By: Ted Nugent
I walk the wild. I’ve walked the wild for my entire 70 years and I know what I see. I determined early on that my quality of life and overall American Dream will be ultimately enjoyed based on my dedication to a higher level of awareness and diligent attentiveness to my surroundings, people, places, things and conditions.
And I walk the wild a lot! I live in the wild, I cherish the wild, I revere the wild, I live the wild, I am the Spirit of the Wild and there is no getting away from it.
I do not believe that there has been a single year of my life where I have not witnessed dead and or sickly critters out here.
It is as natural as nature gets.
As a lifelong trapper and hunter, my greatest joys arise from not going the road less traveled, but rather the non-road untraveled. When I see an impenetrable swamp, I immediately decide to penetrate it and try to go as deep as a wily old buck or swamp rat, quicksand or no quicksand.
When the horrific EHD outbreak hit my sacred Michigan hunting grounds, I donned my chest-waders and trudged and plowed deep into no-man’s land, wading into bottomless mucklands, marshes, swamps, fens, and puckerbrush hell to see what I could see.
Invisible to all but the outback swashbuckler, I ventured deep into the cattails and counted dead deer after dead deer till I thought I was going to puke.
I did not google EHD. I did not look for results on my laptop screen ensconced in some office somewhere.
I went deep, very, very deep into the hinterland where nature rules the day, and I took notes and made my wildlife determinations based on real world tooth, fang and claw, hands-on, eye-witness nature.
I never went to college because I was too busy learning stuff.
So when I see so called professional wildlife biologists somehow work their way into positions of authority in state and federal wildlife agencies and make declarations that defy what my lifetime of swamprunning has taught me, I know we are in serious trouble.
Try this one on for size; Over and over again I hear the provable nonsense that feeding and baiting deer cause the deer to have nose to nose contact, and that this unnatural activity can lead to CWD transmission.
HUH!
Some of you desk jockey bureaucrats might want to write this down, but in the real-world deer grounds where I live, deer spend their entire lives licking, smooching, biting, sniffing and grooming each other in a nonstop orgy of cervid nose-to-nose contact.
Deer eat under the same oak tree. Deer share bites from a single apple and cob of corn. All deer swap spit at the trillions of licking branches ubiquitous in deer habitat.
Tell me you know this.
Tell us the honest reason a bureaucrat would think for one minute they have the authority to dictate whether free Americans can relocate apples, corn, persimmons or other types of feed for whatever reason we may choose.
Are you kidding me?
And if any evidence existed anywhere that feeding or baiting deer would increase the chance of disease, how can it be that all those equally trained and educated biologists from all those states that do allow feeding and baiting have somehow failed to get that critical information.
I will tell you why; bureaucrats lie, that’s why.
Write this down; after wasting more than $100 MILLION of our hard-earned money on research looking really hard to find that link, there is absolutely no sound scientific evidence whatsoever linking feeding or baiting deer to the occurrence of CWD or any other cervid disorder or disease.
Accompanying this defiant little writing by yours truly is a link to the most recent gathering of the most dedicated wildlife biologists with the most up to date studies and research so you don’t have to take the old guitarplayers word for it.
I would challenge any wildlife bureaucrat anywhere anytime to compare their worn-out hunting boots to my worn-out hunting boots and sheer miles trudged through critter grounds and see whose research is better in tune with real wildlife conditions.
My fellow American hunters, we are being scammed for what can only be painfully identified as all too typical bureaucratic overreach, the kind that has ruined everything in its path.
I don’t trust them as far as I can toss them.
All these anti-hunting regulations accomplish is to fan the flames of attrition and create yet more obstacles to recruitment into this critical hands-on outdoor lifestyle.
Please communicate aggressively with your elected employees and tell them to stick to sound science when it comes to managing our precious wildlife resources and our sacred hunting heritage.
Be sure you visit HunterNation.org to join us on the frontlines to battle this epidemic of corruption and abuse of power that is destroying our beloved sport.
Enough is enough. Backstraps forever!