Obey speed limit
Unfortunately, there are some logging truck drivers who do not appreciate being able to travel on Interstate 95 with higher speed limits, instead of having to stay on state and local roads with lower speed limits. They want to go even faster, so they tailgate drivers following the speed limit.
Not a good idea if they want to continue using the interstate.
Jo Ann Higgins
Bangor
Help needed year-round
The Area Interfaith Outreach board thanks the Bangor Daily News for giving attention to our struggle in November to meet the increasing needs in Knox County for food and other essentials such as heat. The community is responding wonderfully. Checks are still coming. The Area Interfaith Outreach is again issuing vouchers to help families in need be safe and warm this winter.
Keeping the shelves stocked is harder the other 10 months, though churches and others continue collecting canned goods. Throughout the year, Shaw’s give us produce every week, Hannaford gives us meat, and Wal-Mart astonishes with over 1,000 pounds of meat and bread it has frozen near the sell-by date to stock our freezers, as well as fresh produce. In season, gardeners, farmers and schoolchildren learning to grow vegetables share their harvests — Knox Master Gardeners, Ericson Farms, Rockland Middle School and others. Amounts vary, of course, but that food makes all the difference. We are endlessly thankful to every one of them, as well.
At Area Interfaith Outreach, we already knew that people care about their neighbors and will do what they can when they know help is needed. The key, of course, is that they know. We are grateful to the Bangor Daily News for helping sound the alarm.
Sherry Cobb
President
Area Interfaith Outreach
Union
Inhumane bear practices
It is too bad the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine and other lobbying groups for Maine’s sadistic practices of baiting, hounding and trapping got their way. They got their way by having state “biologists” and game wardens make false statements (there were exceptions in the 2014 initiative). They got their way by using the false 2004 initiative’s wording (making it a crime) in a University of New Hampshire poll a week before the vote.
I have lost all respect for Maine’s “biologists” and game wardens. It is obvious they are part of the Maine hunting system that promotes high populations of black bear, coyote, fox, beavers, Canada lynx, squirrels, groundhogs, etc., purely for monetary purposes. Why not give bears back their habitat?
DIF&W’s attitudes allowing hunting of all Maine species is anthropocentric. It is obvious these sadistic practices are not working on black bears (population rose 30 percent, nuisance complaints rose 25 percent), but why Maine’s hunters can’t admit it is astoundingly acrimonious. When DIF&W and friends enter bear dens during the winter, why not sterilize them? Ah, yes, it’s the money.
The Humane Society of the United States was started decades ago because humans were being inhumane towards Earth’s other living things. Caring how Earth’s other living things are treated has to do with right and wrong and humane and inhumane; Mainers for Fair Bear Hunting were trying to right a wrong and make inhumane practices humane.
Jackie Freitas
Friendship