Kill, Baby, Kill

Dudgeon and his staff are confident that there are no more than 3.1 wolves per 1,000 square kilometers. Fish and Game had claimed there were no fewer than 8 and perhaps 8.9. How were these wildly disparate numbers divined? Well, the Park Service estimate issues from intense, peer-reviewed wolf studies with the aid of radio collars since 1993. Fish and Game’s issues from eyeballing small sample plots from the air and “anecdotal information”—that is, asking Gus the Gunner and Pete the Pilot, both of whom derive money from killing wolves and thus don’t want to see wolf removal shut down, how many wolves and wolf tracks they’ve seen.

Here’s how Van Ballenberghe assesses Fish and Game’s wolf-survey methodology: “Fish and Game makes it sound as if they have precise numbers when they don’t. The only way to derive reasonably accurate estimates without radio collars is to fly an aerial survey with good snow, wind, and light conditions, and with experienced pilots. They did not do this in this area and seldom do it elsewhere. So they pony up an unreliable estimate from pilot reports. They can hammer the wolves as hard as they can, and immigrants will eventually fill the void, form new packs, and reproduce at high rates. That begs several questions relating to disrupting the genetics and social structure of a wolf population and possibly increasing predation on ungulates.”

Between March 14 and March 19 helicopter gunners killed 84 wolves in the Upper Yukon-Tanana Wolf Control Area. On March 20 David James informed me that the operation had been suspended “until we get new snowfall for tracking.”

The Alaska Wildlife Alliance’s Toppenberg has a different explanation: “We have evidence that one of the reasons they suspended the program was that they couldn’t find any more wolves. Basically, they’ve killed them all.”

Can Alaska bootstrap itself from futile, counterproductive, 19th century–style predator persecution to genuine wildlife management based on what Leopold called a “land ethic”? Not with governors like Sarah Palin and the type of managers and Board of Game members they appoint. But as Audubon’s Schoen observes, that doesn’t mean that Palin is the root cause of the catastrophe under way in our wildest state. “The primary devil,” he submits, “is the Intensive Management Act of 1994”—the statute that stipulates that the “highest and best use” of moose and caribou is passing through human digestive tracts.

The law was pushed through by old politicians with old ideas who longed for pre-statehood days when moose and caribou populations were at unnatural and dangerous highs because predators had been poisoned, trapped, and shot off. Back then there was so little hunting pressure from humans that most anytime and anywhere you wished there were roads you could drive up to “Alaska’s livestock,” crank down your truck window, and slaughter more than you needed.

There’s nothing wrong with predator control if it’s done for legitimate purposes, such as saving endangered birds from human-caused overpopulations of gulls, skunks, raccoons, and feral cats. Audubon does it all the time. But killing off predators in a vain attempt to convert America’s best and wildest land to an ever-expanding Stop-and-Shop for an ever-expanding human population is as brainless as it is counterproductive.

“I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer,” wrote Aldo Leopold. Moose and caribou are deer, yet it has apparently never occurred to Palin, her Board of Game, the Outdoor Council, the majority of the legislature, or the political hacks calling the shots at Fish and Game that an unnatural plethora of ungulates isn’t good and that an unnatural paucity of wolves and bears can cause them to die, as Leopold put it, of their “own too much.”

On March 26, 2009, Palin picked the state’s new attorney general—Wayne Anthony Ross, who helped run her 2006 gubernatorial campaign and who serves on the NRA’s national board (having stepped down as NRA vice president). According to the governor, he’s going to achieve the impossible: managing game “for abundance through science.”

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