Stop Mass Slaughters

Please Support The PAW Act

Dear Representative,

We’re writing because of our profound concern about the mass slaughter of wolves in Alaska, and those planned in the Northern Rockies; aerial gunning has been illegal since 1972, and the claims used to evade the law are in opposition to all available data and scientifically supported wildlife management. Neither were they intended seriously, as former Governor Palin has been documented in complaining about wildlife conservation in many unrelated contexts, e.g., as a threat to gas and oil interests.

Aerial gunning is an exceptionally cruel practice, being used against mothers and cubs in their dens. Wolves are chased by aircraft until they collapse from exhaustion, and have been documented vomiting due to terror and stress when forced to run from aerial assault; when they collapse, usually wounded, the aircraft land, if they can’t finish killing them at point blank range otherwise. Wounded wolves also suffer in the extreme before dying, if they manage to collapse where difficult to reach. Aerial gunning is known to wildlife scientists and workers as one form of “canned hunting”.

You may be our greatest hope to stop this atrocity, by co-sponsoring H.R. 3663, also known as The Protect America’s Wildlife, or PAW Act. While this wonderful legislation has 129 co-sponsors, it’s been blocked in committee since October of 2008, and obviously needs about another hundred. If you are a co-sponsor, you have our profound and heartfelt gratitude; yet now, we have to ask that you do everything possible to see that more co-sponsors will help, and allow this desperately needed legislation to be unblocked, in the face of the special interests in such aggressive opposition to it.

It’s well established that aerial gunning is only done for the benefit of “trophy” hunters, even though many hunters oppose it. Safari Club International, known primarily for its association to “canned hunting”, has funded the current slaughters and the fight against litigation to stop them, by a united front of the world’s most highly regarded environmental and wildlife non-profits. Safari Club International is comprised primarily of urban and out of state “trophy” hunters, and is a very wealthy special interest group. Private aircraft are commonly used, with wolves’ corpses often displayed on the aircraft, and Alaska is also using aerial gunning against bears, also during denning and birth season.

Most of our wolves are in Alaska, but their numbers are low there; the possibility of extinction of all wolves in our country is very real, and far too near. States in which wolf populations are much smaller, and only remain because of historic reintroduction from Canada in 1995, are planning to use aerial gunning against them, according to plans that will ensure their extinction in the lower 48 states, after a brief period of genetic damage, for obvious reasons. The low numbers of wolves there now, make them clearly endangered, and their premature delisting from ESA protections, for the second time by Secretary Salazar, persisting in an awful Bush era decision, is a reversal of President Obama’s stay against their delisting, and a violation of one of the Obama Administration’s key promises.

In addition to having no legitimate rationale, or serious attempt to pretend any, this destruction of our wolf population is extraordinarily damaging to the larger ecology, in which wolves have a very crucial and complex role. Their reintroduction has already benefitted our ecologies beyond measure, including in other wildlife becoming more prominent and growth that had been presumed lost reappearing. Wolf and bear management must be done by qualified, ecologically intelligent people. Only 1/10th of a percentage point of livestock loss is related to wolf encounters, and extensive programs to support ranchers’ relations with wolves are in place. Of course wolves have rarely killed humans throughout our nation’s history, and no healthy wolf ever has.

As a species known to wildlife specialists as a top predator, and keystone or umbrella species, the loss of wolf populations causes immeasurably profound and extensive damage, to other wildlife and surrounding ecologies. They’re now endangered in areas that are certainly among our most precious national heritage, as some of the most beautiful and ecologically wealthy places on Earth. Our nation is deeply impoverished by this cruel and irrational practice, and certainly disgraced.

The former Governor of Alaska’s personally appointed Alaska Board of Game, supported this savage practice in spite of overwhelming opposition from Alaskan voters. This is also in strenuous opposition to National Research Council recommendations, and a united front of qualified scientists; Alaska Wildlife Troopers have also presented strong opposition to this barbarism, and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game is concerned about risks to humans, in outdoor activity areas at their peak season, due to the extensiveness of the slaughters, inclusion of amateurs, and their non-seasonal ongoing basis. Alaska is also using snares and poison gas, including in dens, and at the mouth of dens, against pups and mothers during the birthing season, both practices being unprecedented in any context, because of their extreme cruelty, in Alaska’s history. This is against both wolves and bears, as well as other wildlife. As with aerial gunning, these victims are frequently skinned and butchered in plain sight, for “trophies”. Now we face exactly the same scenario in the Northern Rockies, funded by exactly the same special interests.

Please do everything in your power to ensure that H.R. 3663 is passed, to address this ongoing tragedy, and stop the nightmare of turning our nation into a “canned hunt”. Anything else can only be seen as allowing continued flaunting of the American people’s overwhelmingly expressed values and the rule of law, for a small and morally bankrupt, if wealthy, special interest group.

Time is very important, of course. Please do everything you can, to stop this American tragedy and support our genuine needs and values.

Sincerely,
The Undersigned

[Your name]