http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7690
Lone Wolf
A forsaken predator reappears
By Joe Donnelly
Published in the September/October 2013 issue of Orion magazine
Here’s an excerpt from the article…
Except for a few stubborn holdouts, the era of man seems just about done in Plumas County. It’s an eerie, forgotten landscape, and there’s a certain poetic justice in OR7’s arrival. Bounty hunters killed OR7’s last remaining California cousin near here in 1924, back when wolves were considered to be an enemy of manifest destiny. OR7, though, doesn’t seem to have revenge in mind. He has yet to take sheep or cow from the descendants of those who shot, trapped, poisoned, and burned his kind to extinction in the West.
But this hasn’t stopped some locals from greeting his arrival as if the devil himself were paying a visit. As soon as his epic trek signaled a wolf with Golden State aspirations, the hysteria began. To calm local fears of pending doom, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife conducted public meetings featuring wildlife officials, celebrity wolf experts, government resources managers, and a highly agitated public—all awaiting the imminent arrival of a solitary, thirty-month-old Canis lupus.
After one meeting, Marcia Armstrong, a supervisor for Siskiyou County, where OR7 dallied briefly before moving on, told the Los Angeles Times that she would like to see all encroaching wolves “shot on sight.” Adding to the tinder were ranchers warning that a wolf repopulation would be “catastrophic.” Other folks spread rumors of conspiratorial wolf smuggling by federal agencies, and of a government out to trample rights and make it harder to log, mine, and dam the rural West.
Exposing the Big Game 
Wait! What the fuck did you just write? Marcia Armstrong said she wold like to see all encroaching wolves shot on sight???? Is she outside her fucking head? Who is this woman? I want to know where she lives so I can buy a gun and fire a bullet between her fucking eyes. What a KOONT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now, now, watch the language…That was dangerously close to the forbidden word.
Sorry Dad.
😉
until the population at large finds ways to stop the power of the ranchers nothing will change. As a vegetarian for 25 years I have about had it with ranchers dictating how “my” wildlife is to be treated. If they want to be in the business of meat they should be required by laws to do what it takes to protect wildlife or find another business!
You said it!
It is mostly republicans, especially at the state legislative level but nationally also, lining up almost like a solid wall against wolves and other predators, particularly in the red states, and that makes sense from their values and perspectives: states rule over federal government, business over environment and wilderness, republican politics (trickle down economics myth and unfettered capitalism) over social justice and wilderness and environment, no perspective on lasting legacy, just protect the status quo, knee jerk opposition to change, pro republican rancher, republican yokel, sportsmen, trapper, western state wildlife agency, western governors and legislatures, and against anything liberals and ESA and EPA supporters and animal lovers and what they call tree huggers are for, they are against.
They may love their Fido. But there seems to be a general disconnect in seeing that Fido is cousin to gray wolf. They can breed and the offspring are fertile, so a lot closer than cousins, or even sub-species. Anti-wolfers seem to have trouble relating to other sentient beings in general, something is missing in them. Wolves are social, specialists, family oriented, protective of each other and the pack (moral), loving and caring… scares the yokels, I guess, Big Bad Wolf folklore. Their own folklore scares them… therapy needed here… but does confrontation work? Plant seeds, hope for eureka. But can you talk to stupid? Just keep trying, plant some seeds, change a few, wait for the majority of them to pass on.
but are anti-wolfers offspring fertile, or are they a dead-end subspecies?
It is a war to save our planet – for as the wolf goes so go we. As a professional wildlife photographer I have traveled from the Arctic to the Antarctic, to jungles, deserts and mountains. I have seen the devastation taking place with my own eyes. Environmental devastation, species eradication, and the poisoning of our world. I am fighting not only to save the wolf and the other similarly threatened species…… but to save my species as well (Republicans/Concervatives included – but quite begrudgingly.) Their perverse greed, hatred and fears seem to have blinded them to what is going on worldwide – that we are on the brink of a largely self created catastrophe the likes of which the world has never known. I watch with horror, as instead of trying to save the planet, and the precious life within it, they seem to seek to want kill every animal possible. It almost at times seems like a race to get their trophy’s on their walls before all the different species go extinct. I also believe that a component of it is a hatred of people like us, a hatred that they vent by destroying anything they perceive that so called liberals hold dear. Most bizarrely they call themselves conservatives, and yet we are the ones fighting to conserve….. It is my passion to save the wildlife who I feel are innocents in all of this, but for me it is also a duty. I am honored to share the battlefield with the likes of so many intelligent, devoted and hard working people here on these pages and elsewhere. I shall end by saying some fitting words at this particular time – “WE SHALL OVERCOME!”
David, do you have a FB page? If so, would you mind posting the link to it?
I don’t post pictures on F.B. except in my personal page which you are welcome to request to friend me on – David Andrew Stein – Ciudad De Heredia, Heredia, Costa Rica
P.S. I mean a link to a fan page where you post your pics.
We have a cultural war going on, make no mistake about it. Sportsmen and ranchers and their reps in state legislatures and governors’ offices and on the national level are squaring off against ESA, EPA, and other conservationists. They are embedded in the right and far right way of thinking, read alternative universe. For them state rights trump federal rights, they would do away with the ESA and EPA. They would enshrine sports animal killing in the Sportsmen Act at the national level. They do not see animals, for the most part, as we do, as sentient animals, like us, but as recreational killing opportunities, and as objects, as animals that do not think or feel or face the same struggles in life as man does: food, shelter, safety, family, survival. They see other animals, than us humans, as non-thinking, as purely instinctual as renewable resources for killing, hunting, and trapping. They want to marginalize the predators as much as they can get away with, and essentially farm the rest for sport killing. If they cannot control things at the federal level, they are/will go for control at the state legislative and governor level. They are taking us on, so we need to meet them in the war to save wilderness and wildlife. It is a war against civilizations’ never ending encroachment and its’ war on wildlife, and shortsighted, short range profits at the expense of wilderness and wildlife, as they would let the extraction industries have free reign.