Just Who Is Baiting Whom?
One of the premier wildlife blogs in the Blogosphere is Wolf Crossing — Examination of the Wolf Reintroduction Program & Wolf Education (see [here] and in our Favorite Links).
Recently Laura at Wolf Crossing posted this excellent report [here]:
Groups want investigation into wolf baiting
In an Associated Press story, it has been reported that representatives of 15 conservation and environmental groups want Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to order an investigation by the inspector general into allegations that a Mexican gray wolf was baited into killing a cow so the wolf in turn could be killed. The allegations were printed in a December story in High Country News - an online, independent biweekly news magazine.
“The article was a total piece of fabrication,” Gene Whetten, manager of the Adobe Ranch in Catron County, said. “There is no truth from start to finish.”
The person quoted in the article, Mike Miller, works for Whetten, and, according to the AP story, has denied the allegations. He refuses to speak to the press.
Bill Aymar, Catron County manager, said he was “outraged” by the story and said, “Everything is political at this point.”
“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service put the wolves out there and they set up a den,” Aymar said. “The ranch didn’t move.”
Whetten said the cows mentioned in the story were in the area before “the wolves went and denned there.”
He also reported that since the Aspen Pack, which was confirmed to have killed eight of Whetten’s cattle, with nine head reported missing, was removed by helicopter by USFWS on Dec. 2, “the cows quit dying.”
“We have no wolves that are collared in the area,” Whetten said. “As for the uncollared ones, who knows, but we haven’t seen any.”
“(The wolves) have run most of the elk out of this country, too,” Whetten said. “They don’t like being slaughtered and I would suspect they have found happier grazing grounds.”… [more]
That post drew this very special comment from Mary Macnab, one of the West’s most eloquent voices in defense of human rights and land stewardship, and an occasional and much appreciated contributor to SOS Forests.
Just Who Is Baiting Whom? by Mary Macnab
The wolf program has announced that it will be re-releasing problem wolves on an area scheduled to have mama cows calving. Do you ever hear from the program or the malicious groups in the above article about the fact, attested to by wolf biologists elsewhere, that there never was a core area here for any “recovery”, hence the constant depredations and endangerments experienced here, discounted and swept under the rug?
Do you often hear from them about the almost impossible amount of habituation problems and questionable genetics of these animals hand raised for generations?
Is even the smallest smidgen of thought or effort put into how many of these animals have succeeded by living existences shy of humans and their animals. And how many, and how long such can truly exist in an area before destroying their prey base and hungrily losing their shy disposition and wandering into someone’s pasture, and needing to be controlled?
Are there any true conservationists and biologists involved at all? Or are they such in name only, those titles merely attempts at subterfuge for the political shenanigans so evidently needed to continue a failing agenda in the above letter to Kempthorn?
Are the agendists really using the wolf as a weapon, a land torpedo if you will, for a sort of Stalinistic rural cleansing, to their stated agenda of achieving a people-less area here for their own personal self gratification at the expense of our communities, families and some of the last benign and sustainable existences left in the Arizona and New Mexico?
Just who is baiting whom?
I think this quote from Noam Chomsky speaks to the misinformation and agendas victimizing the people and their rights here.
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate.”
