Hunting and killing are not the same thing. Even as Idaho has sold more than 14,000 wolf-hunting permits, the first 10 days of the first legal wolf hunt here in decades have yielded only three reported legal kills. (Click here for a video from the Times.)On 10 September, "[Judge] Donald W. Molloy of the Federal District Court for Montana, denied a request by environmentalists and animal welfare groups that he stop the hunts, in Montana and Idaho" (AP). Earlier this week I ran across this editorial:
The gray wolf is a top predator, an essential part of the ecosystem, a symbol of the West. And it's a symbol best displayed, not as pelts on a wall, but by packs in the wild.
Exterminated like vermin, a bounty on their heads, the gray wolf was hunted to extinction in the West. Reintroduced in central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming in 1995, the endangered species staged a remarkable, yet still incomplete, recovery. Now, due to the shortsighted decision by the Bush and Obama administrations to remove the wolf from the endangered species list in Idaho and Montana, that recovery is threatened.
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There's no need for wolf slaughters disguised as "management plans." Wolves will manage quite well if just left alone. Hopefully, the judge will come to that conclusion.
You're probably thinking that editorial appeared in a Sierra Club publication or something like that. Well you'd be wrong. Click through to find out where it appeared.
That's right. The editorial appeared in that famous bastion of liberal opinion, the Salt Lake Tribune.
The afternoon's tragedy, and my share in it, as it affected the innocence, destroyed the pleasure of my adventure. It is true, I came as near as is possible to come to being a hunter and miss it, myself; and as it is, I think that I could spend a year in the woods, fishing and hunting just enough to sustain myself, with satisfaction. This would be next to living like a philosopher on the fruits of the earth which you had raised, which also attracts me. But this hunting of the moose merely for the satisfaction of killing him,—not even for the sake of his hide,—without making any extraordinary exertion or running any risk yourself, is too much like going out by night to some wood-side pasture and shooting your neighbor's horses. Henry David Thoreau