Wildlife
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 1993:
Hunting interests within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and recent presi-
dential administrations have kept the USFWS Division of Law Enforcement so under-
staffed and underbudgeted that senior agents admit they can’t effectively halt illegal
wildlife trafficking or even make more than a token effort to enforce the Airborne Hunting
Act, Jessica Speart revealed in the July/August issue of Buzzworm. The International
Primate Protection League has appealed for letters to Congress and the Senate in support
of H.R. 2360, a bill by Rep. Richard Lehman (D-Calif.) to create an assistant directorship
within USFWS for the Division of Law Enforcement, thereby increasing its clout in inter-
nal political struggles. However, IPPL believes the word “wildlife” should be deleted
from a phrase in Lehman’s bill that would require the new post to be filled by someone
with “wildlife law enforcement experience,” inasmuch as people with backgrounds in the
U.S. Customs Service, Secret Service, or Drug Enforcement Agency might be equally
well qualified, and would be less likely to have personal involvement in sport hunting.
Alaska could begin killing wolves to make more moose and caribou avail-
able to sport hunters as early as October 1, under a plan adopted in late June (see the
July/August ANIMAL PEOPLE for details), but the international boycott of Alaskan
tourism called in response by Friends of Animals gathered momentum July 6 with the
endorsement of the 55-member European Federation for Nature and Animals. The
National Parks and Conservation Association, instrumental in enforcing the boycott last
year that kept Alaska from executing a similar scheme, stopped short of joining the cur-
rent boycott, but NPCA Alaska regional director Chip Dennerlein warned governor
Walter Hickel on July 20 that allowing trappers to spot wolves from aircraft and then
shoot them after landing is “a disappointing backslide,” which “abandons the principles of
fair chase and facilitates unethical hunting…It sends a simple message to the 350,000
NPCA members which I represent: in Alaska, if we can’t kill wolves one way, we’ll get
’em another.” Hickel, meanwhile, filed a $29 billion lawsuit against the U.S. government
on July 23, alleging that the establishment of national parks and wilderness areas in
Alaska is a violation of the 1959 statehood agreement. The suit came two weeks after the
USFWS, National Park Service, and U.S. Forest Service warned Alaska that the more
than 129 million acres they control are still off limits to any and all wolf-killing.
A small group called Restore the North Woods, based in Colebrook, New
Hampshire, has distributed 10,000 tabloid newspapers calling for the reintroduction of
timber wolves to northern New England––but some experts believe timber wolves were
never native to the region, and that the “wolves” the first European settlers fought were
actually the animal now known as the eastern coyote.
A five-year, $700,000 study of 32 pumas in the Santa Ana mountains of
California has learned that cars are by far their leading cause of death, killing eight out of
the 25 who died. The study was done by Orange County and the Dept. of Fish and Game.
