A4
Opinion
wallowa.com
January 21, 2015
Wallowa County Chieftain
Hunting
helps our
economy
W
e often praise hunting for its cultural value, but not
as often for its value in dollars and cents.
Hunting Works for Oregon is trying to change
that. The newly created
organization is based off
EDITORIAL
similar ones in the Midwest,
which gather local partners to The voice of the Chieftain
spread the gospel of hunting’s
economic impact on rural
areas.
According to a study by the National Shooting Sports
Foundation, $248 million is spent annually by hunters in
Oregon – about $1,200 by each of the 196,000 men, women
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meadows.
Yet that economic shot in the arm for rural Oregon is in
danger. Hunter participation is in steep decline, down more
than 15 percent in the last decade alone.
Gary Lewis, a member of Hunting Works for Oregon and
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myriad factors are to blame.
Hunting has gotten much more expensive, as everything
from purchasing tags to buying the gas to get to a trailhead has
increased in cost.
And since the state went to controlled hunts in the mid-
1990s, hunters often have to plan ahead more than six months
in advance to secure a tag. No longer can you look out on a
bright fall morning and just go hunting.
But even with advance planning, the tag and lottery system
means hunters many not be able to hunt the places they know
best. That decreases their success rate, and later their rate of
returning to the sport.
Rules and regulations and paperwork have only grown, too,
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of making a costly mistake, hunters are just packing up and
going home.
There are also access issues. Some of the best private
hunting land, which used to require just a handshake and
maybe a little gift of whiskey to secure access to, is now being
sold at top dollar to guides and their richest clients.
The increase in predators is certainly another factor, but one
we feel often overshadows the root causes.
Because the main culprit is habitat degradation, and the
urban sprawl that has put more space between us and the wild
places where animals live.
Internet and video games and fewer young people familiar
with the outdoors hasn’t helped.
But neither have hunters in some respects. Lewis said
many believe roughly 50 percent of big game animals killed in
Oregon are poached – an awful statistic that shows the ethical
hunters are paying for the misdeeds of those who don’t follow
the rules.
The simplest explanation is that hunting has just gotten
harder. Lewis said success rates in some parts of Oregon have
been cut in half or worse, from near 40 percent down into the
teens. Hunting isn’t the supermarket – there are no guarantees
– but the more successful hunters are, the more they want to
return.
Hunting Works for Oregon has plenty of challenges ahead
of it in order to stem the tide and see hunter participation go
back on the upswing.
We hope they stay out of the political morass and keep
their eye on the real prize: reducing costs and expanding
opportunities for hunters.
Because right now hunting means a lot to the Eastern
Oregon economy, but it could mean much more.
Correction
The Chieftain’s Jan. 14 story about Destiny Barney’s
attainment of the Junior Miss Oregon Rodeo title failed
to include her stepmother, Ranzie Barney, in listing her
parents. The Chieftain regrets the error.
Borders anything but natural
Fishtrap’s “Big Read” has us read-
ing Luis Urrea’s “Into the Beauti-
ful North.” The story is a sometimes
lighthearted look at what happens in a
Mexican village when all of the young
and middle-aged men have gone “to
the beautiful north.” The village is
threatened by bandits, and a gang of
young girls – and one gay young man
– go north to find one girl’s father
and six other Mexican men willing
to come home and save the village;
they’d watched Steve McQueen and
Yul Brenner save a Mexican village in
“The Magnificent Seven.”
Most of what we get about our
southern border is stories of illegals
coming this way and of efforts to build
a security wall to stop them — how
much it costs; how new technology is
making it stronger; how effective it is,
etc. We sometimes hear about children
trying to find parents, and sometimes
about farmers wanting more Mexican
workers to harvest crops. We don’t
hear or know much about people go-
ing the other way, or anything at all
about how our borders – or borders
anywhere – got to be where they are,
Sarah Abdeldayem, the AFS ex-
change student from Amman, Jordan,
told the Rotary club that over 20 per-
cent of the population of her country
is comprised of refugees from the war
in Syria. I looked it up: population of
about 8,000,000, of which 1,400,000
are refugees. For a time, Jordan ac-
tively helped settle refugees, but they
are becoming strained – what would
we do if one in five of our population,
or 60 million of our residents, were
refugees from other countries who
had walked, driven, ridden donkeys
and horses, stumbled across the border
thousands a day in fear for their lives?
The borders that divide Jordan and
MAIN
STREET
Rich Wandschneider
Syria, and that define modern Iraq,
Kuwait, and Lebanon, are basically
those set by the Western powers at the
treaty of Versailles at the conclusion
of World War I. The borders that de-
fine most of Africa today are those set
by Europeans in the process of colo-
nization and decolonization over the
past 200 years. In the grand scheme
of things, no current national borders
have been around long. And in most
cases the borders are not “natural” or
even set by local inhabitants.
But our borders, you say, have been
here forever. Not really. I remember
welcoming Alaska and Hawaii into
statehood when I was in elementa-
ry school in the 1950s. Years later I
learned that statehood for them was
not automatic, not desired by all Amer-
icans in the “lower 48,” not wanted by
all indigenous Hawaiians or Alaskans
either. I remember also that many
Puerto Ricans did want statehood, but
that didn’t happen. There was a ques-
tion of language. Which reminds that
many of our Southwest states were
once part of Mexico. There are Ameri-
can citizens of Mexican descent whose
families have been here since before
the Mayflower!
Maybe the oddest settling of U.S.
borders happened right here, in the Or-
egon Territory. It had to do with the fur
trade, the War of 1812 and resultant
political negotiations between Ameri-
cans and the British.
The British, and their emissaries,
the Hudson’s Bay Company, wanted a
border at the Columbia River – leav-
ing the lucrative fur trade north of
the river on their side. The Americans
wanted the 49th parallel – although
a strong faction wanted to go further
north; their slogan “Fifty-four forty or
fight.”
In the protracted negotiations fol-
lowing the War of 1812, a solution
to the Oregon Question (ownership
of the Oregon Territory, as the U.S.
called it, or The Columbia District,
as Great Britain called it) was “Joint
Occupancy,” meaning that the two
countries equally “owned,” or had a
right to claim the land as its own – no
one asked the Indians who lived in the
region what they thought! This condi-
tion lasted from 1818-1846, a period
that saw fur traders, missionaries, and,
eventually settlers scurry to “occupy”
the land, with little or no idea of how
their individual journeys tied into in-
ternational politics.
No matter how they got to be where
they are, borders have always been
porous things that have shifted with
wars, politics, occupancy and neglect.
And the truth of it is that “hard bor-
ders” are a myth. In the long run no
amount of money, stone, steel, and
concrete on any particular border –
think the Great Wall of China or the
Berlin Wall – lasts forever.
But real people get caught up in it.
Broken Mexican families are heart-
breakers; Syria is a tragedy, with thou-
sands dead and millions left, docu-
mented and undocumented, in places
not their own. Luis Urrea reminds us
that survival in and across borderlands
is possible – and that humor and com-
passion might be the oil that makes it
bearable.
Main Street columnist Rich Wand-
schneider lives in Joseph.
Issues with Forest Service plan
USPS No. 665-100
P.O. Box 338 • Enterprise, OR 97828
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Enterprise, Oregon
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Contents copyright © 2015. All rights reserved. Reproduction
without permission is prohibited.
To the Editor:
I have been uninvolved in the Wal-
lowa-Whitman Forest Service Plan
except for attending a couple meetings
to find out about protection of the wa-
tershed. But, I consider myself a user
of the forest and I am aware of bene-
fits I receive even though I am not a
cattle rancher, wood gatherer, or four
wheeler.
No, I have not read the Forest Ser-
vice Plan and I suspect there is a lot
in it that I would not understand, be-
cause I have not studied forest science
except for one college course in Bota-
ny. So there are things that I think the
Chieftain could do that would give me
the understanding that I, as a layman,
need.
The recent Chieftain article tells
me that there are controversial parts in
this plan.
What are those parts and why are
they controversial? Why are Bruce
Dunn and Susan Roberts opposed to
them? What is the scientific reasoning
behind the Forest Service planning?
Why does Paul Castilleja not trust the
data? What are his qualifications in
data analysis or forest science? The
Chieftain could provide a service for
its readers by taking each controver-
sial section of the Forest Plan, print
the section and explain the reasoning
of both the plan writers and the oppos-
ers.
I have not been directly involved,
but I realize the plan’s importance. We
must have clean water from our wa-
tershed, and the living organisms of
LETTERS TO
THE EDITOR
the earth need oxygen and sustenance
from the forests. The forest floor must
be managed to prevent forest fires.
Well managed logging practices pro-
vide jobs. To be responsible citizens
and forest users, we residents of Wal-
lowa County need to know what the
heck is going on. The Chieftain can
make that happen.
Evelyn Swart
Joseph
Media biased against
pro-lifers
To the Editor:
On January 22nd the largest march
of the year will take place in Washing-
ton DC, when 500,000-plus Pro-Life
citizens show their objection to the
1973 Supreme Court Roe vs Wade de-
cision permitting abortion procedures
any time throughout pregnancy.
This huge annual march in support
of Unborn Children will not be report-
ed by any of the liberal press, which
demonstrates their extreme bias on the
abortion issue.
In fact, the Pro-Life movement
is the only major group the Media
doesn’t call by its own name, but re-
fers to them as Anti-Abortionists.
When you can’t call a Spade a
Spade, it reveals a hidden agenda to
cover up the truth about the horror of
abortion.
Greg Wieck
Enterprise
Leter Policy
L
etters to the Editor are sub-
ject to editing and should
be limited to 275 words. Writers
should also include a phone num-
ber with their signature so we can
call to verify identity. The Chief-
tain does not run anonymous let-
ters.
In terms of content, writers
should refrain from personal at-
tacks. It’s acceptable, however, to
attack (or support) another party’s
ideas.
We do not routinely run thank-
you letters, a policy we’ll consider
waiving only in unusual situations
where reason compels the excep-
tion.
You can submit a letter to the
Wallowa County Chieftain in per-
son; by mail to P.O. Box 338, En-
terprise, OR 97828; by email to
editor@wallowa.com; or via the
submission form at the newspa-
per’s website, located at wallowa.
com. (Drop down the “Opinion”
menu on the navigation bar to see
the relevant link).