Show support for Mother Nature
Iwas recently flipping channels, and came across an interesting story. A fair-sized Canadian town near the Rocky Mountains had an unusual problem. Someone had released several pet bunnies, and pretty soon there were rabbits everywhere.
When I was about 15, I took some of my hard-earned paper route money and bought a pair of rabbits, a doe and a buck. The man who sold them to me said, “You’ll have a litter of rabbits every 30 days. Let ’em get ’bout six weeks old, dress ’em, and you can sell ’em for a buck apiece.” I swallowed the spiel hook, line, and sinker. It was one of my early get-rich schemes.
My dad and I built a rabbit hutch, I bought a sack of rabbit pellets for food, and I was in business. When my doe had eight kits, I could see dollar signs. Six weeks later I skinned seven of those little rabbits and sold them for a dollar each. The first female had another big litter, and a week later the female kept from the first litter had a litter, and that was the start of my rabbit raising.
In a couple of months I had four females each having a litter every 30 days, and my dad and I had to build another hutch. I was becoming almost a full-time rabbit skinner and door-to-door rabbit hawker. It went pretty well for a while, but Norphlet isn’t very big, and not everyone likes fried rabbit; and even some of my best customers started telling me they had
eaten enough rabbit to last a lifetime. It came to a head at the supper table when I announced, “Guess what? I had three litters of rabbits born today, 27 in all.”
My daddy looked at me and said, “What are you going to do with another 27 rabbits? You haven’t sold all of the last three litters.”
That was a tough question, but I had the answer.
“I’m going to cut the price to 50 cents.” I said, and I did. Sales picked up, but then I had another four litters about the time the last three litters were big enough to sell and couldn’t sell them even at the reduced price. Finally Daddy stepped in, and after separating the bucks from the does, it slowed down what was about to become a huge rabbit problem, but I found out in about two weeks that five does were already pregnant and I had another 32 more rabbits to get rid of.
It took me nearly two months to get rid of all those rabbits, and my mother threatened to switch me if I brought home another one to cook. It got to where my former customers wouldn’t even take a free dressed rabbit; some wouldn’t answer the door when I knocked. It finally got down to giving them away, and I even paid some of my paper route money for a kid to take the last two.
So let’s get back to the Canadian town and its rabbit problem.
Pretty soon there were rabbits everywhere, big tame rabbits that would take up residence in yards just like a dog. As more and more rabbits popped up, folks started talking about trying to get rid of them, and that caused a problem because others thought they were cute. Mother Nature came to the rescue: Big slow-moving tame bunnies started becoming lynx, fox, and coyote food. They were a lot easier to catch than wild game, and that reduced the town’s rabbit problem.
What does that have to do with Arkansas? Instead of bunnies, insert feral hogs. Back when I did the cougar survey, I received a call from a Canadian cougar expert. He said, “Of course you have cougars in Arkansas. They are coming along the Arkansas River from the Rockies because you have abundant prey: whitetail deer and feral hogs.”
Using sightings from around the state, I estimated 125 cougars in 35 Arkansas counties are roaming the woods. Recently California, which has an estimated 200 cougars, put a moratorium on them. You can’t shoot a cougar in California even if it carries off little Fluffy. We don’t jump at following California politics, but this time we should follow its lead. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission should put a moratorium on cougars if we want help in controlling the runaway feral hog problem, the Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in deer, which is spreading like wildfire in northwest Arkansas, and bring back the quail.
Arkansas’ apex predators were eliminated by the Game and Fish Commission starting in the 1920s when they put a $10 bounty on wolves, cougars, and bobcats. The last wolf was killed in 1962, and the cougars were eliminated about the same time. The cougars in our woods today are newcomers, and if we want to see Arkansas’ ecosystem return to a balance, where we don’t have feral hogs by the millions, deer herds without chronic wasting disease, bobwhite quail to hunt, and a 50 percent uptick in the wild turkey population (feral hogs destroy turkey nests), there is only one way to do it, and that is to protect the predators still here and restock predators into our ecosystem. The United States Wildlife Service has designated parts of the Ozark and Ouachita National Forests as excellent habitat for the restocking of the red wolf, and Game and Fish should be the first in line (contact me for a “Bring back the Wolf” bumper sticker).
Anyone who looks at our broken ecosystem will understand that wildlife management mistakes in the early settlement of our state have heavily contributed to the problems we have today. Sure, Game and Fish restored the deer herd, built hundreds of boat landings, and created some of the best fishing in the mid-south. But we have dark shadows over several parts of our game management that could eventually destroy our deer herd and shrink our turkey population, just as it has our quail.
We can continue to plod along doing the same wildlife management as we have been doing since the 1920s, or turn the page and follow the example of California.