Wolves and Anger

“The Northern Rockies have become an unsupervised playpen for reactionaries to act out warrior fantasies against demonic wolves, coastal elites, and idiotic environmentalists.” - James William Gibson, writing in The Earth Island Journal

I work on an alpaca farm part-time. I generally enjoy myself and love working with the alpacas, but animal exploitation alarms go off in my head on a regular basis anyway. The farm is owned by a born-rich person who does it as a hobby but pretends like it's real-life, "dog-eat-dog," cutthroat sell-or-die work. Long story short, I disagree with many of my boss' assertions about the moral correctness of how the business is practiced. My boss happens to also own a huge cattle ranch in another state.

What really gets me, time and again, is my interactions with farm owners and ranchers that consider themselves "environmentalists" because of the way they run their ranches. They think they're doing a great job providing necessary, "sustainable" meat to the world and they don't "get" the distress of people like me when they talk about slaughtering cattle. In their world, it's all ok, because they decided cattle are "just food." Obviously I disagree strongly with letting ourselves believe the convenient illusion that if you call a living creature a new name, it means it isn't a living creature anymore and you don't have to worry about how wrong it is to kill a living creature for pleasure or convenience (eating meat is not "necessary" btw). They're not alive, they're "just cattle."

They blather on and on about how "environmentally conscious" they are, creating "sustainable" organic beef for people to eat. It's the hardest thing in the world for me to sit there listening to this bullshit and not freak out, because I'm just a peon and there's no way my words could penetrate the self-congratulating fog they've created around themselves. So, the fact that cattle ranching is responsible for most of the devastating environmental degradation affecting our continent (as well as South America), creates 30% or more of the global-warming-causing greenhouse gases, and encourages our government to favor ranchers' financial concerns over other wildlife that are largely on the brink of extinction, as well as public health, doesn't make  them question the "environmentalism" of running a cattle ranch? Troubling at the very least.

Apparently ranchers in my state have been driving wolves to nearby states where it is now totally legal to murder any wolves you see, anyplace, anytime, any reason/lack of reason, and shooting them there. The complete governmental failure that was the de-listing of wolves from the Protected list is already shooting them straight back to the "almost extinct" status they were when the U.S. government funded their extermination in the early 20th century. But here's the problem, see, I just don't understand the woes of the hard-working ranchers who "have" to kill wolves to save their livelihoods, and yes, their families. Pro-wolf-murdering ranchers have created a magical story about child-eating, destructive, mindless predators who want nothing else than to finally exterminate humankind. Handily, this story covers their true reasons for wanting to kill wolves, which is that they can be inconvenient to making money off of exploiting and killing other animals. Being told that they aren't allowed to kill this inconvenience by Big Daddy Gubment also irks them to no end, since Gubment has been getting on their cases already for ignoring tons of environmental protection laws about what lands they can let their cattle destroy and what pollutants can be dumped into nearby waterways.

Seriously, I could go on and on and on about how completely ranching has fucked up our natural environment, in some ways erasing it beyond the chance of ever getting it back again. I get that ranchers don't know or care about the history of their profession and are just trying to make a living. Unfortunately, this is also the reason given by many large corporations that destroy things or people just to keep their stockholders happy. No matter what profession we're in, if we are "good, hard-working" people, at some point we have to acknowledge if we are responsible for very bad things happening. This includes environmental degradation (of public lands) and the killing of living creatures for money or convenience. Ranchers need to call themselves on their shit (not gonna happen) and admit that their anti-wolf murder spree is not a righteous act of Goddamn American Freedom, but a shitty little grab at power that only shows their smallness and ignorance. "Environmentalist" ranchers need to acknowledge that, at best, they are reducing some of their heinous environmental degradation, and their pitiful changes to how they use up the land that they have access to is not the same as "preserving the environment."

Rant done.

The Gray Area

Sometimes, to offset our regular intake of indie, underground, queer, feminist films and films made by immigrants and people of color, my partner and I sometimes grab a movie from one of those Red Box things at the grocery store. We expect these movies to be shmaltzy or shlocky or just bad in a variety of other ways. However, I was shocked when my partner brought home The Gray, starring Liam Neeson.

In order to make it through the movie without breaking something, I had to make up a drinking game where every time  a character in the movie stated something factually inaccurate about wolves, we would take a drink. I drank three glasses of wine during the movie due to this game. My partner takes bigger gulps than me, and went through two bottles of beer and two glasses of wine.

I remember that when this movie came out, there were protests by different wildlife and pro-wolf groups around the country. Not a big deal to anyone. But in the light of all the rampant wolf-killing that's happening in Wyoming, Montana, and Oregon, among other places, this country can't afford to have hatefully false bits of media like The Gray floating around for the ignorant and unintelligent to happen upon.

The film paints a picture of the North American gray wolf that is scientifically false and entirely based on fairy-tale fear. Unfortunately, there are ranchers and other anti-wolf entities across the nation that use these same untrue reasons to validate exterminating wolves, regardless of their right as a wild animal to exist, even if sometimes inconvenient to certain humans.

In the movie, wolves are said to have a "kill radius," meaning they will kill any living being found within a certain circular area of their territory. I don't even know where the filmmakers made this up from. Pulled it completely out of their asses, from what I can tell. The characterization of wolves as heartless killers who target the plane crash survivors, just for the fun of it, is patently ridiculous in the light of the fact that the only species of animal on earth that kills for fun is homo sapiens. There were many other false claims about wolves in the film, including stuff about how wolf pack hierarchy works, plus a pack of wolves with like fifty animals in it is pretty unheard of.

I would call the film hilariously incorrect if not for how many people believe that wolves are always waiting in the woods to take our children, and ranchers that think that two wolves living in their state is "overpopulation." I did laugh out loud at the final scene, when Neeson's character tapes a bunch of broken bottles to his knuckles for a final mano a lobo  showdown in the wolves' "fucking den" against the alpha.

Wolf Rider

I find it criminally inane that one of our representatives in congress, jon tester--a democrat from montana, added a rider to the newest budget bill that strips wolves of their endangered status in montana, idaho, wyoming, washington, and oregon. apparently, no one is opposing it because democrats don't want to lose any of their number and they think this guy will get a free pass in the next election if he makes ignorant ranchers happy by making up a new law that goes completely against the endangered species act and all the reasons that we have that in place. HATE HIM.

Throwing Wolves to the Wolves

Oregon's House Committee on Agriculture and Natural Resources heard testimony on March 30 by the Oregon Cattlemen Association that 5 new bills should be passed concerning approximately 24 wolves that live in the state. Most of the bills are to basically to make it legal to kill all the wolves, any wolves anyone ever sees, at any time, with any weapon.

Details:

Bill #1 & #2: Ranchers would be compensated for livestock killed by wolves by either the state Board of Agriculture or the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission.

Note: Organizations such as Defenders of Wildlife have been offering compensation for livestock proven to be killed by wolves since 1987. One detail of these bills is that ranchers want to be able to get the compensation without having to prove the dead animal in question was killed by a wolf. This is suspicious.

Bill #3: Wolves can be killed by ranchers or other people when they attack livestock or people.
Bill #4: Wolves can be killed by anyone for any reason.
Bill #5: Wolf population must be reduced to four breeding pairs.

Note: This is a most likely unsustainable number of breeding pairs. That makes this a bill for the extinction of wolves in Oregon.

Long story short (and fear and extermination of wolves is a long, long story), people who choose to live or work in the dwindling wild lands of this continent are frightened of the dark. They don't want to have to have adult supervision for their children at all times and they don't want to have to pay someone to watch over their cows and sheep all night. Despite the fact that many advancements have been made in inexpensive ways to deter wolves from preying on livestock, the easiest thing still looks like shooting at anything that moves. Education about co-existing with wolves and other "inconvenient" parts of natural ecology hasn't effectively come to these sunburned (how do you get sunburned in Oregon? somehow it happens) ranchers in white cowboy hats.

The world as we know it won't survive many more of these "traditional" solutions to humanity's desire to over-consume. We really can't keep clear-cutting, burning, exterminating, and sport-hunting our natural world away. Something has to stop us.