New Video of the Elk and Photographer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGQExgOxZMQ
As some
of you already know, I live just outside the boundary of the Great Smoky
Mountains National Park in the extreme western part of North Carolina. Just to the west sets a beautiful high peak
known as Cataloochee. That mountain not
only houses both our winter ski resort and in the warmer months, the historic
Ghost Town in the Sky, but it also acts as a natural barrier to one of the
park’s pristine wilderness areas, the Cataloochee Valley.
Back in
2002, the NC Wild Resources Commission and the National Park Service initiated
an experimental reintroduction of elk to our mountains; they picked the
Cataloochee Valley to establish the herd both for its resources and protective isolation. The valley is accessible from the North
Carolina side only by an exciting, 11 mile, white-knuckle ride on dirt road up
and over a mountain pass with a vertical wall of rock on one side and a steep
precipice on the other. It is a one-lane
road with two-way traffic and often leads to WTF moments when two vehicles meet
midway. The ride is perilous but worth
the effort as our original group of 25 elk has grown to an impressive herd of
150, with new calves being born each spring.
Each evening, these picturesque animals emerge from the forest to graze
in the open valley to the delight of the hundreds of nature lovers who journeyed
to watch from the distant parkways. The
rangers will admit that we do occasionally lose a baby to the black bears or
wolves, but this is one of those rare incidences where humans have tampered
with Nature and the outcome has become a glorious success.
Unfortunately,
whenever humans are involved, because of an anatomical anomaly, you end up with
certain number of assholes. Now to
premise this story, I will tell you that I grew up in southern New Jersey in a
family that supplemented our diet by subsistence hunting and fishing. Without regard to my prolonged abstinence
from that activity, I DO NOT have a problem with people taking game as a food
source under a controlled and regulated harvest. But back to those inevitable “human orifices,”
on May 18th of this year, three elk, a bull, an adolescent cow, and a pregnant
cow, were shot dead in the Pisgah National Forest just outside of the
park. All three (or four) animals were
left to rot in the woods without any attempt to harvest the illegal meat.
There
is, of course, reward money posted for information leading to the arrest and
conviction of the poachers, but I really don’t think that a monetary fine, a
little jail time, and the possible forfeiture of their weapons and vehicles,
goes quite far enough. I think these
arrestees, if they’re found, should undergo a comprehensive re-education on how
difficult it was to take unsuspecting animals from their familiar habitat and
strand them deep in a mountainous forest where they were left to forage for
food, find potable water, avoid bears, and survive the cold winter nights atop
the highest peaks east of the Rockies.
After these butt-heads have a good understanding of the difficulties
faced by these majestic animals as they gained not only a survivable foot-hold,
but flourished in their new surroundings, these creeps that found pleasure in
killing for killing’s sake, should be blindfolded, driven as far into the
mountains as possible, and then marched another 10 or 12 miles, stripped naked
and turned loose (that’s all the elk had).
If they make it out, I think they may have a little more respect for the
sanctity of life and the tribulations of living in the wild without some pea-brained
yahoo shooting a gun at them for no good reason.
Now, I’m
telling you my idea so you will know without doubt, that if you ever wake up to
hear about some wild, naked men, half crazed with hunger and dehydration,
claiming to have been kidnapped and abandoned on a remote mountain top in the
Smokys, the perpetrator wasn’t me, but the assholes deserved it.
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