Dear Editor:

 

The following is an article that appeared in the Kamloops This Week paper on Friday, February 6th, 2015 in the “Guest View” section and was submitted by the Castlegar News. We believe it is right on and we would like to share it with your readers.

When a B.C. wolf is a goat

What if the way to curb our growing global population was to poison the food source or round up a variety of people from different age groups and shoot them with a firing squad?

This is how ecologists and governments deal with growing populations of one species or another.

Humans kill our way out of everything. It seems we always have. Right now, the target is on the back of the wolves living in the South Selkirk range. What is disturbing is the poignant argument both for and against the cull.

There are scientists, ecologists, politicians and — more silently but no less involved — business owners.

The worst of it is the method being used.

It is controversial — involving noisy and invasive helicopters manned with sharpshooters, which, to us, seems like a frightening and traumatic way to die.

There are laws around this.

In 1993, a set of guidelines was created to regulate animal culling and nowhere does it condone shooting from a chopper.

The only humane way to shoot an animal is in the brain, which is tough to do when you’re hovering above them as they run away from you at top speeds.

Even if you are a sharpshooter, is there some sort of evaluation between a sharpshooter and a shooter?

No matter which side of the argument you are on, the method is flawed and it isn’t getting much air time. Wolf packs will be unnecessarily splintered and the cull will leave scars on the remaining wolves.

Why is nobody talking about the fact the wolf is being made into a goat — a scapegoat? The wolf is a convenient patsy for the loss of caribou at the hands of deforestation of their preferred habitat: old-growth forests.

But, that is an argument for another day.

 

Claudette Laffey

Sandi Mikuse

Kamloops