Please Ask L. David Mech To Defend Wolves!

  • by: James Greathouse
  • recipient: David Mech, Department of the Interior and International Wolf Center, Department of the Interior and International Wolf
Sign this petition to tell Dr. L. David Mech and the United States Government that we are not ready to lose of our Wolves and our wilderness to the greed of special interests... that threats and harassment of our scientists and experts will not do.
By signing this petition you are asking L. David Mech to support Wolves so that they may:

1) Be protected from special interests which seek to destroy them for personal gains.
2) Be restored to their historic ranges to improve the health of more wilderness areas.
3) Retain habitat that is being lost to human encroachment and cattle grazing.
4) Regulation of ungulates according to natural selection to maintain herd health.
5) Live as Nature made them without fear of biased and unfair human retaliation.
6) Continue to howl their haunting songs for future generations to appreciate.

Wolves are an important constituent to a healthy environment because by their nature they monitor and cull old and sick ungulates and provide carrion for scavengers and other wildlife. Without Wolves we risk the spread disease among our deer and elk herds, overgrazing of vegetation, soil erosion, and ground water pollution. These things are interconnected and history has shown the detrimental effects of removing Wolves from our wilderness.

"I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddle horn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers." ~ Aldo Leopold (www.aldoleopold.org)



What Has Happened to Dr. L. David Mech?

I suspect Dr. Mech's rapid change of mind about protecting Wolves is political. In David Mech's home state of Minnesota there are over 2600 Wolves. No other state rivals this number of wild Wolves except Alaska, which is currently engaged in a bloody slaughter of Wolves from ground and sky. Is it that Mech's state has been so successful with their Wolves the he is blind to the fact that Minnesota isn't the entire world and that the rest of us who love Wolves might like to bring them back to our states as well? Also, that many of us would like the Wolves present in other places, such as Yellowstone and Alaska, protected as a globally important species.

The disease we face is greed: People perusing personal wealth and short term objectives without regard to the greater scheme of things. These activities have always injured our earth - history is ripe with examples.

Has this happened to David Mech? Has he decided his own situation is more important than the future of our Wolves? Has he been pressured by the Bush administration to sell out our future? There is plenty of evidence to support this may be the case. All over the country experts and professionals are being threatened, laid off, and fired for telling the truth about environmental impacts because special interests stand to loose money if we insist on being responsible to our earth's health.

After all, so many business people and politicians see their profit margin before anything else. They seem to believe that once they are done having a good time a future generation can deal with the mess they've left. Maybe this would be okay if the resources they squandered away or killed could be replaced... unfortunately for our future world, once some of these things are lost they cannot be brought back.

Could this kind of thing be the reason for Mech's change of view? A recent article... Whistleblowers get the axe: http://www.everyweek.com/News/News.asp?no=3194

A quote from this article I find troubling: "From Oregon to New York, state and federal officials are being laid off or placed on leave. While much of the downsizing can be blamed on the Bush administration's privatization push, some of these firings are politically motivated, says Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) national field director Eric Wingerter."

See http://www.peer.org for a number of examples of abuses by organizations set to protect our environment.



What Mech's Support of Wolf De-listing Could Mean

There are many anti-wolf interests that have self-serving reasons for wanting to see Wolves de-listed and killed; all the way from irrational fear and hatred of the species to the fact that protecting any species or habitat imposes restriction to profitable pursuits by special interests. These interests buy political favors and when there's enough money involved it seems the government is right there supporting it.

Dr. L. David Mech is a well published Wolf expert. By buying his testimony special interests secure the perfect spokesperson to get rid of Wolves once and for all. It may start out with de-listing, but then there will be legislation and a precedent set... it all snowballs from there until it's virtually impossible to reverse the effects.



By de-listing we:

1) Allow the slaughter of Wolves to resume in states where they have barely returned.
2) Encourage places like Alaska to continue slaughtering their Wolves in cruel ways.
3) Fuel anti-environmental and anti-wolf groups war against nature.
4) Create standards and precedents that are very difficult and slow to reverse.
5) Read of Wolves being killed while our little bit of success slips away.

Certainly, Wolf recovery efforts have been astounding. But Wolves have been returned to less than three percent of their historic range. The job hasn't even begun and the greed-mongers are trying to put the breaks on recovery efforts. It has taken over 70 years to get where we have. Wolves were driven from most of their range by 1945 and in 2004 we have almost 700 of them restored to three states... where the outfitters and ranchers are gnashing at the bit to destroy them again.

Minnesota has the lower 48's abundance of Wolves at 2600. This is amazing... why can't other states follow this example? When we have national success like Minnesota then we won't need to worry about de-listing; but that time is far away.



Please Support Our Wolves and Our Earth!

Sign this petition to tell Dr. L. David Mech and the United States Government that we are not ready to lose of our Wolves and our wilderness to the greed of special interests... that threats and harassment of our scientists and experts will not do. Tell our leaders that profiteers do not make our environmental policy... that sound science does... and that the love of our natural world must prevail or our earth and the human race is surely doomed.
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