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Enraged John McCain Charges Bears

You know, Teddy Roosevelt got a lot of mileage for being nice to a bear. The ubiquitous Teddy bear was the upshot of his refusal to shoot. So you think John McCain would know better. The Washington Post reports a great piece on McCain's standard stump speech fare about a $3 million study of the DNA of bears in Montana. "Unbelievable," he says. Well, what's unbelievable is that no one on McCain's staff has bothered to inform him of the real purpose of the study he's spent so much energy despising since 2003. Katherine Kendall, a kick-ass biologist, and the mastermind of the Northern Divide Grizzly Bear Project, is actually doing John McCain and his descendants a genuine favor by tackling the life-and-death issues of biodiversity. According to the WP:

Kendall is one tough field biologist: She's rafted wild rivers, forded swollen streams and hiked through remote backcountry for weeks at a time. She goes to places inhabited by all manner of large creatures with sharp teeth. She was once charged by an enraged grizzly. She stared the bear down… As a scientist with the US Geological Survey, she set out to get the first head count of grizzlies in the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem. She and her co-workers at the USGS have used DNA primarily as a bear-identifying tool… "There's never been any information about the status of this population. We didn't know what was going on—until this study," Kendall said. This was an astonishingly ambitious research project involving 207 paid workers, hundreds of volunteers, 7.8 million acres and 2,560 bear sampling sites [including the bear rub tree seen in the video]. The project did not cost $3 million, as McCain's ad alleges, but more than $5 million, including nearly $4.8 million in congressional appropriations. It had a strong advocate in Congress in Montana's three-term senator, Conrad Burns, a Republican who was defeated in his reelection bid in 2006.

Bear at a rubbing tree.

Bottom line: we need bears. We need tough field biologists whose dedication often means the difference between survival and extinction for their study animals. We need to stand up to McCain when he charges blindly and stare him down. Anyone up for attending a stump speech in a bear costume?

Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the John Burroughs Medal Award. You can read from her new book, The Fragile Edge, and other writings, here.

Comments

Not only does McCain dislike bears, he has little respect for the lives and homes of Native Americans in Arizona by signing a bill to remove them off their lands.

Posted by: Rick Theile on 03/12/08 at 1:27 PM Respond

Except for the pretense of being "pro-life", a facetious moniker for "anti-women", conservatives such as McCain have little respect for anyone's life but their own.The crueler one is to animals, the manlier the conservative male. Other ethnicities rank below aryian. And best of all, I have yet to hear an apology from Bush for bamboozling young men and women into dying in Iraq for his self-serving lies about WMD's.

Posted by: addie on 03/12/08 at 3:49 PM Respond

uhh... that was $5,000,000, right? huh. umm, is McCain being a 'bear hater' really the issue here? a dwindling bear population doesn't take much hard math or money to figure out. or a rough-and-tumble, fearless, rock star of the wilderness biologist. seriously, i feel like i'm reading the same type of bullhonkey the right wing media shovels out. for shame.

as far as helping bears, why don't they put that $5 mil into buying land or something useful? or into forced sterilization of an overbreeding parasitic human population? i mean, really, isn't human destruction of habitat and sprawling construction the culprit here?

Posted by: tammy on 03/12/08 at 9:00 PM Respond

Anybody read Paul Davies' COSMIC JACKPOT ?! Tammy, you may benefit from a read- through (remembering, though, that paper comes mostly from trees. Now, I'm reminded of that toilet paper commercial) . . . Ha.
Incidentally, I'm for scientific study, per se, AND women's universal right to choose, period.
Excuse me for leaving the bears in the woods, but hey, does anyone know if McCain was the candidate who said that his "favorite memento" was his "trophy wife" ?!

Posted by: El Evans on 03/16/08 at 4:01 AM Respond

Tammy, actually, "figuring" out the grizzly bear population has been VERY difficult. These huge animals are very secretive, quiet, and DANGEROUS. Previous estimates of the population in the study area were that there were about 200 individuals.

The DNA study showed that there were at least 546 different individuals. This is almost 3 times the expected or estimated number! We still don't have a good idea how much territory is needed for a healthy population, and a study such as this gives us much needed information about how to "help" the bears. It also tells us that decades of protection under the Endangered Species Act is working - contrary to some people's view of it.

Enraged John McCain Charges Bears

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