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State Has Enough Game, Don't Legalize Hunt

Published February 17, 2004. Editorial Board. Kalamazoo Gazette.
State has enough game, don't legalize hunt

If mourning doves were multiplying at an alarming rate, destroying crops and crashing into moving vehicles causing bloody car-dove wrecks, we could understand the repeated efforts to legalize the hunting of mourning doves in Michigan. But doves are not deer; their numbers do not need to be managed through hunting.

Legislation to legalize the hunting of doves in Michigan goes to a hearing in the state Senate this week, possibly today. Although we hope the bill to end doves' protected status stalls in the Senate, we admit we may be disappointed.

The bill passed the state House late last year and it was sent to the Senate Appropriations Committee, whose chairman, state Sen. Shirley Johnson, R-Royal Oak, is clearly opposed to it.

After a hearing in her committee was abruptly canceled earlier this month, the bill was transferred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by state Sen. Alan Cropsey, R-DeWitt. To Cropsey's credit, he said he will remove from the bill the $350,000 that was inserted in the House version, ostensibly to prepare and distribute brochures to help hunters distinguish mourning doves from other birds.

But one does not have to be a detective to recognize that the proposed appropriation in the bill was designed to make it impossible for voters to overturn it through referendum. That was a tactic used by supporters of a bill to liberalize the state's concealed weapon law in 2000. An appropriation inserted in that bill made it impossible for opponents of the law to overturn it at the ballot box.

Hunting groups are overwhelmingly in favor of this bill. But we fail to understand the need for it. Mourning doves, songbirds that are frequently seen around neighborhood bird feeders, are not a menace. These small birds don't yield much in the way of meat.

And it isn't as if Michigan has a shortage of other, legal wild game -- four-legged, swimming and on the wing. It would be a shame if the state Senate demoted the mourning dove from protected bird to live target practice.

The Kalamazoo Gazette

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