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BACK AND REPAIRED!

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!!!!

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CRY WOLF AND LET SLIP THE DOGS

(Luckily this story was written yesterday, before Doc40 became as sick as a dog and AOL (and it’s India-based tech support) started to do their level best to destroy both my mind and my computer. Fortunately that had now been put to rights – mainly by the Doc’s blind intervention rather than any effort of corporate support, and I’ll be catching up on work and email forthwith.)

I have always been inordinately fond of wolves. I think the romance started with Kipling’s Mowgli books, which were handed to me before I could actually read, but it was really cemented during the summer that I worked at the London Zoo in Regents Park in my transition phase between student and wastrel. I was having an affair with a girl called Jane, who was kinda conflicted about why she was spending too many of her nights with me. On one hand, I guess I functioned as some kind of low-budget Bob Dylan surrogate, but, on another, I was way to the weird, bohemian left of what she still thought of as her middle class station. Thus there were bouts of off and on, and, during the off times, I would sit and feel depressed and lovelorn, smoke a covert joint, and look at the wolves on their enclosure, while the wolves looked at me.

I don’t know if it’s the same today, but back in the 1960s the wolves in London Zoo were confined in a long narrow enclosure that ran all the way down the east side of the zoo, which allowed the wolves to gallop, but also provided a major deterrent against human unlawful entry. Thus it was easy to see them from the outside of the zoo – and, indeed, the same scene is played out in the movie Withnail and I when the washed-up Withnail stands in the pouring rain, staring at the wolves much as I did.

With all this personal history going on, I was therefore mad as hell when I read that the wolves were being legally exterminated in Alaska, as part and parcel of the Bush administrations opening up of the wilderness to the rankest capitalism. For the dispassionate facts, let’s go to the NY Times of 3/15/2004..

For 30 years hunting lobbyists have campaigned for what is euphemistically called wolf "control." Thanks to the compliance of Gov. Frank Murkowski and the state's official game board, the legal protections for Alaska's 7,000 to 9,000 wolves have been seriously eroded. In nearly 20,000 square miles of the state it is now legal for private citizens to shoot wolves from airplanes and helicopters. In one district the limit has been increased from 10 wolves a year to 10 wolves a day.
In these districts, the new regulations call for an 80 percent "temporary" reduction in the wolf population. But a reduction on that scale is merely likely to be the first step towards the total elimination of wolves. This isn't sport hunting – there's nothing sporting about deploying an air force to unt animals. The real spirit of hunting has always been about working within the balance of nature. But not in Alaska. There is already a hunting and trapping season for Alaskan wolves, and some 7,500 wolves have been legally killed in the past five years. But hunters want more moose meat on the table, and the state has promised them unnaturally high numbers. Instead of setting sustainable limits for the moose hunt, the game board has decided simply to kill the animals that prey on moose – wolves and bears. According to the game board, "moose are important for providing high levels of harvest for human consumptive use." In other words, moose are important, wolves are not. Wildlife biologists disagree, and so do most Alaskans, who have voted against aerial shooting twice, in 1996 and 2000. But now the extremists have taken over. Any notion that wolves and moose are part of a functioning ecosystem has been abandoned. The hunting lobby demands that moose be managed as livestock destined for harvesting by hunters – the more the merrier, with anything that gets in the way destined for destruction. In Alaska, wolves are now merely competitors seizing valuable human resources.

The final sentence is what pisses me off about the general attitude to wolves. “Wolves are now merely competitors seizing valuable human resources.” That has essentially been the bad rap against wolves for centuries. The Big Bad Wolf, the Boy Who Cried Wolf, and bloody Red Riding Hood, on close examination, all turned out to be little more than evil, 19th century agri-business propaganda. The legend has always been that wolves ate people; that they were one of the few species that disputed the human place at the top of the food chain, but, in reality, the incidence of wolf attacks on people run zero to minimal. On the other hand, wolves do not make distinctions between fair game and domestic livestock, and a propensity for carrying off sheep and cattle made them a threat to the farmer and his profit margin. Not content to make the case on that level, however – to simply state that the wolf was bad for business and had to go – faux-primal fear was injected into the story, and the myths of wolves carrying off babies, of wolf packs chasing one horse open sleighs through the forest, of the gleaming hungry eyes around the trapper’s campfire, were inserted into the folklore, particularly of Central and Eastern Europe, and then brought to America with the waves of immigrants. (And one might note an ugly similarity to the mythology employed in organized anti-Semitism.) In the twentieth century, the fiction of the killer wolf was nailed into the culture by both Bram Stoker and Lon Chaney Jr.. Dracula morphed into a white wolf, the werewolf grew fur and fangs at the full moon. Wolves were evil and must die.

The saga of saving the wolf is another of those battles that we thought had been fought and won in the 1960s when folksinger Pete LaFarge and sections of the American Indian Movement protested the strychnine killing of wolfs and coyotes, and, gradually, the thinking – especially behind wildlife management in the National Parks – came round to the idea that predators like wolves and bears were an essential part of a balanced ecology, and, in the lower 48, wolf populations have been growing. But Murkowski and these bastards in Alaska, have turned all this around and seem once again happy to extinguish a entire species if it suits their corporate agenda.

MEANWHILE,

Our pal Belle de Jour has become famous, has a book deal, and is being outed, and all kinds of other exciting stuff. http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/

CRYPTIQUE – HOOOOWOOOO!