>>2739570same reason everything is protected. there's plenty of money in it. canada geese and mallard are some of the most, if not the very most proliferous of all the birds. but if you bag one without paying the state, they will fuck you in the ass. same with deer, rabbits, trout, carp, or literally anything else.
with bears, its a bit of the cetacean thing. people love them in movies, so they're protected. meanwhile whales are just about the opposite of what people say they are - stupid, cruel, violent; the vast majority aren't even endangered. whaling is federally and internationally banned (with few exceptions.) Japan gets a harder time for hunting than most govt's do for murdering people by the thousands.
it really goes back to the core failing of liberal democracy. anyone can see an episode of carebears and write to their local politician, and he'll insure there's hundreds of grizzlies and wolves patroling the countryside to destroy family farms, but the public consciousness with farmers ends at old McDonald; farmers are bourgeois land owners and deserve to be eaten alive as far as the typical, socially conscious person is concerned.
people hate outdoorsmen (esp. hunting and fishing), so they're extorted every year, and if they don't pay, or act at any point in a manner that the forest janny disapproves of, he can be punished at his discretion, including being banned from hunting for DECADES or branded a felon; getting off lucky would be them just stealing all your stuff to take home with them and writing you a ticket. the icing on top is so many hunters are fudds, they parrot their same bullshit lines about maintaining commons with the money they stole from you (see great lakes for an example to the contrary), and they'll report you too, and they do it for free; with allies like them, why does there even need to be a forest janny?
why do you need a license to own a hawk? because fuck you.
tl;dr they're protected because they hate us and want our money.
