From E&E News: “Lawmakers introduce bills to ban aerial wolf kills”

Sarah Palin may no longer be governor of Alaska, but the controversy she incited over the killing of wolves in the state continues.
House and Senate lawmakers introduced legislation yesterday that would ban the practice of allowing hunters to shoot and kill wildlife from aircraft.
The issue of aerial gunning gained national attention last fall, when Defenders of Wildlife ran a national television ad criticizing Palin, then the Republican vice presidential candidate, for supporting wolf hunts in Alaska.
The ad showed footage of an airborne gunner shooting a wolf and an animal bleeding in the snow. Narration from Ashley Judd said Palin “actively promotes the brutal and unethical hunting of wolves and other wildlife.” A communications research company ranked it one of the most effective ads of the presidential campaign (E&ENews PM, Sept. 19, 2008).
But the fight over whether Alaska officials should allow aerial kills started long before Palin’s election as governor in 2006. It has raged for years in the state Legislature, courthouses and state ballot initiatives. Environmental groups have long opposed the practice and even taken state officials to court.
Now lawmakers from outside the state want to deal with Alaska’s aerial wolf kills on a federal level.
“The state of Alaska has been operating an airborne hunting program that has blatantly ignored federal law, ignored Alaskans’ opposition, ignored the science and ignored even their own wildlife experts,” said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who introduced an aerial hunting ban in the House yesterday. “It’s time to ground this air assault on wolves.”
Miller’s bill, H.R. 3381, would ban aerial kills of all wildlife. He introduced similar legislation in 2007, but it never received a hearing.
Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.) introduced companion legislation, S. 1535.
“Hunting is a part of America’s culture and history, but there is no sport in aerial practices that lead to such cruel and painful deaths for wild animals,” Cardin said. “This bill will help close the loopholes and return us to a proper balance between responsible population control and hunting for sport.”
When Miller introduced a similar bill two years ago, Alaska’s lone congressman, Rep. Don Young (R), fought back against his efforts, saying the bill would impede states’ ability to control their own wildlife populations.
For aerial kills, one person pilots a small plane and another sits in the back with a gun. In clear weather, the practice can yield a bigger kill than traditional hunting, since people can cover a lot of ground quickly.
Many hunters say aerial gunning is unsportsmanlike, since it violates the “fair chase” ethic. Environmental advocates says it is an inhumane practice, since the gunman rarely gets a clean shot.
Congress outlawed aerial hunting in 1972 in the Federal Airborne Hunting Act, but it included a provision allowing state employees or licensed individuals to shoot from aircraft to protect “land, water, wildlife, livestock, domesticated animals, human life, or crops.”
Alaska lawmakers used that exception to reinstate aerial gunning in 2003, when then-Gov. Frank Murkowski (R) signed a bill to expand the state’s predator-control program. Anyone with a pilot’s license and no record of previous wildlife violations can get a free permit to shoot wolves from planes.
Supporters of the killing tactics in Alaska see them as part of an aggressive means of “predator control” to keep wolves from ravaging the moose and caribou populations that some human hunters rely on for food, especially Alaskans living in remote areas. A wolf is capable of eating more than a dozen moose or 40 caribou a year.
When she campaigned for governor of Alaska, Palin vowed to support “aggressive” predator control. She kept her promise, pushing attempts to streamline laws governing the killing of wolves. She also approved a program to pay a $150 bounty for each dead wolf and helped the state launch a $400,000 effort to teach the public about predator control.
Environmental groups and lawmakers supporting the new bans see an animal being savagely targeted.
Defenders of Wildlife, the Humane Society of the United States, and nine former members of the Alaska Board of Game endorsed Miller’s bill. The groups say that the Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game has relied on unreliable population estimates and that gunners are sometimes chasing wolves for miles before shooting them.
“This is precisely the type of unjustified harassment of wildlife that Congress attempted to end when it passed the Airborne Hunting Act more than 35 years ago,” said Roger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife, in a statement yesterday. “Clearly the underlying law needs clarification to put an end to Alaska’s use of this controversial practice, one that should only be used in a biological emergency by trained state wildlife managers, backed up by sound science, as Congress intended.”