Mood:
downTopic: A Hello to Arms
The gray wolf has historically had a hard time dealing with human coexistence, especially in the contiguous United States, although recently (as in during the last 30 years) their numbers have risen through fedeal funding for reintroduction and conservational PR pushes.
In Alaska... well... their numbers have never dwindled and, in fact, those numbers seem to be rising unchecked...
...eegh...
I'm no idiot granola-eating "nature-loving" twit who wants to teach all animals to live on tofu and humans (see PETA for that platform). Nature is, in a word, brutal, and when balance is lost drastic efforts must be taken to restore it. I like hunting, I like extreme (responsible) forms of population control, and I don't even bat an eye when bleeding hearts go on about the clubbing of seals (The differences between shooting a deer and letting it bleed out and bashing a li'l critter's skull in are, as far as brutality goes, infinitesimal, so if I can eat venison, and I can, then I can stomach the more 'hands-on' side to hunting as well).
But I also like wolves. No: scratch that (no pun intended): I looove wolves. Obsessively. Passionately. They are, by a wide margin, my favorite animal: nature's perfect killing machine (short of humans), and nature's most sociable mammal (short of humans). What a dichotomy! It intrigues me.
I loooove wolves...
Of course, I also support measures like helicopter-based hunting of the critters as a form of population control, and what about ranchers and their livestock? Shoot the f**kers, if they pester ya'. No problem. Again: nature is brutal, and it abhorrs imbalance. A few dozen shot wolves is better than a generation of starving canids produced by overpopulation.
But these are pups, for God's sake. At the end of the day this is like going to the kennel and slitting the throats of a bunch of puppies in their runs. Look, yes: they're all wild animals, technically no different from a charging cape buffalo, if you're on the wrong side of one, but at the same time these things're only 100,000 years removed from the Golden Retriever at your feet, so think about that, maybe...
At the end of the day (even though it makes little difference to the pup in the den) it's much more palatable to camp out in the woods and gun down the adults.
They can improve their aim that way, at least...
Aroooooooooooooooo....
