Hope? It takes more than invoking TR...

I love the idea of a sportsmen's advocacy group with cojones. Non-profit status works for groups who want to finesse their way around issues and "compromise" with industry and their on-the-dole politicians (you get 90, we'll take 10 and declare victory). It's the groups that have lobbying power that make the most difference--hell, if you can't beat them, become them. Lobbyists, that is.

Unfortunately, the groups out there that claim to represent hunters and anglers almost always let us down. Take the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, for instance. Here's a group that should have the best interest of game and fish habitat at heart, and they ought to speak for sportsmen who depend on intact habitat for opportunity. Yet they run and hide when industry raises up on its haunches and decries the "radical environmentalists" who are getting in the way of progress. You know, those environmentalists that have the stones to actually want to protect habitat, like roadless lands across the West. You'd think RMEF would be all over that--it's a proven fact that the most successful hunting for big bulls takes place in areas that haven't been scarred by roads or ORV trails.