Tag Archives: wolves

wolves, again

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Sharon Shaw has written a too complimentary response to my recent post regarding Alaskan wolves and has directed us all to the World Society for the Protection of Animals petition. Shaw also points out how little attention animal rights gets as an issue, noting that On the Issues doesn’t list it. I agree that there is a lot of work to do, as Shaw says, and think that work perhaps needs to proceed on more than one front.

FactCheck.org has recently done a piece on Palin and the Alaskan wolf hunt that seems to me to beg a number of questions. Under a rubric reading “A wildlife group’s ad attacks Palin for supporting the shooting of wolves from airplanes. She does, but there’s more to it than that,” the scholars at FactCheck.org, whom I normally respect, make an argument which ultimately reduces the moral claims of those who oppose aerial hunting to semantics and personal taste, ignoring the history of the practice and its effect on wildlife as well as Alaska’s role in the Bush administration’s assault on the Endangered Species Act — and ignoring some other important things as well.

I’m not going to try to reply to the FactCheck piece in detail on the merits. A reply from the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund (which in fairness I need to say that FactCheck references in a footnote) does that quite well. You can read it here. Rather, I want to make two observations. One goes to the FactCheck argument, itself; and the other goes to method.

First, those of us who oppose programs of “predator control” such as Alaska’s do so at least partly out of the conviction that we humans, the most vicious of all predators, have done irreparable damage to the planet which is our home. For some the ground of that conviction is religious; for others it is based in humanistic ethics or in science. but in no case is that conviction a matter of mere personal taste in convictions — the implication of FactCheck’s “That’s a personal judgment call.” I think it remarkable that FactCheck bends over backwards to honor the reasoning of those in Alaska who defend aerial hunting but doesn’t even mention the reasoning of those who oppose the practice. The effect of FactCheck’s foregrounding the case for aerial hunting and footnoting the arguments from the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund is to promote aerial hunting. I’m sure the scholars at FactCheck know this. They are journalists, rhetoricians, philosophers, political scientists, etc.

Which brings up my second observation. If there is anything we have learned from the arguments among scholars during the culture wars, it is that belief in the existence of a neutral territory for the critic is problematic. What is claimed to be neutral territory, upon inspection turns out to be governed by interest. The most honest scholars in the postmodern twenty-first century take positions and acknowledge them. The proposition that the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund’s ad, which is the subject of the FactCheck piece, can be stripped of its emotional characterization so as to reveal its real content is to make a naive fact/value distinction that at bottom is no more than a denial of the valuation that is the core of the ad in the first place.

Here’s my point about method. The idea of the critic as dispassionate, autonomous, and culturally neutral carries with it the idea of privileged access to objective knowledge. That’s an interest like any other. Not that it means we shouldn’t listen to scholars who analyse arguments — we should. But their enterprise is as perilous and prone to error as any other human enterprise. Don’t believe them when they pretend that it isn’t. I think the scholars at FactCheck have made an error here.

I think, perhaps without meaning to, they have preferred the worse cause over the better.

snakes in the grass crying wolf

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I’m glad the Humane Society Legislative Fund has endorsed my guy and hope that endorsement will garner him some votes. But even though HSLF judges that Obama’s record with regard to animal protection is superior to McCain’s (which it is), the real reason for the endorsement is HSLF’s abhorrence of Sarah Palin’s record.

While McCain’s positions on animal protection have been lukewarm, his choice of running mate cemented our decision to oppose his ticket. Gov. Sarah Palin’s (R-Alaska) retrograde policies on animal welfare and conservation have led to an all-out war on Alaska’s wolves and other creatures. Her record is so extreme that she has perhaps done more harm to animals than any other current governor in the United States.

HSLF points out that after Alaska had twice made killing wolves and other animals from helecopters and airplanes illegal by public referendum (referendums which the Alaska legislature immediately rescinded), Palin as governor sponsored a successful a campaign to defeat a similar referendum this year, using $400K in public funds. This was in addition to her attempt to reverse the Bush administration’s listing of Polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Spieces Act.

I’m remembering car trips to New Mexico in my childhood, when for miles along the highways I saw the skins of killed wolves and coyotes hung out on the barbed wire fences. There was a bounty for them, though I have never known how much it was. In Sarah Palin’s Alaska, there is a $150 bounty for the left foreleg of each dead wolf. These are details of the lag end of a certain history that involves the slaughter of the North American bison, the burning of the tall grass prairies, and the genocidal removal of Native American peoples from what became the American heartland, so called. In part this year’s presidential election is about two competing narratives of that history, or as Paul Starr points out in The American Prospect, two different versions of America. I had hoped to outlive the old triumphal narrative’s dominance, but it still has great power.

I’m also remembering Farley Mowat‘s Never Cry Wolf, still controversial though it shouldn’t be, and the popular film made from it. Mowat still fights the good fight. There’s a little film about the Alaskan wolf hunt, which you can see here. It’s very sad, and hard to watch in places, though I recommend it because it contains lots of beautiful footage of wolves roaming free, some of which was appropriated for an ad attacking Obama that I wrote about a while back. Here’s a shorter version.

And of course the Bushies continue to cry wolf about the current economic crisis, trying to stampede the houses of Congress into rolling over as they did after 9/11. But it looks as though that tactic may not work this time. There’s growing right-wing opposition to the bailout plan as well as concern on the left, though some of the right’s newfound desire to limit executive power may be disingenuous, as Glenn Grenwald writes in Salon.

Apparently, the same political faction that has cheered on every instance of unchecked, absolute executive power over the last eight years — which demanded that the President, and he alone, decide which citizens, including Americans, can be spied on, detained, even tortured, and that no oversight or disclosure was needed for any of that — has suddenly re-discovered their desire for checks on federal government power. The reason? They say it themselves: with the looming prospect of an Obama presidency, they may no longer be in charge of that Government and these “small government conservatives” have thus suddenly re-awoken to the virtues of checks and balances, oversight and other restraints.

Still, this political turn may provide an opportunity to reestablish congressional oversight in principle. And it’s hard to see that as a bad thing,