Another excellent piece from the great Thomas Sowell. This time he focuses on Californians’ obsession with protecting wildlife, specifically: the mountain lion. Excerpt:
Fearing that the mountain lion might find one of the local school children a tempting target, the police shot and killed the animal. Outrage against the police erupted up and down the San Francisco peninsula and as far away as Marin County, on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge, more than 30 miles away.
Sowell’s commentary on the situation is excellent. He particularly goes after local academics, and I’m right with him. I’m from an academic family, so I grew up around PhDs. In fact, I think I was in my early teens before I realized that it was not normal for a man to have a PhD. As a result, I’ve seen academics up close, and I can tell you for a fact that having a doctorate doesn’t mean that you have the sense to come in out of the rain.
I also have special resonance for the nuttiness over the mountain lion in California. As I discovered taking a hunting class, hunting mountain lions is illegal in California. Know why? Well, a number of years ago the envionmentalists out here convinced the people of the state that the animal was endangered (it wasn’t) and so got the previously legal practice of hunting it made illegal. No more mountain lion licenses were issued.
The result? The mountain lion population exploded, outstripped its main habitat, and started encroaching on populated areas. Hungry mountain lions started preying on livestock and even humans.
Now, because ordinary hunters still aren’t allowed to purchases licenses to hunt mountain lion, the state has to pay professionals to come in and cull the mountain lion population. That’s right: Previously the state made money from volunteers who paid to serve as agents of the state’s wildlife management program (which only issued the number of licenses each year needed to keep the wildcat population in check). Now the state must pay other hunters to do the job that it used to make money on.
Who says California isn’t crazy?
Silliness.
Sounds like a budget opportunity for the governor … retoration of hunting privs…
When you said, “…a number of years ago the envionmentalists out here…” you stroked a typo, but hey, then again, useful, new words come into the mainstream all the time, no matter their origin.
ENVIOMENTALISTS = of or pertaining to the class of people, who, envious of the common sense crowd, create issues to divert attention to themselves. Lexicographers believe the word somehow derives from ‘envious’ and ‘mental’, as in ‘green’ and ‘crazy”.
Good one!
Reminds me of the school teacher in either Boulder or Colorado Springs, who said, when one of her students was mauled by a cat when mountain-biking, that the body should have been left their so that the lion could have continued to feed.
Gotta love you for your common sense approach to the problem mountain lions that are taking over. On July 14, 2005, a mountain lion killed a fawn as the mother deer watched in the front yard of a residence in North Boulder, Colorado. I live in Arvada where we have had several spotted within 3 or four miles of here. They follow the system of trails, canals and creeks prevalent throughout this area. California is screwy (I lived there for years) but their attitudes on this prove it.