Stop tormenting Nevada wildlife

Is Nevada effectively a private hunting ranch?

Statute calls for public wildlife management benefiting all Nevadans and to protect and perpetuate wildlife for future generations.

Ignoring these obligations has become routine for the Nevada Wildlife Commission and its supplicant staff at the Nevada Department of Wildlife. The department seeks to sell more killing, and providing more opportunities is its desired approach. No consideration is ever given toward animal suffering and sacrifice, or ripping apart animal families because of indiscriminate killing.

The protracted May 3-4 Reno Wildlife Commission meeting spent most of its time setting killing parameters for various species. They and their hunters approach the subject with the zeal of middle-schoolers single-mindedly playing video games.

One result was to increase the prospective death toll of black bears based on specious statistics and questionable mathematical modeling.

The nascent moose population will be new carnage to give hunters the opportunity to kill more wildlife for personal aggrandizement.

They even went so far as to rip bighorn sheep from Nevada’s wilderness and their families, then deposit them in unfamiliar terrain so Utah hunters have more to kill.

Nevada needs a new paradigm beyond the private hunting ranch that public lands have become. We have seen recent, excess brutality from a Wyoming rancher-hunter who ran down a wolf with a snowmobile, then extensively tortured it. Also, the South Dakota governor killing a hapless dog and goat. Nevada can and must do better.

Fred Voltz, Boulder City