Jane Goodall Has Entered The Wyoming Grizzly Hunt Lottery In An Act Of Civil Disobedience; Also Is Apparently Not Dead.
Nat Geo – Jane Goodall is a gentle global icon, perhaps the most admired living environmentalist and legendary for her research with chimpanzees. Another elder, Cynthia Moss, is famous for her conservation work in eastern Africa battling elephant poachers and speaking out against trophy hunting.
Within the last few days, Goodall, 84, and Moss, 78, entered a lottery hoping to win a coveted hunting license in Wyoming allowing them to sport shoot a grizzly bear in the Yellowstone region. They have no aspirations to actually kill a bruin. Their maneuver is part of a mass act of civil disobedience to protest Wyoming’s controversial hunt of up to 22 grizzlies—the first in 44 years—slated to commence only weeks from now.
Called “Shoot ‘em With A Camera, Not A Gun,” the impromptu campaign, spearheaded mainly by women, has caught hunting officials in Wyoming off guard. It has also created a groundswell among those who condemn the state’s recommencement of a trophy season on grizzlies just a year after they were removed from federal protection. In May, Wyoming’s wildlife commission approved the hunt unanimously 7-0.
Jane Goodall, still alive. You heard it here first. For those of you not familiar with my pal Jane, she’s the reason people care about chimpanzees and understand that they’re pretty much just humans with a lot more body hair, elite toe dexterity and the inability to speak. She’s been out in the jungle with apes for like 50 years. She fucking loves apes. It’s a pretty sweet gig if you ask me, but now she’s venturing into a whole new world of animal conservation at the ripe age of 84. What a goddamn legend.
Here’s what we’ve got going on in Wyoming and the greater Yellowstone region:. Basically grizzly bears used to thrive in the region, but over the last few hundred years, due to a combination of hunting and just humans occupying and altering more and more of their habitat, grizzly bear numbers have plummeted.
Back in the day there wasn’t much regulation as to what people could hunt and not hunt, and I’m sure plenty of people made use of the grizzlies they killed, but the majority of these bears were being killed for sport and kept as a trophy. Trophy hunting kinda sucks if you ask me, but I suppose I could understand someone who wants to legally hunt a predator that isn’t a species in danger of disappearing altogether, as long as they do everything the right way and within the confines of the law, so they can tell the story to their grandkids and feel like a badass. The thing is though, that’s nowhere near what’s going on in Wyoming.
The grizzly population in the greater Yellowstone region has recovered recently to the point they were taken off the endangered species list this past year. That’s an amazing thing. Yellowstone needs grizzly bears. Grizzly bears are a staple of the American West and the conservation efforts that led to their triumphant resurgence should be recognized by anyone with a brain, but even with all this good news, the people in positions of power in Wyoming still managed to fuck it all up.
They recently voted unanimously at 7-0 to allow for the hunting of up to 22 grizzlies from the region’s population of around 700 bears, by way of a “tag lottery”. So now you can go online and pay to enter this lottery and if you get chosen you can pony up more $$ to go on a guided grizzly hunt and kill one of these majestic beasts.
Obviously the amount of tags to be given out was chosen by people in the know, after plenty of deliberation, but thousands of folks including the still-alive Jane Goodall are absolutely up in arms over the decision to allow the hunting of these bears again.
A movement has risen using the name “Shoot ‘Em With a Camera” to help the situation gain attention, and I guess it’s been working because a lot of people are now buying up these internet lotto tickets with no intentions of actually shooting any bears with any weaponry. They just wanna take some cool animal pictures and frankly I’m all for it. Anything that can get Jane Goodall out of bed at this point is good enough for me.
As a licensed hunter in the state of New York, and someone who has hundreds of hours logged sitting in a tree stand waiting for something to come close enough to potentially shoot, I’ve never had any desire to go on a “trophy hunt”. I obviously don’t go out and hunt deer because I have no other way to feed myself or my family, but we’re talking about an animal with populations by the millions spread out across the country. Something that needs to be controlled. We harvest all the meat and share it amongst family and friends, and it’s a very profound and exciting experience. Would I ever choose to hunt something with no intentions of eating it? Absolutely not.
That being said, would I relish the opportunity to see a grizzly bear in the woods of the great American North West? You bet your sweet ass I would. They’re beautiful, massive and masterful killing machines. Is it weird that the word relish is used to express finding great pleasure in something and is also the name of a beloved condiment often found on delicious hot dogs? Yeah, it is. I don’t get it at all but I didn’t make up the English language; God did when he wrote the bible. I relish the opportunity to put relish on my hot dogs and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.
Support the “Shoot ‘Em With a Camera” movement if you’d like. Here’s a link to the GoFundMe page set up to pay for the grizzly tags of anyone who wins the lottery and chooses to carry a Cannon into the woods as opposed to a Remington. You can also apply for one of the grizzly tags here, but I’ll be honest you have to pay for that too and you don’t get to relish in any of the subsequent anonymous glory like you would on GoFundMe, so choose wisely. That’s just how my brain works, but it’s really up to you.