> > There are enormous fines for shooting a river otter. Did your neighbor
> > get slapped with a huge fine (I HOPE)??
>
> In Washington, there is a specific legal exemption which provides for
> the killing of most wildlife when they are doing damage to property.
> There are reporting requirements and such and some statements about
> getting permission ahead of time unless it is an emergency but,
> nevertheless, this particular situation may have been legal.
>
> Kelly McAllister


I am curious as to the justifications to these exemptions. My
experience has been that the people wanting most to kill these
animals have done the least to prevent the problem in the first
place.

Two similar occurences when I lived in the Sierra involved raccoons
and a bear. Our neighbor wanted to kill some raccoons that kept
killing his chickens. These raccoons lived under our house,
frequently waking us at night as they ripped apart insulation and the
paper covering the insulation to build nests. They also spent a
great deal of time playing around by climbing the poles our house was
built on and chattering, which usually got the cats all excited, and
they would run around the house, pouncing on the floor as if they
could catch them. (For most, that would qualify as quite a nuisance.
We didn't really care, we lived in forest, and closeness to animals
had a lot to do with why we were there.) Sometimes they would come
out during the day and eat our cats' food. Other than that, we never
had any problems with them, they never bothered the cats, and the
cats didn't bother them.

However, the neighbor's menagerie of peafowl, Chinese geese, guinea
fowl, and just about everything else exotic would end up in an
uproar when the 'coons headed in that direction. For that, he wanted
to shoot them. Never mind the fact that the holes in the fence were
large enough for me to go through with little difficulty, and the
fact that his birds spent half their day admiring themselves in our
french doors and pooping all over the deck.

The bear story is even worse, because they actually got the permit.
8 drunk men, 20 dogs, 3 hours and 50 bulle. . . well, you get the
picture.

But in light of declining numbers, loss of habitat, etc., how can we
really justify these exemptions when people fail to take adequate, or
even any, precautions to protect themselves and their property?
jw
Jane Westervelt
Moscow, ID