From Denise Fort,
Rio Grande Chapter Energy & Climate Change Chair
On November 29th the Santa Fe County Commission unanimously passed a resolution directing the staff to support efforts to end trapping on federal lands within the County and additionally to support state legislative efforts to ban trapping. At the hearing on the resolution a parade of witnesses talked about the cruelty of trapping, the economic value of wildlife, especially in a state like our’s, and how trapping has interfered with people’s use of the public lands. I tend to think about wildlife populations when I’m thinking about trapping, but some of the most moving testimony came from people who had dogs caught in traps. The terror of the dogs, and ...
Update: The commission voted unanimously in favor of the resolution! Thanks to everyone who wrote their commissioners and/or attended the meeting.
The Santa Fe County Commission will be meeting on Tues, Nov. 29, to consider a resolution directing county staff to advocate for trap-free federal lands within the county.
Please attend this meeting to voice your support!
The resolution means that county personnel could lobby the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and elected state and federal officials to prohibit the use of steel-jawed leg-hold traps and wire cable snares on these lands.
It is currently legal for traps to be hidden on public lands where we all recreate. Trappers seek to capture and kill wildlife like bobcats and ...
By Jody Benson,
Pajarito Group chair
On a very hot June 18, during the Valles Caldera Marathon, a mother bear attacked marathoner Karen Williams, who ran too close to one of her cubs. The injuries required Williams to be transported to UNM Hospital for treatment.
Reasonable people would recognize that in this encounter the mama bear was just doing her thing. She was being defensive and protective. Reasonable people understand that the single encounter would not give a predator a taste for human flesh so that she continues to go after humans (a myth that Williams’ research nullifies), nor would the bear be a threat to another human who isn’t threatening her cubs. The mama bear was simply acting as ...
By Mary Katherine Ray,
Chapter Wildlife chair
The challenges to nature are daunting. The climate is changing. There are forces at work trying to sow doubt about the worldwide physical evidence that humans are causing these changes or, if we are, that we need not address them by altering the way we as a species and as individuals operate. Polluting industries, in their PR campaigns of obstruction, are following the model of deception pioneered by tobacco companies denying the health impacts of smoking.
Wildlife, especially carnivores, struggle in a world crowded with humans, where the biomass of one species, our own, exceeds that of all other living wild land vertebrates on earth combined.
Yet in our state there are ...
By Mary Katherine Ray, Rio Grande Chapter Wildlife chair
Last summer, the New Mexico Game Commission adopted new rules for cougar hunting that allow cougar trapping for sport on private and state trust land. The decision makes New Mexico one of only two states in the nation that allows any kind of trapping for mountain lions.
Our colleagues at Animal Protection of New Mexico along with the Humane Society of the United States filed suit to stop the cougar-trapping rule. As part of that process, the Game Commission was asked to stay its decision until a court could rule on the case. The commission listened to arguments about why it should do that at its public meeting in Silver City on ...
For the sake of wilderness and our ecosystem, a growing number of people believe that the Mexican wolf should be given the chance to reclaim its rightful role in the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas.
Please tell Texas Parks and Wildlife to support wolf-reintroduction efforts
Imagine the return of the “grand opera of Texas” while sitting around the campfire, hearing howling wolves in the distance, heads upturned, singing at the night sky. Imagine, the return of the gray wolf.
With all the attention on wolf restoration elsewhere in the Southwest, many people are not aware that the last wild Mexican wolves in the U.S., before the species went extinct in the wild in the 1970s, were killed just north of ...
Mary Katherine Ray
Wildlife chair, Rio Grande Chapter
Please join fellow wolf supporters at the “More Wolves, Less Politics” rally to urge the US Fish and Wildlife Service to stop dithering and release more wolves to the wild. On April 28, it will have been 40 years since the Mexican gray wolf was first listed under the Endangered Species Act and yet today our “Lobo” remains the most endangered wolf in the world with only 97 in the wild at the last official count.
What: “More Wolves, Less Politics” rally on the 40th anniversary of the Lobo’s endangered species listing.
When: Thursday, April 28 at 12 noon
Where: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters, Southwest Regional Office, 500 Gold Avenue SW, Downtown ...
