Vote no on HJR 2

Compassionate Idaho voter, bring your identification and vote no Nov. 6 on House Joint Resolution 2. A key phrase in this proposed amendment is “… the rights to hunt, fish and trap, including by the use of traditional methods.”

Those methods include the chasing of mother bears in spring for six hours or more with hounds, by multiple hunters on multiple days, while their terrified new cubs wait up in a tree without food or water, not knowing if or when mother will return. They include the gory, crushed limbs of animals dried onto leghold traps; the slow hours or days of choking of animals half-caught by the neck, not leg; the drowning of beautiful, hard-working beavers deliberately leghold-trapped underwater; the agonizing days or weeks of infection, starvation, dehydration from a garroting to the bone in a snare trap.

Most of the above I have personally witnessed, the rest and many more such atrocities I have not, but have seen the photos and testimonies of others.

The phrase is a reaction to other states passing humanitarian laws to correct such cruel methods, some of them literally unchanged since medieval times. Please do not preclude/outlaw compassion. Vote no!

Karen Schumaker

Deary, Idaho