Please contact Oregon Governor and ask that he veto HB3636

Please write to Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber requesting he veto HB3636, which will prove deadly to many protected species.  You may use one or more of the Sample Letters provided below; if you use Number Four, however, please remember to provide the source as it is a direct quote from the listed author. Please also note there is a 1000-word limit on the webform so you will need to modify and shorten the others.


Background | From Mountain Lion Foundation, Predator Defense

Last week, the Oregon legislature passed HB 3636 which is now awaiting the Governor’s signature. At first glance the bill didn’t look too onerous. It required that the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife provide an option on all hunting related applications for voluntary contributions in support of county predatory animal control programs. It even allowed the Department to recover some of the costs attributed to enacting this change. However, this is as far in straightforwardness that HB 3636 goes.

First, HB 3636’s authors used a savvy marketing technique and titled the new state fund used to collect and distribute these contributions the Wildlife Conservation Fund. Pretty name; it lulls the public into thinking the fund will be used to conserve wildlife. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

According to HB 3636’s language:

“Moneys in the fund are continuously appropriated to the State Department of Fish and Wildlife to be paid to counties as provided in section 1 of this 2011 act.”

In other words, Oregon’s new Wildlife Conservation Fund only funds wildlife eradication programs.

Second, and far worse, HB 3636 adds cougars, black bears, gray wolves, and that all-encompassing category “fur-bearing mammals” to the official list of predatory animals: a category which previously only included small rodents and crop-damaging birds.

If signed into law, HB 3636 will, under existing section code 610.105, overturn many of Measure 18’s wildlife protection provisions and allow anyone who thinks a cougar is on their property (even if the cougar hasn’t caused any harm or threatened anyone) to poison, trap, or kill said cougar.

In a last ditched effort to stop this miscarriage of justice, Oregon cougar advocates, including the Mountain Lion Foundation, are urging Oregon residents to contact Governor Kitzhaber and demand that he uphold Measure 18 and veto HB 3636.

View HB 3636 pdf text (as well as a selection of relevant predatory animal control laws) at the following: http://mountainlion.org/States/HB 3636 – Oregon’s New Predatory Animal Control Law.pdf

Related | IFAW’s Save Something Wild

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WHOM TO CONTACT

Governor John Kitzhaber
State Capitol, Room 160
900 Court St. N.E.
Salem, OR 97301-4047

Citizens’ Message Line:   503-378-4582

Fax: 503-378-6872

Webform: http://governor.oregon.gov/Gov/contact.shtml

Email: representative.citizen@state.or.us

SAMPLE LETTER ONE

SUBJECT: Please uphold Measure 18 and veto HB 3636

I am writing today to respectfully request you uphold Measure 18 and veto HB 3636; as you know, Measure 18 was enacted to protect wildlife, the provisions of which will be stripped via passage of HB 3636 causing untold suffering and death. Oregonians are largely opposed to such brutality inflicted on wildlife.

Animals are inherently sentient and possess the capacity for thought and emotion, including contentment, loneliness, fear, and agony. All animals, human and non-human, experience the desire to live free from exploitation and suffering and fear the manifestation of death.

Please decide to protect rather than harm these creatures by vetoing HB3636.

Thank you for taking the time to read this message.

SAMPLE LETTER TWO (needs to be shortened)

SUBJECT: Please uphold Measure 18 and veto HB 3636

Dear Governor Kitzhaber,

I am writing today to respectfully request you uphold Measure 18 and veto HB 3636; as you know, Measure 18 was enacted to protect wildlife, the provisions of which will be stripped via passage of HB 3636 causing untold suffering and death. Oregonians are largely opposed to such brutality inflicted on the wildlife.

Despite the promotion of validations used to cultivate social approval, the actuality is slaughter, the calculated hunt and subsequent kill. Congressional black and white diplomatic banalities cannot conceal the red of the blood, the immobilizing, excruciating pain, the struggle to escape, the agony of incapacity, the fear of death, the evisceration of life: you may recoil at gruesome descriptions the illustrations of deathly consequences so easily signed with impunity and indifference. Regardless of culturally accepted monikers of preservation and conservation, however, and despite appeals using biased and emotionally-charged rhetoric, the reality includes the deliberate and vicious killing of sentient non-human animals.

SAMPLE LETTER THREE (needs to be shortened)

SUBJECT: Please uphold Measure 18 and veto HB 3636

Dear Governor Kitzhaber,

I am writing today to respectfully request you uphold Measure 18 and veto HB 3636; as you know, Measure 18 was enacted to protect wildlife, the provisions of which will be stripped via passage of HB 3636 causing untold suffering and death. Oregonians are largely opposed to such brutality inflicted on the wildlife.

Humans have adopted dangerous constructs of speciesism, the prejudicial regard of non-human species, to validate the brutality inflicted upon them. Using this manufactured status of superiority, humans have sanctioned the use of animals as commodities, regarding them only as products to benefit our goals and needs. We embrace inequity to justify our treatment of animals, yet euphemistic descriptions meant to facilitate morality cannot disguise the fundamentally unethical parameters with which we surround ourselves to distinguish our self-serving dominance. As dangerous as racism and sexism, speciesism further divides the chasm between species, which desensitizes us to cruelty and inevitably leads to human inequality and injustice.

This disregard of the state’s most vulnerable group of beings is unacceptable, and until this barbarism is appropriately addressed including a mandatory ban of such, many may choose to boycott Oregon, resulting in the sacrifice of vital tourism and commerce profits. Please act responsibly and with compassion and choose to protect, rather than sanction harm, to animals.

SAMPLE LETTER FOUR

SUBJECT: Please uphold Measure 18 and veto HB 3636

“Why don’t I hunt? I could allude to the fruits of exhaustive research into the ecological and biological consequences of hunting, and to collective insights of biologists, ecologists, and naturalists who challenge the prevailing wildlife-management dogma. Yet, fundamentally, the answer can be expressed in simple moral terms:

Hunting is wrong, and should be acknowledged to be so not only by those who espouse the precepts of the animal-rights credo, but by those who hold a common sense of decency, respect, and justice.

When we have exposed the specious reasoning of the hunters’ apologists and stripped their sport of its counterfeit legitimacy, the naked brutality of hunting defines itself: killing for the fun of it.”

Steve Ruggeri, Why I Don’t Hunt

See More:

• Animal Wrongs
• Earthlings