Source.
After two years of fundraising, a Canadian environmental group known as the Rainforest Conservation Coalition has purchased the exclusive rights to guide non-resident hunters in a huge swath of British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest. The group won’t be guiding any hunters any time soon though, at least not successfully. Instead, the Rainforest Conservation Coalition purchased the massive outfitting lease—known in Canada as a guiding tenure—as a way to lock non-resident hunters out of the area.
The outfitting lease, situated on the southern end of the Great Bear Rainforest, covers 18,000 square kilometers, or roughly 4.5 million acres. Raincoast purchased the tenure from the estate of a legitimate hunting outfitter who recently passed away …
It reportedly cost the organization $1.92 million to acquire the tenure, which comes with the infrastructure needed to run a successful guiding outfit—like cabins, base lodges, boats, planes, and ATVs. According to Raincoast’s website, they received 700 individual contributions from around the world that allowed them to make the acquisition, including substantial support from a U.S.-based outdoor apparel company.
Scott Ellis is the Executive Director of the Guide Outfitters Association of B.C. He tells F&S that Raincoast’s motives for buying up the hunting tenures is simple: They want to curtail legal hunting activities inside the Great Bear Raniforest. “Raincoast claims not to be an anti hunting organization. But they act like an anti-hunting organization, and they talk like an anti-hunting organization,” Ellis says. “They were behind the closure of the grizzly bear hunt throughout the province in 2017, and they’ve been buying guide territories for 20 years.”
With its recent purchase, Raincoast says it now owns exclusive non-resident guiding rights to six guide territories that comprise 87.5 percent of the 15-million acre Great Bear Rainforest. According to Ellis, B.C.’s 2017 ban on grizzly bear hunting greatly reduced the commercial value of those guide territories in southern B.C. because the area was a popular destination for non-resident grizzly bear hunters. And those foreign hunters made up a substation portion of the guide’s and outfitter’s revenue stream.
In the absence of grizzly hunting, the popularity of bear viewing has skyrocketed in the Great Bear Rainforest. And Raincoast is working to support local companies that run bear viewing outfits for tourists. “They were very strategic in how they showed First Nations communities how best to generate revenue by viewing bears,” Ellis says. “Whereas hunting bears may be difficult, the viewing is much easier. So they’ve built docs and given boats and given training and all that stuff. The money behind the environmental movement here that Raincoast has access to is overwhelming.”
Though Raincoast’s stated mission is to rid southern B.C. of what it calls “commercial trophy hunting”, the group still claims publicly that they are actively guiding hunters on the six large tenures they now own in the Great Bear Rainforest. This is likely because the B.C. government designed the tenure program with hunting in mind—and ostensibly requires that some form of hunting be carried out by the license holder. In fact the B.C. Wildlife Act, a body of laws that govern hunting and fishing activities throughout the province, says that habitat managers can revoke or cancel tenures that aren’t being used for hunting purposes.
When asked by John Streit of 980 CKNW if he’s worried about any of the Raincoast’s tenures being canceled due to non-hunting use, Falconer said: “We do hunt them. We’re not very successful. We have a very fussy clientele. But we do absolutely comply with the Wildlife Act.”
What do they do – carry folks out in boats to throw rocks at them? This is called not abiding by the spirit of the law, and it’s immoral.
You know who that outdoor apparel company is? Patagonia. Specifically, it’s Patagonia Holdfast Collective, which is worth a post all on its own. Don’t buy Patagonia gear. If you want good apparel, buy from hunting outfitters Kuiu, Sitka or Badlands. Or buy from a fishing outfitter like Simms. There are very good outdoor apparel companies, even better, than Patagonia, and they cater to our likes.
As for this notion of “rewilding,” the father of this cult movement, Frans Vera devised his plan to make the Dutch Serengeti, the “New Wilderness.” How is it going now? The people hate him. Thousands of animals have starved.
It follows growing anger in the Netherlands over the slaughter of more than half Oostvaardersplassen’s red deer, Konik horses and Heck cattle because they were starving. After a run of mild winters, the three species numbered 5,230 on the fenced 5,000-hectare reserve. Following a harsher winter, the population is now just 1,850. Around 90% of the dead animals were shot by the Dutch state forestry organisation, which manages the reserve, before they could die of starvation.
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But in a drastic “reset”, a special committee convened by the provincial government this week called for a halt to the rewilding principle of allowing “natural processes” to determine herbivore populations. Instead, large herbivore numbers should be capped at 1,500 to stop winter fatalities, the committee said, with new forest and marsh areas created for additional “shelter” for the animals.
Or in other words, allowing trained, knowledgeable wildlife biologists to do their thing and manager herd size, ratios of prey to predator, and those sorts of things, is probably a very good idea.
Don’t be surprised when there are no longer any of the indigenous animals in the Canadian wilderness affected by this stupidity, be it Elk, Caribou, Moose or whatever. Bears are the only thing left. And maybe seeing them kill each other for food will be off-putting for the women, children and effete men visiting for “bear watching.”
In the mean time, hunting is under attack all over America as the eco-Fascists, enviro-kooks, ne’er-do-wells and other idiots take over DNR commissions. It’s this same stupidity which fights forest fires. Allowing nature to burn from things like lightening strikes causes foliage to be born anew, and the animal kingdom to thrive. I recently hunted Groton Plantation, 20,000 acres. It’s one of the most lively, beautiful, thriving places I’ve ever seen. Of the 20,000 acres, they burn one quarter of it every year, or 5,000 acres. The large trees, or the old growth, isn’t much affected. But the undergrowth that chokes the trees and the dead fall is removed.
This same thing needs to happen to Pisgah National Forest. My hunting experience there was miserable. You can’t even walk there for the one to two feet deep deadfall and the brush, bushes, Rhododendron, vines, briars, and weeds. Old growth is being choked. It simply needs to be burned, but all over America we keep fighting forest fires in our stupidity. Stop hunting, fight fires. It’s what the cultists do.
Make sure to fight back wherever and whenever you can.
And don’t buy Patagonia apparel.
