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. The 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 “sharp shooters”, 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, tough to do when you’re hovering above them as they run away from you at top speeds. Even if you are a “sharp shooter”—is there some sort of evaluation between a sharp shooter 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 the scars on the remaining wolves. Why is nobody talking about the fact that the wolf is being made into a goat- a scapegoat? 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.
