Editorial | Notebook
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Published: December 28, 2013
The federal government removed the gray wolf from the endangered list in
the Northern Rocky Mountains in 2011, essentially leaving wolves’ fates
in the hands of state fish-and-game departments, hunters and
ranchers. The predictable happened: hunting resumed, and the wolf
population fell. In states like Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, an age-old
antipathy to wolves flourishes, unchecked.
A wolf in Idaho, one of the states where wolf hunts have resumed.
In Idaho, two recent developments have alarmed those who want to protect
wolves and see them not as vermin, but as predators necessary for a
healthy ecosystem.
First was the hiring, by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, of a
hunter to travel into federal wilderness to eliminate two wolf packs.
The reason: wolves kill elk, and humans want to hunt elk. Normally the
agency would just rely on hunters to kill the wolves, but because the
area where these packs roam — in the Frank Church-River of No Return
Wilderness — is remote, the agency decided it would be more efficient to
bring in a hired gun. A photo last week in The Idaho Statesman showed the hunter, Gus Thoreson, astride a horse, with three pack mules, looking like a modern-day Jeremiah Johnson.
Advocates for wolves are angry at the United States Forest Service for
giving a state agency free rein to practice predator eradication on
protected federal land — meaning, of course, our land — without
public comment or review and in apparent violation of well-established
wilderness-management regulations and policies. They point out, too,
that it’s not clear how many wolves are there for Mr. Thoreson to wipe
out, and little evidence that wolves in that area have done any damage
to elk herds or livestock.
The other example of wolf-animus will be on display this weekend outside
Salmon, Idaho, at a Coyote and Wolf Derby sponsored by a group called
Idaho for Wildlife. A not-too-subtle poster for the event shows a wolf
with its head in the cross hairs of a rifle scope and announces $2,000
in prizes to defend “our hunting heritage” against “radical
animal-rights groups.” Organizers say they want to raise awareness of
the potential risk to humans from a tapeworm that wolves — as well as
elks and dogs — can carry. State officials say there are no known cases
of people contracting tapeworm from wolves.
Environmentalists sought a court order to block the event,
saying the Forest Service violated federal law and failed to follow its
own procedures in allowing the killing contest. But a judge on Friday
said it could proceed. The derby’s ugly depiction of wolves as diseased
predators is a throwback to the bad old days when wolves, like coyotes,
were vilified and bounty-hunted nearly to extinction.
source
No comments:
Post a Comment