First wolves killed in largest effort since Alaska statehood
By Joel Gay
Anchorage Daily News
Anchorage, Alaska – Private airplane pilots have gunned down
the first four wolves from the air in what could be the biggest
government-sponsored killing of the animals since Alaska statehood.
State game managers believe
the effort, targeting more than 500 of the predators for death,
should make moose and caribou more plentiful in coming years.
The goal is to give hunters a better chance to fill their freezers.
Opponents say the program is
unnecessary. They believe that the predator-prey balance in most
of the state is within normal levels and that moose and caribou
herds don’t need human intervention.
“Alaskans need to get
on the horn to the governor and put an end to this genocide,”
said Karen Deatherage, Anchorage spokeswoman for the national wildlife conservation group Defenders of Wildlife.
Calls for another tourism boycott
have already begun.
Gov. Frank Murkowski paved
the way for lethal predator control to resume shortly after he
was elected in 2002 by stocking the Alaska Board of Game with
advocates of wolf control and by signing legislation that allows
private pilots to do the killing.
Working under state and federal
permits, the pilot-gunner teams are not paid. Their compensation
is the pelts of wolves they shoot, which can range in value from
worthless to several hundred dollars, depending on quality.
After a decade in which the
state virtually stopped performing lethal predator control, the
wolf-kill effort began last winter. At the request of hunters,
the Game Board has expanded efforts to four more game management
units.
Pilot-gunner teams working
around McGrath shot two wolves from the air last week.
The new plan also calls for
killing some 80 grizzly bears, which can be more deadly than
wolves to newborn moose and caribou calves. The board is allowing
predator-control participants to lure the animals with bait _
a strategy that sport hunters can’t normally use with brown bears.
Thousands of wolves were killed
in the 1950s by government employees and by private hunters who
earned bounties for each animal, which allowed game populations
to soar.
This year’s plan appears to
be the biggest in decades, said Vic Van Ballenberghe, a wildlife
biologist in Alaska since the early 1970s.
“Barring any unusual circumstances,
there’s every reason to believe it will result in the largest
number of wolves taken (in predator control programs) since the
1950s,” he said.
Several groups tried to halt
the state’s new effort by promoting a boycott of Alaska tourism
last winter, and efforts have started again. Friends of Animals, a Connecticut-based organization, placed an advertisement in
the New York Times Sunday magazine last week asking people to
stay home in 2005.
But the boycott didn’t appear
to have much effect in the past year, said Dave Worrell of the
Alaska Travel Industry Association. The total number of visitors
rose 9 percent from 2003, he said, with gains in cruise ship
traffic, airline passengers and highway visitors.
“The bottom line is that
we didn’t see an impact,” Worrell said. “I just don’t think it was as widely publicized as they would have liked it
to be.”