KATHRYN B. BROWN
Owner
ANDREW CUTLER
Publisher/Editor
ERICK PETERSON
Hermiston Editor/Senior Reporter
THURSDAY, DeCeMBeR 2, 2021
A4
Founded October 16, 1875
OUR VIEW
A move
worth
making?
O
regon allows insurers to use credit
history, gender, marital status, educa-
tion, profession, employment status and
more to determine how much to charge for car
insurance.
Are those things directly linked to how well
you drive? No.
Do they help insurers gauge how much risk a
driver may pose? Insurers believe so.
Two bills earlier this year proposed to strip
insurers from being able to use those factors to
set premiums. Instead, insurers would have to
focus on driving record, miles driven and years
of driving experience. Apparently the idea is
going to be revived in a bill for the 2022 short
session.
Is it the right thing to do? It’s not simple.
Gov. Kate Brown and Oregon’s Department
of Consumer and Business Services backed
those bills. Much of the department’s argument
focused on credit scores. A low credit score
can mean a person pays more for insurance
even if their driving record is clean. There’s
also concern that using credit scores can be
discriminatory. Black and Latino drivers are
more likely than others to have lower credit
scores. Similar arguments about discrimination
also were made about allowing insurers to use
education, employment status and occupation.
The department also challenged the assump-
tion that gender should be considered. For
instance, the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration has said both men and women
are equally likely to be distracted drivers. As
for marital status, a person is not necessarily a
poorer driver because their spouse died or they
went through a divorce.
What would such changes mean for the
insurance industry? Other states, such as
California, have restricted what information
insurers can use. The department argued the
insurance industry still is strong.
There are, though, other things to consider.
It would mean premiums would go up for
many Oregonians. The department says people
with good or excellent credit ratings would
face increases as people with poor credit
scores would go down. “The reduction in cost
for people with poor scores is four times the
increase in premiums for people with good
or excellent scores,” according to a chart the
department provided.
Some people in Oregon also get discounts
because of their membership in a labor union
or other groups. Those would be eliminated.
That’s part of the reason the Oregon Coali-
tion of Police and Sheriffs have opposed such
changes.
Lawrence Powell, an insurance analyst at the
University of Alabama, insisted in testimony
to the Legislature the predictors the insur-
ance industry uses are accurate and help match
premiums to risk. They aren’t perfect. They do
help. Occupation and education can help reveal
things that are difficult to observe, such as
risk tolerance. Gender and marital status also
can correlate with miles driven, and when and
where people drive. He also said if Oregonians
purchased their insurance in California, which
has many of the policies in the bills, they would
have paid more by about 7%.
It’s not easy to know who will be a safe
driver. Should the state of Oregon dictate how
insurance businesses can evaluate drivers? Tell
your legislators what you think. You can find
them here: oregonlegislature.gov/FindYour-
Legislator/leg-districts.html.
EDITORIALS
Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East
Oregonian editorial board. Other columns,
letters and cartoons on this page express the
opinions of the authors and not necessarily
that of the East Oregonian.
LETTERS
The East Oregonian welcomes original letters
of 400 words or less on public issues and public
policies for publication in the newspaper and on
our website. The newspaper reserves the right
to withhold letters that address concerns about
individual services and products or letters that
infringe on the rights of private citizens. Letters
must be signed by the author and include the
city of residence and a daytime phone number.
The phone number will not be published.
Unsigned letters will not be published.
SEND LETTERS TO:
editor@eastoregonian.com,
or via mail to Andrew Cutler,
211 S.E. Byers Ave., Pendleton, OR 97801
It’s all about the dog
BILL
ANEY
THIS LAND IS OUR LAND
I
t’s waterfowl season in the Colum-
bia Basin, and in the wee hours
of the morning one can see house
lights come on, pickups loaded with
decoys and carts heading to the marsh
and fields, bleary-eyed hunters wading
into dark waters to place decoys and
then settling into cold, wet and windy
blinds to await the grey dawn.
Why?
A case can be made that it’s all about
the dog.
I hang out with a questionable camo-
clad crowd on these mornings with
shotguns, decoys, waders, calls, and
of course a dog. The dogs are typically
Labrador retrievers in yellow, black
or chocolate, although some hunters
have German short-haired pointers,
pudelpointers and springer spaniels. I
even have one duck-hunting friend that
swears by his standard apricot poodle
named Penny.
There are a few points of common
understanding among waterfowlers
about dogs. First is the practical: having
a dog in the blind means far fewer birds
get lost in the reeds and cattails. A hunt-
ing dog has something like 300 million
olfactory receptors compared to about
6 million in the nose of a human duck
hunter. The portion of the canine brain
dedicated to analyzing smells is 40
times greater than the similar portion
of the human brain. Their two nostrils
sense and analyze odors independently,
much like our ears do with sound. They
sniff in stereo.
Understanding the science support-
ing a hunting dog’s abilities is one thing,
watching it in action is quite another.
My Ruby routinely finds and brings to
hand birds that have fallen or swum into
dense, flooded pond-side vegetation,
birds that I would have lost without a
dog. She finds great joy in swimming
along the interface between open water
and dense vegetation in search of the
scent of a downed duck or goose. Given
the number of birds that she finds this
way, one could say it is irresponsible or
unethical to hunt waterfowl without a
dog.
One could also say hunting ducks
without a dog is no fun. A good dog will
greet you enthusiastically at 3:30 a.m.,
will race out to load up in the truck, help
you spot road hazards along the way,
supervise decoy placement, assign seat-
ing in the blind, alert you to incoming
birds, and of course retrieve any birds
that you miraculously manage to down.
Ruby would no doubt be a better shot
than me, too, if we could figure out how
to rig up a shotgun for her.
Unfortunately, every duck hunter
must endure a few seasons along the
way without a dog. New hunters before
their first dog, or experienced hunters
that are between dogs, all know what it’s
like to be without. My good friend Mike
has a barely year-old yellow lab that
shows great promise as a waterfowl dog,
but due to an unfortunate (and expen-
sive) off-the-field leg injury is on the
disabled list for the rest of the season.
Mike considered giving up this season
of duck hunting entirely, but I think
Ruby and I will persuade him to go out a
few mornings, anyway.
Fortunately, most waterfowl dog
breeds are also good company around
the home. Ruby is our fourth Labrador
retriever, and all have been generally
well-mannered indoor family dogs. In
succession, each of our labs has worked
out better than the last for us; they were
and are dedicated to us and know their
place in their family pack. There is the
added benefit of labs being able to greet
visitors with an intimidating bark that
truthfully is all bluster.
A good duck dog is a wonder to
watch and makes a great teammate in
the blind. Bird dogs pair natural drive
and motivation with their innate biolog-
ical abilities. They also have a natural
eagerness to please, and when you add
a bit of training, of both dog and hunter,
you have a partnership that lasts season
after season.
Ruby and I, like many canine-hu-
man pairs, love this time of year in the
Columbia Basin. Her greying muzzle
and her fading hearing remind me that
she doesn’t have very many seasons left
to enjoy the marsh. And that’s why I’m a
duck hunter.
It’s all about the dog.
———
Bill Aney is a forester and wildlife biol-
ogist living in Pendleton and loving the
Blue Mountains.
trade, raise a family and keep a low
profile. However, self-righteous grand-
standers, left or right, aren’t about to
let that happen. That’s a bigger prob-
lem, a bigger injustice — one that cuts
into the core of our diseased political
culture.
Keith Gallagher
Condon
both thinning and controlled burning.
They did this knowing the area histor-
ically experienced frequent forest fires.
Little did they realize that within a few
years the Bootleg Fire would burn through
all of their plots. It will be a couple of years
before all the empirical data can be gath-
ered and analyzed. But, preliminary obser-
vations appear to show the plot treated
by both thinning and controlled burning
faired the best. The control plot appears
decimated.
It remains to be determined, but fires
that burn this hot often leave behind soils
depleted of nutrients with slow recovery.
There were other suppositions in this
column that lacked supporting evidence
to be creditable. The statement that the
dead trees should be left standing because
they were storing carbon is only tempo-
rary. The day these trees died the process
of decomposition began with the final
product being carbon dioxide and water,
the carbon cycle of nature.
If he was really interested in the seques-
tration of carbon in these dead trees, he
would have them milled into lumber and
the lumber used in the building of build-
ings that would last 100 years.
Carlisle Harrison
Hermiston
YOUR VIEWS
Grandstanders are evidence
of diseased political culture
“If you believe him when he says
self-defense, then you have to acquit
him,” Lara Yeretsian, criminal defense
attorney.
Question: Would you defend your-
self against hooligans trying to bash
your head in with a skateboard, or would
you signal your virtue and perish for a
“cause” (looting, property destruction,
violence)? Kyle Rittenhouse had a legal
right to have his firearm and to be where
he was. The videos and photos show the
armed looters came at him.
Nonetheless, the kid was a moron for
putting himself in that situation. He should
own that. He wasn’t a “white supremacist,”
and so on; people owe him apologies for
that cowardly virtue signaling.
Sad to witness opportunists trying to
make him into a hero, as for Rittenhouse
to let them. Sad, too, that activists want
to make a villain out of him by disregard-
ing facts. Significantly, a number of these
“victims,” of varying race, have nasty,
violent criminal histories. Their cham-
pions still see them, not the women and
children they abused, as the victims.
Frankly, I think he should learn a
Capital Press story refutes
columnist’s claims
I suspect George Wuerthner, the writer
of a Nov. 27 column (“Merkley’s thinking
is wrong on thinning”) in the east Orego-
nian besmirching Sen. Jeff Merkley’s
efforts to reduce the affects of fire through
thinning and selective logging, is sorry the
Capital Press published a front page arti-
cle on Nov. 26 citing results refuting his
contentions.
The Nature Conservancy, an envi-
ronmental organization, set aside 4,713
acres in their Sycan Marsh forest area as a
controlled study area to address thinning
and controlled burning. They had a plot
where nothing was done, the control plot.
There was a plot where the area was thinned.
Another area was subjected to controlled
burning, and another plot was subjected to