(NOTE:

WHAT? THERE WAS SOME MAJOR POLITICAL NEWS YESTERDAY?

YUP. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT? IT WILL BE ABLY HANDLED TODAY BY OTHERS. THE NEWS GUY WILL LET IT PERK OVER THE WEEKEND, PONDERING IT (AS WELL AS THE WEEK’S OTHER IMPORTANT POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT) MONDAY.

Bull Moose (not

About that moose, the one they’re calling Pete: There’s more to this story than meets the eye, at least such eyes that have been reading Vermont’s newspapers and watching the local television news, or clicking onto the You Tube and Facebook entries about poor, put-upon Pete.

This isn’t just a cute story about a moose and the old farmer who has befriended him (if “befriending” a moose is possible).

This is about politics. Not as in Democrats versus Republicans, but as in who has power and how should it be exercised. It is also about the uses and misuses of science. It is about natural resource policy, the rule of law, when violating it is justified, ethics and the philosophy thereof.

Oh, and money. As usual, money seems to be involved.

To begin with, the old (“73-and-a-half,” in his own words) farmer didn’t just stumble upon this abandoned moose. Nor, despite his flowing white beard and Northeast Kingdom roots, is David Lawrence some country bumpkin. He is a rather articulate fellow who knows just what he’s doing, knows it’s against the law, but thinks it’s the right thing to do.

He is, in other words, engaged in civil disobedience.

He is also part of an apparently elaborate animal rescue network whose other members also do not hesitate to violate the law, as they are doing in connection with this moose.

The moose, according to Lawrence, was discovered in early June of 2008, meaning it would have been no more than a month old, by two people from Bethel who were hiking with their dogs when they came upon a female moose with twin calves. The adult (and apparently one of the twins) ran off, leaving one baby moose apparently abandoned.

The hikers, Lawrence said, called the Fish and Wildlife Department where officials told them to do nothing, to leave the baby moose alone.

That’s the law, in Vermont and most other states.

For at least two reasons, one scientific and one…well, a combination of historic and philosophical. The scientific reason is that the baby moose may not have been abandoned at all. Female cervids (deer, elk, moose), say the wildlife experts, are likely to return to their young once they perceive that the “predators” (hikers and dogs in this case) have left.

(The dogs, by the way, had wounded the calf; so this whole controversy might have been avoided had the hikers had better control of their pets).

The other reason, as John Buck, one of the Department’s wildlife biologists explained, stems from “the public trust doctrine that the state’s wildlife belong to the people and not the king. Wild animals can not be owned by any individual.”

That moose doesn’t really “belong” to anybody, even the state; no bill of sale comes with it. But if it is nobody’s property, it is part of the public sphere or province. It doesn’t belong to the hikers, to Lawrence, or to Doug Nelson, on whose Irasburg elk impoundment the moose now grazes when Lawrence is not there feeding him doughnuts.

When the mother did not return after four days, (perhaps because people kept checking on the calf), the hikers decided to intervene. Somehow they found out about “a wildlife rehabilitator,” as Lawrence called her, who was part of the dissident animal rescue effort, and who therefore was apparently on the radar screen of Fish and Wildlife law enforcers.

“She knew that (if she took the baby moose) the wardens would be there and would destroy it. She called me. I’ve been known to do these things before. We believe in saving all the babies we can.”

As he had done at least twice in the past, Lawrence, a retired farmer who lives in Albany, took the calf to Irasburg, where Nelson keeps some 500 elk in 600 fenced-in acres, charging several thousand dollars for the privilege of shooting one.

“This moose was illegally taken, illegally transported and is now illegally being possessed inside an enclosure,” said Wayne Laroche, the Fish and Wildlife Department Commissioner. “My position is I need to be able to enforce the laws. We can’t have people just picking those animals up. I can’t selectively enforce the law. I have to enforce it the same, from the child that wants to keep a baby raccoon to the richest guy in the state.”

Nelson, a major dairy farmer, could be one of the richest guys in the state.

Keeping wild animals as pets, Laroche said, poses disease risks for both people and animals. It can also be dangerous, a judgment confirmed by Joel Berger, a moose specialist for the Wildlife Conservation Society and a professor at the University of Montana.

“Why would you want a pet moose?” Berger said. “As males grow older, testosterone will kick in, and people will need to deal with his increasingly aggressive behavior.”

Berger said a moose can be safely and humanely confined if its human keepers “know what they’re doing. It’s no different from the Bronx Zoo, if they’re accredited for raising captive animals.”

Nelson and Lawrence are not.

But Laroche has another reason for insisting that the moose leave that elk compound. He worries that Pete, along with perhaps 12 other moose and more than 200 white-tail deer inside the compound endanger the state’s wild deer herd because the wild deer could catch chronic wasting disease from the elk.

CWD, always fatal to deer, has not yet appeared in Vermont, but it has been found in deer in nearby New York State. The disease “leaped the species barrier from sheep to cervids. “ Laroche said. “It makes me very nervous.”

Nelson called CWD fears “totally (nonsense)” (He used another word, but this is a proper web site). He said a brain sample is taken from every elk shot on his property and is tested at a laboratory. None have shown signs of CWD, he said.

Kelly Loftus of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture confirmed that a laboratory in Wisconsin had tested the samples from 73 elk shot at Nelson’s hunting compound in 2008 and 43 this year. No CWD was found. The tests are paid for by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Despite these findings, wildlife biologists fear that whenever wild animals are contained, CWD is a legitimate concern.

“At this point, the literature suggests that artificially concentrating animals tends to exacerbate the danger of the disease,” said Bruce Smith, who spent 23 years as senior scientist at the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “It creates more of an opportunity for disease transmission.”

This doesn’t mean that Nelson’s elk are likely to have the disease. Probably they don’t. But “probably” isn’t good enough for Fish and Wildlife. Because even a small chance of CWD getting into the Vermont deer herd could decimate it. The hunting community would be furious, as would the many hotels, restaurants, and shops that rely on the patronage of hunters. For the department, it would be a disaster.

But there’s more going on here. By January, Nelson needs a permit from Fish and Wildlife if he is to continue operating his elk-hunting operation. The Department insists that, because of the CWD danger, he first eliminate (essentially, shoot) all the wild white-tails and moose, including Pete.

“I would assume they’d be coming in with the strong arm of the law, Nelson said.

Will he comply?

“I don’t know,” he said “We’ve got an awful lot of public support.”

He does. Even Gov. Jim Douglas said he hoped some means could be found to save Pete.

It’s that kind of talk that leads many in the Department to suspect (though Laroche would not come out and say this) that Nelson is using the tumult over Pete as a political device to pressure Fish and Wildlife to grant him the permit without destroying any of the wild animals.

Nelson, on the other hand, thinks the Department would like to shut down his entire elk hunting operation. He’s probably right. Fish and Wildlife officials never liked “canned hunting.” Many don’t even consider it hunting, since it lacks, in their view, the element of “fair chase,” defined by the Boone and Crockett Club the “taking of any free-ranging wild, native North American big game animal in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper advantage over such animals.”

In fact, confined hunting is now illegal in Vermont, with Nelson’s and one other operation “grandfathered” into legality because they were operating before the law was passed.

Nelson does not deny that he has a financial interest in the status quo. Killing all the moose and white-tails would “cost a fortune,” he said, and he already has “a fortune” invested in the deer “because we’ve fed them for nine years.”

Nelson needs the permit, because hunting is the only money-making potential of captive elk. For years, elk owners sold the velvet from elk antlers to Asia, where it is used as medicine and (with more hope than scientific foundation) an aphrodisiac. But several years ago, U.S.-produced velvet in South Korea was found to be contaminated with CWD, and Asian countries banned imports from North America.

This by no means proves that Nelson is motivated only by money. He considers his right to do as he pleases on his land “a property rights issue,” and by all accounts he is a genuine animal lover. He does not hunt. He argues that having hunters shoot the elk is more humane than some kind of mass slaughter.

He also agrees with Lawrence and his guerrilla animal rescuers.

“You know, it’s kind of human nature to nurture and protect the young,” he said. “The game warden said, let’ em die, let ‘em die. I’m a farmer by nature tend to try to help things live.”

Even John Buck of Fish and Wildlife acknowledged that it is “human nature to try to rescue something, to save something, a beached whale or an injured bird.”

But, Buck said, wildlife management “is concerned with the entire population, as opposed to individuals,” and keeping wild animals in captivity “doesn’t serve the conservation purpose of allowing animals to live freely.”

Laroche said the Department was trying to relocate Pete to another state. If that fails, he said, “we need to have the authority to control possession of wildlife in the state.”

He seems determined to enforce the law. Nelson and his allies seem determined to keep the moose and deer. This business is not over.