Courtesy of World News
Today (2nd April), an item was posted on Daily Mail UK titled ‘”You’re next”: Taunting war of words rages on between hunters and animal rights activists as “cruel” pictures of wolves maimed in traps hit internet’.
‘… A debate about the ethics of hunting wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains has taken a threatening turn after gruesome images of the animals, dead and maimed by traps, swept the internet.
The FBI is investigating a report of an anonymous email received by anti-trapping group Footloose Montana warning advocates will ‘be the target next’.
The group says it was likely singled out because it had criticised and widely circulated a snapshot of a smiling trapper posed with a dying wolf whose leg was caught in the metal jaws of a foothold trap on a patch of blood-stained snow …
The image posted on its Facebook page was taken from the Trapperman.com website, including text that joked about the wolf being shot and wounded by a passersby after it was caught — ‘lucky they were not real good shots.’
The photo went viral over the Internet last weekend, and on Monday the Missoula, Montana-based group received the email threat.
The message read: ‘I would like to donate a gun to your childs (sic) head to make sure you can watch it die slowly so I can have my picture taken with it’s (sic) bleeding dying screaming for mercy body.’ Then the email, a copy of which Footloose gave to Reuters, said the recipients would be the next targets …
A Missoula Police Department detective, Sgt Travis Welsh, confirmed this week that investigators were looking into a ‘report from a local institution about a malicious email.’
Footloose Executive Director Anja Heister said FBI agents had interviewed a member of her group about the threat, but an FBI spokesman declined to comment.
By Tuesday, Trapperman.com, a site whose mission statement declares, ‘Always keep in mind that we are the true protectors of wildlife and the wild places in which the animals live,’ had removed pictures of dead or dying wolves and commentary …
Images of several trappings posted on social media have meanwhile escalated rancor between animal rights activists and hunters.
Commenting on a Facebook-posted image of two wolves strangled to death by cable snares, an individual who identified himself as Shane Miller wrote last month, ‘Very nice!! Don’t stop now, you’re just getting started!’
A person going by the name Matthew Brown posted the message, ‘Nice, one down and a BUNCH to go!’ in response to a Facebook image of a single wolf choked to death in a snare.
In Idaho and Montana, hundreds of the animals have been killed – mostly through hunting – less than a year after being removed from the U.S. endangered species list.
Stripping the wolves of federal protection last spring opened the animals to state wildlife management, including newly licensed hunting and trapping designed to reduce their numbers from levels the states deemed too high.
Since the de-listing last May, Idaho has cut its wolf population by about 40 percent, from roughly 1,000 to about 600 or fewer. Some 260 wolves have been killed in Montana, more than a third of its population, leaving an estimated 650 remaining …
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has also proposed lifting the protected status for another 350 wolves in Wyoming. Once common across most of North America, wolves were hunted, trapped and poisoned to near extinction in the lower 48 states by the 1940s under a government-sponsored program.
Decades later, biologists recognized that wolves had an essential role as a predator in mountain ecosystems, leading to protection of the animal under the Endangered Species Act.
Wolves were reintroduced in the mid-1990s over the vehement objections of ranchers and sportsmen, who see the animals as a threat to livestock and big-game animals such as elk and deer.
Environmentalists say the impact of wolves on cattle herds and wildlife is overstated and that the recent removal of federal safeguards could push the wolf back to the brink.
Wolves have long been vilified in the region as a menace, symbolizing for some a distant federal bureaucracy imposing its rules on the West.
‘They’re putting us and our way of life out of business,’ said Ron Casperson, co-owner of Saddle Springs Trophy Outfitters in Salmon, Idaho. ‘It makes me sick every day I look at this country. These wolves… I mean, come on.’ …
State wildlife managers had predicted that such passions would ease once the wolves were de-listed and states gained control. But discourse on the Internet and social networks appears to have grown more hostile.
Some hunters have expressed discomfort at the apparent bloodlust unleashed on the Internet, which they see as tarnishing the reputation of a sport that attracts less than 15 per cent of Americans.
‘There are two groups – one supports fair chase and ethical hunting, and the other views the reintroduction of wolves and the recovery with venom,’ said veteran sportsman Rod Bullis of Helena, Mont.
Idaho Fish and Game Commissioner Gary Power said he was bombarded with letters and emails from people representing extremes on both sides of the debate.
‘There are some folks out there stirring the pot: ‘Get rid of government, get rid of this, they shoved it down our throats, kill them all,’ and they are adding to the contentiousness,’ he said.
Animal rights activists said they are sickened at the online flurry of pictures depicting wolf kills, and alarmed by comments suggesting a growing desire to shoot, trap and snare wolves.
‘Roughly $40 million has been spent on wolf recovery, and now we are witnessing the second extermination of wolves in the West,’ said Wendy Keefover, director of carnivore protection for WildEarth Guardians.
Idaho and Montana are required to maintain about 150 wolves per state each year to prevent federal protection from being imposed again.
But Idaho plans to more than double the number of wolves a hunter may take in some areas for the 2012-13 season, raising their bag limit to 10.
Montana is seeking to raise its wolf-hunt quotas, and state wildlife managers are discussing allowing trapping, which is currently illegal there. At least one Montana county is considering a bounty for wolves killed by licensed hunters …’
You should just hear the arguments by hunters in South Africa – and those who own the reserves, and make the excuses for hunting and the money made from it: “We buy the wild animals, we put a fence around, so that the animals are OURS. We feed these animals, and give them water, and so ‘natural selection’ doesn’t take place, and the weak animals don’t die off. We therefore end up with too many(?) wild animals. So, we must cull them, or, better than that, get hunters in to shoot them.”
Our hunters are apparently so incredibly ethical, they will choose the older, weaker animals to shoot, and leave the strong genetic pool, to proliferate. Blah blah it goes on….
That’s the nice version.
Who interfered in the first place, I ask? A ‘human being’,by any chance?
~Comment is not directly related to this incident, apologies. This article deals with a lot of aspects, and I can only speak for what goes on here.
I’m sure others will have pertinent comments to make, regarding the above.
I’m the hell in with hunters, and this went viral, as is stated, together with the pictures of those traps.
It’s unfortunate that justice does not follow from law in this country. For this callous individual has done nothing illegal.
I liked the one showing soldiers I think 6, standing guard over black rhino. we could use military to protect Mother Earth and all who reisdes therein. It makes more sense to put people to work saving the planet and protecting endangered animals that to keep going to war for profits. I saw where 22 more elephants were slaughtered to day. Every day it is somethinhg else, and Mother Earth is always the one to lose. We Americans need to get our priorities straight! Baubaric unconscinable slauthter of animals should have been ousted with the inilaation of the American Buffalo, when will it end?
Reblogged this on Fahrenheit 451 Used Books and commented:
Die…Hunt down poachers and hunters with same tactics; Traps, Chase, Torture, capture, shoot with tranquillizer guns leave in wilderness bare assed and uh-armed! Equality!
This is obscene beyond words. For a moment, I thought the anti-trapping group had sent death threats to the sick little fuck from the Trapperman incident, which at least would make some kind of sense.
But no, the very same people who tortured and killed the trapped wolves are the ones sending death threats to people who merely showed the world what they did. “Sadist…”. Boo fucking hoo.
As someone who has worked in the interest of wolves and tried to study their history, I can say confidently that there has been a particularly virulent hatred of wolves in European and American cultures, almost from their inception.
Whether this is because of our similarities to them (ie, the same reason people hated great apes) or our competition with them as apex predators, or some other reason, I don’t know; but it is from this cultural baggage that selectively psychopathic hunters and massive argibusiness draw when villifying wolves. Until the image of wolves is changed drastically, the way Goodall and Fossey did for great apes, this kind of thing will only continue.
All of these grinning assholes may pay for their killing off of the wolf. In a study done at Oregon State University said that the loss of large predators destroys the ecosystems that are needed to sustain the elk, moose and deer which is what the assholes like to hunt. When the number of these animals such as elk, moose and deer are to large the animals start to destroy the very ecosystems that they need to survive. Such as eating the bark off trees that kills the trees, stripping the forage down to the ground because they are starving in the winter and basically eating themselves out of house and home. The hunters can’t kill enough of the deer, elk and moose during the hunting seasons to make s dent in the overpopulaation which leaves the herds open to disease which has happened before.
If you want to read the study please go to: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120409133924.htm
excellent post, thanks, I have been looking for such information because in my total liberation view, animal and earth liberation (along with human liberation — from poverty, class domination, etc) are directly correlated because — and few people get this == ecosystems are not self-sustaining but rather animals — whether wolves or pollinators or dung beetles — are essential for ecological integrity. So reporots say because the fish populations of all kinds are being decimated, te oceans are dying and devolving into simpler and less vital systems.
That footloose has threatenes me and my son. Jease james just now is attackingme on fb. If you were smart you would know it was proba ly one of their own making the threat for attention. The things they have said are vile. Just herring these people in the part 2 days of commenting on their sick pictures I am sure it was one of them. Ii think that these bad sites have even banned some of those really vile ones like jesse james
Translation please? If you are a hunter or trapper, you and your ilk have gotten off unscathed thus far, except for the sweet beautiful karma of hunting accidents; that will be changing as it is time for the hunters to be hunted.