Sunday, August 07, 2016

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decide to step in stop Alaskans from slaughtering all of the damn animals.


Courtesy of The Register-Guard:

Alaska has long allowed authorities and hunters to kill bears and wolves on national wildlife refuges as part of what it called an “intensive predator management” program. Approved methods included shooting wolves and their pups in dens, using bait to hunt bears, killing mother bears with their cubs — and one made famous by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin: gunning down wildlife from helicopters. 

That’s now about to change. In defiance of several Alaska officials, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved regulations that ban nearly all predator hunting on national wildlife refuges that is not approved by the federal government and “based on sound science and in response to a conservation concern.” The new regs specifically prohibit hunting bear cubs as well as bear hunting using traps, snares or helicopters, among other methods. 

Alaska’s predator hunting has been a flash point in a growing battle between state and federal officials over who has authority over federal lands. Alaska officials, who criticized the ban as federal overreach, say their program increases moose and caribou populations that attract hunters and serve as a food source for rural Alaskans. But in a column for the Huffington Post on Wednesday, Fish and Wildlife Director Dan Ashe denounced it as unethical and based on flawed science about predator-prey relationships. 

“Over the past several years, the Alaska Board of Game has unleashed a withering attack on bears and wolves that is wholly at odds with America’s long tradition of ethical, sportsmanlike, fair-chase hunting,” Ashe wrote. “We have a long history of cooperative management with the states, including Alaska, and we have deep respect and admiration for our state agency professional colleagues. But there comes a time when the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service must stand up for the authorities and principles that underpin our work and say ‘no.’”

You know we have been mismanaging our wildlife for a long time, and favoring trophy hunters over the welfare of our indigenous animals for far too long.

We have also received warning after warning from biologists and we have ignored them all.

So I certainly do not blame the feds for stepping in.

However ultimately it will only serve to create even more anger and hostility toward the federal government from some of our sovereign citizen types who unfortunately populate a whole lot of the voting precincts not contained within the Anchorage area.

In other words watch for more crazies to be sent to Juneau from places like Wasilla, Fairbanks, and Ketchikan.

34 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:25 AM

    It seems a shame that everyone who is sane, rational and who has some sense of responsibility to the animals on our planet has to tiptoe around the crazy "sovereign citizens" just to keep them from getting crazier and acting more bizarrely. I agree with the new regulations. Hunt but do it properly - with some sense of fair play and respect for the hunted. People like the Palins can still get lots of raw meat for their freezers. After all, aren't they all masters of the gun?

    Of course I'm far away from Alaska so I've not had to deal personally with many "sovereign citizen" types. I admit that we've had our share, like the Oklahoma bomber who was from Michigan but we certainly don't have to deal with them on a daily basis.
    Beaglemom

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    1. Its not enough! The BOG took away the Buffer zone in Denali and now almost all the Toklat wolves are dead! Please read and notify the Gov and others to protect them! Part of going to Alaska is Seeing the Denali wolves at Denali!!
      Thank you!
      http://bit.ly/2bcjmNv

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    2. Anonymous9:16 AM

      I won't set one foot nor spend one red cent in Alaska until ALL this shit is stopped. I have always wanted to visit but will forego the pleasure until the slaughtering is done. If I never go, so be it.

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    3. Good Commentary Gryphen! Thanks!
      " we have been mismanaging our wildlife for a long time, and favoring trophy hunters over the welfare of our indigenous animals for far too long."
      AK has become a "Game farm"!
      "We have also received warning after warning from biologists and we have ignored them all."
      Again, True! The Wildlife dept doesn't even HAVE a accurate count on HOW many wolves are actually left!?! When I spoke to Park Rangers some years back it was dire, and the morale was low because of all the decimation of predators and game animals! It has TOTALLY been mismanaged by the Board of GAME! They have done a pisspoor job of "Managing"!
      All the Park people know it too! This Denali wolf "crises" will hurt Alaska because people do want to come and take pictures of wolves and bears! If they are gone, nobody will want to go there. Shame on Palin and her Board of GAME cronies and SPv2.0! They screwed up and mismanaged the animals so badly & now with Climate change who knows if the game & predator populations will recover? Could be lost forever. No amount of MONEY can cover the loss of these natural resources... Thanks Gryphen for keeping on top of it.

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    4. Anonymous10:33 AM

      Good for you, @9:16. Hitting them in the pocketbook is all they ever understand.

      Delete
  2. Anonymous4:26 AM

    I will NEVER understand killing for no damned good reason--not for food, not for survival, but for SPORT?!! (and the put some putrid trophy on their wall?) There should be a very "special" and horrendous karma for these types. I surely hope so.

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  3. Connie4:49 AM

    Ya know - Most of the sovereign citizen types are Domionists too. In their holy book I believe there is a phrase "what you do to the least of me, you do to me".

    Taking care of, not total domination. Not sure how they missed the message. Glad the Feds are stepping up to speak for the preditors. Yellowstone taught them well.

    As for sovereign citizens - let's treat them as we treat all foreign parties who invade our country.

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  4. Anonymous5:36 AM

    There is an alternative... President Trump can sell Alaska back to the Russians. That will really fuck the Sovereign Citizens. *wink*

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    1. Anonymous7:20 AM

      Brillant! Except I live here. I can’t imagine living under the Putin regime. The Russian Orthodox Church here in Alaska is as fundamental as it gets too. Members would be horrified to be back in the good ol’ USSR, as the Beatles knew it, but they might be quite content with an oligarch like Putin. Extreme and angry attitudes about gays, abortion and women’s rights by Orthodox church members in my little Alaska town are aplenty.

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  5. Anonymous6:40 AM

    So we should bend to their gross hunting tactics because we are afraid of another Palin?

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  6. Anonymous7:11 AM

    Fish and Game has been systematically starved for funds for years. Biologists I know can barely function within the financial constraints due to state budget cuts these last few years. Constitutionally (state) mandated work to protect and sustain species is barely possible. Couple this with the heavy political influence from those wishing to maintain livelihoods hunting or fishing species to their limits is causing untold destruction. The Board of Game is stocked with commercial interests that choose to ignore the science at every opportunity. How often do you hear the phrase “bad science”? That is the buzzword for science that doesn’t allow for people to go out and kill every living thing possible for their own gain. It makes me sick. I applaud the federal government’s efforts and hope they come to my town soon, before the fish and the game are entirely gone. This is not the Alaska we were meant to be.

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    1. Anonymous7:46 AM

      Excellent comment!

      Delete
  7. Anonymous7:36 AM

    That picture has always made me feel sick inside, and even early on, I thought it spoke volumes about who Sarah Palin really is, when she used this photo to brag of her frontier woman, tough-gal image.

    I think she even had a video clip of it- flying across a snowy field and chasing down a wolf who has nowhere to hide in the wide open space, then the red blood staining the snow, and then her glee-filled smirk as she mugs for the camera.

    This was when she had it in for Ashley Judd.

    She makes me sick. And killing wolf pups in their dens. WTF?!

    Who in their right mind could do that?! She and her whacko father have sick and twisted minds.

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    1. Anonymous9:01 AM

      Family values, indeed. Only when it's your family right $arabitch?

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    2. Anonymous10:59 AM

      Suffice it to say the Palins have "reaped what they have sown". They have a retarded serial-breeding daughter who is too stupid for a real job. They have Trig, forever, 'nuff said. They have an alcoholic pill-popping son that will most likely kill someone and go to prison forever. They overspent like a bunch of drunken sailors and now are having a fire sale in order to maintain solvency. Sarah Palin's political career is dead and her punditry platform has been reduced to babbling on Facebook.

      They have to live a life with few friends because they have ruined every friendship ever entrusted to them and they must hide in their compound because they have so many detractors that going out, even for groceries here in Wasilla, can be an uncomfortable venture. (which is why they all have to shop in Anchorage because they don't want our locals getting in their faces at the grocery store and telling them what a bunch of idiots they are.)

      If I believed in Karma I'd have to say this family has been served up a steaming hot bowl of it.

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  8. Maybe Alaska will get their very own hostile takeover of a wildlife refuge like we did in Oregon! :-(

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    1. Anonymous10:59 AM

      The crazies are already here, locked, loaded and ready to roll. It’s terrifying to be amongst such white male entitlement. The rational, sane and kind-hearted Alaska disappeared as soon as the oilmen from Texas appeared. And, there are a lot of retired red-neck military folks who overrun progressive retired military folk. I always find it so disingenuous how the red-neck variety portray themselves as homespun, wholesome and patriotic. As long as they feel on top, they behave; but as soon as their white male values are threatened in any manner, watch out. They are not the sharpest tools in the shed, just the most armed.

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    2. Anonymous11:00 AM

      I'd love to see it because I guaran-damn-tee you that the Feds, after both Bundy debacles, wouldn't be so complacent and we might actually see some gene-pool cleansing come about. Ya'll want a fight? Well here's a fucking fight Cletus!

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  9. About damned time the indiscriminate slaughter of predators is stopped!!! The only reason that the slaughter has continued for so long is for all the revenue from trophy hunters from the lower 48. And because the BOG is populated by hunters who want to compete with the predators for the prey animals - without actually having to compete.

    Put those big swaggering assholes out there with only teeth and fangs, and let's see how they fare in a fair competition.

    I now live in an area where the predators were 99%+ exterminated. If you want to garden, you must build a 6 foot privacy fence so the deer can't see anything to jump the fence to graze on. Large herds go through this suburban area nightly and have no fear of human habitation or activity.

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    1. Wolfsister, awesome comment & true!

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    2. Anonymous11:02 AM

      True, true and more true. Enough of the trophy killing. If you don’t eat it, leave it alone. I live where men spend $10,000 to kill a grizzly for “fun” (whoops, “sport”). These people need a psychological evaluation, not a hunting license.

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    3. Anonymous11:06 AM

      That and the harvest of furs. I fully believe that the anachronistic processes of fur harvest needs to stop, either through hunting or trapping it needs to stop. There is not one person on this planet that needs fur to live. There are much better synthetics that will keep a person warmer and drier. Lots of the native people harvest it and make garments from it merely for tradition sake and it's a tradition that really needs to go away and be forgotten.

      I'm forever horrified that we still have a winter carnival in Anchorage that is called the Fur Rendezvous and part of the festival is having a fur auction! FFS here in 2016 we still have a fur festival complete with an auction and folks, if you attend this crappy homegrown sad-ass excuse for a winter carnival, you must walk amongst some of Alaska's most anachronistic souls sporting wolf-head hats and terrible furs...it's really disgusting, and so 1899!

      We still have that contingent of idiots that come up here thinking they are living on some sort of wild frontier when really we all just need to get firmly into the 21st century.

      Sorry, rant over...

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  10. Anonymous8:33 AM

    That picture surely has been made into an
    enlarged poster and is displayed in a
    prominent place in the Palin household!
    The Trump sons are right now on a
    killing safari for sport somewhere in
    Africa! Have you seen past photos of
    them proudly posed with their kill
    that were put forth not long ago.
    I wish you would put the photos of idiot Palin with her bloody kills along side of
    the two Trump idiots with theirs Gryphen.
    Even their smug expressions are the same!




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  11. There are a few facets to the jewel that is now mismanaging Alaskan wildlife. It started with the AOC (Alaska Outdoor Council)which couldn't stand the thought of a subsistence priority being given to rural residents who depend on the game in the area they live. They don't have the means to travel to other areas of the State to hunt if they can't hunt their home areas. Rich trophy hunters didn't like being denied hunting areas even if it was only during times of low game populations. The AOC got a few political appointments in their favor by playing the political game which again due to travel constraints and costs is something most rural residents have no access to. The AOC got aerial predator control pushed through and the Feds pushed back by taking over management of fish and game on all federal lands in Alaska. Even though for the most part they cooperated with the State on setting seasons and bag limits, there were enough preferences in the federal regs to piss off the big city, big money hunters and they pushed back some more. Then we had the Sarah Palin days and things went to Hell in a hand basket. She brought in a totally unqualified Corey Rossi who had trapped rats with her father and put him in charge of "Abundance Management". He seems to have been a plant from the Utah based SFW "Sportsmen For Wildlife" who are all about tying up game populations for their supporters and directors. This organization is double bad and pushed by the monied big game guiding and hunt selling industry. They weasel their way into State management by donating money to different game departments and getting their plants appointed into positions of authority and then they end up being given coveted hunting tags to auction off in the name of raising money for game management. Their idea of game management is to wipe out all predators and coming up with management plans which are good for guides and those in control of SFW, but bad for the average hunter. Rossi was their guy in Alaska.

    He was the one who pushed trapping and snaring and raising bag limits on bears.

    There is much more, but I don't have time to go into it right now. It's all about rich people and money and guiding and lodges and control.

    The Feds are doing the right thing. And I'm saying this as a lifetime hunter (started when I was 10, now in my 60s.) I'm appalled at what has become wildlife management in Alaska. When I came to Alaska in the early 70s, Alaska had the best management in the country and now it is back in the stone age.

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    1. Anonymous11:05 AM

      You are spot on. And wasn’t Corey Rossi finally in trouble due to some outrageous debacle of his own doing? I am sickened by what I see in Alaska these days.

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  12. Here's a little reading for starters.

    http://www.adn.com/alaska-news/article/how-alaska-wildlife-manager-corey-rossi-was-charged-illegal-hunting/2012/01/17/

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  13. Anonymous9:42 AM

    What is your beef with Fairbanks?

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    1. Anonymous11:10 AM

      Wasilla I get, he hates Wasilla. Ketchikan, I really don't get it. I think he was just pulling out names of towns that he considers "rural" unlike Los Anchorage, Alaska's gem of Diversity and Murder :-)

      With the horrendous crime wave in Anchorage I gotta tell ya I'm pretty happy out here in the Valley. Anchorage is like inner city scary these days...

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    2. Fairbanks is home base to the military presence in Alaska, discussed by two others in this blog thread (redneck retired military vs. progressive retired military).

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  14. I was watching an Animal Planet show last night, Dr Dee: Alaska Vet. One of her clients was an Akita bear dog owned by a fellow who lived out in the snowy bush (he didn't have the vet put his dog down due to an aggressive cancer diagnosis; he did it in due time himself https://twitter.com/AnimalPlanet/status/757016221963485184 ).

    The guy said a bear dog was far better and more reliable against wolves and bears than any firearm.

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    1. You might want to talk to my friend Thea about that. She went hiking near Cordova two summers ago with her dog and a friend's Akita, a Japanese breed used for bear hunting. The Akita ran off and came back with a bear on it's heels which then mauled Thea.

      http://www.adn.com/wildlife/article/woman-mauled-brown-bear-cordova-hiking-trail/2014/08/13/

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  15. Anita Winecooler5:33 PM

    I'm so glad President Obama visited Alaska. And thrilled they'll be some protection for wild animals. Shooting Wolves from a plane when the wolves have no cover nor chance isn't "sports" nor "hunting", and wasting the meat just to get paid for the paw is what sissies do.
    Wait for it, Mrs Crunchwrap Supreme will make it about gov't overreach and her right to bear arms and hunt. Perhaps she should go to Arizona and hunt a buyer for the replica of Bin Laden's last home.

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  16. Anonymous6:12 PM

    If I'm not allowed to predator hunt in Alaska then how will I feed my family? We will starve.

    WE EAT THEREFORE WE HUNT
    -Lou Sarah

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    1. Anonymous6:36 PM

      Here's a thought, feed your family the same way they were getting fed when Levi was boinking your eldest daughter and she was cleaning out his pipe. I thought I read, I believe Vanity Fair, that Levi bought Taco Bell for them as well as cooked for them. I wonder since Barstool couldn't pay him, she repaid him with by playing his flute?

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