Sarah Palin back in the Cross Hairs

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is back in the news under not the best circumstances. This time it is not the Democrats that are after her but the wildlife conservationists. The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund released the following statement:

Palin’s Extreme Anti-Conservation Agenda to be Exposed in National Campaign
The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund today launched a national campaign to expose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s renewed anti-conservation agenda. The Action Fund first highlighted Palin’s record in Alaska during last fall’s presidential campaign when it ran TV ads across battleground states, highlighting Palin’s championing of the brutal and unnecessary aerial killing of wolves and other carnivores.

Governor Palin is an active promoter of Alaska's aerial hunting program whereby wolves are shot from the air or chased by airplanes to the point of exhaustion before the pilot lands the plane and a gunner shoots the animals point blank. The program also targets bears.

In response to the accusations, the Governors office released their own statement claiming that “This is about feeding Alaskans.” The facts however are not necessarily so much pointing in the same direction. According to the site eyeonpalin.com, the Palin administration allows out of state hunters to hunt and directly compete with rural hunters for supposed limited resources in most of the areas where aerial hunting is done. They continue on by pointing out the sport hunter groups are the biggest advocates of aerial hunting and most are opposed to advocates for the poor or hungry. Huffingtonpost.com points out that the wildlife viewings bring far more tourist dollars to the state, where only 11 percent of the population hunts.

As far as her time in office, Gov. Palin has done the following involving aerial hunting:
Palin offered a $150 bounty for wolves to entice hunters to kill more wolves in certain parts of the state, with hunters having to present a wolf's foreleg to collect the bounty.
She actively opposed a ballot measure campaign seeking to end the aerial hunting of wolves by private hunters and approved a $400,000 state-funded campaign aimed at swaying people's votes on the issue.
She also introduced legislation to make it easier to kill wolves and bears and which would have also removed the aerial hunting initiative from the ballot and block the ability of citizens to vote on the issue.
The Board of Game, which she appoints, has approved the killing of black bear sows with cubs as part of the program and expanded the aerial control programs.
The media and state officials are currently looking into reports that state officials implementing one of the aerial wolf killing programs illegally killed five-week old wolf pups just outside their dens.