Over two-thirds of the thousands of kids on the Big Brothers Big Sisters waiting list claim they would like to spend time outdoors with their mentor. Pass It On – Outdoor Mentors can help with that.

PIO-OM is a non-profit organization that connects children with their outdoor heritage by mentoring them in hunting and fishing. To accomplish that, PIO-OM needs men and women volunteer mentors. It also needs money. That’s where RSO readers can help. When you donate $50 to PIO-OM, you get 53 chances to win, via lottery, a new firearm valued between $800 and $4,300. Donate $100 and you triple your chances to win. Weekly drawings will begin the first week of March, 2012. All tickets remain in the drawing for all 52 weeks plus one bonus drawing.

Donate to Pass It On – Outdoor Mentors and not only will you have a chance to win a new gun, but most importantly, you will be furthering efforts to give more children the opportunity to experience the great outdoors we all know and love. Future financial and political support for fish, wildlife and hunting rights depends on citizens who understand our successful wildlife conservation programs.

Donate online or via phone by calling 316-290-8883. You may also send a check or money order made payable to “Pass It On – Outdoor Mentors”:

Mike Christensen
Pass It On – Outdoor Mentors, Inc.
310 E 2nd
Wichita, KS 67202

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As a human, I love house cats. As a hunter and wildlife lover, I hate them.

We had dozens of cats during my childhood. Every farm did. They were our mousers. Many became front porch pets. I managed to sneak them into the house just often enough for one to hatch kittens on my bed. That did nothing for Mom’s blood pressure, but under normal conditions, stroking a warm, purring cat relieves stress better than pills. Watching a kitten chase a string is more entertaining than 600 channels on satellite TV.

Unfortunately, when domestic felines roam freely outdoors they become fierce and deadly predators. In North America alone they annually kill hundreds of millions of warblers, quail, ground squirrels and similar small species of native wildlife that are often struggling to hang on in a shrinking world in which humans have stacked the deck against them. (Check it out at: www.abcbirds.org.)

It’s bad enough we drain wetlands, plow prairies, burn forests, convert pastures to golf courses and pave meadows into Mall parking lots. Such actions absolutely kill the birds and the bees. Fostering huge populations of non-native, deadly house cats and turning them loose on the survivors compounds the losses. It is estimated U.S. harbors 77 million domestic cats, tame and feral.

Sweet as Miss Kitty may be, when she’s turned loose outdoors, she becomes a predatory monster. Imagine if you were a yellow warbler trying to eke out a living in the deteriorated habitat of a suburban backyard. Perhaps there are enough wild shrubs in an odd corner to shelter a nest and grow enough bugs to feed four growing nestlings. You fly overtime and hunt extra diligently to feed your precious brood. And then one morning you return with a beak full of bugs to see eight needle sharp claws and four gleaming fangs ripping the life out of your family.

Not pretty, Miss Kitty.

Housecats killing hundreds of millions of wild animals annually in North America is not natural because our wildlife did not evolve under the pressure of rampaging house cats. Cottontails, ground squirrels and small birds learned to avoid, escape or out-breed snakes, hawks, foxes, bobcats, owls, raccoons, skunks and other native predators. Most of those species, like their prey, face the long odds of survival in the wild. But housecats have an unfair advantage. We feed then, give them expensive health care and a huge advantage over the species they kill. And every critter they bring to the back porch represents one less available to our native predators, which have to work even harder to survive.

In pristine America circa 1492 – and even in intact wilderness ecosystems of today — native wildlife would probably be able to absorb the additional pressure of feral housecat predation. You don’t find housecats in the Bob Marshall Wilderness of Montana, for instance, because they can’t survive there without the daily feeding of Friskies and the protection of a house or barn. But in backyard America, our farms and parks and suburbs where most of our wildlife has been squeezed, we raise millions of pampered cats and brutishly, selfishly, uncaringly turn them loose on the poor native critters we leave out in the cold.

I suspect most folks have never thought of Miss Kitty’s true impact on our wildlife. Upon discovering it they will probably keep the house cat just where it belongs – in the house. Or tethered outdoors, not turned out nightly to roam and destroy. What really frosts me are the cat-loving “societies” that agitate to not only feed and house feral housecats in cities across America, but go so far as to capture them and, instead of caging or euthanizing them, provide extensive health care, then neuter the animal and return it to it’s homeless life on the streets!

That’s cruel and unusual punishment.

Our wild birds, squirrels and rabbits don’t need this kind of unfair predatory pressure arrayed against them. The next time you hear about cat lovers working in your community to raise funds to “save” feral housecats, speak out against their ill-guided efforts. Demand that these deadly predators be corralled and removed from the wild, not nurtured and returned.

And if you have housecats of your own, pet them, love them and keep them from destroying our wildlife. For more information visit the Cornell laboratory of Ornithology website at www.birds.cornell.edu. Here’s an excerpt from that site:  If you own a cat, we strongly recommend that you keep it indoors to reduce the needless loss of birdlife. The American Bird Conservancy has created the Cats Indoors campaign to increase awareness of the problem. For more information, contact: American Bird Conservancy, 1250 24th Street, NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20037, Phone: (202) 778-9666, or go to their website.

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Killing endangered species doesn’t seem like a good idea, but it is if killing them saves the species.

Okay, how can that make any sense?

The scimitar-horned oryx, native to North Africa desert grasslands (which are becoming more desert than grass, thanks to human overuse and abuse) is thought to have been extirpated from its native ranges in 1999. That means gone. Wiped out by loss of habitat (livestock grazing) and unregulated hunting (spelled poaching.) So the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service lists it as an Endangered Species. No kidding.

But last spring I saw several dozen on a private ranch — in Texas. Last December I saw four more, including one that was flying. I wasn’t the only one. Hundreds of folks see scimitar-horned oryx on various Texas ranches every year because those nasty Texans breed and raise these lovely antelope and move them from ranch to ranch by helicopter, which explains how I saw one flying overhead, dangling from a rope, last December. Oh, one more thing. Those same ranchers kill some of their oryx.

What! Kill? But of course. You can’t just let animals increase indefinitely within limited habitat. And Texas pastures are limited. If you don’t kill or otherwise remove excess oryx, the whole herd dies after eating all the forage.

This isn’t rocket science. Nevertheless, animal rights activists sued the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for letting ranchers capture, trade, sell, move, kill and continue their successful perpetuation of scimitar-horned oryx. Brilliant. Harass the people who have saved the species from extinction.

Back up a second. Let’s study a bit of history. Somewhere in the recent past some Texans got hold of captive bred oryx (probably excess zoo animals) and began raising them. Texans raise many non-native species including rhinos and other endangered North Africa antelope such as the addax. While the USFWS, other national and international wildlife agencies, private conservation organizations and anti-hunting groups regulated and legislated and agitated to save scimitar-horned oryx in the wild, the beasts essentially disappeared. Yet, in Texas, where ranchers were selling and trading oryx and hunters were shooting them, the animals were thriving.

So, sensibly, the USFWS promulgated a regulation allowing those ranchers an exemption from regulations against doing such things. The thinking was, quite correctly, that these hunting ranches had been and would continue to be the salvation of scimitar-horned oryx. They exchanged genetic stock, maintained healthy herds, saw annual increases in populations and made money by charging hunters to shoot a few excess animals each year.

This didn’t sit well with the antis. So they pressed USFWS to get tough on those nasty, bloodthirsty Texas ranchers. Naturally, a judge (omniscient, omnipotent expert on biology and wildlife management) slapped USFWS hands and said No more of that. Now you must apply for and be granted a special authorization permit from USFWS before importing, exporting, culling or otherwise managing the scimitar-horned oryx you and virtually you alone have saved from extinction. Exactly who within USFWS will determine which ranches get this permit, and under what criteria, are apparently arbitrary.

This should do several things:

1. Save taxpayers lots of money as we pay bureaucrats to tour ranches and push papers around saying “Yay” or “Nay” about whether any one of some 2,000 captive bred, privately owned oryx can be moved from pasture A to Z, or whether a rancher can recoup $4,000 of his operating expenses by charging a hunter to shoot a 7-year-old bull that is about to die anyway.
2. Increase, dramatically, the numbers of oryx in their native lands of North Africa (sarcasm.)
3. Save energy, reduce carbon emissions and minimize global warming by requiring USFWS bureaucrats to drive all over Texas policing ranchers who own oryx and are continuing to breed, feed and save them from extinction, which all the anti-hunters and international wildlife organizations with their millions of dollars couldn’t achieve in a single country in Africa.

I suspect that most USFWS biologists and bureaucrats were trying to do the right thing and permit ranchers to continue largely unmolested with their oryx-saving enterprises, but our broken judicial system, which permits frivolous lawsuits and reimburses the plaintiffs their court and lawyer fees if they win, prevents common sense solutions.

So now we have government agents, in a non-police state, forcing private property owners to pay for harboring and feeding a privately and legally purchased and privately owned herd of animals without options for monetary remuneration. As I read the regulations, they cannot sell the beasts, cannot move them to other ranches, cannot sell old bulls to help defray some of the expense of keeping them …

I believe no individual should be allowed to kill the last of any endangered species, but neither should society at large force anyone to pay for the maintenance of that species. At some point rational citizens have got to begin pushing back against these emotional, unproductive, regressive anti-hunter shenanigans that ultimately waste millions of taxpayer dollars and hurt wildlife and habitat protection efforts.

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