My family happened to see the little bear cub that was stranded in a tree in downtown Grand Marais and we watched the crowds swarming around it and people letting their dogs get close enough to terrorize it. The bear drowned trying to get away. A very sad ending.
We have also seen baby moose terrorized and killed by well-meaning scientists, intent on spending every dollar to uncover what we already know. That things are out of balance and that people can’t leave well enough alone.
Now Tribal Chair Norman Deschampe wants to continue to collar moose and to hunt the remaining healthy moose in the 1854 Treaty lands, using tribal tradition as justification.
But I’m afraid there aren’t enough moose to sustain the hunters at Grand Portage and the hunters at Fond du Lac and still have some left to collar (and kill?).
I wish that Norman would reconsider, or at least limit the hunt to one or two animals to honor tribal hunting tradition without causing too much harm.
Like Howard Sivertson asked in his letter to the News-Herald about the moose/wolf study at Isle Royale, don’t we have enough combined data about our local moose to compare with data about other moose populations in North America and draw some conclusions about the local population decline?
I am a proud member of the Grand Portage Band and have hunted moose all my life. But now it’s time to stop hunting them and let them recover, so that they have a chance to rebound to healthy numbers. We can’t afford any more sad endings because people can’t let things be.
Francis Drouillard
Grand Marais
Leave a Reply