Alaska Delays Decision for Tribe to Hunt Young Wolves, Bears

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wolves.jpgAs a vegetarian, pet-owning urbanite who’s never been hunting, I find it hard to stomach the idea of grown men with rifles killing fuzzy baby animals. So it was with mixed feelings I read today that Alaskan tribes will have to wait until November to see if they can legally cull wolf pups and bear cubs in their dens along the Kuskokwim River. The now-banned practice, traditional among Orutsaramuit people in southwestern Alaska, is intended to reduce predators killing too many of the moose that tribes rely on for subsistence hunting. While conservationists predictably see the practice as cruel, the real bone of contention lies between the state of Alaska and tribal officials.

The state of Alaska says that the moose population actually increased from 2004 to 2006, years during which at least 70 wolves were killed in reduction efforts. Another estimate, from May 2007, also showed that the moose population in the tribe’s area is on the rise.

A natural resources representative from the Orutsaramuit Native Council disagrees. He says the area in contention “was the best moose habitat in the country and it’s almost totally gone now…We want to do everything we can to get moose numbers up back to the way they were.”

Unfortunately, the Native Council has not supplied any hard numbers (as far as I could see) on moose populations. So what’s the state of Alaska to do—trust anecdotal evidence that moose are nearly gone and allow native Alaskans to reduce wolf and bear populations, or trust its own data that there are plenty of moose around—and risk alienating a local tribe? What’s your take?

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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