VISIT BOLD VISIONS CONSERVATION TODAYWe just learned of the savage violence that one man can inflict on wildlife. The man, if you can call him that, Cody Roberts, went into a bar with a wolf whose mouth was taped shut. He had worn the wolf out by chasing him with a snowmobile and ran him over before showing off the terrified animal to the patrons of the bar, then took it out back and shot it, likely laughing. This disgraceful act is the direct result of the livestock industry, trophy hunting interests, the Game and Fish Commissions of Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, and the leadership of these states. They have done all they can to make wolves the enemy.
They use ignorance and cowboy ideas of wildlife to allow some of the most important species to be hanging on in lands where they should be thriving. Why can a person use a snowmobile to wear out an animal? Who calls this sport? Many sportsmen in these states have a lot to answer for! They support trappers; they do not hunt with a leopolian approach. Instead, they use drones and guns with long-range scopes; they set up on the border of Yellowstone and bait and call out wildlife. This is not hunting; it is a disgrace.Game and Fish Commissioners, who should enforce more ethics and use science to guide them, are political pawns. They answer to their Governors, who want predators destroyed. Governor Gianforte, besides wishing to sell off public lands, enjoyed killing a wolf that had suffered in a trap for days; he killed a collared Yellowstone Mountain lion; why? Because he lacks the ethics to be a real sportsman. This takes us back to Cody Roberts, a person who clearly thought the horror he imposed on this animal was all just good fun. Besides the fact that he should be sent to federal prison and never be allowed to hunt, trap, or be around any animal, the odds are he will get a $250 fine. We live in some of the most beautiful lands in the world, and we have more diversity of wildlife than we ever could people. Yet there remains a “kill” mentality towards wildlife and wolves in particular. The time has come for a change in Montana and these other states. We must rebuild from the ground up the Game and Fish agencies, which in Montana have gone from great to an embarrassment. There remains cruelty towards many species that radiates in the rural parts of our state.
Trappers show the callousness that Mr. Roberts displayed; you can find it in their posts. Martha Williams, the head of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, had the chance to relist wolves but allowed politics to overrule the need to end this slaughter. She should be forced out if Biden wins reelection. We live in a painful time for wildlife, one that, in generations to come, will be viewed as barbaric, ignorant, and sad. If Wyoming had the courage, Mr. Roberts would pay a severe price for this malicious action. But the odds are the agency and commission will write him off as just a bad apple. The reality remains the real bad apples are on the commissions; they are in our capitol, and all of this makes clear that these states have no business managing wolves, grizzlies, or any other species that is not a deer or an elk. People are outraged, and well, they should be; this is not ethical hunting, and it is happening more and more as states like Idaho push to allow wolves to be trapped by outfitters and suffer for days before a slob client shows up to shoot the wolf, we must force real change. This is not human behavior; it is dangerous and sick behavior.This should never be allowed, and moving forward, we must demand respect for all species and an end to violence against wildlife. We must also push for jail sentences for those who live to torture and harm such innocence. Bold Visions demands that Cody Roberts of Daniel, Wyoming, be jailed for animal cruelty by the Sublette County Sheriff’s Office. We believe such cruelty requires him to be subject to psychological evaluation. In addition, Cody Roberts should not be allowed to own a pet. We demand that the Wyoming Game & Fish Department ban Cody Roberts for life from hunting and trapping privileges. This kind of behavior is abnormal and cannot continue unchecked.
Lobbyists for the world’s biggest meat companies have lauded a better than expected outcome at Cop28, which they say left them “excited” and “enthusiastic” for their industry’s prospects.
US livestock bosses reflected on the conference’s implication for their sector on a virtual panel, fresh from “sharing US agriculture’s story” at the climate summit in December.
Campaigners and climate scientists had hoped the summit, which was billed as a “Food Cop” because of its focus on farming, would result in governments agreeing to ambitious action to transform food systems in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement.
In the online discussion, which was hosted by the trade publication Feedstuffs, meat lobbyist groups made it clear they felt Cop28 resulted in a positive outcome.
The three representatives all said there had been widespread recognition at the Dubai summit that agriculture was a “solution” to the climate crisis, despite livestock accounting for more than 30% of anthropogenic methane emissions.
Outcomes at the summit were characterised as “far more positive … than we anticipated” by Constance Cullman, the president of the Animal Feed Industry Association (AFIA), a US lobby group whose members include some of the world’s biggest meat and animal feed producers.
She added that this was the first time she had “felt that optimistic” after a “large international gathering like this one”.
Cullman also praised the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)’s “Global Roadmap” to tackle the climate crisis and end hunger, which she described as “music to our ears”, saying she particularly welcomed the report’s emphasis on “production and efficiency” over “looking at reduced consumption of animal protein”.
Academics described the FAO report’s failure to recommend cuts to meat-eating as “bewildering” in a March submission to the journal Nature Food. According to a March paper, which surveyed more than 200 environmental and agricultural scientists, meat and dairy production must be drastically reduced – and fast – to align with the Paris agreement.
The report concludes that global emissions from livestock production need to decline by 50% during the next six years, with “high-producing and consuming nations” taking the lead. The FAO said in a statement that its roadmap took a “balanced” approach to animal agriculture, saying that its report had “acknowledged the importance of livestock for poor people in traditional agrifood systems” and referred to the need for dietary shifts.
“We believe that some comments on the change in diets and the role of animal products in them are either misinformed because people have not properly read the roadmap report, or deliberately disingenuous for the sake of feeding vested interests narratives,” it said.
Another industry panellist, Eric Mittenthal, had attended Cop28 on behalf of lobby group the Meat Institute (formerly the North American Meat Institute, or Nami). He emphasised the importance of sharing the message that animal agriculture was necessary for nutrition and sustainability.
The Meat Institute represents hundreds of corporations in the meat supply chain, including the meat sector’s three largestcompanies, JBS, Cargill and Tyson Foods, which together have emissions equal to a major oil company on the scale of BP or Shell.
Sophie Nodzenski, a senior campaign strategist on food and agriculture at Greenpeace International, said it was “unsurprising” that industrial meat producers felt positively about Cop28’s outcomes “given that their interests essentially took the central stage there”.
The number of lobbyists for big meat and dairy companies tripled at Cop28, as revealed by DeSmog and the Guardian, amid rising scrutiny of the food sector’s climate impact, while smallholders and family farmers at the summit said they felt “drowned out”.
“Cop28 has rightly put the spotlight on the link between food production and the climate crisis, but the sheer number of Big Ag lobbyists present gave them an outsized influence,” Nodzenski said.
Documents seen by DeSmog and the Guardian show that the meat industry was poised to “tell its story and tell it well” before and during the Dubai conference, which it described as a “notoriously challenging environment”.
Cop28 had promised to increase action on food systems transformation, but campaigners and experts said its declarations and reports fell far short of what was needed.
Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, speaks at Cop28’s Transforming Food Systems event. Photograph: Reuters
On the second day of the summit, the leaders’ declaration on sustainable food systems, which was signed by more than 130 countries, committed to food systems transformation.
But while it was praised for moving food up the global climate agenda, the International Panel of Experts on Food Systems co-chair Lim Li Ching criticised the declaration for its “vague language” and noted the lack of any reference to “reducing overconsumption of industrially produced meat”.
The long-awaited FAO roadmap followed. While it proposed a 25% reduction in livestock methane emissions by 2030 to put the agriculture sector on track to reach global climate goals, it again failed to explicitly recommend a cut to meat and dairy consumption.
A reduction in “excess meat eating” – which is prevalent in high-income countries such as the US and UK – is a key recommendation of major scientific bodies, and has appeared in reports from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the recommendations of the EAT-Lancet commission.
The third Cop28 agreement that failed to tackle food system emissions was the “Global Stocktake”, in which agriculture was mentioned only in the context of adaptation to climate impacts, not mitigation, despite food systems making up around a third of greenhouse gas emissions overall.
Jamie Burr, a representative of the US Pork Board who spoke on Feedstuff’s panel, said he was “excited to see” the roadmap recognise efficiency as the best pathway to emissions reduction, going on to describe US agriculture as the “most efficient in the world”.
Industrial meat companies emphasise emissions intensity and efficiency over absolute cuts to emissions, or dietary shifts that would lead to a drop in production.
This is especially true in the US, where livestock methane emissions as reported to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change have increased by about 5% since 2010 according to the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, and have increased about 20% since 1990.
Cullman also welcomed the FAO’s proposals – including its plug for the role new technologies could play in bringing down methane emissions.
Numerous assessments have found that there is a role for efficiency and innovation to cut livestock emissions, although many technologies are unproven at scale. But to be effective, they should also be accompanied by a shift away from meat in diets, and, researchers caution, should not be used to delay demand-side policy.
Scrutiny of the FAO’s relationship with industry has grown in recent years. Last autumn, former officials said their work on livestock emissions had been censored because of pressure from industry and diplomats from large producer countries. Experts have called on the FAO for greater transparency, querying the lack of authors on the roadmap.
The FAO said: “The Global Roadmap has been developed with reference to and based on existing scientific and peer-reviewed publications. In no stage of the development of the roadmap were livestock industries consulted, or any inputs received from them.”
AFIA, Nami and the US Pork Board did not respond to a request for comment.
The meat lobbyists, whose industry enjoyed many routes to influence at the summit, also celebrated the cut-through of their message that industrial animal agriculture has an important role to play in addressing global hunger.
Cullman said that she was pleased to see there had been a “strong recognition” at Cop28 that animal products “had a real role in meeting the nutritional needs of folks around the globe”.
Burr added that Cops provided an opportunity for US agriculture groups to demonstrate how they “feed the world”, while Mittenthal said the Meat Institute had showcased how agriculture can be a “solution” for “healthy people and a healthy planet”.
A spokesperson for the Global Alliance for the Future of Food said the argument that industrial agriculture is “critical to address hunger” is one of the greatest “myths” shared by the industry.
Today, with our allies, we sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over its decision to not reinstate federal protections for wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains. In 2022, most wolves in the U.S. regained their federal protections under the Endangered Species Act when a federal judge ruled in their favor in response to a lawsuit we filed with other groups—most wolves, but not all. Wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains, including in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, lost federal protections years ago, and the 2022 court decision did not impact their status.
Since losing federal protections, wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains have suffered relentless persecution from trophy hunters, trappers and predator control agents. Conditions for wolves in Idaho and Montana became even worse in 2021 when those states enacted policies aimed at decimating their populations through wolf killings. As public policy, this is nothing less than disastrous. Recent scientific research concludes that the level of genetic variability in U.S. wolves, including in the Northern Rocky Mountains, is already insufficient to prevent long-term extinction risk. Drastic population declines associated with their persecution will exacerbate that harm. Plus, small and fragile wolf populations in other parts of the Western United States—such as California and Colorado—depend on the migration of wolves from the Northern Rocky Mountains. When wolves migrate, they can establish packs in new habitats and also connect different wolf populations, which enhances genetic health. In contrast, killing wolves can limit this range of movement and fragment wolf populations.
In the face of such reckless conduct by these states, we and our allies submitted a legal petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in May 2021 requesting that federal protections be restored to wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains. The agency determined our request may be warranted in September 2021, when it launched a review of their status. Yet, in February 2024, the agency ultimately denied our petition—despite finding that wolf killing under state laws could reduce the region’s wolf population from an estimated 2,534 wolves down to as few as 667 wolves.
Consider the facts. New Montana laws allow wolves to be killed using bait and strangulation snares, permit a single person to kill 20 wolves each year, and lengthen the state’s wolf-trapping season.
In about 85% of Wyoming, including along the entire Colorado border, wolves can be killed without a license in nearly any manner and at any time. Wyoming hunters have killed several wolves just miles from the border with Colorado, a state to which wolves are finally returning through dispersal and release.
In Idaho, recent changes allow the state to hire private contractors to kill wolves, allow hunters to purchase an unlimited number of wolf-killing tags, and permit hunters to kill wolves by chasing them down with hounds and all-terrain vehicles.
And right now, with respect to that state, we’re doing something about the carnage. Last month, we and our allies succeeded in obtaining an injunction halting wolf trapping in parts of Idaho. The court agreed that indiscriminate traps and snares set for wolves under Idaho’s liberal new laws will unavoidably injure or kill federally protected grizzly bears. But protecting wolves needs to be an end in itself, not a contingent consequence of protecting other animals. While this is an important victory, wolves in Idaho and across the northern Rockies are still imperiled by reckless state management practices. Federal protections are necessary to ensure their survival.
Nearly 30 years after the first wolves were brought back to Yellowstone National Park and the Northern Rockies, and after millions of tax dollars spent on this important restoration, they are once again on the precipice of disaster.
The evidence for relisting Northern Rocky Mountain wolves under the Endangered Species Act is overwhelming, and we will not stand by while the federal government allows Northern Rockies states to continue their hostile assault on wolves. We’re taking our fight to court on behalf of wolves in that region and the millions of Americans who care about them and want to see them protected.
Sara Amundson is president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund.
Dinosaurs have thrown into question everything we thought we knew about the evolution of body size.
In biology, Bergmann’s Rule is a 150-year-old principle that correlates an animal’s body size to their external environment. It was first described by German biologist Carl Bergmann in 1847 who noticed that animals in cold climates are expected to have a larger body size compared to their close relatives in warmer climates. For example, polar bears typically weigh more than three times your average American black bear.
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Newsweek
New US Dinosaur That Lived Just Before Mass Extinction RevealedUnmute
However, new research from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Reading in the U.K. has called this rule into question.
“Our study shows that the evolution of diverse body sizes in dinosaurs and mammals cannot be reduced to simply being a function of latitude or temperature,” Lauren Wilson, a UAF graduate student and a lead author of the study, said in a statement.
In the study, published in the journal Nature Communications, Wilson and colleagues trawled through the fossil records to determine whether the correlation between body size and climate was still applicable for prehistoric animals.
“We found that Bergmann’s rule is only applicable to a subset of homeothermic animals (those that maintain stable body temperatures), and only when you consider temperature, ignoring all other climatic variables,” Wilson said. “This suggests that Bergmann’s ‘rule’ is really the exception rather than the rule.”
The dataset included the northernmost dinosaurs known to science, those found in Alaska’s Prince Creek Formation. And yet, despite the freezing temperatures and snowfall these beasts had to endure, the researchers found no notable increase in body size compared to their more temperate relatives.
These findings are a good example of why the fossil record should be used to test current-day scientific rules and hypothesis, the researchers said. “The fossil record provides a window into completely different ecosystems and climate conditions, allowing us to assess the applicability of these ecological rules in a whole new way,” Jacob Gardner, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Reading and the other lead author of the paper, said in a statement.
Patrick Druckenmiller, director of the University of Alaska Museum of the North and another of the study’s co-authors, added: “You can’t understand modern ecosystems if you ignore their evolutionary roots. You have to look to the past to understand how things became what they are today.”
Newsweek
Exposing the Big Game 