During the campaign, some critics of Sarah Palin ridiculed her efforts
to thin the wolf population by shooting them from helicopters, painting
her as cruel and anti-nature. The Anchorage Daily News
reports that the caribou population might dispute that. Thanks to the
limitation of the predators, the survival rate of young caribou has
dramatically increased
As ugly and as politically incorrect as the wolf killing
might seem to some, they said, the helicopter gunning that took place
earlier this year saved caribou, especially young caribou, from being
eaten alive.
Fall surveys of the Southern Alaska Peninsula caribou herd completed
in October found an average of 39 calves per 100 cows. That’s a
dramatic improvement from fall counts of only 1 calf per 100 cows in
2006 and 2007.
The state wildlife board needed to take dramatic action on behalf of
the caribou in the southern herd. The population had dropped from
6,000 to 500. Wolves and bears had wiped out the offspring for too
long, and left alone, the herd would have disappeared altogether.
Unfortunately, critics didn’t bother to find out why
Palin’s administration thinned the wolf population by the most
efficient manner available to them. Critics of responsible wildlife
management seem to live in Cartoon World, where the wolf and the bear
and the caribou all become best friends and have adventures together
with the plucky little kid from the local village. In fact, the wolf
and the bear will eat the caribou until there are none left, and would
have the plucky little kid for dessert if they could.
The biggest irony, of course, is that the critics of drilling in ANWR like to invoke the caribou
as a reason to block extraction of the vast oil resources in the
region. The wolves present a far greater danger to caribou than
drilling ever did, but I guess caribou are only valuable as a means to
block drilling.