Originally Posted by
Fenelon
It all boils down to your own set of personal ethics - your own personal views on compassion, respect and treatment of another living creature, etc. You make your own bed, so it's up to you individually at the end of the day to do an assessment, on how you feel and treat animals. I remember when I used to do a lot of nuisance beaver removal, making pretty good money during the peak spring and fall months. The animals were definitely causing problems, plugging culverts, flooding roads, washing-out shoulders, etc. I broke my own rules and trapped a well-established beaver colony in early June, knowing that the adult female would have recently whelped. The next day, I could hear her pups crying in the house as I removed her from a 330 conibear. Two days later they were still crying/whimpering, so I spent 45 minutes with a pick and axe, digging-out the house so I could euthanize the pups. $65 (fee for removing the beaver) doesn't cover how I felt after that. Maybe it's an age thing, I don't know, but my attitudes towards how I see wildlife has changed over the years. As a kid, I used to shoot pile of groundhogs, as that was the acceptednorm for a rural kid, and the attitude was that a dead varmint was a positive thing. It used to be you'd look out into a 100 acre hay field, and you'd see 10 hogs. Yes. there were legitimate beefs back then with damage to haying equipment, etc. Been around cattle and horses my entire life, and have yet to see a single animal break a leg from a hog burrow. Then coyotes arrived on the landscape in the late 70's/early 80's. Goodbye ground hogs. It's now almost a treat now to see a hog in the area I live. I personally see no sense in shooting what's left now, as they're serving a better cause ecologically by being in that hayfield. I'll leave them to feed the raptors and fox pups (that will bring me $50 in the fall), eat the perennial weeds, and aerate the soil.