Wildalaska
member
Well round one is over as evdenced by the attached stories, and Alaskans can excersize our local control over game management despite the efforts of the Fiends of Animals. They are threatening a boycott, hope y'all will take the time to drop them a note stating that you intend to visit Alaska and boycott Connecticut 
Judge OKs plan to kill wolves
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: December 5, 2003)
An Anchorage judge has given the green light to a state plan to kill some three dozen wolves around McGrath.
In a 14-page ruling issued early Friday afternoon in Anchorage, Superior Court Judge Sharon Gleason found no legal justification to postpone the aerial wolf-control plan. State biologists believe that eliminating the predators will allow the local moose herd to grow, eventually providing more meat for subsistence hunters.
A national animal rights group and seven Alaska residents had sued, claiming the state had not met legal requirements to approve the plan.
They contend the moose herd is big enough for local needs.
Alaska Board of Game chairman Mike Fleagle said the ruling vindicates the state and could portend a new era in which small numbers of wolves are killed to help buoy moose and caribou populations.
"I think the public knows we're not in danger of losing our wolf population," said Fleagle, a McGrath resident.
The state has already issued permits to three pilot/gunner teams to shoot the wolves from their airplanes. Their only compensation will be the wolves they shoot.
AND-------------------------------
Activist issues boycott warning
WOLF HUNT: Friends of Animals leader pledges action if lawsuit fails.
By MARY PEMBERTON
The Associated Press
(Published: December 5, 2003)
An animal-rights group will go forward with a national tourism boycott of Alaska if it fails to win its lawsuit to stop hunters from shooting wolves from airplanes, its president said Thursday.
Priscilla Feral, president of the Darien, Conn.-based Friends of Animals, said she dreaded organizing a tourism boycott but would do it if it would pressure Alaska into ending its aerial wolf control program.
"It is a lot of work and upsets a lot of people," Feral said of a boycott, as she prepared to leave Alaska after participating in a wolf control debate here to be aired on television. "But the goal here is to change public policy and put pressure on the people responsible for establishing it. That is the Murkowski administration."
A spokesman for Gov. Frank Murkowski, John Manly, said the governor appreciates the importance of tourism to Alaska, but isn't overly concerned about a boycott. He said it seems as if other states can do much more with predator control than Alaska without drawing national attention.
"Alaska seems to be under the microscope," Manly said. "In Alaska, moose and caribou are our livestock. ... We are just trying to protect our livestock like any other state."
Tourism is a nearly $2 billion business in Alaska, according to 2001 estimates, the latest date for which numbers are available.
Feral has faced down Alaska governors before.
Her group, which has about 200,000 members nationwide, was behind a tourism boycott a decade ago that resulted in then-Gov. Walter J. Hickel imposing a moratorium on wolf control in 1992. During that boycott, Friends of Animals launched 53 demonstrations called "howl-ins" in 51 cities around the country.
She said she has not heard from Murkowski this time around. But she said that when he was a U.S. senator -- during the last boycott -- he sent her a letter threatening to round up wolves and set them free on the streets of Manhattan.
Manly said he wasn't aware of any such letter but would do some checking. He called Chuck Kleeschulte, who was Murkowski's spokesman when he was a senator. Kleeschulte said he didn't recall the letter, but he said if the senator wrote it he probably didn't tell the media.
Superior Court Judge Sharon L. Gleason was expected to decide this week whether to issue a preliminary injunction sought by Friends of Animals, along with seven Alaska plaintiffs, to stop the aerial wolf control program approved last month by the Board of Game.
Feral said she would be "thrilled" if the judge ruled in Friends of Animals' favor, but even if she did, it probably would not put an end to the fight.
"I anticipate this will not be the end of the faceoff on the issue of wolf control," she said. "The state is going to continue to push these pogroms -- I call them pogroms -- if they can get away with it."
Before Alaska statehood in 1959, shooting wolves from airplanes was common practice. Aerial sport hunting was banned in 1972 but the law allowed aerial shooting for predator control.
Alaska voters in 1996 and 2000 banned a similar practice known as land-and-shoot hunting.
Feral said state Sen. Ralph Seekins, R-Fairbanks, whose legislation made aerial wolf control near McGrath possible this winter, holds Draconian views.
Seekins and Feral squared off during a debate between wolf advocates and predator control proponents to be aired Dec. 12 on ARCS, the Alaska Rural Communications Service. No dates have been set for broadcast in urban areas.
"It is not snow removal," Feral said of Seekins' attitude toward wolves. "That is how he approaches free-living animals, as if they were snow removal."
The aerial wolf control program is intended to increase the moose population around the Interior town of McGrath so that residents have more moose to eat. The town is off the road system and about 300 air miles from grocery and department stores in Anchorage and Fairbanks.
Gleason last week issued a temporary restraining order after the state gave the OK to three teams of pilots and hunters to begin shooting wolves. A five-hour hearing was held Tuesday on whether she should grant the preliminary injunction.
The judge said her role is not to decide whether Alaska should have an aerial wolf control program, but to determine whether the Board of Game acted legally in establishing it.
The state called Matt Robus, director of the Division of Wildlife Conservation, to testify. He said while there are more moose in the McGrath area than previously thought, they are not in areas where hunters can easily get to them.
Robus said harvest objectives have not been met in McGrath for years.
During the hearing, plaintiffs' lawyer James Reeves said he didn't know why more moose weren't being harvested near McGrath.
"Admittedly people have to go out and find the moose," he said.
State lawyer Kevin Saxby bristled at that remark, saying it wasn't right to insinuate that the problem was lazy hunters.
and this tells it all---------------------
Wolf wars about more than wolves
By PAUL JENKINS
First, let me say for the record that I have nothing against wolves. Nothing. I like wolves, although admittedly I wouldn't want my schnauzer to marry one. In fact - and I usually don't share this until about drink No. 6 - in a past life, I was a wolf, a dark, cranky German wolf with a taste for BMWs and blonde babes hauling Heinekens to their grandma's house. I think I may have come to a bad end. But I digress.
Wolves, or rather the sensible thinning of wolf numbers in a 2,200-square-mile area near McGrath, are making headlines again, and animal wackos have their undies in a bunch. They promise, as usual, to boycott Alaska tourism if the program is not shelved - hurting, in their zealotry, those who had no part in the decision to reduce the wolf population.
What triggered this most recent round in the endless bout over predator control in Alaska? Folks in McGrath say they harvest up to 90 moose a year in Game Management Unit 19D, but need more. The state just coughed up more than $100,000 to remove 78 black bears and nine brown bears from the area (without much in the way of protests, you may note), and planned to allow three aerial permit holders to shoot about 40 wolves in the area as the predator control program's second step.
Opponents claimed over-hunting is the problem; that moose numbers have improved because the bears were taken for a ride. They asked Superior Court Judge Sharon Gleason to rule that the Board of Game did not follow the law in instituting predator control, and they want her to block the much-needed second step.
No matter her ruling this week, the Wolf Wars will rage on. At their very core are power and money.
Let's concede this point to the wackos: Alaska would not be Alaska without wolves, and bears and crazies, oh my. Nobody in their right mind wants to whack all 7,500 to 9,000 to 11,000 of them roaming the state. (The wolves, that is, not the bears and crazies. We can talk about them later.) Despite a propaganda campaign that would leave Joseph Goebbels chuckling, nobody is proposing wholesale butchery of the wolf population. From the start, it was planned that the McGrath hunt would involve only 0.38 percent of the state's land and target, at most, about 0.53 percent of its wolves.
It is easy to understand the wackos' fascination with wolves. Porcupines, pikas and garden slugs do not fire the imagination, much less fatten bank accounts. When you need something sexy to wring your hands about, to help milk the hapless rubes, to tap those fat checkbooks in New Hampshire, Connecticut and other points south and east, well, wolves fill the bill nicely.
For many who rarely encounter wolves while motoring over the river and through the woods, the predators are magic; the wild's primal, dark essence, its blood-chilling soul, effortlessly, silently, seamlessly gliding as rapacious sharks through the falling shadows in an eternal hunt. In their view, without wolves, without the promise of them forever, Denali might as well be Detroit.
In that, they may be right, but others more grounded in reality see wolves for what they are ‹ opportunistic killers whose numbers can get out of hand.
"I wonder how many activists have ever seen a real wolf?" John Jameson of Ambler asks in a recent letter. "They should go to Buckland right now and you can see them across the river, hunkered down waiting for darkness. They come across and eat the puppies and any dogs they catch. . . . A day will come when the wolves get an Eagle River kid going to school ‹ you just wait and see if it doesn't happen."
We can only hope he is wrong, but if not, you can bet some would fight wolf culling in Eagle River Valley, saying the critters have the right to eat children. Read "Little Red Riding Hood," they'd say. And wolves were, after all, here first.
There is nothing wrong with the predator control program slated for the McGrath area, but if the judge shuts down the effort today because of procedural problems, its outcome will forever be in doubt.
That's been the wackos' aim all along, I suspect - to never actually find out. What would happen if predator control increased hunting opportunities near McGrath and wolf numbers rebounded because more prey was available? What could they say then? The possibility of such a success must be their worst nightmare. It would reduce their power to tell us how to live. But more importantly, it would put an end to the sound they so dearly love. No, no, no, not the howl of the wolf.
It's more like the Kacheeng! of a cash register.
Paul Jenkins is an editor of The Anchorage Times.
WildwhatstodoinconnanywayAlaska
Judge OKs plan to kill wolves
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: December 5, 2003)
An Anchorage judge has given the green light to a state plan to kill some three dozen wolves around McGrath.
In a 14-page ruling issued early Friday afternoon in Anchorage, Superior Court Judge Sharon Gleason found no legal justification to postpone the aerial wolf-control plan. State biologists believe that eliminating the predators will allow the local moose herd to grow, eventually providing more meat for subsistence hunters.
A national animal rights group and seven Alaska residents had sued, claiming the state had not met legal requirements to approve the plan.
They contend the moose herd is big enough for local needs.
Alaska Board of Game chairman Mike Fleagle said the ruling vindicates the state and could portend a new era in which small numbers of wolves are killed to help buoy moose and caribou populations.
"I think the public knows we're not in danger of losing our wolf population," said Fleagle, a McGrath resident.
The state has already issued permits to three pilot/gunner teams to shoot the wolves from their airplanes. Their only compensation will be the wolves they shoot.
AND-------------------------------
Activist issues boycott warning
WOLF HUNT: Friends of Animals leader pledges action if lawsuit fails.
By MARY PEMBERTON
The Associated Press
(Published: December 5, 2003)
An animal-rights group will go forward with a national tourism boycott of Alaska if it fails to win its lawsuit to stop hunters from shooting wolves from airplanes, its president said Thursday.
Priscilla Feral, president of the Darien, Conn.-based Friends of Animals, said she dreaded organizing a tourism boycott but would do it if it would pressure Alaska into ending its aerial wolf control program.
"It is a lot of work and upsets a lot of people," Feral said of a boycott, as she prepared to leave Alaska after participating in a wolf control debate here to be aired on television. "But the goal here is to change public policy and put pressure on the people responsible for establishing it. That is the Murkowski administration."
A spokesman for Gov. Frank Murkowski, John Manly, said the governor appreciates the importance of tourism to Alaska, but isn't overly concerned about a boycott. He said it seems as if other states can do much more with predator control than Alaska without drawing national attention.
"Alaska seems to be under the microscope," Manly said. "In Alaska, moose and caribou are our livestock. ... We are just trying to protect our livestock like any other state."
Tourism is a nearly $2 billion business in Alaska, according to 2001 estimates, the latest date for which numbers are available.
Feral has faced down Alaska governors before.
Her group, which has about 200,000 members nationwide, was behind a tourism boycott a decade ago that resulted in then-Gov. Walter J. Hickel imposing a moratorium on wolf control in 1992. During that boycott, Friends of Animals launched 53 demonstrations called "howl-ins" in 51 cities around the country.
She said she has not heard from Murkowski this time around. But she said that when he was a U.S. senator -- during the last boycott -- he sent her a letter threatening to round up wolves and set them free on the streets of Manhattan.
Manly said he wasn't aware of any such letter but would do some checking. He called Chuck Kleeschulte, who was Murkowski's spokesman when he was a senator. Kleeschulte said he didn't recall the letter, but he said if the senator wrote it he probably didn't tell the media.
Superior Court Judge Sharon L. Gleason was expected to decide this week whether to issue a preliminary injunction sought by Friends of Animals, along with seven Alaska plaintiffs, to stop the aerial wolf control program approved last month by the Board of Game.
Feral said she would be "thrilled" if the judge ruled in Friends of Animals' favor, but even if she did, it probably would not put an end to the fight.
"I anticipate this will not be the end of the faceoff on the issue of wolf control," she said. "The state is going to continue to push these pogroms -- I call them pogroms -- if they can get away with it."
Before Alaska statehood in 1959, shooting wolves from airplanes was common practice. Aerial sport hunting was banned in 1972 but the law allowed aerial shooting for predator control.
Alaska voters in 1996 and 2000 banned a similar practice known as land-and-shoot hunting.
Feral said state Sen. Ralph Seekins, R-Fairbanks, whose legislation made aerial wolf control near McGrath possible this winter, holds Draconian views.
Seekins and Feral squared off during a debate between wolf advocates and predator control proponents to be aired Dec. 12 on ARCS, the Alaska Rural Communications Service. No dates have been set for broadcast in urban areas.
"It is not snow removal," Feral said of Seekins' attitude toward wolves. "That is how he approaches free-living animals, as if they were snow removal."
The aerial wolf control program is intended to increase the moose population around the Interior town of McGrath so that residents have more moose to eat. The town is off the road system and about 300 air miles from grocery and department stores in Anchorage and Fairbanks.
Gleason last week issued a temporary restraining order after the state gave the OK to three teams of pilots and hunters to begin shooting wolves. A five-hour hearing was held Tuesday on whether she should grant the preliminary injunction.
The judge said her role is not to decide whether Alaska should have an aerial wolf control program, but to determine whether the Board of Game acted legally in establishing it.
The state called Matt Robus, director of the Division of Wildlife Conservation, to testify. He said while there are more moose in the McGrath area than previously thought, they are not in areas where hunters can easily get to them.
Robus said harvest objectives have not been met in McGrath for years.
During the hearing, plaintiffs' lawyer James Reeves said he didn't know why more moose weren't being harvested near McGrath.
"Admittedly people have to go out and find the moose," he said.
State lawyer Kevin Saxby bristled at that remark, saying it wasn't right to insinuate that the problem was lazy hunters.
and this tells it all---------------------
Wolf wars about more than wolves
By PAUL JENKINS
First, let me say for the record that I have nothing against wolves. Nothing. I like wolves, although admittedly I wouldn't want my schnauzer to marry one. In fact - and I usually don't share this until about drink No. 6 - in a past life, I was a wolf, a dark, cranky German wolf with a taste for BMWs and blonde babes hauling Heinekens to their grandma's house. I think I may have come to a bad end. But I digress.
Wolves, or rather the sensible thinning of wolf numbers in a 2,200-square-mile area near McGrath, are making headlines again, and animal wackos have their undies in a bunch. They promise, as usual, to boycott Alaska tourism if the program is not shelved - hurting, in their zealotry, those who had no part in the decision to reduce the wolf population.
What triggered this most recent round in the endless bout over predator control in Alaska? Folks in McGrath say they harvest up to 90 moose a year in Game Management Unit 19D, but need more. The state just coughed up more than $100,000 to remove 78 black bears and nine brown bears from the area (without much in the way of protests, you may note), and planned to allow three aerial permit holders to shoot about 40 wolves in the area as the predator control program's second step.
Opponents claimed over-hunting is the problem; that moose numbers have improved because the bears were taken for a ride. They asked Superior Court Judge Sharon Gleason to rule that the Board of Game did not follow the law in instituting predator control, and they want her to block the much-needed second step.
No matter her ruling this week, the Wolf Wars will rage on. At their very core are power and money.
Let's concede this point to the wackos: Alaska would not be Alaska without wolves, and bears and crazies, oh my. Nobody in their right mind wants to whack all 7,500 to 9,000 to 11,000 of them roaming the state. (The wolves, that is, not the bears and crazies. We can talk about them later.) Despite a propaganda campaign that would leave Joseph Goebbels chuckling, nobody is proposing wholesale butchery of the wolf population. From the start, it was planned that the McGrath hunt would involve only 0.38 percent of the state's land and target, at most, about 0.53 percent of its wolves.
It is easy to understand the wackos' fascination with wolves. Porcupines, pikas and garden slugs do not fire the imagination, much less fatten bank accounts. When you need something sexy to wring your hands about, to help milk the hapless rubes, to tap those fat checkbooks in New Hampshire, Connecticut and other points south and east, well, wolves fill the bill nicely.
For many who rarely encounter wolves while motoring over the river and through the woods, the predators are magic; the wild's primal, dark essence, its blood-chilling soul, effortlessly, silently, seamlessly gliding as rapacious sharks through the falling shadows in an eternal hunt. In their view, without wolves, without the promise of them forever, Denali might as well be Detroit.
In that, they may be right, but others more grounded in reality see wolves for what they are ‹ opportunistic killers whose numbers can get out of hand.
"I wonder how many activists have ever seen a real wolf?" John Jameson of Ambler asks in a recent letter. "They should go to Buckland right now and you can see them across the river, hunkered down waiting for darkness. They come across and eat the puppies and any dogs they catch. . . . A day will come when the wolves get an Eagle River kid going to school ‹ you just wait and see if it doesn't happen."
We can only hope he is wrong, but if not, you can bet some would fight wolf culling in Eagle River Valley, saying the critters have the right to eat children. Read "Little Red Riding Hood," they'd say. And wolves were, after all, here first.
There is nothing wrong with the predator control program slated for the McGrath area, but if the judge shuts down the effort today because of procedural problems, its outcome will forever be in doubt.
That's been the wackos' aim all along, I suspect - to never actually find out. What would happen if predator control increased hunting opportunities near McGrath and wolf numbers rebounded because more prey was available? What could they say then? The possibility of such a success must be their worst nightmare. It would reduce their power to tell us how to live. But more importantly, it would put an end to the sound they so dearly love. No, no, no, not the howl of the wolf.
It's more like the Kacheeng! of a cash register.
Paul Jenkins is an editor of The Anchorage Times.
WildwhatstodoinconnanywayAlaska