Arizona Sen. John McCain is pushing an amendment in Congress that would allow anyone who kills bison at the Grand Canyon to keep the meat.
Hunting is prohibited at the national park, but land managers are trying to find ways to control hundreds of bison roaming the northern reaches of the Grand Canyon to preserve water resources, vegetation and fragile cliff dwellings. One of the options raised during a public comment period was lethal removal.
The National Park Service has the authority to kill animals that harm resources, using park staff or volunteer shooters. But the shooter cannot keep the meat. Instead, it is handed over to wildlife agencies, tribes or charities to distribute.
McCain's amendment -- one of two he proposed this week as part of the Sportsmen's Act -- would change that. The bison hunt in the northern part of the Kaibab National Forest is highly coveted, McCain said. Allowing hunters to take the full animal would be a service to the national park, he said.Read the rest of the story HERE and below are McCain's Amendments:
Bison are an invasive species inside the Grand Canyon National Park. About 400 of the bison have migrated from the Kaibab National Forest to inside the Park where hunting is prohibited. The Park acts as a safe haven for the exploding bison population who continue to damage and overgraze the Grand Canyon’s natural resources. The Park Service over the last decade has tried numerous methods to remove the bison with little success. Earlier this year, the National Park Service proposed employing a strictly regulated hunting program to cull the bison from inside the Park.
This amendment would allow authorized hunters who remove bison from Grand Canyon National Park to take home the full animal carcass. Typically, federal regulations require that the meat from an animal culled inside a National Park must be partially or fully donated to food charities.
In Arizona, the Willow Beach National Fish Hatchery may have to end its 50-year trout stocking mission along the Colorado River if U.S. Fish and Wildfire Service (USFWS) is unable to find funds within its budget to repair a broken water intake pipe. Willow Beach NFH was constructed in 1962 for the purpose of stocking trout to mitigate the impact of the Hoover Dam.
This amendment would require federal water agencies, like the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (BOR), to help fund certain fish hatcheries that are operated by the USFWS. According to a independent audit by Government Accountability Office (GAO), federal water agencies have been dodging their responsibility to transfer “reimbursement funds” to hatcheries that were constructed to mitigate the loss of fishery resources resulting from a federal dam. To address funding shortfalls, GAO recommended that Congress provide USFWS with “clear authority” to transfer reimbursement funds from its sister agencies.
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