You wouldn’t think that canning tomatoes and Republican politics would easily come together in one’s mind. But, here we are, canning tomatoes and pondering the strange fact that a wonderful, progressive state like Vermont has a Republican Governor, that many people wrongly believe, isn’t one of THOSE Republicans. We are also reflecting back on a lifetime of animal advocacy and are preparing to take our efforts in that area in a particularly wild direction.
As we begin to prepare for our second winter in our new sanctuary, we have been enjoying the bounty of the first season of our new garden. We have a plethora of tomatoes, garlic and herbs. Along with some gifted herbs from neighbors and some wonderful tomatoes from the Montpelier Farmer’s Market, we are putting up a surprising amount of tomato sauce for winter.
Though our garden space is new, this is the most tomatoes we have ever produced ourselves in one season. A combination of great Sun, pristine water and nice soil has brought a nice harvest. As a result, we are purchasing smaller volumes from the market and we are processing smaller batches of sauce each week using a good number of tomatoes from our garden. It is a much easier pace than we used to do, trying to do all the canning in 2 weekends, and we are really enjoying watching the jars of sauce grow in number.
At the same time, we have been enjoying getting to know our local wildlife. We continue to monitor our trail cams and are getting to know a wide range of creatures that share our 1 acre piece of land. It is a staggering array of mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, arachnids and all kinds of plants.
One of our trail cams is pointed to the opening of a burrow that is along our drive. We knew woodchucks lived there. And, as big fans of woodchucks, we set it up to get closeup videos and pictures of them. To our surprise and delight, it turns out that there are about seven different species of animals that all use this same burrow. There are multiple woodchucks, at least one skunk, an opossum, fox squirrels, chipmunk and multiple species of birds that we catch on camera coming and going on a regular basis. See some highlights below.
Above ground, we also see a regular stream of deer, fox, flocks of all kinds of birds and even the occasional coyote. Naturally, we couldn’t be happier about all of that and don’t even begrudge the deer and the occasional nibbling they do on our garden plants. And, frankly, we find the more wild we let our yard be, the less the animals need to eat our food.
While we’ve been enjoying the wildlife and the progressive culture of Vermont, we have also become aware of how grossly dysfunctional the Republican Governor (Phil Scott) is, and how dangerous his policies and his political cronies are for the wildlife in the state. Currently, they are trying to change the rules around hunting bears, for example, to allow hunters to dig out and kill hibernating bears that are not hurting anyone, in a misguided mission to cut the numbers of bears in Vermont in half, even though the bears are not overpopulated and there are actually fewer of them per square mile here than in other surrounding rural states.
A quick back-story: Typical of Republican politics… the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Board is comprised entirely of hunters, all appointed by the Governor. A former chair of the Board, with connections to Phil Scott (the Governor) has petitioned the Board to be allowed to kill 2 bears per year, instead of being limited to killing just one. This well-connected hunter was then promised (according to himself) that he would get his second bear tag, long before the public comment period on the proposed hunting changes even started. It is all about cronyism and a bunch of old white Republican dudes doing backdoor deals for each other, the wildlife and the rest of us be damned.
So, while we’ve been taking a break from active animal advocacy in recent years, we are ramping our efforts up again. We will spare you the details of the bear saga. If you want to know more, you can check out this video. And, this one, too.
For these and other reasons, we’ve been reorganizing some of our social media. We are merging 2 of our YouTube channels into one and you can expect so see a new “Wildlife” link on the top of our website soon. Check out the new YouTube Channel.
As we gear up for this new effort on behalf of Vermonters and Vermont wildlife, we are getting inspiration from some of our successful efforts from the past. The transition to No Kill in the Twin Cities, Minnesota is one story we are particularly proud of. We hope you will check it out!