‘They don’t understand how nature works’: Curley appalled by Oregon hunting ban initiative

Oregon’s Initiative Petition 28, which would ban hunting, fishing, and animal slaughter throughout the state, turned in roughly 140,000 signatures to the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office late last week. If approved and verified, the measure will qualify for the November general election.

KIRO host John Curley was appalled by the chance of this initiative passing.

“Speaking of really sucky ideas, here’s one for you. Oregon is putting the initiative forward. They got 140,000 signatures of people who don’t understand how nature works,” Curley said. “What they want to do is stop hunting, fishing, and quote unquote animal slaughter in Oregon. It’s one step closer. The voters have a chance to vote on it.”

The law, if passed, would expand Oregon’s animal cruelty laws to cover animals living in the wild, raised on farms, and used in research. The initiative failed to qualify for the ballot in the last two election cycles.

“It reminds me of Mao Zedong, who was upset with the fact that birds were eating the grain and people were starving. So he said, ‘OK, I call upon every person in China to kill every single bird that you see,'” Curley said. “They were just knocking them down with slingshots and nets and BB guns and, proudly, the people of China were throwing all of these dead birds on top of these giant wagons that would go by. I think they were swallows that were taken out. Well, what do you think happened after they had eradicated 100,000 or more birds?

The insects that ate the crops are like, ‘Well, I guess it’s up to us folks to eat all the grain because they killed all the birds.’ This here is the same thing,” Curley continued. “So if you don’t thin the herd of deer, the population compounds. And deer have a voracious appetite. They do this thing called ‘browse line,’ where they just eat everything in their path, everything from shrubs to seedlings, leaves. Anything that they can see, they eat. So now, after about three years, [what should be] a healthy forest, you don’t see because the stuff that’s supposed to be coming underneath isn’t there. They take out the wildflowers; they take out anything they possibly see, and then that affects the songbirds and the insects, so you’re disrupting.”

The Secretary of State’s Office is currently reviewing and verifying the signatures. If enough are valid, Oregon voters will decide the measure in November.

“Would you rather have the deer killed and the meat processed and enjoyed by people who want to be able to have venison, or do you want to see a deer wandering, starving to death, and then also just insects taking over?” Curley asked. “There’s no healthy growth from the seeds and saplings and little trees and stuff like that.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to John Curley weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

Follow @http://twitter.com/curleyseattle