Camping with Bears

In December 2010, two years into the 2nd Great Depression, the State of Georgia purchased 10,000 acres of Oaky Woods in Houston County for $28.7 million ($2,875 per acre). Georgia had already purchased 200,000 acres of uninhabitable land and this will bring our total holdings of uninhabitable land to 210,000 acres of land for wildlife. This has been brought to us by the lobbying of 8,400 Georgians working in behalf of the other 9,820,811 Georgians and the haplessness of the Board of Natural Resources that should be abolished. So the State is going to pay $2,875 per acre for uninhabitable land we will “all enjoy visiting”, so we can camp and hike and run from the wild bears ? I don’t think so.

We could have had the 8400 Sierra Club members in Georgia and 100 bear and wild boar hunters buy the land. It would only cost them $3,376 each and after all, it’s for the bears. If you Georgians can’t wait to camp there, I urge you to bring your running shoes and extra food to lob at the bears when they chase you. The bears can run faster than you and they also climb and swim, so if they chase you, you’re in trouble. It might be good to bring paper bags full of salad to lob at them. They also like fish, but the fish should be alive and moving, so this might not work out so well. Wild hogs will eat anything, so make sure you have plenty of anything to lob at them.

Was the original argument for buying this uninhabitable land to promise that if we gave wild animals their own land, they would not visit our homes ? I realize the black bears and wild hogs the pest control people remove from our homes need to go someplace, but we are not likely to pack up the kids to go camping with bears. Don’t we first need to recruit hunters to become interested in hunting wild hogs and bears before this gets out of hand ? The folks in the Florida Keys are having a hell-of-a time finding hunters interested in eradicating the 9 pound African Gambian pouch rats inhabiting their wildlife preserves to keep them from heading north.