Key West The Newspaper

Many states have predator control programs targeting wolves, coyotes or bears that attack livestock. Alaska, however, has an Intensive Management (IM) program designed to kill 75% of all wolves and bears in order to increase populations of game animals – caribou and moose.

IM means shooting these animals on sight and using tactics and technology that can hardly be called sporting, such as –

• Shooting wolves from helicopters and airplanes;
• Using “Judas Wolf” collaring, where state agents radio-collar a wolf who then leads their gunners to the entire pack, where they then kill them all; and
• Employing a practice called “denning” to kill wolf pups and bear cubs in their lairs.

For the most part, these slaughters are not allowed on federal parks and refuges but the predators face “lethal removal” when they venture outside these reserves to devastating results:

• Tourists are now largely unable to see the iconic wolf packs of Denali National Park because there are so few surviving wolves;
• At Yukon-Charley National Preserve, a more than 20-year study of predator-prey dynamics has ended because the state has killed so many of the park’s radio-collared wolves. Park biologists now conclude that their wolf packs are “no longer in a natural state” nor able to maintain a “self-sustaining population”; and
• The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service adopted a rule barring state predator control operations from its Alaskan national wildlife refuges. Director Dan Ashe, an official not known for standing on principle, declared that “there comes a time when the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service must stand up for the authorities and principles that underpin our work and say ‘no.’”

PEER is also pushing back by acting to –

• Eliminate any federal direct or indirect subsidies for Alaskan predator control;
• Establish buffers around federal lands so that wolf packs can exist in a functioning ecosystem; and
• End the controversial and unsafe practice of shooting wildlife from planes.
• This is part of a broader effort to end militarized wildlife management throughout the U.S. We recently won a major court ruling ending depredation orders in Eastern states.

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About PEER

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) is a national alliance of local state and federal resource professionals. PEER’’s environmental work is solely directed by the needs of its members. As a consequence, we have the distinct honor of serving resource professionals who daily cast profiles in courage in cubicles across the country. Read more at http://www.peer.org/about-us/