Groups want investigation into wolf baiting
Jan 9th, 2008 by admin
In an Associated Press story, it has been reported that representatives of 15 conservation and environmental groups want Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to order an investigation by the inspector general into allegations that a Mexican gray wolf was baited into killing a cow so the wolf in turn could be killed. The allegations were printed in a December story in High Country News - an online, independent biweekly news magazine.
“The article was a total piece of fabrication,” Gene Whetten, manager of the Adobe Ranch in Catron County, said. “There is no truth from start to finish.
“The person quoted in the article, Mike Miller, works for Whetten, and, according to the AP story, has denied the allegations. He refuses to speak to the press.
Bill Aymar, Catron County manager, said he was “outraged” by the story and said: “Everything is political at this point.” “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service put the wolves out there and they set up a den,” Aymar said. “The ranch didn’t move.”
Whetten said the cows mentioned in the story were in the area before “the wolves went and denned there.”
He also reported that since the Aspen Pack, which was confirmed to have killed eight of Whetten’s cattle, with nine head reported missing, was removed by helicopter by USFWS on Dec. 2, “the cows quit dying.”
“We have no wolves that are collared in the area,” Whetten said. “As for the uncollared ones, who knows, but we haven’t seen any.
“(The wolves) have run most of the elk out of this country, too,” Whetten said. “They don’t like being slaughtered and I would suspect they have found happier grazing grounds.”
Among the allegations in the High Country News story was that radio telemetry receivers were used to “bait the wolves.”
“The high rate of wolf poaching and suspicious disappearances strongly suggests that the federal take of wolves, the telemetry receivers and other substantial steps taken by the (Fish and Wildlife) service to conciliate the livestock industry have not resulted in reducing illegal take - they may have contributed to the opposite result,” the letter to Kempthorne said.
The letter also asked Kempthorne to order any trapped wolves that might have been baited, to be released back into the wild, according to the AP story. The letter also asked whether the agency took steps to ensure telemetry equipment and codes were not available to those who might use them to illegally take wolves.
The receivers are given to ranchers so they can determine whether collared wolves are in the area. They are then able to take measures to protect their livestock and domestic pets.
The wolf program has announced that it will be re-releasing problem wolves on an area scheduled to have mama cows calving. Do you ever hear from the program or the malicious groups in the above article about the fact, attested to by wolf biologists elsewhere, that there never was a core area here for any “recovery”, hence the constant depredations and endangerments experienced here, discounted and swept under the rug?
Do you often hear from them about the almost impossible amount of habituation problems and questionable genetics of these animals hand raised for generations?
Is even the smallest smidgeon of thought or effort put into how many of these animals have succeeded by living existances shy of humans and their animals. And how many, and how long such can truly exist in an area before destroying their prey base and hungrily losing their shy disposition and wandering into someone’s pasture, and needing to be controlled?
Are there any true conservationists and biologists involved at all? Or are they such in name only, those titles merely attempts at subterfuge for the political shannigans so evidently needed to continue a failing agenda in the above letter to Kempthorn?
Are the agendists really using the wolf as a weapon, a land torpedo if you will, for a sort of Stalinistic rural cleansing, to their stated agenda of achieving a peopleless area here for their own personal self gratification at the expense of our communities, families and some of the last benign and sustainable existances left in the Arizona and New Mexico?
Just who is baiting whom?
I think this quote from Noam Chomski speaks to the misinformation and agendas victimizing the people and their rights here.
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of debate.”
…”to ensure telemetry equipment and codes were not available to those who might use them to illegally take wolves…”
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For those who might use them to protect their stock, dogs, elk and their way of life -
There are no codes. The collars transmit a radio frequency that can be picked up on AM, FM or FM-USB. They are not digital.
The only equipment necessary to monitor the wolf collars is a good scanner and a hint as to what frequency band to search.
Go to Radio Shack and ask for more information.
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