Vehicle restrictions put in place last Friday to protect wildlife in areas severely affected by the summer’s wildfires are unfairly targeting resident hunters, the B.C. Wildlife Federation said Tuesday.
“Hunting is a very small part of the puzzle, as it were, on the total mortality of moose,” BCWF president Harvey Andrusak said Tuesday. “It’s the landscape that’s been impacted by a myriad of roads as well as people. The impacts of everything from cars to trains — those are the impacts that really affect the moose population.”
Last Friday the Ministry of Forests announced the restrictions under the wildfire act for within the Chilcotin Plateau Hanceville Riske Creek fire areas prohibiting the use of all motor vehicles for the purpose of licensed hunting, except on designated highways and mainline forestry roads.
ATV restrictions were also put in place for some hunting areas impacted by the Elephant Hill fire.
In its rationale, the ministry said wildfires have enabled motor vehicle access by hunters to remote moose and mule deer habitats that were previously only accessible by foot and the loss of vegetation has significantly increased lines of sight for hunters.
The restrictions, however, do not apply to First Nations exercising Aboriginal rights to hunt, which Andrusak said raises another question.
“Is the concern of the ministry, by putting in these restrictions, about conservation of moose?” he said. “Are they that worried about the numbers of moose and the impact of fires to the point where it is a conservation concern? Because if that’s the case, then we would readily agree there should be no hunting. Conservation comes before any consideration of resource allocation before First Nations and before recreational hunters.”
As for the suggestion by the ministry that the fires have increased the line of sight for hunters, Andrusak said it’s a shallow argument, considering the moose are not going to do well this winter because “a lot of” their food has gone up in flames.
The harvest of moose is tightly regulated with limited entry hunts (LEHs), he added.
“There are a certain number of permits put out there for people to apply for,” Andrusak said. “The resident hunter harvest in the Cariboo has dropped from 3,000 per year in the 1980s to 600. If the ministry decides the number is 600 then only those people that have a permit can go harvest a moose. It’s not like everyone can go out there and start shooting a moose.”
Tl’etinqox (Anaham) Chief Joe Alphonse has called for a cancellation of the moose hunt this fall. He has also encouraged his own community members not to hunt and said many of them are not hunting.
“A lot of our leaders don’t want to see anyone out there hunting, including First Nations because of the stress the animals have been in,” Alphonse said. “The only way around it is for government to deal directly with First Nations governance, which they have been reluctant to do. The government could work with us to set up our own enforcement agency. ”
Alphonse said some First Nations people are choosing to go hunt, and there is nothing he can do about it.
“The Aboriginal right to hunt is protected under the Supreme Court of Canada,” he said. “Some of our community members are also choosing to hunt in other territories this fall because of the fires.”
He said he received a report Monday that there were a bunch of non-Aboriginal people hunting on quads in the Owen Lake area, and that’s an area where people aren’t supposed to be hunting in.
Next year he said he will do what he thinks is necessary.
“People will find out very quickly they won’t be able to come into our area when all the roads are deactivated,” he said. “I’ll let the logging industry know what date to be out of there.”
This year he tried to be forthright and work with the public and there was a big backlash, he said.
“Maybe we won’t be forthright anymore.”
The Ministry of Forests did not respond to request for an interview by press time.