Game animals in Hawaii should be treated with more consideration, according to a series of bills introduced in the state Legislature.
House Bill 1872 and Senate Bills 2069 and 3299 urge the Department of Land and Natural Resources to recognize the value of game animals and birds as a sustainable resource and integrate local hunting and fishing industries into food security and sustainability programs.
“We just want to influence the mindset about game animals and move it away from eradication,” said Nani Pogline, a member of the Hawaii County Game Management Advisory Commission’s legislative committee, which helped develop the bills.
Hamakua Rep. Mark Nakashima, who introduced HB 1872, said the DLNR’s efforts to control game animals — on the Big Island, that is pigs, sheep and goats in particular — have been “one-sided” over the last few decades, and have treated them as invasive species disruptive to the island’s ecosystem that need to be contained and eradicated.
But this attitude toward game animals is ahistorical, Pogline said, and disregards both the societal and ecological value of maintaining a balanced population of game animals.
“Back during the Great Depression, the government opened up forest reserves so that people could hunt game and get food that way,” Pogline said. “Why can’t we do that now?”
The three bills, which are functionally identical, note that game animals are a well-established part of the islands’ ecosystems and that eradicating them is not necessarily what is best for the environment.
Pogline said that a balanced population of sheep and goats can eat the grass and plant matter that is fuel for wildfires. She noted that last August’s record-breaking 40,000-acre wildfire came dangerously close to wiping out the only remaining habitat for the endangered palila bird.
Pogline said an additional bill, Senate Bill 2994, would require the DLNR to investigate the causes of palila decline and the results of a federal mandate between 1979 and 1986 to eradicate sheep on Maunakea.
Although that mandate was set to protect palila from invasive sheep, Pogline said the palila population has continued to decline even as the sheep population does as well, suggesting that fears of game animals endangering local wildlife may have been overstated.
“It’s obviously not the sheep causing it,” Pogline said. “But there’s this mindset that game resources are no better than rats or mongoose.”
Nakashima said he hopes that the bills will encourage the DLNR to incorporate hunters into their wildlife management decision-making process, rather than relying on aerial shooting to reduce game populations, which he said is expensive and often wastes the animals’ meat.
So far, none of the bills have been discussed by their initial committees.
Email Michael Brestovansky at mbrestovansky@hawaiitribune-herald.com.