ALASKAN WOLF MASSACRE: SIERRA CLUB BREAKS BOYCOTT
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1994:
FAIRBANKS, Alaska––Alaska’s “ground-based” wolf-killing campaign in
Game Management Unit 20A, south of Fairbanks, was more than $50,000 over bud-
get in early February, with only 84 wolves killed out of a quota of 150––tending to
affirm the view of wolf expert Gordon Haber, Friends of Animals, and the Alaska
Wildlife Alliance that the state greatly overestimated the wolf population of the area
to begin with. Only $100,000 was to be spent on the wolf-killing, including $30,000
for personnel and $15,000 for helicopter rentals, but by mid-January personnel costs
were already over $60,000 and helicopter rentals were at $23,000, the AWA reported.
Finding the federal Airborne Hunting Act impossible to enforce when state
law allows “trappers” to spot wolves from the air, land, walk 300 feet, and shoot
them, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on December 22 proposed a ban on killing
any free-ranging wolves or wolverines on Alaskan National Wildlife Refuges the
same day a hunter is airborne. Killing trapped wolves would still be permitted.
After John Balzar of The Los Angeles Times amplified an observation in the
January/February issue of ANIMAL PEOPLE that the Fund for Animals had not fol-
lowed through on last summer’s pledge to join Friends of Animals and In Defense of
Animals in renewing a tourism boycott of Alaska, the Fund took out an ad in The Los
Angeles Times closely resembling boycott ads FoA published earlier. The Sierra Club
meanwhile broke the boycott with a full-page ad in the West Coast edition of the New
York Times and a mass mailing to membership, promoting Alaskan tourism as a
means of influencing the issue. The ad included a protest coupon to be sent to Alaska
governor Walter Hickel, and a thank-you to Nancy Lethcoe, president of the Alaska
Wilderness Recreation and Tourism Association, for the organization’s “efforts to
protect not only the wolf but all of Alaska’s wildlife.”
Eco-tourism promoters had asked FoA president Priscilla Feral to lift the
boycott because they were economically suffering. However, Feral responded, virtu-
ally all Alaskan tourism could be called eco-tourism, since nature is the main attrac-
tion, and a boycott with exceptions would not be effective.
The wolves are being killed to make more moose and caribou available to
human hunters. However, of the 34 wolves whose stomachs were examined between
publication of the January/February and March editions of ANIMAL PEOPLE, only
one had recently eaten caribou meat.
