wild hunter

wild hunter (CBS News) From the moment it leaped out of captivity on Jan. 12, 1995 the wolf has been fruitful and multiplied and replenished the earth. From a dozen Canadian transplants, 1,700 individuals in 250 packs now roam our Rocky Mountain wilds. So, victory for the Endangered Species Act? Not exactly. The biological beast runs free. But the symbolic wolf remains caged in purgatory between science and emotion; state and fed officials; activists and ranchers; tourists and hunters. Now, in an unprecedented federal controversy, the wolf has thrust America's legislative branch against our judicial branch against our executive branch over whether the species has recovered enough to let States control it this fall by hunting. So, how many wolves is "enough.

This question tests our national and cultural comfort zone; views range from 'zero' to 'a million.' After decades of paralysis it is time we shut up and answered with our wallets. That's right. As a hunter, lifelong environmentalist, and wolf advocate at the U.S. Department of the Interior during the 1990s, I have a modest proposal: de-politicize the warm-blooded wolf by trusting its fate to cold market forces: let Montana and Idaho sell their peer-reviewed scientific quota of wolf hunting permits...but ensure each license can be bought and sold on an auction block open to all U.S. citizens. Heartless? Get over it. The truth is that Canis lupus has always lived and died with a price on its head. Greek officials in A.D. 46-120 paid five silver drachmas to a hunter for bringing in a dead male wolf. In 1630, America's pilgrims established the first Colonial wolf bounty for the big bad antagonist of Old World fairy tales who threatened farm piglets and red-robed daughters. Within 250 years President Teddy Roosevelt was annually subsidizing the killing of 55,000 "beasts of waste and destruction." Then Aldo Leopold - writer, hunter, game warden, wolf eradicator - had a religious conversion on the road to lupine extinction. He urged us to respect this alpha predator not as our moral equal, nor as a novelty, nor to commune with wild spirits, but because wolves completed our ecological community of interdependent subjects. At that point, the market shifted. If cash killed off the 'sinister' species, cash brought 'charismatic megafauna' back to life. When passions ran high, cash cooled tempers. When ranchers stalled wolf reintroduction in court, environmental groups - namely Hank Fischer of Defenders of Wildlife - broke the political deadlock by offering livestock owners cash compensation for documented wolf kills.
Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/08/opinion/main20070236.shtml#ixzz1OxYbduL6

wild hunter