by Dave Nocera

Created on: February 23, 2009

Should Alaska be allows to kill wildlife from the air? Absoluetly not! The aerial gunning of wildlife is the disgraceful practice of shooting defenseless animals like wolves from an aircraft. Why do people do this? Because people don't think about consequences, they don't recognize that we are all part of the web of life, and ultimately because people are stupid.

Stupid people, who call themselves sportsmen, have been using planes for years to herd wild animals like polar bears in Alaska and elk in Montana, they herd them towards hunters waiting on the ground to ambush the unsuspecting animals. Stupidity and guns are never a good mix, so it didn't take long for these airborne gunmen to start shooting the wildlife from planes and helicopters. And rarely do they get a clean kill, so the poor animal dies a painful death, while these modern day "caveman" go back and boast about the "great hunt" to their buddies. As if it were a sport and as if the animal ever had a chance.

Disgusted by this practice, Congress passed the Federal Airborne Hunting Act which made it illegal for hunters to shoot animals from a plane or helicopter. And of course like all federal legislation, it is full of loopholes, permitting licensed individuals to shoot animals from an aircraft for the sake of protecting "land, water, wildlife, livestock, domesticated animals, or crops". Alaska took these loopholes a step further. Wolves are a major predator of moose and caribou, which are part of Alaska's lucrative tourist industry. Alaska issues permits allowing wolves to be massacred from the air in order to beef up the population moose and caribou, attracting more hunters to the state.

The fact that we need laws to protect defenseless animals from horrific acts by stupid people says a lot about us as a species. In the mid-1800s, American Bison roamed the western prairies in great numbers and a herd could delay a train for days. Then senseless practice of shooting Bison from trains almost eliminated the species from the planet. In that same period, poet and philosopher George Santayana first coined the phrase, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". Think about the fate of great animals like wolves, tigers, rinos, whales, and elephants and how they have been are exploited. How many more species will man need to drive near extinction by stupidity before we condemn ourselves to that same fate?

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