Pennsylvania Game News - February 2020 - 17

"During the fall and winter of 194445, the field officers destroyed 941 red
foxes, 671 gray foxes, 45 weasels, 7 wild
cats, and 20,660 crows, hawks and owls,"
Gordon wrote in the agency's 1945-1946
Biennial Report.
In the 1945-46 fiscal year, more than
$200,000 in bounties were paid on red
and gray foxes, weasels, goshawks and
great-horned owls.
Eventually, some predator bounties
were repealed: goshawks in 1951; weasels
in 1954.
But foxes and great-horned owls got no
such break. Through the 1950s, the Game
Commission paid more than $1.1 million
on foxes and great-horned owls.

BURYING BOUNTIES
The 1960s opened with science-based
conservation beginning to steer more and
more state and national wildlife-management policies. The Game Commission
finally had cleared one of its longest-lasting hurdles by convincing legislators and
hunters that antlerless deer needed to be
removed from deer populations annually.
Maybe it was time for bounties to go,
too. They really weren't making a difference, according to Latham. Bounties had
been paid on foxes throughout the 20th
century, he wrote in Bounties Are Bunk,
"...yet these animals have been at an alltime high for the past 15 years."
What Latham was suggesting was that
when predator populations are pressured,
there is a compensatory response in their
birth rates. Efforts to eradicate coyotes in
the West have illustrated this point repeatedly over time.
Moreover, removal of predators doesn't
necessarily lead to reduced predator pressure, reported Harvey Roberts, a former
Game Commission biologist, in the June
1966 issue of Pennsylvania Game News.
FEBRUARY 2020

"The assumption that the removal of
over 15,000 foxes would save 110,000
rabbits is not valid," Roberts wrote.
"Nature doesn't operate that way. In actuality, the remaining foxes would merely
find less competition, live high on the hog,
and exact the same toll on the cottontail
population."
From 1960 to 1964, the Game Commission spent $520,398 - $4.3 million
today - on fox and great-horned owl
bounties. It was money that surely would
have been more wisely allocated buying
state game lands, or equipment to manage
the nearly 1 million acres of game lands
the agency had by that time.
Recognizing bounties were a waste
of money and falling out of favor with
more and more wildlife managers and
Americans, the Game Commission in
1963 sent a questionnaire on bounties to
all 50 states and 12 Canadian provinces.
Responses were received from 48 states
and 10 provinces.
The survey found bounties still existed
in 29 states and seven provinces. Seven
states never had bounties: Alabama,
Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky,
South Carolina and Tennessee.
Fourteen states had bounties exclusively supported by local funding. Pennsylvania's average annual bounty payment
ranked fourth in the nation, even though as
a state, it ranked 33rd in geographic size.
Twelve states and six provinces also
reported their predator populations had
not increased after bounties payments
were stopped. Only two provinces experienced "serious agitation" after closing
their bounty programs.
Eighteen other state and four provincial
agencies also were currently working
toward the eventual termination of their
bounty programs.
More telling was that in 25 of the 29
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