Gray Wolves Start To Make a Comeback, Only to be Illegally Hunted

How can we protect our Environment, if we not only refuse to protect, but go out of our way to kill those species who live within the environment, that are at greatest risk?

Growing up in Michigan, I never saw a wolf in the wild, though they once ranged widely across much of North America. Predator control programs wiped them out in most of the lower 48 states and they had disappeared from Michigan’s Lower Peninsula by the early 20th century and were all but gone from the Upper Peninsula by 1960, when a state bounty program was repealed.

As a child, I’d heard stories though, of wolves that had inhabited the forests that my Grandfathers farms sat on, and during the winter, I’d sit in the snow under those trees and pretend that I could hear them howling.

In Segola Michigan, Brian Roell got word from an aerial surveillance crew that a gray wolf’s radio collar was indicating no movement, he knew what it probably meant.

A few hours later, the wolf program coordinator for Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources was trudging through a swampy backwoods near this township in the Upper Peninsula with another wildlife biologist and a DNR conservation officer. Guided by a hand-held antenna that picked up the radio collar’s rapid beeps, the searchers made their way into a thick black cedar stand. There, in a slight depression, lay the dead wolf on its back, legs jutting skyward.

The 6-year-old male, his neck soaked with blood, appeared to have been dragged to this spot. The wound on the right side of his chest left no doubt about the cause of death: a bullet from a small-caliber rifle.

The wolf was among more than three dozen believed to have been deliberately and illegally killed in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula within the past five years, according to DNR data obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act. Officials in other north central and Rocky Mountain states report scores of wolf shootings despite legal protection for the animal driven to near extinction in many areas.

Some residents of the sprawling, rural Upper Peninsula deeply resent the wolf’s presence. Among them are hunters who believe the wily predators are decimating the whitetail deer herd and farmers who have lost livestock to wolf raids.

This battle between Ranchers and Carnivorous Animals goes back as far as Humanity itself. Since man has raised domesticated meat, animals like wolves have preyed on that meat. Granted, it’s not an easy equation, when deciding between the priority of someones ability to raise meat unmolested and a species of animals extinction. But it is when we go from “Culling down the numbers in an attempt to support ourselves” to “placing negative iconic representation on a certain animal and then sport hunting it to extinction” that I get upset.

One Michigan rancher was quoted as saying “They’re natural born killers!” Well of course they are you moron! Just like we are! But the difference is that we evolved into a culture that does our killing with our dollars at the grocery store. We pay you, Mr. Rancher, to do our killing for us. Just as assuredly as that wolf kills your cow, we kill your cow too, every time we buy meat. Lets not talk about natural born killers Mr. Rancher.

You see, that’s the thing with us, we don’t get the whole “Circle of Life” thing. We think the circle starts and stops with us, and does not involve any other person, group, process or species other than ourselves.

I digress. I neither advocate nor do I shun hunting. I am a firm believer in the “Shoot what you eat” philosophy though, and I believe that any single species of animal is neither good nor evil. It’s not natural to place human emotions on an animal. Animals have their place in nature, not in our heads.

Consider what happened when the Wolf was almost hunted to extinction in areas of the Western United States. Wolves, as a prey driven animal, hide when they stalk game. The game, in this case, Caribou, learned not to go into the places where the wolves like to stalk. (Well sheltered areas amongst the trees, near creeks and rivers.)

As the wolf numbers fell, due to hunting, the Caribou were free to forage amongst the trees and shrubs that had once hidden the wolves. The result? Without a natural predator, the Caribou numbers exploded, and the result of that was the death of thousands of trees due to overgrazing. The mouse and rodent population exploded to, as 90% of a wolfs diet is mice, and the dominoes just kept on tipping, effecting one species after another.

I think that we need to realize that we are the only species on the planet that is not relied upon by another species for it’s survival. Yet we rely on the whole ecological system for our own.

What do you think?

Adam Shake

Thank you for visiting Twilight Earth for your Environmental World News

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