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Defenders Magazine
Defenders View: Ending Alaska's Aerial Killing Program
In August Alaska voters will go to the polls to vote for or against their state's outrageous promotion of aerial hunting to slaughter wolves.
Let's be clear up front: There are no reasonable arguments supporting this state program. Scientists have repeatedly complained about the absence of scientific justification. The slaughter ignores the respect most people feel toward wildlife, while many hunters denounce this extreme practice as violating their sport's ethics of "fair chase." And Alaska citizens have twice voted to outlaw the use of aircraft to kill wolves and other wildlife.
Supporting the massive killing program are the state's small but politically influential commercial hunting interests. Their clear intention is to eliminate as many of nature's major predators as possible to artificially increase moose and caribou numbers where it'll then be easier for urban and wealthy out-of-state hunters to shoot their trophy animals.
What gives this small constituency its disproportionate political power? First is the state's extremely undemocratic approach to wildlife management, which effectively puts all policy direction in the hands of an unelected board of game whose membership historically represents only the hunting and trapping community and ignores all other state stakeholders and interests. Second are the many state elected politicians who clearly are more responsive to this small community than to the rest of the state, with its much broader economic interests and modern sensibilities. It is special-interest politics at its worst.
Twice in the past 12 years, Alaska voters have approved state ballot initiatives to limit the use of aircraft to kill wildlife—and twice the state legislature, encouraged and abetted by the board of game, has overridden the citizen-passed laws to restore use of aircraft. Worse, in the latest case, they went well beyond a simple override, allowing hunters for the first time since the early 1970s to actually shoot the animals from the air…after chasing them to exhaustion so they'd be easier targets. Also, some legislators decided they'd had enough of the state's pesky voters, and wrote a new law that made qualifying a ballot initiative in Alaska immensely more difficult.
Alaskans, however, can be a determined lot. Record numbers from across the state signed a petition to place aerial hunting on the ballot for a third time. The new initiative, if passed in August, will end the current aerial program that targets wolves (and, as planned by the board of game, black and brown bears), and will ban use of aircraft except in the case of a bona fide emergency. Further, when Alaska Governor Palin and her allies in the legislature made a blatantly undemocratic attempt earlier this year to remove this legally qualified anti-aerial-hunting initiative from this August's ballot by trying to enact legislation crafted by special interests, Alaskans rallied to defeat that shameful effort.
But Alaskans who care deeply about passing this initiative face continued tough opposition from the special interests. Not only does the governor herself favor aerial killing of wolves and bears, but also the legislature approved an expenditure of $400,000 of public funds to undermine the citizens' initiative.
Conservationists are right to be outraged by this state-sponsored program. But they shouldn't blame the citizens of Alaska, who have twice shown that they detest their state's actions. They can and should, however, blame the state's political leadership, which infuriatingly continues to refuse to put the public interest above that of the special interests—even when it means recklessly and arrogantly disregarding the scientific evidence, ethics and voter decisions, all at once.
Watch a video and learn more about Alaska's aerial wolf hunt.
