Bison, Cattle and the Great Plains/Rocky Mountains

I got this from Defenders of Wildlife. I have no idea why these idiot cattle ranchers in Montana hate buffalo so much. Does anyone have any ideas?

I have a feeling that it might have to do with brucellosis. It is true that bison do have brucellosis, and theoretically they could transmit it to cattle. Cattle can be devastated by brucellosis. However, to my knowledge, there has not yet been a single case of bison to cattle brucellosis transmission. Apparently bison need to have very close contact with cattle to transmit the disease, and that just does not happen in the wild. It might occur in a zoo or game farm or some artificial environment where you threw the animals together.

I understand at least as of 15-20 years ago, there were parts of the northern Great Plains that were actually losing population in many areas of the states. I think especially of North Dakota and South Dakota. Some counties are nearly hanging up the Going out Business sign as the number of residents goes too low to support county services. Some towns have become virtual ghost towns. Many of the remaining are elderly people living alone. There are many abandoned old homes in some of these counties. If you have the guts, you can poke around these old homes. They still have a lot of period furniture, old clothes, old books, old lamps and other accessories. Wild animals are now reclaiming a lot of these old homes and you will often ferret them out when you go into these old houses.

I am not sure what the depopulation is all about. Does anyone have any ideas?

Anyway, I believe that what we ought to do in these depopulated areas is have the state condemn the land and buy it out. Then run bison on it or allow private bison ranchers to lease the land and run bison on it. Or sell it to bison farmers so they can run bison on it. If no one wants to run bison on the land, you can open it up to private harvest by hunters or you can lease use of it to private bison harvesting concerns so they can harvest the bison and ship it to slaughterhouses for packaging to consumers.

Bison is said to taste a lot like beef but it is very much better for you. The Plains Indians lived on bison meat for millenia and there was little evidence of any harm to them from this diet. Bison meat is very lean and low fat.

In particular, the Great Plains evolved with bison! There is a whole ecosystem that has been almost completely destroyed out there with the elimination of the bison. Prairie dogs and the black footed ferret are two of those that have been hit the hardest. The black footed ferret was nearly driven to extinction, mostly by extermination campaigns waged by cattle ranchers against prairie dogs. Cattlemen slaughter prairie dogs because they say that stupid cows trip over their prairie dog burrows and the dogs compete with cows for forage.

As you can tell, I have an extremely low opinion of cattle ranchers! However, they do have some potential. Perhaps we could allow ranchers who agree not to exterminate everything that is not a cow on their land to charge a lower price for their beef. Call it “endangered species beef.” Even better yet, hit those ranchers who will not undertake these measures with a tax that raises the price of their beef by maybe 10% above the conservationist ranchers. The good ranchers would be allowed to sell for cheaper and slap a pro-environment label on their beef. This is a sort of a market friendly regulation that I like, but as you can see, it still involves government regulation, taxation and so on. But carrot and stick approaches are usually nice.

It’s the latest threat to wild bison conservation.

All we have worked for could be severely compromised if a batch of bad bison bills passes through Montana’s state legislature. Some of Montana’s most extreme anti-wildlife legislators are attempting to make restoration of wild bison to the Great Plains nearly impossible.

A Massive Assault on Bison

The worst of the bills, SB 143, would:

• Order Montana officials to “immediately” kill or remove all wild bison migrating into Montana;
• Prohibit wild bison relocation anywhere in Montana except to the National Bison Range – where wild bison are already located;
• Establish a bison hunt “statewide and at any time of the year;” and
• Allow landowners to shoot wild bison on private land.

To add insult to injury:

• SB 256 would make Montana’s wildlife agency liable for any property damage from wild bison, a precedent meant to financially prohibit bison restoration;
• SB 341 would require Montana’s wildlife agency to navigate a massive list of additional hurdles prior to relocation of any wildlife species and prohibit relocation if the species could impact livestock grazing, clearly intended to prevent bison relocation; and
• HB 396 would attempt to give county commissioners veto power over bison restoration within their counties – even on tribal lands and our federal public lands.

Our Plan for Bison

Defenders of Wildlife’s Rockies and Plains team is working overtime to turn back this cruel assault on bison recovery.

We’re working with a diverse coalition of tribes and conservation organizations to testify against these bills and mobilize opposition; we’re getting word out to the media to bring attention to these bills; and we’re organizing Montanans to show up at the Montana capitol, make phone calls and send emails to exert grassroots pressure on legislators and the governor.

Our efforts are beginning to pay off. Three of the eight anti-bison bills are now dead. But five more remain a threat to wild bison in Montana — and we need your help more than ever to continue this critical work.

Last year, we helped relocate 61 pure wild bison from Yellowstone National Park to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. It was the start of an historic effort to restore Yellowstone bison to key places in the Great Plains – an effort that is now in jeopardy, unless we can turn back this latest assault. Please help today!

Indonesia Is a Shithole

Dota writes:

I knew that Indonesia was very corrupt, however in its defense, it is a middle income country with a reasonable standard of living.

I don’t think so. The poverty is horrible, the workers make almost nothing, and there is a terrible amount of malnutrition. It’s horribly overcrowded, and they are cutting down all of the rainforests. Large landowners own almost all the land. There’s never been any land reform. The city slums are horrible. There’s terrible pollution.

The rich do whatever the fuck they want, and at the moment, they are completely destroying the rainforests to cut them down to make palm plantations. Currently a lot of the rainforest is on fire, fires deliberately set by timber barons. The state is completely controlled by the timber barons, and they won’t do anything about this, not even try to put out the fires, which are killing a bunch of orangutans as we speak.

Even the national parks are encroached constantly by poor farmers who cut down the forest in the national parks to make farms. Labor unions are illegal, and labor activists are routinely beaten, harassed, fired, arrested, tortured and often they are even murdered. People who try to stop development get the same treatment by death squads run by the state and the multinational corporations.

The state has waged fascist genocidal campaigns against secessionists in East Timor, Aceh, and Irian Jaya.

Irian Jaya was simply stolen from the Dutch. It’s not even part of New Guinea. Indonesia has murdered 150,000 people there since 1965 with the help of the US, whose corporations have a lot of investments in Irian Jaya.

In East Timor, 1/3 of the population was murdered in a genocide that had overtones of Islamic jihad. The US supported this too because the East Timorese were said to be Leftists, and the Indonesian fascist state has always been a US ally.

In Aceh, another 100,000 or so people were murdered to stop a secessionist rebellion that started on the day Indonesia declared independence. There are periodic Islamic jihads against Christians in the Moluccas.

It’s not even a medium income country. It’s a poverty stricken mess, and the state doesn’t do anything to help the people.

Indonesia is a shithole!

Stop the House Interior Funding Bill

A mail I got from the Defenders of Wildlife, a group I support. I don’t really understand why environmentalists vote Republican. If you’re an environmentalist who votes Republican, why don’t you tell us what’s going through your head. The Republican Party is a viciously, savagely, brutally anti-environmental party, and they have been for 30 years now, since Reagan.

If you like to fish and hunt, why vote Republican? I don’t get it. Fishing and hunting depends on open, clean and wild areas for the fish and animals to live in. Republicans destroy rivers and lakes and wreck any wild land that they can find.

Now, if you’re an anti-environmentalist and vote rightwing, I respect that. You are a man of principles, and you are sticking to them. But a fisherman, a hunter, and environmentalist, who votes rightwing? You need to have your head examined.

Denham, the guy who wants to kill the restoration of the salmon run in the San Joaquin River, is my congressman. He’s as reactionary as they come; he’s more or less a Tea Partier. People don’t understand California. The Whites here (and some of the others) are very rightwing. The only liberals are on the coast. Inland, in the Central Valley, the Inland Empire, the Great Basin, the North Coast, the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades is very White and very, very rightwing. By the way, all of this slashing and cutting is being done under the rubric of deficit reduction.

The House of Representatives has left town for their summer recess, but not before unveiling a barrage of new anti-wildlife provisions in the Interior spending bill.

These provisions threaten wild Mexican gray wolves and endangered Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles with extinction and pose a significant threat of increased injury and death for gentle manatees.

We must stop them.

Some in Congress seem bound and determined to unravel basic protections for some of our most vulnerable wildlife…

* Extinct Mexican gray wolves. Republican Representative Steve Pearce (NM) has introduced an amendment to end lobo recovery efforts, essentially dooming the 50 remaining Mexican gray wolves in the wild to extinction.
* Crushed sea turtles. Republican Representative Blake Farenthold (TX) has proposed blocking efforts to reduce the speed limits on beaches where threatened and endangered sea turtles – already reeling from the effects of last year’s BP oil disaster – nest.
* Wounded manatees. Boat strikes are one of the leading causes of death for Florida’s threatened manatees, but Republican Representative Richard Nugent (FL) wants to block a Fish and Wildlife Service rule to prevent boat collisions and end the hazing of these gentle sea cows.
* Dead salmon. Representative Republican Jeff Denham (CA) has introduced an amendment to block restoration of salmon in the San Joaquin River.
* A path to extinction for lesser prairie chickens and dunes sagebrush lizards. Republican Representatives Pearce (NM) and Randy Neugebauer (TX) are fighting to prohibit vital Endangered Species Act protections for these highly vulnerable animals.
* A lawless border zone. Republican Representatives Paul Gosar (AZ) and Rob Bishop (UT) have proposed amendments that would exempt the border patrol from laws and regulations that protect imperiled wildlife and federal conservation lands like our national parks and wildlife refuges.

But that’s not all. The bill also proposes deep cuts in funding for our National Wildlife Refuges and key conservation programs to keep our imperiled wildlife and wild lands safe.

“The Indifference of Polar Bears,” by Alpha Unit

Svalbard is the northernmost part of Norway. This archipelago lies midway between mainland Norway and the North Pole. About 60% of the area is glacier. The only permanently populated island on the archipelago is Spitsbergen.

Polar bears are a symbol of Svalbard. They are one of the main tourist attractions, in fact. Anyone traveling outside the settlements is required to carry a rifle at all times. Tourists are warned about the danger and unpredictability of these animals. You can forget about outrunning a polar bear.

A 17-year-old British boy is dead this weekend after a group he was camping with on Spitsbergen Island was attacked by a polar bear. He was part of an expedition run by the British Schools Exploring Society.

The group, most of them between the ages of 16 and 23, were hunting for fossils, taking part in environmental experiments, and clearing beaches of debris. They split into smaller groups to head out to more remote areas. The boy was in a group of 13 people who were attacked. Others were lucky enough to survive it, at least so far. Some of them are in the hospital with severe injuries.

The polar bear is dead, too. One of the campers shot it. There are people just as outraged over the death of the bear as they are over the death of the boy. They point out that the polar bear is endangered. People shouldn’t be invading this animal’s habitat and then killing it when it acts on instinct. These expeditions need to stop.

I don’t know if the expeditions will stop. They are clearly of value to many people. But I do know that conservationists around the world, including here in the U.S., are acting to protect the habitat of polar bears, filing lawsuits when they deem it necessary, to stop any kind of interference with the habitat of polar bears.

The polar bears will go on doing whatever polar bears do to survive, including killing humans who come into their habitat when the bears are looking for food – and those humans are the only food available.

Is there any such thing as peaceful coexistence when polar bears and humans are in the same space? Something or someone is probably going to die. If people die, as this 17-year-old did, it’s a tragedy. It’s no less a tragedy if bears die, some insist.

It’s only humans that can care either way. The bears are indifferent to human suffering. They don’t care much about the survival of their species, either.

Blue Whales

An incredible photo of a blue whale. If I saw that, I might think it was a sea serpent!

Take a look at this photo. This is a blue whale shot near the Azores Islands. For Chrissake, it looks like a sea monster! I wonder how many sea monster sightings were whales like this?

There were formerly 275,000 blue whales in the oceans. Then commercial whaling started. Whaling was halted in 1960, but illegal whaling by the USSR continued until the late 1970′s. The blue whale population is now 8,500, or 3% of its historic value. Whaling drove the blue whale to near extinction.

Wolverines In Washington

Note: Repost from the old blog.

Separate posts on this blog deal extensively with wolverines in Oregon, Idaho (here and here), Wyoming, Nevada , Utah and Colorado, the Upper Midwest and New Mexico. There are also five posts on the wolverine in California.

This post was split off from an earlier post that got too large, California Wolverine Re-discovered After 86 Years. This particular post will deal with the question of wolverines in the state of Washington.

First of all, wolverines have been proven to exist in Washington in the past six years. On May 29, 2009, a wolverine was photographed on the north side of Mount Adams on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Another wolverine was photographed on the Yakima Indian Reservation the year before.

The report on the Methow District of the Okanagan Forest below shows that two wolverines were trapped on the forest in 2005. This is excellent news and is the only report of wolverines being live-trapped anywhere on Earth, or possibly ever.

In addition, wolverines have been photographed on the Wenatchee National Forest and on the Yakima Indian Reservation in 2006. In 2005, fur was collected south of Danville on the Okanagan.

Compared to and Oregon, wolverines in Washington seem to be doing a lot better.

Although most reports indicate that wolverines are dire shape in Washington, the truth is that they are probably not in in immediate danger of going extinct, at least up in the far north of the Okanagan, where the wolverines are probably drifting down from British Colombia.

The report on wolverines in the Methow Ranger District in the Okanagan National Forest in far northern Washington near the British Colombian border is here. That location is in the Northern Cascades.

In addition, there have been sightings of wolverines outside of the Hart’s Pass area of the Okanagan. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife reports that wolverines are thought to exist on the Colville, Gifford, Pinchot, Kanisku, Okanagan, and Wenatchee National Forests based on 33 reports of sighting and tracks from 1985-2000.

In 2005, wolverine fur was collected just south of Danville in the Kettle Range in northeastern Washington. This area is just south of British Colombia.

Photo of a wolverine shot on the northwest side of Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington in May 2009.

In 2006, a camera station detected a wolverine in the Napeequa River Valley in the Glacier Peak Wilderness to the south of Hart’s Pass on the Wenatchee National Forest.

The Napeequa River Valley in the Glacier Peak Wilderness. The valley has been compared to Shangri-La. The trail to the valley is now damaged and overgrown in spots, but you can still get there. The valley floor is about 4,200 feet. A wolverine was detected at a camera station here in 2006.

In the same year, another camera detected a wolverine on the northeast slope of Mt. Adams on the Yakima Indian Reservation. This is also in the Cascades, but is in southern Washington.

The northeast slope of Mount Adams in the middle of winter. A wolverine was detected here with a camera in 2006. There are many avalanches here. Within the area shown by this photo, there were several avalanche and mountain climber rescues in recent years.One theory is that wolverines evolved in glaciated regions and then adapted to the receding glaciers.

As the glaciers receded, they left behind huge rock fields called glacial moraine. In the steeper areas, there were probably many rock slides as the glaciers receded. These rock slides probably killed many animals, including large animals.

The theory is that the wolverine, with its frost-resistant fur and frenetic lifestyle capable of traversing the most formidable territory, evolved to scavenge the dead animals killed as the glaciers receded. They are now found in the areas that most closely resemble the glaciated environment in which they evolved.

There were also sightings on the Olympic Peninsula and on the Mount Baker National Forest east of Bellingham in the 1990′s.

A wolverine was sighted near Twin Lakes on the Colville Indian Reservation in 2005. This is at the southern end of the Kettle River Range.

Click the wolverines label at the end of the post to see other posts on wolverines in the US, including many sighting reports and photos.

References

Biodiversity Legal Foundation, Predator Conservation Alliance, Defenders of Wildlife, Northwest Ecosystem Alliance, and Superior Wilderness Action Network. (2000). Petition for a rule to list the wolverine (Gulo gulo luscus) as Threatened or Endangered under the Endangered Species Act within the contiguous United States. Submitted to the U.S. Dept. of Interior Fish and Wildlife Service on July 11, 2000.

Predator Conservation Alliance. (2001). Predator Conservation Alliance’s Literature Summary — Draft — January 24, 2001 — Draft Conservation Status and Needs of the Wolverine (Gulo gulo).

Wolverines In Oregon

Note: Repost from the old blog.

Separate posts on this blog deal extensively with wolverines in Washington, Idaho (here and here), Wyoming, Nevada, Utah and Colorado, the Upper Midwest and New Mexico. There are also five separate posts on the wolverine in California.

This post was split off from an earlier post that got too large, California Wolverine Re-discovered After 86 Years. This particular post will deal with the question of wolverines in the state of Oregon.

It is true that there have been no proven occurrences of wolverines in Oregon since 1992, but there is considerable anecdotal evidence that they live there, including many sightings. Five wolverines have been collected since 1965, one live and four dead. That’s four more than have been collected in California.

Further, aerial surveys in recent years have found discovered what appear to be wolverine tracks, snow tunnels and in a few cases winter dens on the top of high Oregon peaks. No such findings have turned up in California, but no aerial surveys have yet been attempted either. All of this implies that the wolverine is in better shape in Oregon than in California.

The wolverine seems to be in best shape in Washington, then in Oregon, and finally in worst shape in California.

In Oregon, a wolverine was trapped in 1986 in Wheeler County, a wolverine was found dead on I-84 in Hood River County in 1990 and another was recovered as a partial skeleton in Grant County 1992.

An unnamed lake at the end of an unnamed trail in the Wallowa Mountains in far northeast Oregon. This is definitely a Great Basin Range. On April 2 and April 13, 2011, two wolverines were spotted on trail cams here in the Eagle Cap Wilderness. In addition, tracks were found. This was the first positive proof of wolverines in Oregon in 19 years.

Early March surveys by airplane in 1997-98 ( video of the aerial surveys with awesome footage of a live wolverine and tracks in winter in Washington) found 12 sets of tracks, 2 snow tunnels and one possible wolverine den on the Mount Thielsen Wilderness and two sets of tracks on the Rogue/Umpqua Divide Wilderness, both on the Umpqua National Forest.

The elevations in the Mount Thielsen Wilderness were 7,000-7,200 feet.

On March 8, 1997, state and federal biologists found three sets of possible wolverine tracks on 7,000 foot+ ridgelines north of Mt. Thielsen in the Mt. Thielsen Wilderness on the Umpqua National Forest. One set of tracks included a possible wolverine den. On the same day, researchers noted possible wolverine tracks at the head of Devil’s Canyon on nearly Mt. Bailey (8,375 feet).

Mt. Thielsen is a 9,182 foot peak. On March 20, 1998, a federal biologist spotted eight sets of possible wolverine tracks and two possible wolverine snow tunnels in this wilderness area.

The spectacular sweeping and dense forests of the Rogue-Umpqua Divide Wilderness. On March 10-11, 1998, state and federal biologists spotted two possible sets of wolverine tracks here.

In 1998 in more March surveys, more tracks were found at 8,000 feet on Mt. McLoughlin and on Devil’s Peak in the Sky Lakes Wilderness in the Winema and Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forests, and more were seen in 1998 at Fuller Lake in the Boulder Creek Wilderness.

On March 20, 1998, state and federal wildlife biologists spotted possible wolverine tracks at 8,000 feet on the north side of Mt. McLoughlin, shown here. The mountain rises to 9,495 feet. This peak is west of Upper Klamath Lake, north of Mount Shasta in California and south of Crater Lake.

Devil’s Peak (7,300 feet) in the Sky Lakes Wilderness south of Crater Lake National Park. Possible wolverine tracks were seen by an aerial crew here on March 20, 1998. Note the ugly clearcuts in the background. This is why I oppose clearcutting so much. It’s totally devastating to a forest to cut it like that.

Wolverine tracks were photographed on the side of a Jeep near Silverton, Oregon in Marion County. The sighting occurred in October 15, 2009. The photo was shown to a zoologist, Charles Clapsaddle, who identified them as wolverine prints. Sightings occur occasionally in the next county to the south, Linn County, in the foothills of the Cascades.

Steens Mountain in far southeast Oregon. Hikers resting in a streambed saw a wolverine through their binoculars from 1/3 of a mile away on an overhanging hill. They watched him for a number of minutes. He seemed to be digging. In addition, a wolverine was trapped and released here in 1973. This is high desert, but note the road-killed wolverine above in similar high desert territory at the Dalles.

The area used to be full of lakes and was very lush and productive. Various California Indian tribes like the Miwok, Yokuts and Ohlone probably originated here over 5,000 years ago during the wet weather.

They then moved down the Oregon-California border to Lake Tahoe, where they crossed into the Delta. From there, they probably split to become the Ohlone, Miwok and Yokuts. These three language groups do seem to be related, but the degree of their relatedness is not known. Some say they are all just under Penutian, with no special relationship amongst them.

Strawberry Lake in the Blue Mountains in the Strawberry Lake Wilderness Area. Wolverines were seen on two separate occasions on the Wenaha Unit in the Blue Mountains, one in 2006 and another in 1991. A timber wolf was also seen here, probably a wanderer from Idaho. Another Great Basin Range in Eastern Oregon.

A spectacular shot of the Boulder Creek Wilderness in Oregon. Photo taken by T.A. Klingenberg. On March 10-11, 1998, surveyors found possible wolverine tracks here.

There was an unverified sighting of a wolverine on the Umpqua Trail near Roseberg, Oregon in 2001 along the Jessie Wright Trail Segment in the Umpqua National Forest.

The North Umpqua Trail on the Umpqua National Forest. There was an unverified sighting of a wolverine here in 2001 in Jessie Wright segment of the trail in the Boulder Creek Wilderness.

In 1996, a wolverine was seen on a trail leading down from a peak near Olallie Lake on the Mount Hood National Forest.

In 1993, a wolverine was spotted during summer on Road 100 in the Rogue River National Forest north or Rancheria Road.

This is a recent photo of the area along Cobleigh Road in Butte Falls, Oregon. In summer 1993, there was an unverified sighting of a wolverine on Road 100 in the Rogue River NF, which is about 6 miles northwest of here. This is in the same general area as the sighting around Prospect, Oregon, in the Rogue River Gorge.

In Autumn 1992, a wolverine was seen on Dead Indian Road near Lily Glen.

This is Dead Indian Road in the Umpqua National Forest. There was an unverified wolverine sighting seen here in Autumn 1992 near the Lily Glen Equestrian Area, an historical site that preserves one of the area’s first settlements.

In October 1990, a hunter saw a wolverine at Mill Creek six miles north of Prospect in the Rogue River NF.

Mill Creek Falls north of Prospect, Oregon in the Rogue River Gorge. There was an unverified wolverine sighting on Mill Creek in October 1990. An elk hunter saw one at his camp 6 miles north of Prospect.

Wolverine tracks have been seen on the Diamond Lakes Ranger District of the Umpqua.

A wolverine was seen south of La Pine in northern Klamath County in the 1990′s.

Tracks were confirmed on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest in the northeastern part of Oregon in the 1990′s, and during the same period, possible wolverine sign was detected on the Malheur, Deschutes, Rogue, and Fremont National Forests. In addition, wolverine tracks were seen at Snow Bunny Snow Park on the Mount Hood National Forest in 1990.

There was an incredible finding west of the Dalles at Rowena on the Colombia River in 1990 when a wolverine was run over by a car. This area is hot, dry Great Basin steppe and is far from any wilderness area. This goes to show that wolverines live in many locales in the West, including the high, dry Great Basin plateaus and mountains.

The Dalles near Rowena Gorge. It’s hard to believe that wolverines live in such hot and dry terrain, but apparently they do. A wolverine was killed by a car here on Highway 84 in 1990.

In the late 1970′s, local newspapers carried multiple reports of wolverine sightings around Chemult on the Umpqua National Forest.

In 1965, a wolverine was shot on Three-Fingered Jack Mountain in the Oregon Cascades. This was the first confirmed report since 1912.

Three-Fingered-Jack Mountain in the Oregon Cascades, where a wolverine was shot by a hunter in 1965, the first verified report of a wolverine since 1912. At the time, the wolverine was thought to be extinct in the state.

Since then, wolverines have been reported from the Cascades, as noted above, and in addition in northeastern Oregon in the Blue Mountains, the Wallowas, and even on Steens Mountain in the far southeast of the state.

There have also been sightings recently near Pullman in southeastern Oregon near the Idaho border.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife feels that wolverines occur or are suspected to occur in the following counties: Baker, Clackamas, Crook, Deschutes, Douglas, Grant, Harney, Hood River, Jackson, Jefferson, Klamath, Lake, Lane, Linn, Malheur, Umatilla, Union, Wallowa, Wasco and Wheeler.

References

Biodiversity Legal Foundation, Predator Conservation Alliance, Defenders of Wildlife, Northwest Ecosystem Alliance, and Superior Wilderness Action Network. (2000). Petition for a rule to list the wolverine (Gulo gulo luscus) as Threatened or Endangered under the Endangered Species Act within the contiguous United States. Submitted to the U.S. Dept. of Interior Fish and Wildlife Service on July 11, 2000.Predator Conservation Alliance. (2001)

Predator Conservation Alliance’s Literature Summary – Draft – January 24, 2001 – Draft Conservation Status and Needs of the Wolverine (Gulo gulo).

The Northern Spotted Owl

Interesting article from the Smithsonian Magazine on Northern Spotted Owls. They are being displaced, but not by man, primarily by Barred Owls, a competitor. This raises an interesting conundrum about what we should do about it.

But the Barred Owl invasion is being caused by man. Barred owls do better in the more open forest that is created by massive clearcutting, while Spotted Owls prefer closed canopy old growth. Others say the move west by Barred Owls was due to fire suppression which opened up more forests for them. Yet others say that it’s simply a natural range expansion.

The timber industry is in court litigating now, saying the Spotted Owl decline was caused by Barred Owls and not logging. But it was caused by both, and the logging may have created the more open conditions favored by the Barred Owl. Anyway, returning to massive logging will just reduce spotted owls even further. It’s not a solution.

It’s clear to me that Northern Spotted Owls qualify for uplisting from Threatened to Endangered. The USFWS has been deliberately starved for funds for decades now, first by Republican Bill Clinton, then by Republican George Bush and now by Republican Barack Obama. Barack Obama has a worse record on endangered species even than George Bush’s father, George Bush Sr.

Incidentally, the California Spotted Owl lives in this region, though I have never seen one. It desperately needs to be listed as at least Threatened, but it’s never going to happen, especially under Republican Barack Obama.

The Mexican Spotted Owl lives in the Southwest. It has been listed as Threatened. If I am not mistaken, it is continuing to decline.

DNC Democrats, the mainstream Dems since 1990, are characterized by a savage, vicious hatred for all environmental issues. They are corporate, rightwing Democrats. Bill Clinton was a nightmare on all things environmental, and Obama has been catastrophically worse than Clinton. I don’t understand Obama and why he’s so disastrous on the environment. If Obama is an environmentalist, he will lose to Republicans?

I don’t get it. During the latest wild budget slashing, the USFWS has been cut to the bone worse than ever, after 20 years of endless slashing by rightwing Democrats and rightwing Republicans. What is this “government’s too big” shit anyway? The state at all sorts of levels is seriously underfunded, if anything.

As an environmentalist, why should I support all this insane budget slashing shit? The budget slashing has been going on for 30 years now under rightwing Democrats and Republicans. One of the goals of it is to gut the state’s environmental protection ability. That’s part of the “government is too big” shit. Big Government protects the environment, and White shitheads don’t like that.

This really indicates to me that White Americans are the worst threat to the US environment of any people. White Americans have always been characterized by extreme hatred for the natural world and lust to destroy everything and kill every living thing, all to make a buck, because White Americans are greedheads who care only about money.

There was a brief period from about 1964-1980 when White Americans for some reason became environmentalists. Whites created the environmental movement and pushed through all of our great environmental legislation. Now they’ve turned their backs on all that and it’s just back to kill and destroy.

In fairness, I must say that all 3rd World non-Whites are totally disastrous on the environment too. Destroy everything, kill everything, that’s been the human motto from Day One. To some extent, hunter-gatherers are the exception, but once agriculture steps up, it’s kill kill kill destroy destroy destroy. Hunter-gatherers at least need to allow enough living things out there so they can eat and survive. Agriculturalists don’t.

Really, White Americans are backwards, reactionary, savage, primitive, uncivilized type people, similar to the barbarians of the 3rd World. They shame any proud White man.

The White man should be Civilized Man, guardian of nature.

As you might have guessed, I am an extreme environmentalist, almost an Earth First type. I support tree spiking, the whole nine yards.

More on spotted owls here.

Is the Eastern Cougar Extinct?

The US Fish and Wildlife Service recently decided that the Eastern Cougar is indeed extinct. This was a very controversial decision, as folks have been seeing mountain lions back east for some decades now, mostly in Appalachia, but also in New York and Maine. In fact, one was roadkilled in Maine in 1994. If you see one and tell your local state Fish and Game, they always tell you that they don’t exist here.

So what’s with all the sightings? I don’t believe that these are all hallucinations or misidentifications. People are definitely seeing real mountain lions back east for decades now.

However, intensive studies to look for them back East have found nothing, except in Wisconsin and Michigan.

These findings have been critiqued. The challenge to the Michigan findings was apparently on the basis that since mountain lions don’t exist in Michigan, having gone extinct, the team could not possibly be finding any. The “impossible” argument. This is what “science” has come to these days. Not so much skepticism and outright denialism. But denialism is no more scientific than pseudoscience that believes any nutty theory that comes down the pike.

The Michigan findings were strengthened by the fact that the Michigan samples’ DNA resembled DNA from fossilized mountain lions found in Michigan. In other words, Eastern cougars never went extinct in Michigan, nor did they in Manitoba. They probably never went extinct in Wisconsin either. However, they did probably go extinct everywhere else in the East other than in Florida, where the Florida Panther barely holds on.

However, recent DNA analysis shows that none of the 15 subspecies of mountain lions in the Americas north of Costa Rica are valid subspecies. All have been collapsed into a single subspecies, the North American mountain lion. So, not only is the Eastern cougar extinct, but it never existed in the first place.

So what are folks seeing? I think they are probably seeing escaped pets that have gone back to the wild, are breeding and are hunting game. Escaped pet mountain lions begin killing very quickly in the wild, and they are able to mate and live long lives there. The population on New Brunswick is apparently wholly made up of escaped captive mountain lions and their descendants.

Credible tracks have been found and cast back East for a couple of decades now. Clearly the cats are out there.

Politics comes into play here. The mountain lion lovers say the extinct decision was politics in favor of land developers and timber interests. On the other side are environmentalists who probably want the Eastern cougar to exist in part to block extensive development of rural land back East.

USFWS document is here. It’s correct, except they never went extinct in Michigan and Wisconsin. But with the new genetic lumping, there never was an Eastern cougar in the first place.

Implications of the Discovery of Bigfoot

Bigfoot will be discovered and proven to science quite soon. I am quite sure it will happen before my death in 30 or so years.

The discovery of Bigfoot, which will come soon, will be one of the greatest biological discoveries in history. It will be a paradigm-changer as they say. People may go crazy in the US and react in all sorts of unpredictable ways. Revolutionary type movements may begin along with messianic or new and changed religious forces.

Bigfoot’s discovery could have major political implications, with redneck White idiots reacting n mass movements this or that way in reaction to the discovery. Either the Democrats or Republicans may be hammered or helped at the polls.

Political parties, notably the Republicans, will probably demogogue the issue. Large groups of stupid Whites may treat Bigfoots like wolves and call for their extermination. The Republicans will probably say that Bigfoot still does not exist and ignore the science. They will then try to force the Democrats to acknowledge that Bigfoots exists to force them into a corner.

The Dems are already seen as the party of the subhuman non-White niggers and spics, and now there will be many jokes about the Dems as the ape party of niggers, Bigfoots, beaners and other subhumans. White nationalists will go absolutely insane over the discovery, but it is hard to say how they will act.

We will need new legislation. There will need to be hunting regulations for Bigfoot and laws about whether or not it is legal to take one. As Bigfoot is very close to humans, these laws will be very controversial. People killing Bigfoots may go down on homicide charges. If Bigfoots are seen as semi-humans, how to we react when they damage property, threaten people, raid farms and orchards and kill livestock, as they do all of these things regularly. When is it permissible to shoot one? If a Bigfoot is killing your dog, can you shoot it or not?

Since Bigfoots are dangerous to humans, how can we deal with them? Do we want more of them or fewer of them? Should we allow people to harass them or order people to leave them alone? When is it ok, if ever, to shoot a Bigfoot?

The environmental issue is massive. Environmental groups will demogogue the issue and probably try to lock up even more public forestland to protect the Bigfoots. The Right will go nuts and say Bigfoot is a plot to lock up the forests. In the West, Republican state governments will probably offer bounties on them or encourage hunters to slaughter every Bigfoot in the state, as they are doing with wolves. If Bigfoots have no endangered species protection, no one could stop these state efforts.

Environmental groups will probably try to get Bigfoots listed as endangered, but this will be hard to do since there is little no good scientific data on numbers, population trends, etc.

Are Bigfoots humans or animals? This is an excellent question and opens up all sorts of weird legal angles. We have laws dealing with humans, which generally assumes some agency and understanding on the part of humans, and laws dealing with animals, which assumes that they have little to no agency or understanding. To what extent are Bigfoots like humans in terms of agency or understanding, and to what extent are they just another unpredictable wild animal governed by instinctive reactions?

There is a strong religious angle. New Agers, of which there are many, will go insane with the news of Bigfoot’s discovery. These folks already feel that Bigfoot is in with the UFO types – that is, Bigfoot comes on spaceships or the spaceships leave the Bigfoots.

50% of Americans are fundamentalist Christian shithead Creationists who think that humans showed up in the last 10,000 years. These dipshits totally reject the theory of evolution.

Bigfoot has major implications for evolutionary theory, in particular for the evolution of Homo sapiens ourselves. How will the religious dipshits react to the discovery?

Believe it or not, I think that Bigfoot is capable of breeding with humans, and there is a documented case from Abkhazia in the 1800′s. Many Indian tribes say that Bigfoot raided villages to steal young women. These women were taken back to the Bigfoot group. In some cases, the women escaped and came back to the Indians. In other cases, they bred with Bigfoots and produced Bigfoot-human hybrids who were more or less like normal people.

Evidence from the Zana case in Abkhazia shows that Bigfoot-human hybrids look and act like normal humans, while having some primitive features. They are quite quick to anger and get into many fights. Their strength is described as superhuman. However, they learn language, work at jobs and are otherwise unremarkable.

We have no laws on humans breeding with nonhumans, since it is not thought possible. However, humans and Bigfoots can breed. With the discovery, I am sure that some nuts will somehow try to capture or breed with a Bigfoot.

New legal theory opens up. Should this be allowed or made illegal? What should be done with the offspring. At the moment, Bigfoots are far too wild for much breeding with humans to occur, but this may change.

Should it be legal to have sex with a Bigfoot? Can you marry one? Bestiality is against the law in many states. Is human – Bigfoot sex bestiality or does it fall under laws governing human – human sex? You cannot marry an animal. But could you marry a Bigfoot?

The skeptical – scientific community will have egg all over their faces after the discovery, but they will carry on regardless After all, they reject everything until there is evidence. With evidence, they accept X as truth. The discovery of Bigfoot, with snarky to vicious rejection followed by embarassed admittance of truth, has many precedences in science, and follows from empiricism. Science will carry on nonetheless.

Soon someone will shoot and kill a Bigfoot and display it for science before authorities can cart it away. Will this person go down in history like Mary Leakey or like Lee Harvey Oswald? What will the law do with him? Arrest him? Prosecute him? He will receive many death threats from animal lovers. On the civil side, will there be lawsuits, since Bigfoot is so human? Will the legal fees break him? Will he become a millionaire from the publicity?

Hard evidence for Bigfoot will likely come from a body produced in one state. A single body from a single region, possibly from the Pacific Northwest. If one is discovered in Washington, the skeptical idiots and the Republicans will say that Bigfoot is only proven to exist in Washington, probably only in one part of the state.

Barring DNA sequencing, you will need a body in every state to prove they exist there. Likely feds and Republicans will only admit they exist in say the Washington state Cascades and deny they exist everywhere else. As with the wolverine, all engangered species act listing attempts will be rejected on the circular grounds of lack of evidence. But then the evidence will be almost impossible to gather.

Good DNA sequencing may well occur in the near future. Then we may be able to document their existence in other places.

There are serious implications for philosophy. What does it mean, after all, to be human? The existence of Bigfoot calls into question many of our beliefs about humans and their difference from animals.