They're Always Lurking.

 Most of the time when I'm on the Internet and I comment on, or post anything about wild predators, some guy (it's always a male) will pipe up with a comment about killing the predator with a gun.

Sometimes it won't happen, but generally it does. If I show a photo of a bear that I've photographed on a hike, or of a coyote I've seen while in a wilderness only a moment will pass before some armed-up idiot makes a comment on how I should carry a firearm, or what kind of weapon I need to kill said animal.

And my reaction has become one of revulsion rather than of surprise or amusement. This is the kind of reaction I've come to expect from these creeps who inhabit US society. And, yes, it's always one of my fellow US citizens who reacts this way. I've never had anyone from another continent or country tell me that I need to kill some animal.

I used to wonder where this attitude of belligerence toward wild animals comes from, but now I think I understand it. It has nothing to do with negative encounters these people have had with wolves, or mountain lions, or grizzly bears. It has everything to do with propaganda. That's right. The US press isn't happy just trying to make Americans hate each other; or how we should be ready to kill Russians, or Chinese, or Mexicans or anyone else the system currently wants to demonize. They also do it to animals of all things.

When I was a kid I was interested in wildlife. I would read anything and everything I could find about wild animals. When I ran out of books to read I turned to the vast numbers of magazines in my dad's warehouse. And I gravitated to the magazines that had cover photos of bears and wolves and lions. These were, of course, hunting magazines. Usually I'd skip right past the articles about rifles and pistols and compound bows and go right to the prose concerning wild creatures: the game, as the authors termed them.

It was in those vast stacks of hunting magazines that I'd sit and read about mule deer, and elk, bison, moose, pronghorn, mountain goats, wolverines, black bears, puma, timber wolves, lynx, otters, and their vast company of other herbivores, carnivores, and omnivores. Even as a generally non-critical child I began to note a decidedly negative tendency toward any animal that was a carnivore. If the animal sported fangs and/or sharp claws it was on the writer's shit-list. And they'd pile on the hate. Bears and mountain lions were bad, and should be shot. Wolves and coyotes should not only be shot, but wiped from the face of Mother Earth.

Well, it was apparent that the editors of all of these varied hunting publications hated all predators who were not Homo sapiens. They referred to most of them as vermin. It was, obviously, paramount that such animals be cleansed from the landscape. After realizing this ridiculous tendency of the publications I ceased to read them.

But it took me a while to figure out why they were taking this attitude. It wasn't just that human hunters don't want any competition. Such people don't generally even like other gun-owners to share a few hundred acres of forest with them. (Other human hunters accidentally shoot and kill one another to a shocking extent every year. Look it up.) No, I couldn't base this endless blather of hatred toward wolves and such creatures merely on the fact that human hunters don't want canines and felines and ursids eating up their game. Sometime else was afoot.

And I realized what it was when I noticed that these magazines also had a tendency to hate government legislation that established National Parks and wilderness areas; and any law that mandated the protections of rare and endangered animals. Even when hunting is allowed in wilderness areas, these periodicals didn't support their establishment, based on some vague dimming of our rights.

At last I realized from whence these clowns were receiving their marching orders. All such publications are corporate owned. Large, ongoing publishing concerns. And each under the control not just of editors and publishers, but of executives who gather in boardrooms commanded by major stockholders. The same fat-cats who call the editorial shots are also the same people who invest their money in timber, in real estate, in mining, in drilling rigs, in pipelines.

Timber wolves and mountain lions are a threat to these human vermin. A blackfooted ferret can screw up plans to exploit an oil field. An endangered bird of prey can derail the laying of pipe. It is in their interest to demonize a predator as surely as it is in their interest to foment a war against another nation which presents no threat to us.

I haven't picked up such a magazine in decades. Not even out of curiosity, or during a moment of childhood nostalgia from the days when I was a kid hungry for knowledge and looking for information within the pages of those poisonous magazines.

But, at last, I understood the origin of the mania against predators, and I know the source of the fuel that feeds the insanity that pops up when I post a photo of a bear or a coyote.

So, to the idiots always calling for me to kill bears and wolves: grow the fuck up.

Hawk.

Turkey.

Elk.

Coyote.