Bobcats in the Nonotuck bioregion
I read in today’s Daily Gazette that, tonight, the Mass Division of Fisheries and Wildlife is hosting an info session about new laws governing bobcat hunting at:
6:30 PM
Northampton City Council Chambers, 210 Main St.
The old laws allowed hunters to kill bobcats until a total-statewide-limit of 50 was reached. The new laws will “allow hunters to take an increased number of animals each year,” according to the Daily Gazette.
This is a great opportunity to learn about the science the DFW is using to support the need for the new laws, and to listen to and weigh the viewpoints of all. What is sure to be revealed is an up-to-date assessment of how various actors perceive, and value, the lives of bobcats. These perceptions and values reveal as much about who we are as they tell us about bobcats.
It’s an opportunity, also, to learn about the extent to which the “land ethic” informs the DFW’s regulation making process.
In preparation, I’ve re-read this portion of A Sand County Almanac:
**It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of the species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.
Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.**
(116-7; Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine Books, 1990.)
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