Animal Rights/ General/ Politics

Sarah Palin’s Shocking Animal Cruelty

If Sarah Palin ran the United States like she has run Alaska, it would indeed be a terrible day for animals.
GOP conventioneers were officially introduced to their vice presidential candidate who is, as Fred Thompson said, “the only nominee in the history of either party who knows how to properly field dress a moose.”But it’s not Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s personal love of hunting or appetite for moose venison that should strike fear in the heart of every animal advocate in the nation–it’s her retrograde policies on animal welfare and conservation that have led to an all-out war on the state’s wolves and other creatures.Her record is so extreme that she has perhaps done more harm to animals than any other current governor in the United States — and that’s a difficult distinction to achieve among our 22 Republican and 28 Democratic chief executives. Voters of both political parties who care about the humane treatment of animals must unite to make sure that the nation’s worst governor doesn’t end up just a heartbeat away from the nation’s most important job.Palin is not only a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, but is also a close ally of Safari Club International. These radical groups don’t represent rank-and-file hunters, but instead lobby on behalf of their elitist, wealthy members to defend despicable and unsporting practices such as captive trophy hunts, bear baiting, and steel-jawed legold traps — practices that real hunters agree are inhumane and unacceptable.
And the Palin Administration, in lock-step with these extreme anti-conservationists, has waged an all-out war on Alaska’s predators to artificially boost the populations of moose and caribou for trophy hunters. Palin has tried to pass legislation making it easier for state officials to gun down wolves and bears from the sky, and even offered a $150 bounty for the left foreleg of each dead wolf as an economic incentive for pilots and aerial gunners to kill more of the animals.Leading up to the recent statewide vote on Measure 2 to stop the aerial shooting of wolves and bears, Palin’s Board of Game spent $400,000 of public money on brochures and radio ads to influence the election. She not only took an inhumane and unsporting position at odds with the principles of wildlife management and fair chase, but did it in an undemocratic and underhanded way. Palin may have criticized “the old politics as usual” and “the culture of self-dealing” in her speech last night, but that’s a pretty good description of her dealings with the NRA and Safari Club.Since Alaska is not protecting its wolves from aerial hunting, the U.S. Congress has stepped in and is now considering the Protect America’s Wildlife (PAW) Act, which would close a loophole in federal law that allows the shooting of animals from airplanes and helicopters. But Gov. Palin has attacked that effort, too, and used her office to criticize the federal legislation. She wrote in a press release that the bill’s author “doesn’t understand rural Alaska” and “doesn’t comprehend wildlife management in the North.”
This new video from our friends at the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund reveals shocking images from the brutal practice of aerial hunting, and shows the world just what Gov. Palin has championed at the state and federal levels.

But that’s only one part of the story. It’s not just wolves, of course, who have been the targets of Palin’s outdated policies, but also the Arctic region’s iconic polar bears, the 21st Century’s canaries in the mineshaft who are teetering on the brink of extinction.

Despite the effects of climate change on the bear’s vanishing habitat and shrinking ice floes, Gov. Palin penned an op-ed in The New York Times earlier this year arguing that it was the “wrong move” to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act. Later, when the Bush Administration announced its listing of the polar bear as a threatened species, she filed a lawsuit seeking to reverse the decision. Environmentalists fired back over Palin’s lawsuit and said “her head-in-the-sand approach to global warming only helps oil companies, certainly not Alaska or the polar bear.”

For those who don’t believe that the number two spot on the ticket matters much at all, consider this: fourteen vice presidents in American history eventually climbed to the top job, eight of them because their predecessors died in office. If Sarah Palin were to be propelled into the presidency and given the opportunity to run the United States like she has run Alaska–controlling the Departments of Interior, Agriculture, and Commerce, with wide-ranging authority over issues affecting pets, wildlife, farm animals, marine mammals, animals in research, and public lands–it would indeed be a terrible day for animals and for the country.

 

Article by Michael Markarian, Humane Society Legislative Fund. Posted September 16, 2008.

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7 Comments

  • Reply
    Tatiana (20 comments)
    September 19, 2008 at 7:51 am

    Like I’ve told a lot of women who love Palin…Just because she can shoot an innocent animal from a helicopter doesn’t make her a feminist…

  • Reply
    JohnnySensible (31 comments)
    September 19, 2008 at 10:48 pm

    What a team!

    John McCain quote – “I eat almost everything. Sometimes I don’t do too well with vegetables.”

    More at – http://www.chow.com/stories/10894

    Where we learn that he likes baby back ribs very, very much!

    ……………………………………

    Baby back ribs – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BabyBack.jpg – looking similar to close-ups of Viet Nam War napalm burn victims.

    “Napalm is the most terrible pain you can imagine,” said Kim Phúc, a napalm bombing survivor known from a famous Vietnam War photograph.

    All respect to Huỳnh Công Út / Nick Ut – http://stateoftheart.popphoto.com/blog/2007/06/nick_ut_exactly.html

  • Reply
    JohnnySensible (31 comments)
    September 19, 2008 at 10:49 pm

    More re: “foul mouthed” politicians & “living god’s” – http://www.happycow.net/forum/vegetarian/view_topic.php?id=130

  • Reply
    webmaster (15 comments)
    September 20, 2008 at 8:44 am

    Hilarius:
    http://www.michaelpalinforpresident.com/

    Vote for Palin!

  • Reply
    DC Vegan (1 comments)
    September 20, 2008 at 6:53 pm

    There’s an image out there of her sitting on a sofa in her living room. The sofa is draped with the pelt of a murdered bear and there is a dead crab on her coffee table. Her parents are similarly bloodthirsty; an image of their family/living room reveals a virtual abbatoire of dead animals as decoration.

    Not that you didn’t need enough reasons not to vote for her.

    http://www.dawnwatch.com/Palin.htm

    Scroll down for shocking images.

  • Reply
    JohnnySensible (31 comments)
    September 20, 2008 at 9:55 pm

    If this pair of jokers are elected we can expect more & longer wars / conflicts.

    John McCain became a “hero” after jumping into airplanes loaded with bombs & flying up in to the sky to drop them on the people of Viet Nam on 22 separate occasions.

    I simply cannot understand why dropping bombs from aircraft to indiscriminately maim & kill the people of Viet Nam is considered heroic?

    On his 23rd attempt when he was flying over Hanoi when a very brave North Vietnamese shot his plane down.

    He dropped bombs on people / animals from his A-4E Skyhawk.

    She promotes shooting animals from helicopters & low flying planes!

    What a pair!

    +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

    US “looney tunes” politicians / military personel – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

    + The objective of forcing North Vietnam to stop its support for the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF), however, was never reached. As one officer noted “this is a political war and it calls for discriminate killing. The best weapon … would be a knife … The worst is an airplane.” The Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force Curtis LeMay, however, had long advocated saturation bombing in Vietnam and wrote of the Communists that “we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age”. +

  • Reply
    Chia (324 comments)
    September 23, 2008 at 5:27 pm

    Scary!

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