Research Hunts & Conservation Hunts: New Ways to Fetishize Wolf Slaughter

David Cassuto

Not too long ago, I blogged about the duplicity of Japan’s “research” hunting of whales.  The practice is little more than a disingenuous attempt to circumvent the global ban on whale killing by pretending the slaughter has some scientific purpose.  I called on the rest of the world to repudiate such tactics and to hold them up to public scrutiny and scorn.

Then, a few weeks ago, a federal judge in the U.S.  ruled that gray wolf hunts in the Northern Rockies violated the Endangered Species Act.  Guess what then happened:  U.S. wildlife officials proposed a “research hunt” to kill the wolves. Apparently, their idea was that it was okay to kill listed species as long as you claimed a scientific reason for doing so.  You know, just like they do in Japan with the whales.

And the ostensible reason for the wolf “research?”  “In the absence of hunting, more than 1,200 wolves have been killed during the last 15 years by government agents and ranchers in response to livestock attacks. . . [A] research hunt could reveal if a regulated public harvest could accomplish the same task.”  In other words, they wanted to know whether killing a lot of wolves all at once would reduce the number of wolves killed in dribs and drabs.

Thankfully, most parties have now punted the idea to the dung-heap.  In Montana, the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks “could not justify carrying out a hunt in the name of research since the goal would have been to reduce the wolf’s population, not study it.”  U.S. Fish & Wildlife has also abandoned the idea.  Unfortunately, Idaho has not yet been heard from.  More unfortunately, the principals are now considering “conservation hunts” where government officials instead of private parties shoot the wolves.

“Conservation hunts” replace “research hunts.  More and more, government jargon devolves into Newspeak.  Language decays, animals die, and the rule of law becomes little more than a speedbump on the road to misguided policy.