Too Clever by Half

If you oppose the President’s policies expect to be called a “racist”.

If you oppose official government sex preferences you are a “sexist”.

If you oppose same-sex “marriage” or same-sex adoption you are a “homophobe”.

If you oppose abortion you are “anti-woman”.

If you oppose gun control you are “clinging to your guns”.

If you oppose public school teaching same-sex sexual activities you “cling to religion”.

If you oppose unfettered immigration you are a “bigot”.

If you oppose laws against trapping or hunting you are “cruel”.

If you oppose teacher union demands you “don’t care about children”.

If you deny that more government controls “climate” you are a “joke”.

If you question environmental laws you are “ignorant”.

If you question federal authority over animals and plants you are “stupid”.

If you want fewer or no wolves in your County you are a “wimp?”, “wuss?”, “whiny?”, and “weak?”??? 

These last adjectives are now bouncing around Western newspapers as states begin wrestling with the disaster just dumped in their lap by federal legislators.  Federal legislators passed the law (ESA) and funded the agency (USFWS) that castrated the state fish and wildlife agencies while releasing and protecting the wolves that are now totally out-of-control (literally) in half a dozen Lower 48 states.  Almost another dozen Lower 48 states have wolves as the strategically scattered introductory states spread them like flies from a dead carcass. 

We should ask ourselves why are those rural residents living with wolves and objecting to their presence and effects being called “wimps”, “whiny”, “wusses”, or “weak” in western newspapers?  Could it be because they all begin with “w”?  Naw.   

Could it be because someone is trying to vilify rural westerners with some of those pejorative adjectives?  Who would do that and why would they use those terms?  I’ll bet it is an attempt to avoid the facts involved in the wolf issue and to make those that are objecting to having wolves forced on them look like those dumb rural bumpkins the President noticed while crossing the country during the last election and then joked about to San Francisco supporters.  You remember those funny folks “clinging to their guns and religion”. 

Come to think of it, those rural folks living with and upset with wolves are ranchers, hunters, gardeners, grandparents, jack-of-all-trades, parents, families, fishermen, and other such “macho” folks living in relatively isolated homes.  They tend to think of themselves as independent and self-sufficient.  I guess that nothing would anger or intimidate such people more than calling them “wussy” or “wimpy” or “whiny” or “weak”. 

As newspapers and other media outlets spread this pejorative perception, allow me to interject a few “facts” (notice I don’t say “science” as that term has evolved into a term synonymous with corporate prostitution and pornography).  Let us dismiss for the purposes of this discussion the following real-life impacts of wolves:

-          That they kill and reduce dramatically and long-term big game herds such as elk, deer, moose, etc.

-          That they kill calves, lambs, steers, sheep, llamas, goats, and all manner of livestock.

-          That they diminish hunting and ranching along with the preceding two items.

-          That they kill watch dogs, herding dogs, flock-protecting dogs, hunting dogs, watchdogs, pet dogs, show dogs, etc., often in yards before children or when being walked either on or off a leash.

-          That they transmit over 30 deadly diseases and infections (I will provide the list on demand).

-          That many of these diseases and infections currently affecting rural people and their property (like deadly tapeworms, brucellosis, distemper, etc.) cannot be traced to wolves as such investigation is well beyond current government funding or government truthfulness to establish.

-          That the threat of many other disease and infection (like anthrax, foot-and-mouth, BSE Mad Cow, etc.) outbreaks will be spread by wolves and thus become almost instantly un-containable, is a subject covered up by government and “scientists” like the advantages of capitalism under Stalin or the humanity of Jews and Gypsies under Hitler.

-          That rural folk are so primitive that, after encountering wolves and talking with neighbors, doubt the wisdom of “experts” that say wolves are benign and that by simply “puffing up” or “standing your ground” or “never looking them in the eye” that the wolves they encounter on the way to their mailbox or in the yard or while walking or that they see near the school bus stop or that the kids see on the way home are “necessary”.

-          That 20 years of government “science” about “how many wolves” would be allowed; how they can be counted accurately; how they wouldn’t eliminate hunting or ranching; how they would be “controlled”; and how the federal government would “pay” for damages have now been exposed as bald-faced lies of enormous proportions.

-          That the reality of how burgeoning wolf populations will be controlled (too costly today for state or federal programs; and hunting, trapping, and other citizenry methods are prohibited or impractical for many reasons as either effective or practicable solutions) has become a state and local problem beyond the wildest imaginings of those faced with the presence of wolves and the lack of any wherewithal to do anything about it. 

No, let us simply focus on the human safety threat of concern to so many rural residents of government-created wolf habitat: 

-I recommend that all of you urban elites and rural media mavens so enamored of wolves living with others take some time and read Will Graves’ Wolves in Russia.  The history of Russians and wolves over the past 150 years is replete with human attacks, human deaths, and human disfigurements.  There is a chronic and year-in/year-out level of wolf attacks as well as the rabid wolf outbreaks.  Children and women are most often the victims while even a man actually running a chainsaw is not immune to a deadly attack.  Whether in Kazakhstan or on the edges of St. Petersburg or Moscow - Asian attitudes about the dangers of daily living with wolves is simple historic experience become custom and culture.

-I recommend your read Young and Goldman’s Wolves of North America.  Read the Indian, soldier, settler, and herder accounts of wolf attacks in early America.  Consider, as with the book Wolves in Russia, that the vast majority of such attacks over the past hundreds of years went both unreported and unknown to others.

-I recommend you read recent newspaper reports of the Canadian singer killed by a pack of coyotes in a Canadian Park or the account of the Saskatchewan min worker killed by wolves as he went for an afternoon walk or the new schoolteacher on the Alaska Peninsula that went for a jog on the lone gravel road to the airport and was found later killed and half –eaten by wolves.

-Familiarize yourself with Canadian and Alaskan experiences with wolves and the needs and problems of effectively controlling their numbers, dangers, and damages to rural society in general. 

That such will become common here in the Lower 48 is due entirely to federal legislators, federal bureaucrats, state bureaucrats, and “scientists”: all of who sold themselves for money and power to the national and international organizations that similarly have reaped this whirlwind.  The wolves in the Lower 48 States are due SOLELY to federal interventions and actions.  Montana and Minnesota, the only 2 Lower 48 States with wolves kept wolf numbers and presence low and took aggressive action routinely and particularly when damage or threats to humans emerged. 

For 200 years in America the introduction, management, and control of such animals was a Constitutional matter of concern for Local Communities and Local Government alone.  State governments were formed to protect the rights of such communities to not only “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” but to the “domestic Tranquility”, “general Welfare”, and “Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” so aptly described in the Preamble of the Constitution as to why “We the People” ordained and established the “Constitution for the United States of America”.  Those Constitutional guarantees did not exist where wolves were ubiquitous and uncontrolled – PERIOD.  Today, the federal government can simply invent its own “bought-and-paid-for science” to justify putting any animal wherever it wants. Whether on public or private property federal officials can incarcerate or simply ignore any citizen, State elected official, or Local elected official that offers any resistance or fails to follow federal directives. 

So westerners and others “scared to go to mailboxes” or concerned about “wolves at school bus stops” are “wusses”, etc. for being concerned about wolves?  Are you kidding?  The “weak”, “wussy”, “whiny”, “wimps” in this morality play are those urban elites and officials (from Boise to Boston and Los Angeles) that impose their feelings for whatever reasons (anti-hunting, anti-private property, anti-gun, socialist, anti-human, anti-capitalist, grants, advertising revenue, donations, re-election, salary, influence etc.) on others by force of an oppressive and invented government power surrogate.  The rest of us are in that pack of jackals only if and when we submit to unjust government and tolerate those things that endanger not plants and animals but kids, families, culture, traditions, and economies that government was formed to nurture - not destroy.

Jim Beers

19 June 2011

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Jim Beers is a retired US Fish & Wildlife Service Wildlife Biologist,
Special Agent, Refuge Manager, Wetlands Biologist, and Congressional Fellow. He was stationed in North Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York City, and Washington DC.  He also served as a US Navy Line Officer in the western Pacific and on Adak, Alaska in the Aleutian Islands.  He has worked for the Utah Fish & Game, Minneapolis Police Department, and as a Security Supervisor in Washington, DC.  He testified three times before Congress; twice regarding the theft by the US Fish & Wildlife Service of $45 to 60 Million from State fish and wildlife funds and once in opposition to expanding Federal Invasive Species authority.  He resides in Eagan, Minnesota with his wife of many decades. 

Jim Beers is available to speak or for consulting at   jimbeers7@comcast.net