The Killing Of Wolves

wolf

"Yesterday a neighbour told me that he heard that the province of Manitoba has allocated $190,000 to deal with the decimation of moose in the province.  The money will be spent on hiring several new conservation officers to control illegal hunting.  If this is true, then who's kidding who?  What is that going to solve?

Both the decimation of moose and the killing of wolves is an ecological time bomb.  How in the world can we as humans justify and tolerate untruthful responses?  We know what the problems are.  These animals have been around for at least 700,000 years.  They developed with a purpose.  We have to understand that wolves are the most abundant top-predator in North America.  Nature created them for a reason.  Now we are just killing them.  Most of those who do this, don't care.  They kill one or one hundred, so what?  A good wolf is a dead wolf, so let's kill them all, right?  But if we kill them all - which we now have the capacity to do - we destroy the food chains of North America, and we should be more thoughtful.

Here's what I think, as a hunter, who lives in an area rife with wolves.  I think that future generations are going to look back on us as barbarians.  To think that in a couple of generations we have become arrogant enough so as to believe that we can manage, let alone undo imbalances today, with a few dollars worth of intervention.  And this is the worst part...we know what we are doing.  The scientists know, the general public knows, the conservationists know, and industry knows.  And yet we are allowing ourselves to do just this.

Wolves have lived in balance in the boreal forest as the top predator for longer than modern humans have walked the earth.  But now we are the top predator.  And it is us who decides who lives and who dies.  Looking at how we deal with our problems I really don't think that we have evolved enough to make such a decisions...I really, really don't."http://growingwolves.blogspot.com/