To some, it seemed like madness to set aside these lands, to close off any space whatsoever to hunting, or to curtail the trade in wildlife parts. Yet the idea of protecting millions of acres and placing limits on their exploitation reflected a new sensibility and code of ethics: that other species have a place and purpose of their own, that there are limits not only to what is possible with nature but also to what is right, and that public access to these great places was a unique source of American vitality.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the slaughter of wildlife had been checked, in part because so little wildlife had survived. America saw the first serious campaign to restore some of what had been, and along with that came a debate about the correct philosophical approach to conservation. One of the men who shaped that debate was Aldo Leopold—another figure who, like Roosevelt, was fraught with contradictions and whose legacy is still felt today. A forester, conservationist, and, like Roosevelt, a sport hunter, Leopold is recognized as one of the founders of the game-management model that has dominated wildlife policy in America in the post–World War II era.
A professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin, he argued that the hunting of animals could be rationalized—that government wildlife agencies could treat deer, ducks, and other game species as a crop and manage them scientifically to produce a maximum-sustained yield for the benefit of society. By blending the science of wildlife management with agricultural principles and theory, Leopold focused not on individual wild animals but on the maintenance of populations. State and federal fish and wildlife agencies embraced these principles and sought to rebuild animal populations, such as deer and elk, and to stock pheasants, turkeys, and other game animals to cater to hunters, setting up an interlocking relationship between hunters and government agencies that continues to this day.
But Leopold also advocated restraint. In his master work, A Sand County Almanac, he advanced the often-quoted principle: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Leopold opposed state killing of predator species, but despite his warnings, the war on predators never really stopped—it only changed form. Most hunters viewed them as competitors, and ranchers and farmers thought of them as vermin. In 1931, Congress passed the Animal Damage Control Act promoting the elimination of predators “injurious to agriculture.” Leopold opposed this idea, pointing to the example of the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona. There, he claimed, after government hunters killed all the mountain lions, the deer population increased by tenfold and then crashed, causing starvation and suffering, as well as serious damage to forest health.
The scenario that Leopold laid out has been challenged over the years, but Kaibab became a defining case study in American wildlife-management theory, and it drove the argument that human hunters were needed to control deer populations, absent predation by wolves and mountain lions. This idea influenced the 1937 Pittman-Robertson Act, which levied a federal tax on gun and ammunition sales and directed the proceeds to state fish and wildlife agencies as an incentive to support hunting. Natural resource programs at major universities churned out staff for the state agencies and incorporated the thinking of foresters and agricultural economists in creating the new breed of wildlife managers, providing intellectual reinforcement for the game-management model.
As wildlife managers succeeded in growing larger game populations, states sold more hunting licenses, and the industry grew. The dogmas of wildlife management took hold and would not come under serious challenge until the last quarter of the twentieth century. That’s when the animal-protection movement began to stand up to the hunting industry. And that’s also when conservation biologists emerged to challenge wildlife policies focused almost exclusively on producing game for hunters instead of protecting wildlife for its own sake and for broader ecological purposes.
Unaccustomed to being questioned, hunters during this same period formed new lobbying groups, such as the U.S. Sportsmen’s Alliance and Safari Club International, and existing groups like the National Rifle Association took on a harder edge. These organizations can still be heard trading on the memories and reputations of men like Roosevelt and Leopold, even as they accept and promote practices considered contemptible and unsportsmanlike, such as shooting animals confined to pens, setting robotic ducks afloat to act as decoys, and using high-tech gadgetry like telescopic sights and global positioning systems that remove from the blood sports whatever modest measure of fairness they ever had.
“Let’s Kill Them All”: The Attack on Alaska’s Wolves
A FEW YEARS AFTER my winter 1989 trip to Yellowstone, I was dispatched to Alaska. It was the winter of 1993 and the Fund for Animals was dealing with a different wildlife controversy. The issue was Alaska’s notorious wolf-control program—one of the intractable wildlife-management debates of our time.
The occasion for the trip was a so-called Wolf Summit, a gathering hastily called by Governor Walter Hickel to facilitate “the exchange of ideas” after he grudgingly suspended plans to launch an aerial wolf-hunting program. Hickel, elected in 1990 as the candidate of the Alaska’s newly formed Independence Party, convened the three-day summit in mid-January, when the sun peeks above the horizon for about four and a half hours a day and the thermometer can sink to forty below zero.
He set the meeting at a hockey rink in Fairbanks, the state’s second-largest city but its main stronghold for prohunting activism and political conservatism. Governor Hickel advertised my presence and the attendance of a small cadre of other animal advocates from Outside—as Alaskans term the Lower 48. The governor’s antics had the desired effect. About fifteen hundred locals, some decked out in wolf fur, turned out for the summit to rally for the “Alaska way of life.” The pro-wolf-slaying assembly was about as interested in the exchange of ideas as the beer-swilling crowds at the hockey games that usually filled this venue. It didn’t take long for me or the other Outsiders to realize that the purpose of the whole exercise was to make us feel as unwelcome as possible, while the state “reeducated” the American public on why Alaska is different and wolf control desperately needed.
A few months earlier, Hickel had advocated the aerial-hunting plan by declaring, “You just can’t let nature run wild.” But wolves were not a safety threat to people or to livestock in the vast wilderness between Anchorage and Fairbanks. Hickel had called moose and caribou “Alaska’s livestock,” and the transparent purpose of the wolf-control program was to boost their numbers, so that hunters could shoot more of them.
Even so, the reeducation efforts were not taking—and most Americans asked only that the wolves be left alone. About one hundred thousand people wrote or called the governor’s office, and many promised they’d boycott travel to Alaska if the state went ahead with its aerial killing. As national director of the Fund for Animals, I urged the public to take their wildlife-watching trips elsewhere if Alaska intended to slaughter wolves from the air. Alaska couldn’t have it both ways—luring nature lovers to the state with glorious images of wildlife and stunning landscapes, while engaging in a deliberate program of wildlife extirpation.
Tourism is Alaska’s third-largest industry, and business owners who relied on Outsiders made their worries known to the governor. But even after Hickel bowed to their concerns and suspended the program, he remained defiant, and I had no illusion that the state would relent for long. At the summit, Hickel had pandered to the raucous crowd, declaring “I will not be a part of Alaska giving away its sovereignty over the management of fish and game. We have a right to care for this land, according to our knowledge of the North.” He said people from Outside knew about Alaska from the television show Northern Exposure, but that “people here have to deal with northern reality.”
Since Alaska’s statehood in 1959 successive governors have had the opportunity to put their signatures on wolf-management programs, but none had ever given wolves a reprieve. It generall
y just got worse for the wolves. Hunters and trappers annually kill five hundred to a thousand wolves, and the only reason it’s not more is the vastness of Alaska and the difficulty in accessing the bush—hence the interest in aerial wolf control. In terms of standard tools, trapping has been the cruelest method used. If wolves are snared around the neck, blood is trapped in the head and it swells to double its normal size—a gruesome phenomenon known as “jelly head.” Moose, lynx, and other animals also get snared, and this “bycatch” is another awful consequence of the method. If caught in a leghold trap, the struggling wolves sometimes resort to chewing off a frozen limb. Scenes of just that agonizing spectacle were captured on film in the 1990s by Dr. Gordon Haber, an independent wolf biologist, and for millions of Americans these images were hard to forget.
Cooked up by political appointees at the Alaska Board of Game, the plan was to use fixed-winged aircraft and helicopters to reduce targeted populations by 80 percent—with the aerial gunners killing three hundred to five hundred wolves. This wasn’t a novel program. In the 1960s, the aerial gunning of wolves and polar bears in Alaska had shocked the nation and prompted Congress to pass the Airborne Hunting Act of 1971. That law forbids killing wildlife from the air or shooting animals within twenty-four hours of landing the aircraft, with exceptions for the protection of public health and of wildlife populations. Land-and-shoot hunting was, in many respects, worse than airborne shooting. The pilots would harass and chase the wolves by aircraft, exhausting them to the point that they could run no longer. They’d then land the aircraft and shoot the terrified animals unable to flee because of lactic acid built up in their muscles. Under Hickel’s plan, the state sidestepped the federal law by arguing that aerial wolf hunting would boost depleted populations of moose and caribou.
The summit proved to be nothing but a chance for the wolf-killing lobby to posture and vent. I had a few conversations with state wildlife officials, but the leaders of the Alaska Outdoor Council, the state’s primary hunting lobby, had no interest in talking. Hickel took the press on a same-day land-and-lobby jaunt to Minto, an Athabascan Indian village forty miles west of Fairbanks that was strongly in favor of wolf killing. In this piece of sylvan theater, a tribal member named Ronnie, one of a roster of speakers at the local gym, complained, “We don’t manage your cattle, so why should you manage ours?” He added, “I’m all for wolf control. Let’s kill them all.” His point, apparently, was that the state should not manage wildlife, but actively hunt wolves to the point of extinction. I was thankful that many tribal members disagreed, and some of them spoke up at the Wolf Summit.
Having made their case at the summit and elsewhere, the Board of Game convened and reauthorized a wolf-control plan for the next year, only slightly scaling back its original plan. Hickel had packed the board with the most notorious wolf-control advocates in the state, many of whom were closely affiliated with the Alaska Outdoor Council. Still, it wasn’t as if the Alaska Department of Fish and Game had a starkly different viewpoint. The department’s director of conservation had himself joined aerial wolf-gunning expeditions as a regional wildlife manager in Tok and earned the moniker David “Machine Gun” Kelleyhouse.
Wolf-control programs went forward that year, but after Alaska elected Democrat Tony Knowles as governor in 1994, he grounded the aerial-gunning program. And two years after his election, voters approved by a wide margin a citizen initiative on the November 1996 ballot to ban aerial wolf gunning except in “a biological emergency.” This outcome demolished the wolf hunters’ claim that this was a clash between Alaskans and Outsiders. Alaskans wanted, at the very least, aerial wolf killing to stop, and polls revealed even a majority of hunters favored this position.
That should have settled the matter. Yet remarkably, state lawmakers overturned the voter-approved citizen initiative in the following year’s legislative session. Unbowed by the actions in Juneau, wildlife advocates put a second measure on the ballot in 2000 to stop aerial gunning and voters approved that reform, too. And again lawmakers overturned it—defying their constituents for a second time on the same issue.
But the most destructive thing that lawmakers did was to pass, back in 1994, the Intensive Management Act, declaring that “the highest and best use of most big game populations is to provide for high levels of harvest for human use.” Signed by Governor Hickel as one of his final acts, this legislation effectively committed the state, as a matter of law, to manipulating predator populations so that people could kill more moose and caribou for the freezer. Wolves and bears be damned.
After Knowles left office at the end of 2002, his successors Frank Murkowski and Sarah Palin lifted the restraints on wolf killing. Both had close ties to the Alaska Outdoor Council and an unqualified political enthusiasm for wolf killing. They launched aerial-gunning programs not only for wolves, but for bears, and Palin even proposed paying bounties for the left forelimbs of wolves. Seeing this harsh turn, voters put a third anti-aerial-gunning measure on the ballot in August 2009, but this time, in a low-turnout primary, it was defeated. The governor’s office itself committed $400,000 to an in-state PR campaign promoting the value of “predator management” programs. Having twice voted to end a practice they considered cruel and unwarranted, clearly Alaskans themselves now needed to be “reeducated.”
“Garbaging for Bears”: Commercial Hunting and Contemptible Conduct
AT HSUS, WE HAVE not campaigned against all forms of sport hunting in Alaska or any other part of the country. Despite the over-blown claims of the NRA and other prohunting organizations that we are working to ban it all, we’ve largely asked hunters to hold themselves, at the very least, to their own professed standards of conduct. Retrieve and eat what you kill, treat wildlife as a public resource and do not kill for commerce, observe traditional norms of sportsmanship and fair chase, and do not subject animals to lingering deaths.
These are standards that no politically influential hunting organization advocates today—indeed, none of these groups asks its members to abide by any serious ethical code of conduct. On the contrary, the politically active hunting groups are the ones who promote the worst practices and resist any restraints at all. When it comes to the insanity of predator-control programs, Audubon magazine columnist and lifelong advocate of hunting ethics Ted Williams captured the mind-set long ago: “Wolves don’t pay for hunting licenses and every moose or caribou lost to a wolf is one less hunting license fee paid to the state.”
As unfair or unethical as wolf control in Alaska may seem, it is hardly unique in our era. Everywhere predators live in the United States, they are under assault from ranchers and sport hunters. In the northern Rockies and Great Lakes region, wildlife officials are doing their best to delist wolves and begin killing them for sport. Mountain lions inhabit a dozen western states, and they are hunted in nearly all of them, principally by hunters who use hounds fitted with radio telemetry collars to track down the animals and kill them. Only California bans trophy hunting, and that came through a ballot initiative in 1990. Even there, the state’s hunting lobby persuaded lawmakers to put a repeal measure on the ballot just six years later, after two fatal lion attacks on people. On this second vote, the margin of victory against hunting was even greater—not because of any lack of sympathy for the victims, but because there was no evidence that trophy hunters killing lions would at all diminish the small possibility of a lion attack on a person. Voters in Oregon and Washington followed up, in 1994 and 1996, respectively, by banning the hunting of lions with packs of dogs, again scoring a victory for the principles of sportsmanship and the place of predators in the ecosystem.
In the interior West, however, thousands of mountain lions are still shot and killed each year. Montana trophy hunters kill hundreds annually, even though the state has no idea how many lions there are. In Utah, hunting guides have used “roping and choking” techniques, in which they tree a lion, rope and choke the creature to the point of suffocation, and then release him just ahead of the dogs
of a fee-paying client. The table set for him, the so-called hunter then shoots a dazed, half-dead lion out of a tree. Such heroic exploits can be enjoyed for about $3,000.
Black bears are treated no better. In more than a half-dozen states, it is still legal to hunt bears during the spring, when females are nursing dependent cubs. When the females are shot just three or four months after giving birth, the cubs are doomed to starve. In the spring, or in the more typical fall hunting seasons, ten states allow bear baiting, in which food is set out as a lure and the bears are shot while feeding. Ted Williams calls it “garbaging for bears,” with pizza, jelly doughnuts, grease, and rotting meats set up in fifty-five-gallon drums to draw the bear into shooting range. The U.S. Forest Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service admonish forest users to “never feed bears,” but they make an exception for baiters who dump millions of pounds of food in the woods during the hunting season in order to get an easy shot. The bears regularly visit the bait sites—making them less wary of people and more inclined to raid other human trash sources. It’s the very thing that wildlife agencies claim is detrimental to bears and people, but they apparently suspend that thinking when it comes to trophy hunters.
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