Inslee its time to replace Holzmiller, Susewind as well as Martorello. There is no room for State Employees that only care about pandering to Ranchers. Holzmiller is to slow to figure out that ite 40 years later, and the slaughtering of Our Children’s Resources is no longer needed. Hunters have this dream that they are somehow Conservationists. They need to read the definition.
By Richard Read / Los Angeles Times
ANATONE, Wash. — Somewhere near this tiny farming town last month, a Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife hunter conducted what officials call a lethal removal, killing a gray wolf, a member of a species that the state considers endangered.
Most likely the agency employee or contractor fired a 12-gauge shotgun from a helicopter after following signals from a radio collar on a member of the Grouse Flats pack. Citing “safety reasons,” officials won’t say how or where the wolf — which they now believe to have been a breeding female — was exterminated Sept. 25.
A century after gray wolves were all but eradicated from Washington, the state is trying to encourage the return of the iconic predators, which normally hunt deer, elk and smaller wild animals. The state’s gray wolf population has gradually recovered to at least 126 since 2008, when the first two packs since the 1930s established dens.
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But wildlife officials ordered the Grouse Flats extermination after determining that the pack roaming grasslands in the state’s farthest southeast corner had killed four farm animals in two months. That’s the minimum number of deaths or injuries required within 10 months for them to begin killing wolves until the livestock attacks cease.
Five days after the mother wolf was killed, Washington Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee wrote to the director of the Fish & Wildlife department, an agency accused by animal advocates of bowing to the interests of ranchers hostile to wolves. Inslee cited public outrage over the elimination of packs near the Canadian border, and asked Kelly Susewind to find ways “to significantly reduce the need for lethal removal of this species.” He gave the director until Dec. 1 to report back.
The ultimatum from Inslee, who’s seeking a third term as governor after dropping out of the Democratic presidential campaign, irked rural residents who often feel marginalized by politicians from Washington’s more populous west side. The political divide between red and blue runs roughly north-south along the Cascade Range, with Seattle and Olympia, the capital, holding sway over the state’s eastern range country.
Jay Holzmiller, 62, is a hunter and cattle rancher in the Anatone area, the Grouse Flats pack’s home territory. He pulled himself recently into the driver’s seat of a tall crew-cab pickup in his tidy farmyard and gestured toward a neighboring ranch, one of two next to his woodlots and pastures where cattle were lost last summer to the pack.
Holzmiller, whose ranch-house walls are festooned with mounted heads of wild animals he’s shot, is troubled by declines in elk and deer herds preyed on by wolves, bears and cougars. He said that Inslee’s directive disrupts painstaking compromises reached through years of negotiations between wild-animal advocates, farmers and hunters.
Inslee nominated Holzmiller in 2013 to a six-year term on a commission that oversees the wildlife department, and then opted not to renew his appointment. The rancher feels that the commission’s membership favored environmental interests.
“We’re fighting for a way of life,” Holzmiller said. “There’s a huge concern whether our hunting culture is going to come to an end, and there’s lots of us rednecks that love to do it.”
Source: Gray wolves are protected, so why is the state killing them? | HeraldNet.com