If ever we're honest with ourselves, we'll realize that we are all prone to flights of fancy. We hope for outcomes, or the avoidance of outcomes, with no regard to the causal inevitability of either. As children, we are more prone to the capricious nature of happenstance because we simply don't understand that if we hope it, that doesn't cause it to be so. I think that as adults we do the same thing, but we rationalize the chain of unlikely events such that one input to an expected outcome becomes a mandate that things will be as we wish. We begin to feel that if we hope for something REALLY hard, then we've earned the expected result, or if we ignore a warning, that the danger will simply go away. Sadly, these flights of fancy are often reinforced, with no actual input from ourselves, just because things work as we want them to. But when they don't, we often turn to the courts to give us our desired due.
With an intro like that, you might think I'm writing about Terri Schiavo again. No. The stakes in that situation are far too high to discuss silly expectations and inevitable pain from unavoidable result. But pointing to adult flights of fancy does lend itself to laughing at Wyoming.
You see, Wyoming has been having a court based temper tantrum. There's a nationally protected resource out there that the institution that is Wyoming arrogantly believes should be completely controlled by that state. (Apologies to Seb, but) Sadly, No! The US Department of the Interior has given guidelines for the delisting of wolves from the Endangered Species Act in the areas of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. Montana and Idaho complied. Wyoming went to court, claiming that it would hold its breath until it got it way. STATE'S RIGHTS, by golly. It seems a federal judge had a bit of a clarification for the rectangular state below us.
Here's the simple upshot of this: Wolves are returning to the mountain west, either with human help or not. Nothing that we do, short of hunting them into near extinction again, is going to stop that process. Montana has accepted that fact, as has Utah, Idaho and New Mexico. Colorado, Washington, Nevada and Oregon are preparing for their roles in this play. The holdup is Wyoming. As plainly as this can be put, Wyoming's control plan is shoot wolves on sight, as trophy animals near federal preserves, and as predatory pest species everywhere else. This plan is unacceptable to the federal mandate of controlled reintroduction of a national resource species.
For some time, I felt clearly that Wyoming's objections were sincerely based on state's rights issues. Legally speaking that may be the case. But it is beginning to appear that the motivation for Wyoming's action are more infantile; they want things to be "gooder", they hope for the problem to go away, and they're gonna cry if the don't get the sad little do-over they desperately hope for. Not.going.to.happen! The wolves are here; they're not coming soon, they're here. Wyoming can join the rest of us adults and learn to deal with the problem, or they can continue their tantrum. It seems obvious which they'll choose.
Montana has chosen rational control, and a rancher near Dillon is the first to avail himself of the new control measures. Though I regret the killing of a wolf, I applaud the necessity of the action. If only Wyoming would take a hint, and join the rest of the west in actually facing the problem.
I strongly urge anyone who read through my babble to peruse Jeff Hull's terrific article on the topic at the New West Network.
