I 169 supporter now playing money card?

I guess it all comes down to dollars.

Tom Gignoux wrote recently in the Great Falls Tribune that trapping “is a cruel recreation that drains money from Montana businesses ...”

It was an interesting use of the “it’s-costing-us-jobs-and-dollars” argument that I hear most often used in reference to wilderness.

Every time I write a column in praise of wild lands I receive letters from folks convinced that wilderness costs us jobs, drains our economy, and is simply part a federal plot to remove humans from the land.

I don’t buy it.

But neither do I buy Gignoux’s argument.

In both cases I believe the money/jobs card was played as a last resort and meant to appeal those folks who really don’t give a damn about either. How you feel about trapping or wilderness matters little when you discover what they cost our fragile economy.

End of argument.

Or so they hope.

Apparently -- in Gignoux’s case anyway -- when all those shocking photos of animals caught in traps failed to turn the tide against trapping, it was time to play the money card.

“How many more dollars would come if tourists had a real chance to see a wolverine, a bobcat, or the vibrant life around a beaver pond?” he writes.

So that’s why I’ve never see a wolverine. Trappers got ‘em all. But if anti-trapping Initiative 169, for which Gignoux is gathering signatures, passes, they’ll be thick as flies on a skinned muskrat carcass.

Gignoux also warns that it’s only a matter of time before headlines announce a child getting caught in a trap. That would certainly spell an end to tourism in Montana where it’s been a couple of years now since anyone’s even been eaten by a grizzly bear.

What surprised me most was who played the money card. The anti-trapping crowd and the anti-wilderness crowd seldom mingle. I’m talking Duck Dynasty and Project Runway here.

Now that they’re using the same argument it’s blurring the lines.

Apparently it’s all about money. Ban trapping and wilderness, and every rancher, miner, logger and motel owner in the state will be living in fat city.

I suppose for a while it will be hard on all the out-of-work trappers, but they should be able to find jobs pretty quickly once the wilderness areas open up to logging and mining.

They can take their kids to work without fear of them being caught in traps.

Maybe they’ll even get to see a wolverine.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]