I need opinions from all you gun-owning / hunting folks

[allyphoe]

One of the items I get to vote on is a state constitutional amendment on hunting and fishing rights.  It would add no rights that don't already exist in state law; it would just add another hurdle to any future attempt to limit those right.  (Constitutional amendments are generally proposed by initiative petition, with twice as many signatures

Comments

[jesuismoi]

this part, "makes hunting, fishing, and trapping the preferred means to manage certain game and fish" is worrisome.

So, if, for example, they have a geese colony take up home in the Memorial in OK City, the "preffered" way to get rid of them wouldn't be egg removal, or scaring them off, but shooting and trapping.

The biology major who works w/ a bunch of biology PhD's say that hunting is a poor wildlife management technique overall and shouldn't be part of the constitution.

And I do fish, so I'm not all PETA here.

[allyphoe]

Further investigation translates "certain" as "not identified as threatened by law or by the Commission."

[jesuismoi]

So animals who just annoy people and can be considered game, have to be shot or trapped?

I would vote nay. It seems like a really stupid thing to put into law, and, from a biology standpoint, short sighted.

Re: comments below-- thus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

[jesuismoi]

And if Oklahoma changes it's mind in 75 years and as a group decides, "hey, you know what? hunting bad, let's all have some soylent green" then so be it.

[gwendally]

I'd be in favor of it. There is some sort of momentum to do away with all these "uncivilized" things now that we're so civilized. Except, well, we aren't really. We just think we are. We still eat meat, we just expect it to come in vacuum-packed packages killed and processed off-stage.

And civilization really does away with common sense in areas like reducing vermon in the road (like deer) and how to handle beavers damming up streams and causing infrastructure damage. Sometimes trapping is the right thing to do, but it's too easy to accidently outlaw it.

I think making it a "right" makes sense. It wasn't an explicit "right" before because no one realized they had to say that. It'd be like saying that everyone has a right to breath oxygen. Uh. Yeah.