2014-10-27 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

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Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes —October 27, 2014 what I see on the net— that our problem as hunters is access not acreage and I think with the maps I showed you guys earlier it isn't' particularly access —we are losing acreage due to the plans that are happening right now and we are not part of these plans. And also we need to eradicate all non-native invasive, injurious sheep; those pigs there across the state; farm animals don't belong in Hawaii; all this non-native stuff— but yet some reason watershed projects and groups support cattle ranching and support sustainable logging, saying the idea that our consumptive resources are actually good —which our consumptive resources are also sheep, goats, pigs and deer, somewhat hypocritical in that sense. To a game manager— I took this out of chapter one of Game Management by Alder Leopold — if anyone one doesn't know who Alder Leopold is — he's one of the great conservationists at the turn of century — and along with folks like Theodore Roosevelt, Gerrit [sp?] Brunel, even John Muir, himself, the founder of Sierra Club back then. But game management is the art of making land produce sustained annual crops of our game for recreational use. So while the other guys say we need to eradicate them — well that's management in our sense for sustained use. I'd like to out the recreational though because the vast majority of hunters do not purely hunt for recreation — but always include some kind of sustenance or subsistence. Nobody here that hunts just kill something just to kill it. There is only one group of people that actually kills things just to kill it and leave it there — and I don't need to say who does that. Consumable resources put funds also into the management budget of the land, versus seeking public treasury monies or non-domestic sources. So these animals that we have —that we're gonna start charging for tag —we got the administrative rules — that's great— these are funds that we can use for our land management. All these years we weren't doing it— but— I don't know— that's just the way it is. So what I'm saying is our consumptive resources are important and we need to keep them. Otherwise we're gonna look for federal dollars all the time and be stuck to fed rules and of those hunters. I just have a little illustration of game management— kind of a joke but it's really not. Here's Hawaii's theory — you can just pretend this is Saddle Road, maybe, and you can see all the sheep on the side of the road and DHHL and these things and we don't have hunting there but we have nearby fences where we fence off the important stuff and we continually to encroach and get less and less land that people can hunt, increasing the population of animals, also reducing the amount we can hold, increasing the damage, and this is what they put on TV all the time. Now also sometimes you get one plant and we make a big fence. Sometimes they take critical habitat area that doesn't even make sense, so this is the theory that we have. We have lot of hunters, small areas, lot of animals concentrated and of course they cause a lot of damage that's 13