Alaska begins aerial wolf hunt to boost caribou population
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Alaska’s aerial hunt for gray wolves, decried by many animal activists (and, famously, by actress Ashley Judd in a Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund video), is now in full swing.
At least 30 wolves have been killed by hunters wielding high-caliber guns in the program that began in earnest last weekend. Our colleague Kim Murphy at the Greenspace blog has the details:
The predator control effort has run into opposition from the National Park Service, which manages the nearby Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, where biologists have been radio-collaring wolves in a long-running study of how predators and prey interact in the 2.5-million-acre wilderness near the Canadian border. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game, aiming to boost the survival of caribou calves, wants to kill up to 328 wolves, leaving behind at least 88 to 103. Killing them, state officials say, will allow the Fortymile caribou herd, ravaged by three years of bad weather and heavy snow, to expand from its current level of 40,000 animals to as many as 100,000. There are several problems with that, according to the park service. First, park officials believe there aren’t nearly as many wolves as state officials estimate and that killing so many could devastate the packs. Second, the Fortymile herd hasn’t approached 100,000 since the early 1900s. And preserve Supt. Greg Dudgeon fears some of the preserve’s collared wolves, along with others that typically make the preserve their home, could be shot. ‘They [the state] have a mandate to provide for maximum sustained yield. They want to provide more moose and caribou for people to harvest,’ Dudgeon said. ‘Our mandate is to manage and provide for healthy populations of wildlife. So we don’t place the value of a wolf over a caribou, or a caribou over a moose.’
Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund, of course, is crying foul -- and the group places the blame for what it calls a ‘sweeping wolf massacre’ squarely on the shoulders of Alaska’s governor, Sarah Palin. ‘Removing such huge numbers of predators from a region will do untold damage to all the wildlife that depends on that habitat. Governor Palin is recklessly pursuing policies that could turn America’s last frontier into nothing more than a large game farm,’ said Rodger Schlickeisen, the group’s president.
--Lindsay Barnett