electricity and telephones.
And they want the rest of us, who often labor at
low-wage jobs in little towns, to subsidize their rural
dream estates with higher taxes and utility rates. Several
Colorado counties have figured this out, and have issued a
Code of the West
which points out that middle-class
town dwellers subsidize these parasite country
dwellers.
The subsidies might be justified -- I, at least,
wouldn't mind paying them -- if these residents of the
boondocks produced beef or grain or something else we use.
But the new gentry mainly produces No Trespassing
signs.
And so, if the presence of big-game hunters works to discourage such development, then more power to the hunters. In fact, hunters might be working toward another form of habitat protection for an endangered species.
That conclusion comes from another piece of recent reading, about how Western Democrats are almost an endangered species these days. As recently as a decade ago, the West often offered a competitive political climate.
Our population has grown plenty since then, though, and
the immigrants aren't the poor huddled masses,
but
instead, upscale white suburbanites who vote Republican
just in case their protective covenants don't keep the
rabble out. Many of our political races are no longer
competitive, and so we lose all the alleged benefits of the
two-party system.
But now big-game hunting season has come to the remote estates. Out on the nearby public land that was supposed to be a private amenity, there are armed guys, mostly blue-collar working stiffs, roaring around in pursuit of deer and elk. We can hope that this is a terrifying prospect, so frightening that the new residents decide it's time to pull stakes and move on, thereby returning the West to a habitat where more than one political party can thrive.
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