Editor,
The Bush (mis)administration wants to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration.
This is not a good idea.
Current events would indicate that the people in charge of wildlife refuges and taking care of our wildlife are not competent to look after an area as large as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge if there were thousands of oil workers running all over the place.
Recently, local government officials dropped five bighorn sheep out of a helicopter to their deaths while attempting to relocate them. This was certainly a terrible accident, but one wonders if it could have been prevented if they were moving one sheep at a time instead of five.
They did successfully move 56 sheep while losing five.
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One official said that was 10 percent of the sheep and more than they expected.
They only expected to lose 8 percent of the sheep. What? New Mexico Game and Fish moves animals and expects casualties?
Another project of government animal workers is to occasionally move antelope from one herd to another on the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge. I understand, from talking to several mammalogists, that they also lose a number of antelope during these round-ups.
Antelopes are very high strung and die from the stress of being handled. In other words, they are terrorized to death. One scientist told me that is the price you pay when you move animals.
What? Who pays that price? It is the animals that are dying because of human intervention that are paying the price. In another incident, an antelope was killed on the Sevilleta because of an unfortunate interaction with a van full of people. The details of the accident are murky and the final report is suspect, but the incontrovertible fact is that the antelope died because of human activities.
This beautiful, female antelope also left behind a foal for the coyotes. Basically, we seem to have, or at least people who are supposed to look after our wildlife seem to have, a disconnect with their charges. They don’t seem to have any respect for our wildlife.
In an age of supercomputers, stem cell research, cloning and smart bombs, you would think we could come up with a way of moving large animals without killing them. Maybe they could use tranquilizers or some other non-lethal methods that wouldn’t require an 8 percent mortality rate of the animals.
I think that the sooner we realize that all animals have hearts and souls just as we do, and the sooner we start to respect them as our neighbors and not consider them potential specimens for some dingy museum, then the better off we will be as a society.
We have absolutely no business being on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I am beginning to think that with the exception of a few biologists, we have no business letting anyone on our own, taxpayer funded, Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge.
Richard Fagerlund, B.C.E.
Environmental Services
