A moose tag in Idaho is a once in a lifetime tag. Those odds are getting a little tougher for the 2019-20 season. Idaho Game and Fish Department is cutting tags across the state from 805 to 634. Moose numbers are declining due to lack of forage and predation as well as climate change according to biologists. Hunter success rates have dwindled from 80-90 percent to 50-70 percent. The reduction in tags and removing the antlerless hunts from some regions is an attempt to reverse fate and help the moose population grow.
Will these steps ensure that moose numbers will stay healthy in the state?
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Idaho Fish No Game has been downplaying the effects wolves have been having on our moose and elk populations for two decades. Pile on Grizzly and Black bear and combine the Mountain lions, and we have a predator pit. This is a direct management failure, and to some extent, caused by bad people embedded in our very own department, that had very bad intentions from the day they started working for the department.
This whole blame game surfaced a few years ago in Michigan when the faile Isle Royale wolf experiment fell flat on its face. I knew it wouldn’t take long for the halfwits at IDF&G to pick up on that messaging.
I started reporting major wolf kill impacts to the department as early as 2005/06 and continued for several years. In the early days, while the department was participating in wolf relocations, they had spent a great deal of effort to downplay the impacts, as they infested every inch of Central and North Idaho. I filmed much of the destruction, and reported multiple times, that wolves were literally sterilizing each and every drainage, one at a time; killing 4,5,6 moose at a time, and not eating a single pound out of the animals. The department went so far as to change the localized public meetings from Q&A meetings to Open House meetings, where no biologist present had a single clear answer, nor could they be held accountable. Why did they do that? Because their incompetence and refusal to address the problem left hundreds of Hunters extremely angry and outraged as the years went on.
The reduction in the Moose population has another problem; the department’s skeleton in the closet. What they won’t tell the public, is that they allowed these introduced Canadian Wolves to be transplanted to our state without testing or treating for diseases. Now, after 24 years, just about every single Moose has been infected with E.g. and when hunters harvest a diseased moose or elk, the department is reissuing a second tag if the hunter refuses to take possession of the infected animal. So, if you are lucky enough to draw a tag where the quota is (3), and you find that it is severely infested with hydatid cysts, you are essentially taking (2) or (3) moose instead of the original management objective. This is the ugly truth of this failed department.
Idaho Fish and Game is dead wrong to blame the decline of our moose population on Climate Change. It’s a hoax, a fraud, and a cheap trick played on the unknowing public, and it is wrong. I have documented and filmed all of this debacle through the entire state, as well as Montana, Wyoming, Washington, and Oregon. It’s all the same, and all the people involved with wolves, are as corruptible as one could ever imagine. In a nutshell, they are lying.