By Dave Hurteau

From the Billings Gazette:
Lost in the Big Horn Mountains, presumed dead by family and friends and hallucinating because of too much wind and too little food, Travis McMahan, stumbling up a creek, found a dead fish.

“It looked all rotten,” he said. . . . “I cut its head off and skinned its back,” he said of the fish. “And there was good meat in there, so I ate it.”

By Dave Hurteau

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson’s request for a massive hunt of an estimated 100,000 pythons roaming the Everglades in Florida has been approved by Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist.

Crist has asked wildlife officials to start trapping pythons immediately. This comes a couple of weeks after a 2-year-old girl was strangled by a pet Burmese python in central Florida.

There's already been a  boatload of bloviation expressed on the recent reversal of the ban on loaded firearms in our national parks, some of it sensible but most of it (predictably) bordering on  hysterics.

This column from the Huffington Post is a perfect example:
 
"In fact,  the new rule is likely to make national park visitors less safe around  wildlife. Packing heat could give some people a false sense of security and  make them more likely to approach bison, elk, moose, and grizzly bears,  rather than keep a safe distance which is better for both people and  animals."

But the most certain outcome of this congressional action is  that it will promote poaching. The National Park Service warned in its fiscal 2006 budget submission each year for the past several years ... The data  suggests that there is a significant domestic as well as international trade  for illegally taken plant and animal parts." Poaching, the agency said, "is suspected to be a factor in the decline of at least 29 species of wildlife  and could cause the extirpation of 19 species from the parks."