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.

Why are You so Grouchy?

"Why are you so grouchy?"

People ask me this all of the time.

I used to know a comic book artist who ended up being revealed to me as a neo-Nazi who thought that all leftists were unhappy grouches. He was always a very happy fellow. I can't imagine the dreams that goose-stepped through his mind.

At any rate, I only seem grouchy much of the time. These people don't get to see me when I'm hiking and exploring the forests and mountains. They don't witness my wife and me paddling down a crystal clear spring run in sunny Florida. They don't hear me whoop with joy as I stand on a mountain pinnacle after scrambling to the summit to see the view at the top.

These folk also don't see me smiling as I labor on one of my novels or short stories, feeling joy as I figure out how to piece a yarn together to make it work.

That said, I concede that I have a realist's view of what we have done to this world. And having figured out what we have done and how we act, I see no happy ending for the world as we know it, nor for the companion creatures who have walked this globe alongside us for the past few thousand years.

Too late. Too late. Too late. The time to complain was when they were passing the laws that allowed this obscenity.

When People ask me why I'm always so grouchy (in truth, I'm not, but I seem so to them) I have to tell them that it's because I read widely and am aware of what we have done to Mother Earth and to our own societies and to one another and I clearly understand what is going to happen next.

We have been proceeding down a path that is leading to destruction. No one cares that soon there will be no whales plying the seas. No one cares that soon no tigers will be left to stalk the snows of Siberia or the mangrove swamps of India. No one will do what it will take to keep the tiny pika alive and comfortable in their alpine world. We will all stand aside and watch as the last wolf howls alone, trying to find companions who are no longer there. Not a single person will stand in the way as oil is pumped out of the Earth's violated skin, as gas is spat out by spewing polluted water into our aquifers, as our mountains are torn down and their shattered summits packed into watersheds that will flow no more. People will stand and nod while our marshes are drained and soon the birds that once filled our skies will all lie like dried and fluttering husks in the dead air.

Grouchy? Not really. I just see what's coming down the pike. At the end of that road is a big gaping pit called Extinction. We're headed there at break-neck speed.

My fellow Americans.

Corporate Crimes

British Petroleum is responsible for what could be the worst ecological disaster to ever occur within the United States of America. We must not allow the industrialists who rule this nation to blame the average citizen for the simple fact that we use the products which they provide. We are forced to consume the Earth-burning toxins that drive the economy for the reason that the corporations who took our government from us will not allow any alternatives. They make obscene profits from the poisonous ways in which they procure the elements that lie within our planet. We cannot allow them to deny their crimes and lay those acts at the feet of the common man.

The time has long since passed when we must destroy the companies that drill for oil, tear the Earth for coal, and poison our water and our air and our soil. They need to stop what they're doing. If they won't do so voluntarily, then they need to be forced to cease and desist. I don't care if we legislate a cease and desist order, or achieve this end by other means, including violence. If we don't put a stop to it, we're going to lose everything that each of us needs for our basic existence.

These energy companies must either change their ways, or they must be totally, completely, utterly destroyed. The men who sit on their boards and serve as their executive officers, and the ones who shill for them within our political system must all be made to pay. Enough of their crimes.


I'm sick of watching my world die a strangling, offensive, hideous death so that a very few can enjoy personal wealth.

The time has come to end these monstrous, criminal, murdering firms.

Yes, Corporate America, there is justice.

Sara Pee