Blue Planet Journey

  Hunter education student taking shooting test. I may be unique in the world for having taught more non-hunters the basics of hunting than anyone else. Let me explain. For years, I taught a course titled "Living With Wildlife" at Utah State University. Obviously, and especially in Utah, one of the ways people interact with wildlife is by shooting and eating them. It was a large class, averaging about 100 students from a variety of majors. I wanted all students to understand the education requirements for hunters in the state, so I made all students, hunters and non-hunters alike, take this course. Yes, even the hunters, who had already gone through hunter education (HE) and may have had years of hunting experience. The only ways to opt out of this were to demonstrate that you had taken HE within the past year (happened once), a judge said you couldn't be around firearms (once), you were ethically opposed to touching firearms (usually one student per semester), or firearm...

  Everyone has had to adapt to the 2020-2021 Covid-19 pandemic. Wearing masks (single or double layers), trying to interpret muffled speech, and avoiding or being avoided by family and friends are all part of this new reality. Thankfully, with vaccination programs well underway, life will soon be a bit more relaxed - and less deadly. However, I am concerned about the stall in the decline of active cases nationwide, the surge in some countries, and those pesky virus variants that may be more transmisible. Our adaptations may continue for the year. One company that has been a boon during the past year (and the stock price increase reflects this) is Zoom . Zoom is a video communications company, and has both a free basic version and a fee-based professional or business version. This means it is available to practically anyone with a device that has a camera and can connect to the Internet. I've used Zoom on a regular basis, for everything from a weekly family visit, to church service...

We were on our way to the famous Chobe National Park, in northern Botswana.  This visit was somewhat troubling for me.  In May, Botswana's president had announced an  end  to a five year ban on elephant hunting.  Elephant hunting?  There were calls for a boycott against Botswana.  Botswana is a bright spot for African savannah elephants, with over 100,000 in the country.  The proposal was to permit around 400 elephants to be killed by trophy hunters, who presumably would pay $30-50 thousand dollars to kill each of these animals (at $40,000 each, that would come out to $16 million).  There's roughly an equal number of elephants being poached for their ivory each year in Botswana.   I'm going to editorialize on hunting elephants for a moment.  Just scroll down to the white rhino photo below to skip my ramblings. But the overall populations of both forest and savannah elephants in Africa are in steep decline (espe...