By Chris Powell
For years environmental extremists and animal lovers have been telling Connecticut residents that they must learn to live with the state’s growing population of bears. But live with them as roommates?
The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection reports that as of last month bears have broken into homes in the state 65 times this year, the largest number of bear burglaries since 2004.
According to the environmental agency, so far this year bears in Connecticut have caused structural damage 286 times, injured livestock 146 times, injured pets 24 times, damaged vehicles 24 times, damaged agriculture 77 times, and damaged trash cans and birdfeeders more than 2,000 times, an increase over previous years. This year some houses have been broken into by bears more than once.
The increase is blamed mainly on the increase in the state’s bear population, now estimated at more than 1,200, and the increase in population may be blamed on the animals’ having begun to sense that they are a protected species in Connecticut. The official advice about dealing with bears on your property is only to shoo them over to your neighbor’s property.
While bears are not equally distributed throughout the state, in the last year they have been spotted in many towns and even cities. A “fair share” bear policy would allocate seven bears to each of Connecticut’s 169 municipalities. That’s where protected species policy for bears will take the state.
Connecticut’s bears are seldom aggressive toward people, but they are still a danger and nuisance, just like coyotes and bobcats. But while state law allows hunting of most animals, including rabbits, woodchucks, and squirrels, as well as some birds, bears and bobcats are protected. This makes no practical sense, only political sense, since for some reason the environmental extremists and animal lovers have made bears and bobcats their favorites and have scared state legislators out of protecting the public.
Bears and bobcats won’t go extinct if Connecticut authorizes a hunting season to push them back toward the north woods, and the state will be better for their departure. Besides, extinctions are not always regrettable. Few in Connecticut miss wolves, which were hunted out of the state a couple of centuries ago. Who wants great white sharks prowling Long Island Sound? Who isn’t glad that the dinosaurs are long gone?
Better to start shooting bears in the northwest hills than to have to start shooting them when they are nearly everywhere every day.
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What is meant by the proposed state constitutional amendment on early voting, which voters will be asked to approve on Election Day next month?
The amendment means mainly that the General Assembly and the governor will be authorized to make big changes in election procedures, changes that have not yet even been formally proposed.
The general idea is to allow people to vote ahead of Election Day. But how far ahead? A week? A month? The amendment doesn’t say, leaving the issue to ordinary legislation.
What would the manner of voting be? Would it be in-person voting at town halls and other designated polling places? Or would it be a vast expansion of the absentee ballot system, which puts intermediaries between voters and the casting of their votes? Ordinary legislation would decide that too.
Both these issues easily could have been settled by the amendment itself.
The amendment’s vagueness and broad grant of authority prompt skepticism from two Republican legislators from Wolcott, Rep. Gale L. Mastrofrancesco and Sen. Rob Sampson.
Mastrofrancesco notes that the liberalized rules for absentee balloting that were enacted during the recent virus epidemic essentially allow anyone to vote ahead of Election Day, so “we already have early voting.”
Sampson calls the proposed amendment a “blank check” for the legislature to change the state Constitution on a sensitive subject.
Early voting might be progress if it required voting in person and the early voting period was short. But the more absentee balloting there is, the more potential for corruption. Connecticut should have been warned by the recent absentee ballot scandals in Bridgeport and Stamford. Imagine them extended to the whole state.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.
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Chris Powell column 