SUN JOURNAL • August 12, 2023
A very misguided bill that almost passed in the state legislature, LD 814, would have set back a lot of work in this state to bring back Maine’s declining deer populations in the North Woods. The bill would have ended recreational coyote hunting and trapping as we know it. Why would the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife include two well-known anti-hunting activists on a technical subcommittee charged with evaluating wildlife management strategies? This seems more a political gesture, a bow to “inclusivity,” than it does a wildlife management priority. DIFW has no historical or constitutional obligation to get on bended knee for the anti-hunting activists. ~ V. Paul Reynolds