U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance will defend hunting on California preserve (7/24/2002)

Eight years after the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance fought to designate the East Mojave Desert a national preserve where hunting is permitted, environmentalists are petitioning the National Park Service (NPS) to end hunting there.

The Center for Biological Diversity and other environmental groups are petitioning the NPS to impose additional restrictions on hunting on the East Mojave Desert Preserve. They claim the restrictions are to protect endangered species.

The U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance helped draft the amendment that designated as a preserve 1.5 million-acres of the 6.6 million-acre Mojave Desert. Without the amendment, the Mojave Desert would have become a series of national parks and monuments where hunting would have been prohibited by federal law. The Alliance is opposed to additional restriction on hunting in the East Mojave Desert Preserve and will send comments to the National Park Service, on behalf of sportsmen, informing the Service that the restrictions being petitioned for by environmental groups are unnecessary, ill-advised and illegal.

The National Park Service has attempted to end hunting in other preserves. Recently, it issued restrictive airboat and swamp buggy regulations for the Big Cypress Preserve in Florida. These limitations severely inhibit hunter access and are a betrayal to the sportsmen who played a key role in the creation of the preserve in the 1970s. The Sportsmen’s Legal Defense Fund is currently involved in a lawsuit against the NPS and several anti-hunting groups to defend hunter access to the Big Cypress.

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