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Referendum wrong

I am responding to John Holyoke’s article about the Kellys of Allagash in the Aug. 30-31 edition.

Wade Kelly has been one of my best friends for 20 years. I happened to have driven my family to Two Rivers Lunch for supper the day the article was published. I realize that Mr. Holyoke has a finite space of paper within which to write his article, but somehow he hit the proverbial nail on the head and portrayed the town of Allagash and their situation(s) extremely well. Good economy of words, I suppose. Mr. Holyoke addressed the issue of a possible referendum regarding the method of hunting bear over bait.

I’ve never hunted bear, and don’t know much about it. But the difference between me and the people pushing the referendum is that I admit it. I’ve been going to Allagash for decades, but most times I do not even fish. I just try to breathe in the poetry of the place and hope that some of the resilience of the people rubs off onto me. Writers like Steinbeck and Hemingway used to search all over for places like the town of Allagash.

It is amazing to me that floods, ice jams and personal injuries can’t kill a town, but some people from away championing something they know nothing about might. A point of fact for the people who are considering voting to pass a referendum altering bear baiting: It would be impossible to find any person, from either side of the issue, who is more humane or cares more about the animals around them than Wade and Tylor Kelly. Please consider your ways, people.

Dee Dauphinee

Bradley

‘Boss’ in lion’s den

The Red Sox battling the Yankees down to the wire this fall reminds me of Tom, who grew up in the Boston area and is a true-blue dyed-in-the-wool loyal rabid Boston Red Sox baseball fan. He came to work in the same life insurance company home office in Columbus, Ohio, where I worked.

The Columbus Clippers baseball team is the New York Yankee’s Triple-A franchise in the International League, not entirely by chance. The Columbus team usually has a good following of fans and has one of the best baseball parks in the minor leagues. Also, George Steinbrenner, owner of the Yankees, was originally an Ohio guy. He was born in Ohio, went to college in Ohio, his family’s shipbuilding business was in Cleveland, and he has family still in Ohio.

None of this impressed Tom. He hated the Yankees, hated Steinbrenner, and took every opportunity, even manufacturing some, to damn the Yankees up one side and down the other, and to damn Steinbrenner up one side and down the other.

The president of the life insurance company, Ralph, was a friend of Steinbrenner, and they occasionally had lunch or dinner together when he was in Columbus. Once when they were having lunch, Ralph told Steinbrenner about Tom, and Steinbrenner said: “I’d like to meet this guy!”

So after lunch Ralph brought Steinbrenner over to the company and down the hall they went to Tom’s office. Tom did a lot of traveling in his job and the baseball gods decreed that that day Tom would be out of his office traveling. Disappointed, they turned to leave, when Steinbrenner had an inspiration. He grabbed a memo pad on Tom’s desk and wrote a note: “Dear Tom: I heard you are a big baseball fan and I stopped in to talk some baseball. Sorry I missed you. (signed) George Steinbrenner”

Well, you can imagine that when Tom got back to the office and read the note, he thought it was the work of an office prankster. It was only after talking with Ralph that Tom believed the note was genuine.

I don’t know whether Tom kept the note, but he is probably the only Boston Red Sox fan who got Steinbrenner’s autograph, and without asking for it, which no true Red Sox fan would ever do.

Maybe this year Tom will see his dreams come true.

Bill Reidenbach

Greenville Junction

Opposed to bait, dogs

This letter is in response to John Holyoke’s article in the [Aug. 30-31] weekend edition of the Bangor Daily News. In this article Mr. Holyoke addresses the concerns of Wade Kelly and his family. As a resident of the town of Allagash, Mr. Kelly depends on bear hunting and guiding to augment his income.

I applaud his tenacity and willingness to embrace a diversity of employment strategies to maintain the way of life he and his family cherish. However, my husband and I are opposed to hunting tactics that require the hunter to bait the game animal or hunt with dogs.

When humans make food available for bears they lose all wariness of humans and are easy targets. That is why visitors to campsites in national and state parks are warned to keep food stored securely. Park rangers warn visitors that feeding bears is detrimental to their own and the bear’s safety because bears that grow used to being fed by humans or find food close to campsites soon become nuisance bears. When this happens they have to be removed to a more remote area of the park, or destroyed. For the same reasons people who chose to have their abode in bear country learn early on to not leave containers of garbage where bears have easy access. Even bird feeders become a magnet to wild bears. Bears will come right up to buildings, onto attached decks, and into open garages searching for food if they have become used to associating such places with food.

We have first hand experience with this. A neighbor has fed local bears for years, not for hunting, but the result is the same. We have a lot of bears in the area and for all practical purposes they are tame. They have been right beside our front door, sitting on our cellar door, playing with clothes on the clothesline, etc. In other words, they are often in our yard very close to the buildings. One has to look carefully before going out at night to make sure you are not going to step on one, since the bears might resent that. You can talk to them and they stay where they are listening to you. I have photographed them at very close range. I know if my camera had been a gun I could have gotten just as close. How can anyone call this hunting?

Bears usually have a wide ranging area they patrol looking for food. When they find a food source they return to it. That is why, weeks before the season opens, hunting guides and outfitters set up bait stations with cheaply obtained food such as stale bread, doughnuts, and junk foods. Bears begin daily feedings at these bait stations. When the hunting season actually begins, the bears have become accustomed to feeding at the bait stations, unaware that fee-paying hunters are concealed in hunting-blinds. From this vantage point the fee-paying hunters can pick and choose their quarry. Again, how can anyone call this hunting?

We have also had experience with hunters who use hunting dogs. It seems they take their hunting pack out all year to run on other peoples’ land without permission. Although there is a statewide leash law that requires your dog to be under your control at all times, hunting dogs seem to hold some special exemption. The hunters that had hunting dogs loose on our land were not in control of their hunting dogs. For example, one individual lets his dogs loose miles from our land, letting them run free. By the time they get onto our property they have been loose for hours. Supposedly they were under his control with radio collars. However, several times it took him over two hours to round up his dogs when we told him we wanted his dogs off our property, which is well posted with no trespassing signs. Of course, hunting dogs cannot read no trespassing signs, a fact their owner pointed out to us.

Meanwhile, his hunting pack is dashing through fields, up and down river banks terrorizing nesting wild fowl, rabbits, partridge, deer, and moose, not to mention bears. There is a state law against molesting wild life. However, it seems hunting dogs are exempt from this law also. A pack of hunting dogs that is charging through fields, woodlands, streams, and rivers is molesting wildlife. Also, they are not only terrorizing the target game, they are terrorizing all of the wildlife. They are out terrorizing wildlife all year, not only during hunting season.

I would like to understand how anyone could possibly think that hunting with dogs is sport? They chase the bear, or target game animal up a tree, or until it is cornered somewhere, then the hunter shoots the bear out of the tree.

I have gone hunting with my husband many times. We never felt the need to bait or to run a pack of hunting dogs, nor do we consider such activities to be hunting.

Michele and Eugene Green

Westfield