White Pine News

THIS IS THE LIMIT.

Unscrupulous life-job hunters are getting pretty hard up when they cause the introduction of a bill in the Nevada legislature requiring a license of $3 from any person who sets a trap to capture a coyote.

These life-jobbers are the officials holding office under the so-called biological survey. This bill is the outward symptom of a long and bitter controversy in the western country over the question of government trapping versus private trapping.

For ten years the government men have been essaying to destroy predatory animals which are destructive to sheep and to every form of life from human beings down when the animals have the rabies. The campaign has proved a most ignominious failure. The chief cause of such failure is that the officials do not wish to exterminate coyotes, but to perpetuate them, for extermination would mean so many government life jobs gone. Perpetuate them and the life jobs continue indefinitely.

The system has been laughed and scoffed at so much by stockmen that it has commenced to get under the hides of these legalized grafters. Their cheerfully candid plaint is that they cannot do better because private trappers keep the animals thinned out too much for them.

Now to put the private trappers out of business and also to help perpetuate the coyotes they introduce this license bill in the legislature.

For the ten years mentioned this life-job coterie has carried on a campaign of lobbying before western legislatures at government expense. They have told the legislators that the government demands so-and-so, when only the life-jobbers demand it. They are using the government's name to obtain this money under false pretenses.

One and sometimes two trappers to protect the 200,000 sheep of White Pine county! It is to laugh.

Yet that is all the basis there is for the nerve to go before the state legislature and demand that private trappers be put out of business for the benefit of the swivel-chair men.