“What happens in the oil patch stays in the oil patch . . .”
I thought the problem was all those dern wolves, but apparently not. 😉 Article in the Billings Gazette. “State influx leads to more poaching. Long distances, lack of witnesses make job hard for wardens.” By the Associated Press
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Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He was a Western Watersheds Project Board Member off and on for many years, and was also its President for several years. For a long time he produced Ralph Maughan’s Wolf Report. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He and Jackie Johnson Maughan wrote three editions of “Hiking Idaho.” He also wrote “Beyond the Tetons” and “Backpacking Wyoming’s Teton and Washakie Wilderness.” He created and is the administrator of The Wildlife News.
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Well, we can’t let wildlife conservation interfere with the nation’s insatiable need for energy, can we?
There seems to be an attempt to blame the poaching on people who use the new oil/gas field roads to come into the remote areas to poach, while carefully avoiding putting any blame on the oil/gas workers for the actual poaching. I’ve got news for everyone; I’ve been around oil/gas workers a lot during my life and their morals and values make Sudanese slave traders look good. Sure, there may be some other people using those roads; but, the citizens of Wyoming need to stop kidding themselves. When the City of Cody goes out of its way to explicitly invite the motorcyclists off the road to Sturgis and implicitly disinvite the family tourists in the process, then they have only themselves to blame when the Hell’s Angels show up to hang around the schools, sell their filth, and try to intimidate the Sheriff. When the State of Wyoming falls all over itself to waive its own environmental processes and cheer the feds on to waive theirs, then Wyoming has only itself to blame when the oil/gas crowd shows its real face …trashes the place …and then quietly skips town, bills unpaid, to leave the Wyoming taxpayers who are left behind to clean up and try to rebuild. Clearly Wyoming is just to arrogant to bother looking at the history of copper in AZ and MT or what silver left behind in CO and ID or what uranium left in NM and UT. It’s always the same with the extractive industries, oil/gas included, and always will be; I guess Wyoming thinks it’s going to be “special.”