The Open Forum Spare bobcats from traps
On Thursday, the Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) Commission voted unanimously to continue the trapping of our iconic bobcats, ignoring the views of thousands of citizens who asked them to ban this cruel practice. In 1996, Colorado voters passed Amendment 14 to outlaw commercial and recreational trapping using “leghold traps, instant-kill body-gripping design traps, poisons, or snares.” In an end run, the commission allowed trapping with the use of cage or box traps.
This commission, bowing to special interest groups whose bloodlust for Colorado’s iconic native carnivores is never satiated, is doing another end run. Yet, the CPW has neither reliable population nor trend data for Colorado’s bobcat population. Bobcats are highly-sentient and familial beings and require habitats with little human disturbance — a growing rarity as Colorado’s population grows. Shame on the CPW Commission for allowing such cruelty to continue.
In allowing a greatly expanded hunting and trapping of bobcats, their fur currently a prized item in the fashion industry, Colorado Parks and Wildlife continues its regard of wildlife as a revenue resource and commodity to be harvested. There are some who hunt and fish for food, but there remains a massive swath of male ego in hunting success and trophy taxidermy. Catch and Release fishing, similarly considered a “sport” requiring skill, is more truthfully the torture of living beings for fun. Our human psyche is indeed a strange presence on the earth.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife commissioners have once again caved to monied interests in refusing to ban trophy and pelt hunters from trapping bobcats in our state.
Why should our wildlife, which belongs to all of us, be killed to satisfy the Asian market greed for fur coats? This decision trivializes the true worth of our wildlife, and allows lazy hunters to set traps to indifferently cull cats in a barbaric manner. Trapping should be banned.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife needs to stop pandering to the trappers and and make protection and conservation of our wildlife their first priority. It’s time to ban trophy and pelt hunting from our state.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials do not believe the bobcat population is being harmed by trapping for the Asian fur market but admit that “no comprehensive population count has been done, because of difficulty and cost...”
China has an apparently insatiable desire for animal products (elephant ivory, rhino horn, shark fin and tiger parts.) On the eve of the U.N. report warning of devastating human impacts on the natural environment, we should protect our public land and the animals who live there. Fur coats for vain humans is the ultimate insult to the report. It is time for a moratorium on hunting and trapping until a study is completed. Send letters of 250 words or fewer to openforum@denverpost.com or 5990 Washington St., Denver, CO, 80216. Please include full name, city and phone number. Contact information is for our purposes only; we will not share it with anyone else. You can reach us by telephone at 303-954-1201.