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For
the fourth year now, our Panther Creek Youth Ranch is ready to provide a free
outdoor environment for underprivileged kids. This is a fifty-acre retreat on a
beautiful little creek with a lodge and two cabins, kayaks, canoes, a sports
field, a trap range, trails and a rec room. Smaller churches that do not
have the money to take kids to expensive summer camps may use ours for no
charge, for a weekend or a week. I
write about it because the only publicity it has ever had has been through this
column. I need readers to help spread the word. No television or large
newspaper in the Ozarks has ever mentioned it, and I don’t understand why.
Lots of kids have come there, but it needs to be used much more. We have accommodated 30 kids before, who
swam and hiked and fished and enjoyed an abundance of wildlife. Help me spread the word to churches or organizations
that work with kids who seldom see the greatest of God’s creation in the
outdoors. And while we have accomplished a great deal there, our old tractor
has gone under, and we need to buy a small, older model tractor to pull a disc
and a mower. It has to fit into
our budget, so we need one that is economical. It doesn’t have to be very big. If you have one for sale, the phone number is at the end of
this column.
Recently
the editor of one of the newspapers using this outdoor column said that several
of his readers have said they do not like this column because I criticize the
Missouri Department of Conservation too much. So I asked readers to let me know if it offends them when I
truthfully state what is going on inside that agency, and with agents abusing
their power. I now have more than
100 letters and emails from readers of about 40 of those newspapers, and more
keep coming in. Only one of those
dozens of letters is critical of the columns I write about the MDC.
He
says….”one
thing that bothers me about your blog and articles is the constant criticism of
the department. I have been a volunteer and the Springfield Nature Center
for over 26 years and now volunteer at the WOW museum also. During this
time I have gotten to know many, many Conservation Department people and have
found them to be nothing but concerned and professional. On various
hunting and fishing trips I have had contact with enforcement people and never
found them to be anything but friendly and helpful. I feel like your
constant harping on the Department has really diminished the conservation
message of your writings. Luther
Smith.
I
only wish I could show Mr. Smith what is being done on wildlife management
areas, I wish I could take him to talk with hundreds of innocent people
targeted by agents, and I wish he could see the corruption I have documented
with hours of investigation and interviews with biologists and employees of the
MDC, one of whom told me…”If things continue like this, you might as well
rename this agency and take the word ‘conservation’ out of it.”
I
have never lied about anything concerning the MDC… not ever, not once. I have told them many times that I
would meet with them in a public debate, allow them to print their objections
in my magazines, or interview any agent who felt I had described his
actions. There has never been even
one response to those offers.
When
I spend the day Friday with the Director of the MDC, Sara Pauley we aren’t
going to just talk, I am going to take her to see the destruction of what they
call ‘wildlife management areas’, through tenant farming and logging. I am going to repeat those offers
to her. Let me meet with MDC
people in public debates, answer the charges I and others have made against
them in my magazine, and investigate the worst of them. And I will print her
response in this column.
Mr.
Smith is a partner with the MDC and his eyes are open to any good thing he sees
and closed to what is happening that isn’t so good. He will never ever see or accept what I am writing about.
And I
wish he could know the truth.
The book I hope to finish soon will document much that he couldn’t
possibly accept, and he and those like him will never read it. The large-scale news media in our state
will never let the truth be told through them.
While
some editors do not want these columns to appear in their newspapers, the
majority of them do want them and they have let me know. As a result of my columns, over
several years, the department has reversed charges against folks who were
falsely accused. And more than two hundred acres of big
beautiful timber near Lake of the Ozarks, given to the MDC by an old man who
was dying, was to be secretly sold to a real estate company after his death. I wrote about it, and due to the uproar
it created, and resulting threats of lawsuits, they canceled the sale.
An
article I wrote about a lady who had an eight-year-old pet raccoon in southern
Missouri was carried all over the world after I wrote about how two agents
forced their way into her home by threatening to arrest her, and took her pet
raccoon out and shot it.
I
wrote about the MDC giving 235,000 dollars to a judge who let department
officials hunt on his private waterfowl marsh. Today his family also has their property taxes paid by the
MDC. The words ‘in perpituity’ is in that agreement. That means taxpayers in Missouri will
pay that family’s taxes forever. Should I have kept quiet about that? Maybe
I should never have written about finding out, through MDC employees who ask
that I do not use their name, that deer heads confiscated by agents are not
destroyed, as they want you to believe.
My book will detail how many have been sold by MDC employees for large
amounts of money, and how many of those heads confiscated now adorn the walls
of MDC agents themselves, and their friends. I could go on and on.
I haven’t written about much of the worst of it. Maybe that should be
kept under wraps too.
One
of those Springfield area enforcement people that Mr. Smith thinks is concerned
and professional was reported by other agents as having spent many of his work
hours at the home of the wife of one of his best friends, with his state
vehicle hidden behind her bar. She decided to divorce her husband to marry that
MDC agent. He declined because he
too was married and had children.
If that affair was on his own time it would have been his business, and
no one elses On paid MDC time it was the business of all Missourians who pay
his salary.
Although
the MDC officials in Jefferson city was told about all this by the woman’s
husband, they kept quiet and that agent was promoted, still working today,
perhaps visiting more women on state time in his state vehicle
.
Oh,
I know… some readers stick their head in the sand and will believe none of
it. Many of them think the MDC is
still stocking deer and turkeys, a great project that ended decades ago. Most
of those biologists who did that work are dead now. When someone starts citing those decades-old accomplishments
and attributing that to today’s MDC employees, I wonder how anyone could be
that stupid.
I
will say again, I have a biology degree and when I was young I wrote dozens of
columns about the great things being done by an MDC of another age. Back then they gave me conservation
awards for what I wrote. I want to
see the truth come out, because the media is not going to let it happen.
I
will see to it many, maybe all, of those reader letters are read too. We will set up a website soon where
they will all be printed, from all sides.
And many will be used in the Lightnin’ Ridge magazine’s summer issue.
To
let your feelings be heard, pro or con, write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo.
65613 or email me at lightninridge47@gmail.com. My office phone is 417 777 5227.
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