Ohio's plan requiring coyote hunters to buy a trapping license an epic mistake

The poorly vetted proposal to require coyote hunters to buy a trapping tag first certainly shows how out of step are the Ohio Division of Wildlife and the Ohio State Trappers Association.

Just as the two tried to do in 2018 with a went-down-in-flames attempt to create a season on the taking of bobcats.

You might hear all kinds of stories how wiser state natural resources heads prevailed, with the matter eventually scuttled by the eight-member Ohio Wildlife Council.

Yet the fact is the agency – with blessing of trappers - put the idea on the market and attempted to sell the lemon. Thus the Wildlife Division owns it in larger measure.

So you’d think the couple would have learned from their epic 2018 bobcat blunder. They haven’t, and are now engaged in an idea of equal harebrained gobbledygook. This is a coyote clinker of an idea.

What the Wildlife Division is floating is the leaded balloon concept that hunters – not just trappers – be required to buy a trapping license before being allowed to shoot/kill/take a coyote.

That requirement would lasso not just a determined fur hunter who intends to gut, skin and sell the hide of a coyote but also the casual archery or gun hunter who takes aim at a coyote running underneath his or her deer stand.

Compounding things is the idea of an actual season on coyotes, complete with a closure.

A reason for the season being bandied about is that most of Ohio’s neighbors have coyote seasons. However, that “But, Dad, EVERYONE is doing it” excuse is correctly rejected by any responsible adult. But “responsible” is not always visible in the Wildlife Division’s windshield.

Alas, these two-pea-in-a-misinformed pod just cannot grasp that coyotes are invasive. They are dangerous. They are pests. They are not like other furbearers.

You don’t see possums sneaking into suburban backyards and pilfering puppies let out to do their business. Skunks do not attack Columbus police officers. Fathers in New Hampshire do not have to strangle raccoons that attack their children; like one “Live Free Or Die” Granite State dad did to a coyote on January 20th.

Nor have any trail camera photos appeared on Facebook of a weasel making off with a fawn deer clutched in its jaws.

That is because coyotes are different; a difference the Wildlife Division and the state trappers group stubbornly refuse to acknowledge.

Just as sadly the Wildlife Division never seems to stop putting its fingers into the back pockets of sportsmen, either. Even the $72.6 million the agency collected in Fiscal 2019 doesn’t seem to satisfy Wildlife Division officials.

Instead, these officials are all in for trying to reverse the decline in the number of trapping licenses issued - and the monies derived from them - by exploiting the wallets of hunters who might take pot shots at passing coyotes.

The push to establish a bobcat season was nonsense. And the shove to demand that hunters first take a trapping course and then buy a trapping tag just in order to take a poke at a coyote is a trumpery even more bizarre and outlandish.

- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn
JFrischk@Ameritech.net
JFrischk4@gmail.com