Motion seeks to prevent “irreparable” wolf killing pending ruling on legality of State’s wolf-hunting policies
HELENA, MONTANA— A motion was filed today asking a Montana state court to prohibit the start of the state’s wolf-trapping season as well as to immediately halt the on-going wolf-hunting season while the merits of a pending lawsuit are being considered. Conservation groups WildEarth Guardians and Project Coyote, a project of Earth Island Institute, filed the time-sensitive motion with the wolf trapping and snaring season set to begin on November 28, 2022. The hunting season began in September.
Today’s motion comes two weeks after the conservation groups filed the initial lawsuit against the State of Montana, Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks (MFWP) and the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission (the “Commission”) alleging that the state’s current wolf hunting and trapping regulations violate numerous laws and the Montana constitution.
The motion asks the court to issue a temporary restraining order, followed by a preliminary injunction, to stop all recreational killing of wolves in the state pending resolution of the lawsuit. In the 2021-2022 season, 273 wolves were killed by hunters and trappers—including 19 Yellowstone wolves—with nearly 70 percent of the wolves killed after the trapping season began on November 29, 2021. So far, hunters have killed 55 wolves this season, while regulations permit hunters and trappers to kill an additional 395 wolves before the season ends in March 2023. The motion alleges that the conservation groups’ interests will be harmed beyond repair if the court allows the hunting and trapping season to proceed while they fully litigate their case.
Notably, the motion—and the underlying lawsuit—claim that there are significant flaws in the population model used to estimate the total number of wolves in the state. Since the 456 quota for the 2022-2023 season relies upon a flawed population model, reaching the quota could have devastating consequences on the state’s wolf population. Per allegations in the motion, “Montana does not have an accurate picture of how many wolves are living in Montana and cannot sustainably and legally manage the species through another wolf hunt this winter.”
“At the time of this writing, the lives of 55 wolves have already been claimed in Montana since the September start of the hunting season,” said Michelle Lute, PhD in wolf conservation and carnivore conservation director for Project Coyote, an organization that works to protect native carnivores. “Multiple studies document that illegal poaching increases during legal recreation hunts so we know that untold numbers of additional wolves, as well as non-target animals, have been indiscriminately killed and are not reflected in the official death toll. We need to put a halt to this season’s wolf hunting and trapping seasons at least until the court can determine whether the state of Montana is in violation of its policies.”
This motion is part of the groups’ lawsuit filed on October 27, which claims that the State of Montana, MFWP, and the Commission are violating the law by relying on stale and insufficient scientific data in order to authorize the killing of roughly 40 percent of the state’s wolf population this coming winter. The suit also alleges that the state is flouting its responsibility to manage wildlife for the benefit of the entire public and is overstepping its management authority by allowing wolf slaughter on the boundaries of federal lands, namely Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks. For more information about the specific claims in the complaint and the legal background that led to this lawsuit, read our initial complaint here.
“Montana’s wolf hunting and trapping season must be stopped before our state’s wolf population faces potential decimation and the point of no return,” said Lizzy Pennock, Montana-based carnivore coexistence advocate at WildEarth Guardians. “As long as the wolf killing season continues, each wolf that suffers and dies under the alleged unconstitutional and illegal policies is a wolf that should never have been killed in the first place.”
During the approval process for the challenged hunting and trapping regulations, first adopted in 2021, MFWP noted that the new killing method most anticipated to increase the number of dead wolves is snares, because snares are cheap, easy to place in abundance, and easy to maintain in bad weather. Additionally, trapping and snaring are inherently non-selective for the target species. Research shows that neck snares are anywhere from 21-50 percent selective, and foot snares are approximately 32-45 percent effective at capturing the intended animal. Non-target animals that die in traps and snares set for wolves include, among others, companion animals, deer, bighorn sheep, and imperiled species such as grizzly bears and Canada lynx.
Published:Nov. 5, 2022 at 11:58 AM PDT|Updated:Nov. 6, 2022 at 1:49 PM PST
CASS COUNTY, Texas (KSLA) – A man has been arrested for allegedly accidentally shooting another man with a 12-gauge shotgun while hunting.
On Nov. 5 at 10:30 a.m., a Texas game warden was dispatched to a hunting accident on public hunting land at Black Point in Cass County, Texas.
The accident occurred when Daniel Abston, 57, fired a 12-gauge shotgun in the direction of a sound and movement in the woods. Abston allegedly did not identify his target before firing the weapon and accidentally struck Jason Mills, 49.
Mills was flown to a hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Abston was arrested and charged with one count each of deadly conduct, unlawful possession…
With the most popular portion of firearms deer season opening Nov. 12, the Missouri Department of Conservation reminds non-hunters to practice safety measures when afield during hunting seasons.
“Safety while hunting is ultimately the responsibility of the hunter,” MDC Hunter Education Coordinator Justin McGuire said. “Hunters must clearly identify their targeted game animals before even putting their fingers on the triggers of their firearms or before drawing their bows when archery hunting. They must also be aware of what is behind their targets and should never shoot at movement or sound.”
McGuire added that non-hunters out in hunting areas can also practice some safety measures. He and MDC offer these safety tips for non-hunters:
Wear bright clothing to be more visible, such as a bright orange hat, jacket, or pack.
To the editor: The recreational trapping season in Vermont started on October 22 and runs through March 31. This includes the use of baited steel-jawed leghold and body-gripping kill traps, as well as cage traps that are set underwater that drown multiple animals at once. Traps inflict tremendous fear and suffering upon the trapped animals who are, all too often, not even killed humanely. Drowning, bludgeoning, and strangling are all legal methods of killing trapped animals in Vermont. Not surprisingly, Vermont trappers have fought recent efforts to restrict the method of kill to gunshot only.
Traps not only injure, but also maim, and kill their intended victims; untold numbers of non-targeted animals like owls, eagles, and even turtles are caught every year. They are cavalierly referred to by trappers and…
An iceberg in Ilulissat, Greenland. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting rapidly, and that melt will accelerate as the Earth heats up.
Ryan Kellman/NPR
The goal of the international climate meeting underway in Egypt is to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to temperatures in the late 1800s. Even at that level, communities will experience more dangerous storms, flooding and heat waves.
But if the planet heats up beyond 1.5 degrees, the impacts don’t get just slightly worse. Scientists warn that abrupt changes could be set off, with devastating impacts around the world.
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Global temperatures have increased nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1800s. Here, federal scientists show that change using the average temperature over each 5-year period going back to 1880.
Credit: NASA
Such changes are sometimes called climate tipping points, although they’re not as abrupt as that term would suggest. Most will unfold over the course of decades. Some could take centuries. Some may be partially reversible or avoidable. But they all have enormous and lasting implications for the humans, plants and animals on Earth. And they are looming.
It’s still possible to avoid such widespread calamities, but only if countries move far more aggressively to cut the pollution driving climate change. The Earth has warmed about 1 degree Celsius so far. If countries, including the United States, follow through on current promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the latest estimates suggest that Earth’s temperature will still top out around 2.8 degrees Celsius of warming.
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Here are the three most important and well-studied changes, from collapsing ice sheets to thawing Arctic permafrost, to disappearing coral reefs.
A group of scientists from the United Kingdom trek up to a research site on the west side of the Greenland ice sheet near Kangerlussuaq in the summer of 2022. This year marks the 26th year that Greenland has lost more ice than it gained.
Ryan Kellman/NPR
Change #1: Ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica could collapse
Ice sheets are the massive expanses of ice that cover Greenland and Antarctica, and which contain about two thirds of the freshwater on Earth. Climate change is already causing them to melt, and raising sea levels around the world.
But if the Earth lingers at, or above, 2 degrees Celsius of warming, as it is on track to, that melting will steadily accelerate. Scientists warn that will cause parts of the ice sheets to collapse, sending massive amounts of water into the world’s oceans.
The million dollar question is how quickly that collapse will occur. “Collapse tends to be a bit of a loaded world. People think of it like a building collapse,” says Ian Joughin, a glaciologist at the University of Washington who has spent decades studying how giant glaciers move and change.
“Maybe a better timescale for an ice sheet [collapsing] is the Roman Empire,” Joughin explains. Like a dying empire, the ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica are huge. It will take decades or even centuries for them to disintegrate.
Snow and ice are melting more quickly than they are being replaced on the world’s largest ice sheets. That’s causing the ice sheets to get out of balance and rapidly destabilize, sending enormous amounts of freshwater into the ocean and driving global sea level rise.
Ryan Kellman/NPR
This year marks the 26th year that Greenland has lost more ice than it gained. Last year, rainfall was recorded at the ice sheet’s highest point, rather than snow, a sign that warmer temperatures were triggering widespread melting.
As temperatures continue to warm, scientists say the two-mile thick ice sheet is getting out of balance. Snow and ice are melting faster than they’re being replaced, and as the ice melt accelerates, the process is difficult to stop. One study found that no matter how humans cut greenhouse gas emissions going forward, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is likely to cause 10 inches of sea level rise.
Research suggests that the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet may already be underway. A massive glacier there, which covers an area about the size of the state of Washington, is melting quickly in response to climate change, and could splinter into the ocean in the coming decades.
The Getz Ice Shelf in West Antarctica. Scientists are working to figure out exactly how quickly ice in West Antarctica is collapsing into the sea. The answer has profound implications for coastal communities around the world.
Jeremy Harbeck/NASA
If that glacier melts entirely, it will add so much water to the oceans that sea levels will rise about 2 feet. If the entire West Antarctic ice sheet melts, scientists estimate that sea levels will rise about 12 feet.
Due to their enormous size, ice sheets have a huge amount of inertia. Once the melt process gets underway, it’s difficult to stop.
“It takes a few hundred years to really get going,” says Joughin. “And it’s kind of a snowball effect, where the faster it goes, the more it’s going to go.”
But it will take a long time for people around the world to feel the most extreme effects of that melt. “It could be anywhere from two or three hundred years to a thousand years,” says Joughin.
If humans slow down the pace of global warming, it will help slow down the pace of ice melting, giving the billions of people who live along coastlines more time to adapt.
Change #2: Permanently frozen ground could thaw
Climate change is causing permafrost – the permanently frozen ground in the Arctic – to thaw. And as the Earth approaches 2 degrees Celsius of warming, that thawing ground will cause both local and global problems.
Let’s start local. When permafrost thaws, the ice that’s trapped in the ground turns into water and drains away. “It can have really profound consequences,” says Merritt Turetsky, the director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “We can see lakes draining overnight. We can see ecosystems becoming much drier in some areas, because the permafrost was actually holding the water up at the surface.”
That’s because when the ground is frozen, it’s impermeable to moisture, like the lining of a bathtub. “When it thaws, we pull the drain out of the bathtub,” Turetsky explains.
Scientist Keith Larson walks past a pond formed by thawing permafrost in Sweden.
Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images
Thawing permafrost has profound impacts for the millions of people who live in the Arctic. In many places, the land is sinking as it thaws, cracking the foundations of buildings, buckling roads and runways and kinking pipelines. That will accelerate as the Earth heats up more.
Thawing permafrost also has global climate implications. Permanently frozen ground is like the world’s freezer: millennia of dead plants and animals are locked up in permafrost.
“When permafrost thaws it’s a little like losing power to your freezer. That food starts to rot,” explains Ted Schuur, a permafrost expert at Northern Arizona University. Bacteria and fungi start to digest the carbon-rich soil, releasing planet-warming methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Basically, it’s an infinite loop of greenhouse gasses: human emissions cause the planet to heat up. That heat thaws permafrost, which releases more emissions.
But how much extra carbon ultimately gets released by Arctic permafrost in the future is up to humans. “The faster we can decarbonize society today, the more permafrost carbon we can keep in the Arctic ground where it belongs,” says Turetsky. For example, by using renewable energy instead of burning fossil fuels.
But, she warns, there will be a lag: the warming that has already occurred will keep thawing permafrost for decades. “Our climate warming today is going to thaw permafrost and cause that permafrost to lose carbon 50 years from now,” Turetsky explains.
Change #3: Coral reefs could be gone forever
By overall area, coral reefs are a tiny part of the ocean. But they’re a bedrock ecosystem for marine life, supporting an estimated 25% of all species.
Corals are highly sensitive to heat, and as the oceans warm, the future of reefs is in peril. When marine heat waves hit, corals under stress expel their algae companions, which they need to survive. The reefs turn a ghostly white color.
A bleaching event doesn’t necessarily mean the end for a coral reef. Corals have the ability to recover, given enough time. But repeated heat waves, as seen at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, can kill a reef, leading to the collapse of the ecosystem.
Bleaching coral in Kahala’u Bay in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii. Corals are highly sensitive to heat, and as the oceans warm, the future of reefs is in peril.
Caleb Jones/AP
Oceans are also becoming more acidic, as they absorb the carbon dioxide that humans emit from burning fossil fuels. That also stresses corals, making it difficult for them to build their skeletons.
If the world passes 2 degrees Celsius of heating, an estimated 99% of the world’s coral reefs could be lost. The damage is happening faster than scientists expected. Combined with the effects of pollution and human development, half of all reefs worldwide will be in unlivable conditions by 2035, according to a new study.
“The coming decades will bring, I think, unprecedented change for both these reef systems and humanity in general,” says Erik Franklin, professor at Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who worked on the study.
It’s estimated that half a billion people around the world depend on coral reefs for food, income and livelihoods. Losing reefs would destabilize many countries, along with risking extinction for marine life that can only be found on coral reefs.
“There’s entire societies and economies that are built around reef systems, especially in equatorial and tropical regions,” Franklin says. “So these societies will be in dire straits.”
Many scientists are searching for “refuges” – pockets of the ocean where conditions might remain livable for coral reefs. The hope is that coral reefs can hold on there, surviving just long enough until humans can get their heat-trapping emissions under control.
In cognitive tests for recognizing certain types of patterns, crows outperformed monkeys.
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Scientists recently found that crows are capable of grasping a complex cognitive principle known as recursion. (Image credit: R.A.Chalmers Photography/Alamy Stock Photo)
Crows are notoriously clever — the songbirds can use tools, understand the concept of zero and follow basic analogies. Now, a new study suggests that their grasp of one complex cognitive principle in particular is better than that of monkeys and comparable to that of small children.
Researchers found that crows can distinguish paired elements buried in larger sequences, a cognitive ability known as recursion. Consider the sentence: “The cat the dog chased meowed.” Although the sentence is admittedly a grammatical nightmare, most adults would quickly understand that the cat meowed and that the dog chased the cat. This capacity to pair elements like “cat” to “meow” and “dog” to “chase” in a sentence, or any sequence, was once thought to be a uniquely human trait.
The new study, however, suggests that crows can do it too. And this latest research builds on previous work demonstrating the existence of recursive reasoning among monkeys. “One of the most distinguishing features of human communicative cognition may turn out not to be that human-specific after all,” lead author Diana A. Liao, a postdoctoral candidate at the University of Tübingen in Germany, told Live Science in an email.
Grammar isn’t the only place where recursion occurs. Our ears can distinguish a musical phrase within a larger piece, and our minds can set aside a mathematical expression embedded between parentheses. Indeed, a 2020 study published in the journal Science Advances(opens in new tab) demonstrated that people can follow recursive patterns even without a formal background in reading and mathematics. In that study, people from isolated Amazonian tribes identified recursive patterns about as well as adults living in the U.S. did. Nonhuman primates also demonstrated an ability to understand recursion; the same study found that rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) were only slightly inferior to toddlers when it came to distinguishing paired elements, such as opened and closed brackets, from a morass of symbols.
The new study, published Nov. 2 in Science Advances(opens in new tab), builds on this work to extend the findings beyond primates. “The study is well-designed and executed, and the results are clear and compelling,” said Stephen Ferrigno(opens in new tab), an assistant professor in the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lead author on the 2020 paper. Ferrigno was not involved in the new study.
Liao and her colleagues started off by teaching two crows (Corvus corone) to identify the symbols { }, [ ] and < >, rewarding them with treats only when the birds pecked in the order of a center-embedded recursive sequence, such as { ( ) } or ( { } ). It took the birds about a week to learn to peck the symbols in that order, after which the crows sat for their final exams: strings of similar symbols they had not yet seen, such as { } [ ]. Humans, toddlers and monkeys faced with such a test usually understand that if { ( ) } is correct then { [ ] } or [ { } ] is also correct.
As for the crows, not only did they perform as well as preschoolers typically do on such tests, they also outperformed monkeys. In the 2020 study, adult humans selected a center-embedded structure between 60% and 90% of the time; children did so 43% of the time; and monkeys, 26% of the time. In the new study, crows selected center-embedded structures about 40% of the time.
This result suggests that the ability to identify recursive sequences, often considered a defining feature of language, may have initially evolved for other purposes. “The finding that non-linguistic animals — both monkeys and crows — can represent these complex sequences suggests that this ability may have evolved outside of the language domain,” Ferrigno said.
It is also possible that recursive logic is a key component of communication, even for crows. “If corvid songbirds can understand and produce recursive structures, they may also use it for vocal communication and managing their intricate social relationships,” Liao said.
Meanwhile, from a neurobiological perspective, the findings open the door to questions about how non-mammalian brains perform cognitive feats once thought to be beyond the scope of animals that lacked a six-layered neocortex. “Our results suggest that certain brain structures, such as the layered cortex of primates, are not necessary to support recursive understanding,” Liao said. “Further research on the neural circuits underlying this ability would be fascinating.”
Dionysus’ Maenads: Émile Bin, The Death of Orpheus, 1874.
“Our violence toward nature and other species permeates everything as the violence of human slavery did. Most people are too divorced from nonhuman life to get it, except for their dogs and cats.” ‑ David Johns via email to Karen Davis, Nov. 2nd.
We are in agreement about Michael Moore and about the Left. Most people Left, Right, Center are dissociated from the world that exists outside our parochial domain. Environmentalists too are divorced from other-than-human-beings. Ditto “Religious” people for the most part. Ditto almost everyone else.
Environmentalism bypasses individual animals for the Aggregate (Species) and Biosystems / Ecosystems. The mainstream Left being rooted in Marxism does not recognize nonhuman animals as fellow creatures, worthy of moral consideration as individuals in their own right.
Years ago, what used to be the annual Summit for the Animals meetings, consisting of the heads of national animal advocacy organizations in the U.S., invited an environmentalist named Roderick Nash to speak. Nash seemed unable to comprehend that animals are Individuals, not just Species. Or that domesticated animals such as farmed animals are as sensitive and alert as “wild” animals are.
The environmentalist J. Baird Callicott wrote in one of his pieces in Environmental Ethics that domesticated animals, especially farmed animals, and in particular “hens” and “bobby calves,” have nothing in common with “wild” animals but, rather, they resemble tables and chairs deserving no moral considerateness from human beings.
A problem with the environmentalist / conservation / deep ecology perspectives is that they are rooted in a rigidly masculine sensibility that is virtually all “animus” with little or no “anima.” The fact that these perspectives’ representatives have chosen as their “heroes” and founders such notables as Theodore Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold, while rejecting John Muir in particular, as being “out of touch with Nature” because Muir supported Animals Rights and did not hunt and consider himself a Glorious Apex Predator who “Thinks Like a Mountain” devoid of pesky individuals like a chicken or even a wolf other than WOLF as Macho Icon – all this is pertinent to the problem of Environmentalism.
The fact is, there is no LIFE apart from individual embodiments of life. There are lives, not Life, except as an abstraction from reality.
This is not to say that women are all that great either. They aren’t. I had an experience a few years ago when the editor of a progressive publication invited me to contribute an article about Mother Hens for Mother’s Day. A few days later he informed me that my article had been rejected by another editor, a “radical feminist” who resented the idea that a mother hen could care for her chicks the way a human mother cares for her children.
Carol J. Adams wrote an important essay, “The Feminist Traffic in Animals,” in Neither ManNor Beast, about the difficulty of getting organizers of feminist gatherings to agree to serve animal-free, or even just vegetarian (including eggs and mammary products but no meat) food at their events. Feminists complain[ed] that women are being “oppressed” by these requests, and that a vegetarian “option” suffices.
I’ve encountered some very cruel women over the years. Some of the worst are those who have found a “purpose” in life as DIY (Do It Yourself) animal controllers and killers enjoying the superadded exhilaration of writing articles, blogs and books about their exploits such as luring a hen with “kindness” in order to cut her throat and put pieces of her in “delicious” soup. Such women are prefigured in the murderous Maenads in Greek mythology who “nurse” wild animals as a prelude to tearing them to pieces.
Animal Rights philosopher John Sanbonmatsu has spoken and written eloquently about the modern lust among certain women, for domination of chickens and turkeys and goats and lambs and cows and rabbits – the visceral thrill they get, and can’t wait to share their naughty-girl sadism.*
An article online recently shows Georgia Senator Marjorie Taylor Greene sitting on the ground next to a wild pig she bragged she had just shot dead from a helicopter, just ‘cause she felt like it and wanted to enrapture her Base with how totally into assault weapons she is, what a He-Woman.
All other-than-human-animals, healthy and fit in their natural bodies and habitats and helplessly deformed and disfigured by ourselves, suffer in alien, dysfunctional “anthropomorphized” bodies and conditions for the insatiable pleasure and Will to Power of the Self-Idolizing Omnivore.
“Our goal has to be to figure out how we get through this bottleneck until the whole mess collapses and we have ensured what follows cannot subjugate others.” ‑ David Johns via email to Karen Davis, Nov. 2nd.
Oceanographers sometimes classify seawater aseither “spicy”, meaning warm and salty, or “minty”, when it is cooler and has a lower salt content. Temperature and salinity are important factors because of their effect on the density of seawater.
Cold water is heavier and tends to sink, which can drive large-scale movement. This contributes, for example, to the well-known El Niño oscillation off South America. Salty water is also denser, and again tends to sink.
These two effects may cancel each other out though, so spicy water, which is warmer but saltier, can have the same density as cooler but fresher minty water.
PUBLISHED:November 7, 2022 at 12:00 p.m.| UPDATED:November 7, 2022 at 5:30 p.m.
Marin County is home to a wonderful community of people who love, appreciate and respect local wildlife, but occasionally something happens to challenge the assumption that everyone here equally appreciates our wild neighbors.
Patient No. 22-3127 arrived at WildCare on Oct. 27 after being rescued in the Gerstle Park neighborhood of San Rafael. A concerned neighbor spotted the young raccoon trying to climb a tree with a heavy-duty steel trap clamped on her front leg. The neighbor called Marin Humane, and two animal services officers were dispatched to rescue the young animal and bring her to WildCare’s wildlife hospital.
SAN MIGUEL COUNTY, Colo. — A man from California who failed to return to his group after going hunting in southwestern Colorado was found dead Saturday morning.
TheSan Miguel County Sheriff’s Officesaid the 64-year-old left his group of family and friends Friday afternoon with plans to return to them at their campsite in the Dry Creek Basin area outside of Norwood around sunset.
When he didn’t return, the group conducted a search but didn’t find him. They called dispatch at 5 a.m. Saturday and while deputies and search and rescue crews were preparing to search for him, the group resumed their own search and found the man dead…
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