December 10, 2003

• 

  
  

  Predator Control

  
  

  There is currently an aerial wolf hunt under way in Alaska.  At least there would be, if the weather would clear up.   The Board of Game mandated the hunt to eliminate five packs, about forty wolves, from a 1,700 square mile area around McGrath.  They say it is because wolves in that one specific area have been getting more than their share of the moose, and the families of subsistence hunters are going hungry. 

  
  

  I don’t have ears in the villages, don’t sit in on the Game Board meetings, and so I don’t know the truth of the matter.  The cynic in me suspects that it is for the consideration of sport hunters at least as much as for those who need moose meat to subsist.  Whatever the reasons, my visceral reaction to the killing of a wolf is one of revulsion.  Doing it from aircraft is not, I suppose, qualitatively worse than doing it from snowmobiles.  If one were to be fair about it, one would do it naked, on foot, without firearms, and give the wolves a fighting chance.

  
  

  But fairness is not apparently on anyone’s mind here.  The same animal rights group that extorted a moratorium out of Governor Wally Hickel a decade ago is trying the same terror tactics again.  They are organizing a tourism boycott.  Yeah, right, that makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?  It worked with Wally Hickel, they may be thinking, so it will work with Frank Murkowski.  I’m not so sure.  Wally had been U.S. Secretary of the Interior under Nixon, and proved himself a “conservationist” long before the term, “environmentalist”, came into use.  In Washington, he instituted tighter controls on pesticides, and as our governor he worked on oil-spill prevention and response, to cite just a few of his environmental issues.

  
  

  Frank Murkowski, on the other hand, has demonstrated that he favors resource exploitation at any cost, and he has failed to demonstrate any true practicality, or any intelligence beyond the level of low cunning.  He is an honest politician in the sense that once he’s been bought he stays bought.  He also has the sort of personality that tends to dig in its heels and resist when anyone tries to maneuver or control him.  His public persona has NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) written all over it.  I wouldn’t want to know him personally.  I don’t see him showing any concern for how the world views Alaska in terms of its humanitarian values, nor even its less-pristine-by-the-moment environment.  His interests are those of big business, particularly oil business.

  
  

  Oil men are not going to be hurt by a tourism boycott.  The people who stand to lose their subsistence should Murky stand firm and allow the wolf hunt are those who run and are employed by small businesses.  So here we have the subsistence interests of a few rural villagers (purportedly), set up against the subsistence interests of the entire Railbelt, where three quarters of the state’s population lives scattered along that thin line between Seward and Fairbanks.  Sure, many of us have incomes independent of tourism.  Some even work in the North Slope oil fields, flying up there for a week of work and then home for a week.  But for most of us, tourist dollars make up part or all of our income.

  
  

  I used the term, “terror tactics.”  I see it as terrorism, economic terrorism.  They are trying to use Alaskans’ fears of economic scarcity to coerce us into deluging our government with appeals for leniency for the wolves.  AS IF OUR GOVERNMENT CARED FOR OUR APPEALS, OR FOR THE WOLVES!  Tree-hugging dirt worshipper that I am, I can’t condone that strategy.  If I were an activist seeking to stop the aerial wolf hunt, I’d be out on some airstrip in McGrath, sabotaging planes.  Yeah, yeah, I know that’s just not in the repertoire of those city people, those armchair activists.  They intend, instead, to hold “howl-ins”.  People will gather in at least five cities (after Christmas when, if the weather has cooperated with the pilots, the wolves will already be dead) and howl.

  
  

  When you look at what the animal rights “activists” have done, are doing, and plan to do, it becomes apparent that they don’t want to save the lives of those wolves.  They are not even protesting the killing of wolves.  They protest the aerial killing of wolves and never mind that running around on snowmachines trying to do it on the ground is more harmful to the environment (and make no mistake, when those men in power decide that another predator is predating on their territory and must be stopped, they will be stopped one way or another).  They don’t propose to STOP the hunt even, but just to get out publicly and protest its happening after the fact, and vindictively strike out with economic weapons against a big bunch of people who had no interest in killing wolves to preserve moose for their own tables. 

  
  

  Most of us on the Railbelt buy our meat in grocery stores.  If they wanted to be fair about it, they’d take their protests and some moose meat to McGrath and those villages around there and try to negotiate something… or maybe they’d spend some money and time on wolf contraception… I dunno what’s the right answer, I just know that Friends of Animals hasn’t found it.

  
  

  Thank God they’re doing those howl-ins in cities, down there in the Lower 48, where the wolves can’t hear them.  The first thought that flashed across my mind when Greyfox read me the bit from the paper about the howl-ins was how much havoc people create for wolves when they go out into their territory and howl.  Packs will abandon their hunt for food and travel for miles to locate the strange wolves howling in their range.  Think how frustrating, how disorienting, it must be to track down the competition through auditory clues and never find even the merest sniff of olfactory evidence of its existence.  So, please folks, if you have to get together and howl, howl like a monkey and do it downtown where there are no wolves.  Leave the wolves I love alone.

  
  

   

  • 6:47 pm
  • 5 Comments