Feature Article November 6, 2003
LAND O' LAKES NewsWeb HomeLicense-Free Hunting and Trapping for the Masses
by Jeff GreenThe season for hunting deer in Ontario is now well underway. Deer hunters carry their rifles, warm clothes, food and drink, and camping gear with them into the bush, and hunting camps are stocked up with sundry items. Along with all the traditional hunting gear, hunters must carry their papers. If they have a rifle, they need a PAL and a firearms registration certificate. And they need their hunting card, which must have the appropriate sticker affixed to the back of it.
By contrast, a large group of people, including myself, carry on a hunting & trapping regimen right in their own homes. This season takes place on a year-round basis in a license-free environment, picking up steam as soon as the weather cools, and maintaining a relentless pace until the end of winter. The hunted, in this case, are mostly the Hanta virus-carrying, long- eared deer mice that are so plentiful.
Early in the morning, bleary-eyed trappers start up their wood stoves or turn up their thermostats and begin to survey the trap lines. From pantries to shelves, to other nooks and crannies within their houses, they check poison bait stations and deadly, better built mousetraps, tallying their kills as they go along.
Others use hunting animals, cats (known euphemistically as mousers), to kill all offending members of the species known as Vermius Mousius.
There are humane alternatives to kill traps. Large contraptions - live traps, are available for use, but the question of where to put the mice has never been satisfied. No matter how far one goes to release the mouse, there is no way of knowing that it will not return, and since few mouse trappers can tell one mouse from the other, there is always the suspicion that the same mouse is being trapped over and over again.
The massive mouse kill does not seem to have diminished the species, but there has never been an accurate census of the mouse population in Ontario or Canada.
All that will change, however, if an obscure bureaucrat in Ottawa has his way. Sometime in the next few years, the licensing of MKDs (Mouse Killing Devices) will become the law throughout Canada. All mouse traps and poisons, as well as all cats, will be numbered and registered so the government can track them, and purchasers of such equipment will be required to file weekly kill reports through a convenient online reporting procedure, which is being developed at a government office north of Wawa, Ontario. Many of the details have not been worked out; however a debate over which species of mouse should fall under the regulations still rages within the Federal DRR (Department of Rodential Resources). A memo from the DRR, leaked to this newpaper by opponents to the proposed Mouse Management Act, sums up one of the major stumbling blocks to regulated mouse trapping. We must face the facts. People dont like mice, and until that changes they will not be concerned with the cruel slaughter of the species.
As word of this Mouse Management Act surfaces, opponents are mobilizing, calling it just another tax grab by the federal government. Sooner or later there will be a head tax, or should I say a tail tax, for every killed mouse. And then there will be licensing fees, registration feesthe whole nine yards. Were not going to accept this, said a Mousing Management Act opponent, adding, Id like to see them try to enforce it.
[Ed. Note: This story could be true, but it isnt]
