Comments on: Texas Parks & Wildlife and Bigfoot

By: DWA

DWA — Fri, 11 May 2012 21:55:45 +0000

There is a very very simple way to protect an animal unknown to science from being shot: make it illegal to kill one.

This can be done by a very simple expedient, used by many states: prohibit the shooting, trapping or taking by any other method of any species for which a season and limit are not specified in the state game laws.

If you are not specifically told that you can take the animal – specified by name – then you cannot.

It would be just like TX not to do this (apologies to those Texans rightly offended). But given the gun-toting TX tradition, the state might want to do it soon, before a bipedal primate known to dress up in costume fields a bullet or six.

If one insists on limiting Texans’ rights to kill stuff as little as possible, one could simply add a provision against shooting bigfoot, sasquatch, or anything on two legs that isn’t a currently accepted game species in Texas, to the laws. I mean, we are talking about people in gorilla suits here. Unless we want to see that shenanigans stop, by any means necessary, but you didn’t hear me say that.

By: graybear

graybear — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:55:21 +0000

The late Dr. Carl Sagan said that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof,” which is exactly the case for Bigfoot. The existence of a large, hairy, bipedal, North American primate (not to mention all the other variations reported world wide) would require vast and far reaching alterations in the way anthropology looks at our own selves, our ancestry and our place in the world. Many scientific disciplines would need to invent entire new paradigms to allow our towering cousins room to sit at the known primate table.

Many scientists resist the idea of Bigfoot simply because we don’t have the extraordinary proof necessary to upset so many years of incorrect assumptions. For this reason, as the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, we need a body or a significant portion thereof. I don’t like it, but my (or anyone’s) like or dislike of the necessity makes no difference. We need the extraordinary proof a body would provide.

By: Hapa

Hapa — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:51:20 +0000

Wishful thinking. Texas Parks and Wildlife might accept a new species on a basis of small biological remains (hairs) or silly photographs (oh, those CAN’T be faked!) for usual new species, but not one that is as controversial, as ridiculed, as folkloric, as hoaxed, as Sasquatch.

We’ve been down this road before. The P/G film should have been the type specimen if films and photos are the ultimate “Smoking bullet” (oh, nobody would believe a CORPSE, but a PHOTO or a FILM! Oh my giddy aunt we can prove it with THOSE!). But it didn’t happen. Neither have the hairs that have been found, the tracks out the wazoo, the films and pics out the wazoo, the historical and archeological and folklore evidence, none have done squat. Even a pic or film as clear as the one about the Cross River Gorillas would not convince the scientific community, and if (ROFLOL), if the Texas Park and Wildlife folks dared accept a clear film/photo as fact, they would be beetle-browed by the skeptic elite and TPTB into disregarding it.

Look if you don’t believe in killing it then you should believe in capturing it alive, or getting something more substantial than anomalous hairs and spit and blood.

Don’t want it killed to be proven? Then capture it before someone does kill it to prove it. And don’t doubt that no one will ever kill one, whether discovered or not (the Mt St Helens episode recalls a killing of a Squatch, just not a retrieval of a corpse).

By: Novelhawk

Novelhawk — Fri, 11 May 2012 12:30:53 +0000

Thank you for posting this, Mr. Woolheater. I missed it the first time around and it is very interesting correspondence between a bigfoot group and a government entity. Texas Parks & Wildlife took the correct stance in the letters (though the interview answers were somewhat disappointing). Sort of a “if it’s there and we can verify it, we’ll protect it, but until then, we don’t recognize it.”

I am a native Texan and spent a lot of my youth hunting in the woods and national forests that cover much of east Texas. I never laid eyes on any animal I couldn’t identify, and the most exotic thing I ever found were bobcat tracks. That’s not to say something wasn’t out there, but I didn’t see it.

I do wish the TBRC luck in their search though, since it seems they have a pretty solid group of dedicated researchers and if bigfoot is in Texas, it should be identified and categorized by science.