The Scum at the Top
Commentary on the Rats in Washington
Her deadly wolf program
By Mark Benjamin
Salon.com
© September 8, 2008
With a disdain for science that alarms wildlife
experts, Sarah Palin continues to promote Alaska's
policy to gun down wolves from planes.
Wildlife activists thought they had seen the worst
in 2003 when Frank Murkowski, then the Republican
governor of Alaska, signed a bill ramping up state
programs to gun down wild wolves from airplanes,
inviting average citizens to participate. Wolves,
Murkowski believed, were clearly better than humans at
killing elk and moose, and humans needed to even the
playing field.
But that was before Sarah Palin took Murkowski's job
at the end of 2006. She went one step, or paw, further.
Palin didn't think Alaskans should be allowed to chase
wolves from aircraft and shoot them -- they should be
encouraged to do so. Palin's administration put a
bounty on wolves' heads, or to be more precise, on
their mitts.
In early 2007, Palin's administration approved an
initiative to pay a $150 bounty to hunters who killed
a wolf from an airplane in certain areas, hacked off
the left foreleg, and brought in the appendage. Ruling
that the Palin administration didn't have the authority
to offer payments, a state judge quickly put a halt to
them but not to the shooting of wolves from aircraft.
Detractors consider the airborne shootings a savage
business, conducted under the euphemism "predator
control." The airplanes appear in the winter, so the
wolves show up like targets in a video game, sprinting
across the white canvas below. Critics believe the
practice violates the ethics of hunting, while supporters
say the process is not hunting at all, but a deliberate
cull.
Palin has argued that she is worried about Alaska's
hunters, locked in perennial competition with the canine
carnivores for the state's prodigious ungulate population.
A hunter herself, Palin has battled critics of aerial
wolf hunting with the support of the Alaska Outdoor
Council, a powerhouse advocacy and lobbying organization
for hunting, fishing and recreation groups. In addition
to so-called urban hunters, who shoot moose mostly for
fun, Alaska is home to a significant number of subsistence
hunters, including some of the Native population.
Subsistence hunters rely on an occasional moose to
make ends meet. The wolves, Palin has said, are stealing
food from their tables.
"Palin acts like she has never met an animal she didn't
want shot," says Priscilla Feral, president of Friends
of Animals, based in Connecticut.
The controversy over Palin's promotion of predator
control goes beyond animal rights activists recoiling
at the thought of picking off wolves from airplanes. A
raft of scientists has argued that Palin has provided
little evidence that the current program of systematically
killing wolves, estimated at a population of 7,000 to
11,000, will result in more moose for hunters. State
estimates of moose populations have come under scrutiny.
Some wildlife biologists say predator control advocates
don't even understand what wolves eat.
State officials stand by their scientific findings on
predator control. "Several times over the past several
years, our science has been challenged in court," says
Bruce Bartley, a spokesman for the Alaska Department of
Fish and Game. "In every instance it has prevailed."
Yet it is not hard to find Alaskans who say Palin's
enthusiasm for predator control fits a broader narrative
of how she edits science to suit her personal views. She
endorses the teaching of creationism in public schools
and has questioned whether humans are responsible for
global warming.
In 2007, she approved $400,000 to educate the public
about the ecological success of shooting wolves and bears
from the air. Some of the money went to create a pamphlet
distributed in local newspapers, three weeks before the
public was to vote on an initiative that would have
curtailed aerial killing of wolves by private citizens.
"The timing of the state's propaganda on wolf control
was terrible," wrote the Anchorage Daily News on its
editorial page.
"Across the board, Sarah Palin puts on a masquerade,
claiming she is using sound management and science,"
says Nick Jans, an Alaskan writer who co-sponsored the
initiative. "In reality she uses ideology and ignores
science when it is in her way." The initiative was
defeated last month.
Gordon Haber is a wildlife scientist who has studied
wolves in Alaska for 43 years. "On wildlife-related
issues, whether it is polar bears or predator controls,
she has shown no inclination to be objective," he says of
Palin. "I cannot find credible scientific data to support
their arguments," he adds about the state's rationale for
gunning down wolves. "In most cases, there is evidence
to the contrary."
Last year, 172 scientists signed a letter to Palin,
expressing concern about the lack of science behind
the state's wolf-killing operation. According to the
scientists, state officials set population objectives
for moose and caribou based on "unattainable, unsustainable
historically high populations." As a result, the
"inadequately designed predator control programs"
threatened the long-term health of both the ungulate
and wolf populations. The scientists concluded with a
plea to Palin to consider the conservation of wolves and
bears "on an equal basis with the goal of producing more
ungulates for hunters."
Apparently Palin wasn't fazed. Earlier this year she
introduced state legislation that would further divorce
the predator-control program from science. The legislation
would transfer authority over the program from the state
Department of Fish and Game to Alaska's Board of Game,
whose members are appointed by, well, Palin. Even some
hunters were astounded by her power play.
The legislation would give Palin's board "more leeway
without any scientific input to do whatever the hell
they basically wanted," Mark Richards, co-chair of
Alaska Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, wrote in an
e-mail. The legislation is currently stalled in the
Alaska state Senate.
Predator control in Alaska dates back to the 1920s and
1930s. Even then, wildlife biologists insisted that
wolves were important to the area's natural ecology and
not responsible for inordinate deaths of sheep, caribou
or moose. Yet the scientists fought a losing battle
against ranchers, hunters and government officials, who
backed the extermination of tens of thousands of wolves.
Aerial hunting began in earnest in the 1940s and
continued through the 1960s after Alaska had earned
statehood.
But starting in 2003, Murkowski opened the airborne
shooting to citizens with special permits and expanded
predator-control programs to cover 60,000 square miles
of state and federal land, the largest wolf-killing
operation since Alaska became a state. The stated goal
is to reduce wolf populations in some areas by 60 to 80
percent. Teams of pilots and gunners have killed at least
795 wolves since 2003. Conservationists counter that the
total number of wolves trapped, shot from airplanes,
chased down by snow machines, and killed legally and
illegally in Alaska every year is more along the lines
of 2,000.
Scientists insist that the Palin administration is
systematically killing wolves with an inadequate
understanding of the relationship between the carnivore
and hoofed animals. The state responds that predators
kill over 80 percent of the moose and caribou that die
each year, while hunters and trappers kill less than 10
percent.
Haber says the state's numbers are wildly inflated. His
decades of wolf research have shown that wolves are,
in fact, mostly scavengers. "Sixty to 70 percent of the
moose they eat are scavenged, not killed," he says. He
adds that the state's wolf population estimates, based
on secondhand observations and extrapolations, are also
high.
Palin offered the $150 bounty for wolf paws in 2007
after efforts to kill wolves from airplanes that season
were, in her view, coming up short. State officials had
hoped that 382 to 664 wolves would be killed during that
predator-control season. State officials were disappointed
when only 115 wolves were killed from the air.
Palin thought the $150 cash bounties would do the trick.
Haber has another explanation for the dry spell. "I can
tell you from my own research that the reason they didn't
get many wolves in certain years, particularly last winter,
is because they have scraped those areas clean," he says.
Last year, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., introduced
legislation designed to curtail predator-control programs,
except as a last resort. "It's time to ground Alaska's
illegal and inhumane air assault on wolves," Miller said.
Palin quickly fired off a curt letter in response,
applauding the state's programs as "widely recognized
for their excellence and effectiveness." She pointed out
that her state has "managed its wildlife so that we still
maintain abundant populations of all of our indigenous
predators almost fifty years after statehood."
Says Jans, co-sponsor of the losing initiative to outlaw
aerial wolf hunting: "This is a reflection of a somebody
who doesn't have any use for science."
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Last Modified:
October 21, 2008