by Jim Robertson
DEAR UNCLE JIM,
What’s this I’ve been hearing that us hunters should check to see if the deer we shot has been infected with screwworms? What the heck are they and how did they get here? First there was CWD and now this?! Are screwworms something I should be worried about next time I harvest a deer or cut up some venison for dinner?
Johnathon Tweedsmuir, El Paso, TX
Dear Johnathon,
The New World Screwworm has been on this continent until the 1950s, when they were temporarily eradicated on the Northern Hemisphere. Now they’re back, coming into being whenever a certain species of blow fly lays its larva (in the form of maggots) in an open wound on warm-blooded animal.
As you may have guessed, these guys aren’t finicky, being attracted to fresh blood like some kind of vampire. Other points of entry for them include body openings such as the nose, ears, eyes, or mouth; even a tiny tick bite will do.
In this case, lesser-evolved animals like reptiles, fish or amphibians, are the lucky ones. Unlike cows, deer or humans, cold blooded animals don’t have to worry about flies leaving flesh-eating maggots in any scratch they might acquire.
Many people still debate about whether or not hunters are in fact warm-blooded animals, but since science recognizes them as mammals, hunters must be conscious about being infected with screwworms, just like they should about CWD from consuming deer meat ultimately ending up in their brain.
I know it’s not a pleasant thought that the venison you feel entitled to eat could be infected with something so disgusting. But there is a simple solution: Don’t kill and consume the flesh of other living beings.
Hunters should know that “harvesting,” i.e., shooting, killing, taking the life of, or to be blunt and call it what it is—murdering—not to mention, cutting up and eating something or someone can be a risky endeavor to say the least.
If Mother Nature seems to be coming up with more and more countermeasures to humans’ ‘achievements,’ perhaps she’s getting kind of tired of sitting by and watching as one species of animal (that would be us humans) becomes overly successful and threatens to throw off her time-tested balance.
Uncle Jim
DEAR UNCLE JIM
Is C.A.S.H. just a bunch of anti-gun nuts who want to make the woods a safer place for hikers and mountain bikers, or what?
Herbert Nesbit, Cheyanne, WY
C.A.S.H. is not a self-serving group like the NRA or the Safari Club, who are only looking out for their own interests or hobbies. We want to see sport hunting abolished for the sake of its victims: the deer, the elk, the bears or wolves, the ducks, geese or sandhill cranes. Bowhunting, or muzzle-loading, black powder doesn’t impress us. As far as we’re concerned, the only thing worse than killing an animal with a high-powered rifle is crippling them with a more primitive one.
What you may think of as handicapping yourself to make it more of a challenge for you or to make the sport seem more fair for your quarry doesn’t make a bit of difference to those who end up wounded or dying so you can have your fun. You’ll never find an injured animal on its death bed thinking how lucky or honored they are to be impaled with a wooden arrow, rather than with a chunk of lead.
So in answer to your question, yes, we want to make the woods a safer place, but not for any type of human recreationists, but rather, for the animals who call the wild their home.
Uncle Jim
DEAR UNCLE JIM,
You seem to know a lot about wildlife. Did you get a degree in wildlife at a school?
Alice White, Boone, IA
Dear Alice,
When I started off in college, I wanted to go into wildlife management, but after a semester or two I came to my senses and finally asked myself, “What the hell was he thinking?”
Clearly, I didn’t know what I was getting into. I knew I loved animals and wanted to work around wildlife, but what I didn’t realize was that about the only work in that field was for some game department promoting hunting, or in the vile Wildlife “Services” department, killing off animals by the droves in horrible ways for the livestock industry.
I had enrolled in a small, rural college where the same teacher taught every class in the wildlife curriculum. In an obvious plug for the local logging industry, he started off each class (no matter which course he was teaching) with the mantra, “Clear cuts are good for wildlife,” at which point I would raise my hand and ask, “What about wolves or wolverine or grizzly bears who prefer wilderness and try to avoid people whenever possible?” To that he would rephrase his spiel and say, “Clear cuts are good for deer.”
It didn’t take long before I realized that wildlife “management” had an agenda, a higher purpose—to serve the logging and hunting industry. Not, as I had imagined, to serve wildlife or to promote the balance of nature. No, quite the opposite, in fact.
Judging by the vehemence with which today’s “game managers” want hunters to target wolves, it’s plain to see that wildlife management still hasn’t come very far in its grasp of nature’s mechanisms.
As anthropologist Richard Leaky pointed out the folly of trying to manage wildlife in his book, The Sixth Extinction: “It is far better to understand and accept the world of nature in its infinite variety and its infinitely complex processes, acknowledging the near futility of attempts to control them, than to imagine through ignorance that it is possible to do so.”
Uncle Jim