Sarah Palin's Big, Sleazy Safari
[Palin's] most recent "victory" came on Aug. 26, when Alaska's voters defeated Measure 2, an initiative that would have banned hunting wolves from airplanes for sport.
Palin organized a campaign against Measure 2 and funded it with $400,000 of state money. For most of us, the idea of zooming around in a private airplane over snowbound wilderness just for the chance to spot a terrified wild dog and blow it apart with a high-powered rifle is insane. But there's a whole culture out there in love with the idea. Palin did her part by playing the tired old Alaskan pioneer card, saying that lower-48 naysayers who dared to object to the idea of dive-bombing wildlife didn't "understand rural Alaska."
8 comments:
Watch the opening sequence of John Carpenter's The Thing and tell me that Measure 2 should have gone ahead!
I think Megadeth wrote a song about something similar. Anyway these "hunters" are just about as close to hunting as I am to fishing when I buy a salmon steak from the local fish monger.
Oddly enough, it's just business as usual. And if it's wildlife preservation you're interested in, take a gander as some of the whaling operations being undertaken on the Eastern Hemisphere; makes these "aero hunters" look like tree-loving hippies.
Real men, er...women, don't hunt animals from planes. Real men don't shoot Quail that are penned in and can't escape while driven in front of the shooters waiting for them with guns. Both, it seems to me, tragic images of immoral behavior.
But those images don't even compare to the treat of network and cable broadcasts featuring "Shock and Awe", war treated like a movie trailer for the amusement of the viewing audience complete with the obligatory heroic soundtrack.
It's all representative of a sick society lead by very sick people. Of course that's just my opinion.
Michael
Oh now, we all know that a technologically advanced species would never zoom around in its aircraft hunting, capturing, or otherwise intending to do harm to the far less advanced local fauna.
Hey guys, they are not hunters....
The Alaskan Wolf Control Project is not a "hunt": "Wolves and bears are very effective and efficient predators on caribou, moose, deer and other wildlife. In most of Alaska, humans also rely on the same species for food. In Alaska's Interior, predators kill more than 80 percent of the moose and caribou that die during an average year... Predation is an important part of the ecosystem, and all ADF&G wolf management programs, including control programs, are designed to sustain wolf populations in the future." In other words, the program part of the Wildlife Conservation Program intended to balance the caribou population with wolves, for example.
I am reminded of a Far Side cartoon. Two bucks watching a hunter in the background with one buck commenting "Why don't they thin their own damn herds?"
From what I can discern, the voters in Alaska have approved the ban on this activity twice, only to have it overturned by the legislature each time.
Depending, of course, on the side that is putting forward it's argument, this is either an abuse of the wildlife of Alaska, or one hell of a good time.
No one is talking about banning hunting, but c'mon, can it be at least somewhat challenging and outdoorsy.
Michael
I've regaled PB readers with my own opinions on hunting and meat-eating before, so I'm gladly taking a backseat on this.
Palin's a murderous fuckwit, of course.
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