Kill, Baby, Kill

Also in 2007 Palin introduced her Active Management/Airborne Shooting Bill, which, for the first time, would have legalized same-day airborne sport hunting of black and grizzly bears and the selling of tanned bear hides. It also would have granted the Board of Game official (instead of just tacit) permission to ignore scientific data. After passing the House, Palin’s bill died in Senate committee, although from lack of time, not lack of enthusiasm.

“The department does not support the taking of any grizzly bear by trapping, snaring, or same-day-airborne, or the sale of tanned bear hides, even in brown bear predator-control areas,” Fish and Game informed the board in the spring of 2008. But a year later the agency told the board that it endorsed all these things. Such flip-flops didn’t happen before Valkenburg and Rossi showed up.

Palin isn’t the first Alaska governor to seek a wider war, just the most successful. I was with Governor Walter Hickel in Fairbanks in January 1993 when he attempted to win the American public over to industrial-strength wolf cleansing via a three-day “Wolf Summit,” at which he repeated his memorable line: “You can’t let nature just run wild.” Moose and caribou, he explained, were “Alaska’s livestock.” And as with all agribusiness operations, natural predator abundance could not be tolerated. The previous winter wolves had been tranquilized and fitted with radio collars so that “wolf managers” could home in on packs and hose them down with semi-automatic shotguns.

The summit had been designed, Hickel kept saying, to facilitate the “constructive exchange of ideas.” But I quickly learned that in order to “exchange ideas” with wolf-removal advocates, one needed to have the right ideas, and in national publications I had repeatedly expressed the wrong ones. The politest response I got was from Richard Bishop, with whom I had frequently exchanged ideas when he was a regional supervisor for Fish and Game. He had since moved on to chief lobbyist for the Alaska Outdoor Council before becoming its president, a position he held until last February. Bishop scrutinized my name tag, spat the words “Ted Williams,” turned on his heel, and stomped off.

Somehow Hickel failed to win over the American public. After receiving at least 100,000 nastygrams and facing a major tourist boycott, he tested the water by substituting snaring and shooting in the ears for shotgunning from the air. Somehow the public didn’t go for that either, especially after it watched a video by wildlife scientist Gordon Haber that aired around the world (even in China) and showed snared wolves chewing off their frozen feet. The governor watched his game-farm vision for Alaska take wing as nature continued to run wild.

Smarting from the insult from “away,” the Outdoor Council descended on the legislature, pushing through the Intensive Management Act of 1994, which imposes Abraham’s land ethic on Fish and Game by stipulating that the “highest and best use of most big game populations is to provide for high levels of harvest for human use.” The agency speaks the truth when it proclaims that it must, by law, manage for unnatural ungulate abundance.

Still, in 1995 newly elected Governor Tony Knowles halted most wolf removal. Again the Outdoor Council hissed into the ears of lawmakers, in due course convincing them to disappear the criterion of a biological emergency for predator cleansing. Knowles vetoed the bill, but the legislature overrode. In 2003, after a decade-long near cease fire, the Board of Game reinstated airborne wolf killing by private citizens.

Predator-removal advocates keep telling me that all the boot prints I’ve left in Alaska don’t count, that no flatlander from “away” can ever understand “Alaskan reality.” So I consulted Vic Van Ballenberghe of Anchorage, a moose and wolf biologist, formerly with the U.S. Forest Service and now a private consultant. He was twice appointed to the Board of Game by Governor Knowles (then removed by Murkowski), and he has hunted during each of the past 50 years. If anyone understands “Alaskan reality,” it’s Van Ballenberghe.

“None of these [predator-removal] units have anything but crude carrying capacity estimates,” he declared. “At best, Fish and Game does a few superficial browse studies, and invariably they tell the board that an area can support more moose. That’s a dangerous approach. You don’t want the maximum number of moose out there, because that could cause a crash with the next severe winter.”

At the request of Governor Knowles the National Academy of Sciences studied predator removal and, in 1997, issued an excellent report that outlined rigorous biological and economic standards and guidelines. Knowles embraced them. Murkowski and Palin tossed them out.