Alaska Game board authorizes aerial wolf shooting
By Yereth Rosen
ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Nov 4 (Reuters) – Alaska hunters will be allowed to
shoot wolves from aircraft for the first time since 1972 under a plan
approved on Tuesday by the state Board of Game.
The board, which sets policy for state wildlife management, authorized the
aerial wolf control program in limited parts of interior Alaska where
local hunters say populations of moose and other game have been depleted.
“We’ve seen both wolf numbers increase dramatically and prey populations
— moose and caribou — decrease dramatically,” said Mike Fleagle, the
board’s chairman.
State officials do not want to revert to the days of wolf eradication
programs, he said. But past state policies have been too protective of
wolves, he said. “I just think it’s gone way too much to the extreme,
where we’re deifying the wolves,” he said.
Fewer than 200 of the state’s 15,000 wild wolves will be killed under the
program, which is to take place this winter and to involve shooting from
aircraft as well as land-and-shoot practices, said officials with the
Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
Environmentalists criticized the plan.
“We’re leaping back many decades into old practices, shooting wolves from
the air,” said Paul Joslin, a biologist with the Alaska Wildlife Alliance.
He and other activists argued that the Board of Game, a panel made up
entirely of hunters, is acting contrary to the wishes of most Alaskans.
Voters in 1996 and in 2000 approved ballot initiatives banning
aircraft-assisted wolf hunting, Joslin pointed out.
Alaska wolves are not classified as threatened or endangered, and hundreds
are killed legally each year by trappers.
But wolf control — killing wild wolves to boost game populations for
hunters’ benefit — has long drawn heated opposition. The last aerial
control program, conducted in the early 1990s, was halted by a threatened
tourist boycott and other expressions of public disapproval.
“I know that this is going to be a real controversial program. There are
strong feelings on both sides, and it’s a clash of values,” Wayne Regelin,
deputy commissioner of the state Department of Fish and Game, said at a
news conference on Tuesday.