To the editor:

And so are Bugs Bunny, Busy Beaver, Tom Turkey and Wily Coyote.  Quick, grab the assault rifles, 12 gauge pumps, traps, snares, nets, trepans and nooses.

We’re at war with nature and, by golly, all those Disney animals aren’t going to win. We’re not going to lose any property rights to them, especially not since all those darned UDOs, MRPOs and zoning ordinances have already taken so many away.

Ok, ok, perhaps all those wild animals like Bambi aren’t scared of us anymore, but we can change that, can’t we? Man is the most feared of all predators in the forest, but we’ve become too tame and civilized, too denatured over the last generation. We’ve evolved into sentimental, tree hugging, Bambi-loving whooshes.

That 1975 North Carolina law limiting trapping and hunting?

Just think of all the harm it’s done, unleashing all those precious woodland creatures who have discovered that life among humans can be more “habitable” than any forest, that eating in the ‘burbs is also better and easier, and that now there are fewer hunters to fear. We need to go back to a North Carolina where men were hunters and gatherers, women couldn’t vote and if Tom Turkey came into my backyard he was dinner.

Just look at an old picture of a typical North Carolina town a century ago and you’ll understand why we don’t need all these laws restricting our property rights. Our forefathers conquered a primordial wilderness, clear cut perhaps 250 million acres for farmland, hunted and trapped the beaver almost to extinction, killed every last one of a zillion or so passenger pigeons, and reduced the white-tail deer population to less than 450,000.