A bobcat stakes out a gopher hole in Marin County | Photo: Len Blumin/Flickr/Creative Commons License
The California Fish and Game Commission voted 3-2 Wednesday to ban bobcat trapping everywhere in California. The vote, which took place at the Commission’s regular meeting in Fortuna, caps a controversy that started when a Joshua Tree resident found traps illegally placed on his land less than a mile from the National Park.
Concern over the threat to bobcats in Joshua Tree and elsewhere in the state prompted the California Legislature to pass AB1213, the Bobcat Protection Act of 2013, which directed the Fish and Game Commission to establish trapping-free buffer zones around national parks, wildlife preserves, and other areas where trapping is already prohibited.
After studying a pair of proposals for those buffer zones’ boundaries, the Commission voted in a narrow majority to adopt so-called “Option 2,” which essentially declared the entire state a buffer zone in which trapping is prohibited.
“The vote today is historic and shows California’s national leadership in wildlife protection,” said Camilla Fox of the group Project Coyote, which had worked to promote both the Bobcat Protection Act and the more extensive buffer zone proposal. “This victory will help protect California’s native bobcats from the insatiable international fur market where individual bobcat pelts can sell for as much as $1,000 per pelt.”
The vote came after Fox delivered a petition with more than 30,000 signatures in favor of a total ban.
Observers had been far from certain about the outcome of Wednesday’s vote, as two of the Commissioners who voted for the statewide ban — Anthony C. Williams of Huntington Beach and Eric Sklar of St. Helena in Napa County — were attending their first meeting as Commissioners, and thus had little track record on wildlife issues. They were joined in their vote for a statewide ban by Commission president Jack Bayliss of Los Angeles.
Commissioners Jim Kellogg of Contra Costa County and Jacque Hostler-Carmesin of Humboldt County voted against the statewide ban.
Though the number of bobcat trappers in California has been steadily dwindling since the 1970s as the sport goes out of fashion, individual trappers had been taking more cats in recent years as a partial result of the boost in the potential financial gain from bobcat pelts. Trapping advocates opposed both the statewide ban and Option 1, which would have banned trapping in about half the state. The California Trappers Association had asked the Commission to delay a decision until the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife could complete a bobcat population census, which hasn’t been done for 36 years.
Wednesday’s vote protecting all of California’s bobcats wasn’t what Tom O’Key imagined when he found a trap in 2013 that had been illegally placed in a rock pile on land he owns near the National Park in Joshua Tree. His find, reported to local media in the area, generated a firestorm of opposition to trapping. A local group, Project Bobcat, organized to support a legislative ban, and a broad coalition of groups from Project Coyote and the Center for Biological Diversity to national humane groups lent their full support.
Reached in Fortuna in the wake of the vote, O’Key admitted to KCET that he was celebrating. “I feel liberated,” he said. “I never had an inkling that it all would end up this way.”
On August 7-9, 2015 Americans from all over the country will meet in West Yellowstone, Montana to discuss, strategize and unite in building a coalition to address the need to reform wildlife management in America. It’s time for wildlife management to integrate the science of the 21st century and the ever-changing demographics and values of our citizenry. The status quo of wildlife management in America is broken and it needs to be fixed.
Gray wolves are keystone predators that fill a crucial ecological niche across the landscape. Known throughout the scientific community as trophic cascade, wolves are apex predators whose behavior affects dozens of other species, leading to an increase in biodiversity. Soils, plant communities, other wildlife species, riparian areas and forests are all effected by the presence of wolves. Watch the video Speak For Wolves About Page
2015 EVENT LOCATION: UNION PACIFIC DINING LODGE
WEST YELLOWSTONE, MONTANA AUGUST 7-9, 2015 Location Here
A 3-day family-friendly event that will feature prominent speakers, panel discussions, live music, education booths, children’s activities, local food vendors and screening of wildlife documentaries.We hope you can join us on August 7-9, 2015 at the historic Union Pacific Dining Lodge in West Yellowstone, Montana for Speak for Wolves! 2015 Speak For Wolves Home Website
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7:00pm Screening of OR-7 the Journey with filmmaker Clemens Schenk. Amaroq Weiss of the Center for Biological Diversity will be part of the Q&A session following the film. Tickets cost $10 and can be bought online athttp://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/1634194. They can also be purchased at the door-cash only.
Saturday August 8
11:30am doors open.
12:00pm opening remarks.
12:30pm Kim Wheeler, Executive Director of the Red Wolf Coalition, will discuss the plight of red wolves and the USFWS Red Wolf Recovery Program.
2:00pm activist Oliver Starr will discuss the reasons for the sharp decline in gray wolf populations in Denali National Park in Alaska and offer remedies.
3:00pm Brian Ertz, founder and Board President of Wildlands Defense, will discuss the failure of the controversial McKittrick Policy and why it needs to be reformed.
BREAK
6:30pm doors open with live music by Matt Stone.
7:00pm Camilla Fox, founder and Executive Director of Project Coyote, will discuss current efforts to end wildlife killing contests on public and private lands. A panel discussion will follow with Amaroq Weiss, West Coast Wolf Organizer of the Center for Biological Diversity, Kevin Bixby, founder and Executive Director of the Southwest Environmental Center, and author/ecologist George Wuerthner.
The entire program on Saturday is free.
Sunday August 9
9:00am doors open with music by Goodshield Aguilar.
9:30am Mike Mease, co-founder and Board President of Buffalo Field Campaign, will discuss the continued hazing and slaughter of wild buffalo in/around Yellowstone National Park and efforts to list the species under the Endangered Species Act.
10:30am Louisa Willcox, wildlife advocate and long-time conservationist, will discuss the government’s ill-conceived push to remove federal protections for grizzly bears and examine the role that states play in wildlife management.
11:15am Interpretive dance by choreographer MaryLee Sanders.
11:30am Inspirational talk by Jimmy St. Goddard of Blackfeet Nation.
Rachel Tilseth is the founder of Wolves of Douglas County Wisconsin, a wolf advocacy site, first started in the summer of 2012 for the purpose of getting dogs out of the wolf hunt. Rachel Tilseth has been involved with WI’s Wolf Recovery Program in one way or another since 1991. Tilseth was a Volunteer WDNR Winter/Wolf tracker from 2000-2013. Rachel is an artist, blogger and educator living in the heart of wolf country in northern Wisconsin.
Posted by Jennifer Molidor, ALDF Staff Writer on February 3, 2015
This weekend, February 6-8, the town of Adin, in the rural northeast corner of California, will hold its annual coyote killing spree, the “Big Valley Coyote Drive,” despite the 2014 ban on prizes for killing furbearing animals in contests. Last week, concerned about the high potential for law-breaking at this event, the Animal Legal Defense Fund sent a formal letter to the California Department of Fish & Wildlife, Law Enforcement Division, asking them to send an observer to the Pit River Rod and Gun Club and Adin Supply-sponsored killing contest. Last December, the California Fish and Game Commission banned the distribution of prizes in killing contests.
Historically, every February for the last eight years, contest participants in Adin’s Coyote Drive have competed for large cash prizes and other awards (like expensive artillery) to see who can kill the most native coyotes. These prizes were outlawed in 2014 in California’s Fish and Game Code § 2003:
“it is unlawful to offer any prize or other inducement as a reward for the taking of furbearers in an individual contest, tournament, or derby.”
California taxpayers overwhelmingly support the Commission’s ban on killing contest prizes. A wide majority of hunters also support the ban. In these bloodbaths, animals like foxes, coyotes, and bobcats are cruelly killed for no other reason than to procure prizes for killing. Tens of thousands of signatures have been garnered on a Project Coyote petition to ban wildlife killing contests in California.
Killing contests are reckless wildlife management: those who defend the killing sprees by pointing to an increase in coyote populations refuse to acknowledge science which has conclusively shown that killing animals haphazardly like thisincreases their populations and worsens any “problem” they may create for “livestock.” These contests are creating the problem they pretend to be controlling, and are ineffective at best, savage at worst: glorifying killing for the sake of killing. As ALDF has repeatedly shown, nonlethal predator control works, is more effective, and is more humane.
As a leader in humane laws, California should ban all killing contests—not just the prizes that have traditionally been awarded to hunters. Until that safeguard is in place, California’s Department of Fish & Wildlife must ensure that these reckless killing sprees—like Adin’s this week—are acting in accordance with the ban on prizes that reward this mindless destruction of wildlife.
Wolf Is My Soul 