It’s Legal to Kill Baby Bears and Wolves in Their Dens – Urge the Government to Protect Innocent Animals

Spring is here, which means it’s birthing season for many species, including wolves! Wolf pups are born blind, deaf, and utterly adorable. They don’t open their eyes for at least ten to thirteen days, and they don’t start to get teeth, or even begin to explore their den until they’re around three weeks old. Yet, at any point during this time, it is now completely legal for sport hunters in Alaska to raid their dens and heartlessly murder these defenseless newborns and their moms.

These unjustifiable cruelties first became legal when Alaska’s Board of Game approved new predator-control tactics on 76.8 million acres of federally-protected national preserves in order to artificially inflate area populations of moose, caribou, and other game. This was done solely to assure plenty of live gun targets for hunters, despite the unhealthy imbalance it stood to create within these natural ecosystems.

In addition to targeting wolves and their pups, this ruling allowed hunters to use bait to attract and kill unsuspecting brown bears as well as steel-jaw leg-hold traps (which are banned in 88 countries) and wire snares (which are also considered some of the most barbarous traps available). Both leg traps and wire snares keep wildlife trapped and suffering for hours if not days before they are ruthlessly killed point blank. Hunters can even utilize aircraft to shoot brown and black bears from above. How very sportsman-like, wouldn’t you say?

In August 2016, the Fish and Wildlife Service pushed back against this decree by implementing “fair chase” rules designed to restrict the use of unfair hunting practices. But then we had an election, which brought in a new President and tipped Congress in lobbyists’ favor, and it didn’t take long at all for the House of Representatives to get to work on overturning that ban by invoking the Congressional Review Act, a 1996 law allowing legislators to repeal federal regulations adopted in the last few months of the previous presidential administration. The vote quickly moved on to the Senate, which similarly voted along party lines to re-enact this war on wolves and bears, and President Trump signed the bill into law on April 3, 2017, officially nullifying the protections for wild predators set in place during the Obama era.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, such unbridled use of the Congressional Review Act, which Congress and Trump have already wielded 13 times in four months, “violates the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine by preventing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from future rulemaking that is ‘substantially the same’ as the disapproved rule. By constraining the agency without changing its governing laws through the procedures mandated by the Constitution, the Act unconstitutionally expands Congress’s power at the expense of the executive branch.” The Conservation group now aims to restore protections for Alaskan wildlife by suing the Trump Administration for allowing Congress to repeal the “Fair chase” rule in this manner.

In the meantime, however, the lives of newborn wolf pups and Alaska’s iconic bears are at stake, and until the court has a chance to hear and rule on this case, we need Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to staunchly deny any requests that put these inhumane hunting tactics into practice.

Please help by signing and sharing this petition urging Interior Secretary Zinke to take a firm stand and refuse any requests from Alaska predator controllers to kill wolves and bears on our national wildlife refuges.

Image source: Art Babych/Shutterstock