The ever marvellous George Monbiot blogs for The Guardian on the environment and social justice. Unlike many in the environmental justice community, he has no difficulty defending the moral standing of animals and nature, in conjunction with his moral critique of social inequality and political-economic privilege. In this he is akin to some of my favourite ethicists — Arne Naess, Mary Midgley, and Val Plumwood. More to my heart, he has a special love of wolves, and routinely applies an excoriating wit to unearth the collective crimes we commit against these creatures.

In “Wolf killings are based on the most cynical of premises”, he sends up Brigit Bardot for threatening to move to Russia in protest of circus animal abuse (seriously?). As if her threat is not absurd enough, he discusses the ongoing abuse of wolves in Russia and Canada that takes place in the name of conservation and sustainability. He does a superb job connecting the dots of corrupt politicians, corporate greed, and the distortions this breeds in environmental policy and wildlife management.

As Monbiot notes, Bardot is in for a bit of a shock when she lands in Moscow.

…Take for example the decree on Tuesday by the president of the Sakha Republic (also known as Yakutia) in Siberia.

There are 3,500 wolves in Sakha, which sounds like a lot until you discover that the republic is the size of India. President Yegor Borisov wants to reduce the population to 500 through an intensive three-month hunt, supported by a state of emergency, bounties for every wolf shot and a prize of 1m roubles for the hunters who kill the most.

This “emergency” massacre is necessary, he claims, because wolves are killing too many domestic animals. Last year, apparently, they incurred 5m roubles’ (£103,500) worth of losses – considerably less than the likely cost of the wolf hunt. Would it not make more sense to use the money to compensate the farmers? Would it not make more sense to protect the wolves’ natural prey: animals such as hares which are currently being overhunted by people, driving the wolves to look elsewhere for food?

Monbiot then turns his attention to Albert (Canada) where a corporate-funded astroturf campaign against wolves is being used to divert attention from real concerns about the habitat distraction and overhunting that are decimating the Woodland Caribou herds.

In Alberta, …the government plans to carry out a mass killing of wolves by shooting them from helicopters and poisoning them with strychnine.

The reason, ostensibly, is to protect the woodland caribou, a subspecies of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus caribou), whose numbers have been diminishing rapidly. This, according to the Alberta Caribou Committee, is because wolves have been killing them.

So what is this Alberta Caribou Committee? As you might expect, it represents all the usual environmental organisations, such as, er, PetroCanada, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Koch Petroleum, TransCanada Pipelines, Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries and the pulp company Daishowa Marubeni.

Between them they have decided – and apparently convinced both the provincial and federal governments – that the problem afflicting the province’s caribou is not the fragmentation of their habitat by seismic lines, pipelines, roads, oil platforms, timber cutting and the transformation of pristine forest into wasteland by tar sands operations, but the natural predator with which the species has lived for thousands of years.

There is more, and I highly recommend this and previous posts on the subject. Monbiot provides those of us in North America with another perspective on the troubled relationship between humanity and wolves. I regret that the political and corporate mendacity he recounts is little different from that which characterizes wolf policies in the US. I have added Monbiot’s blog to the resources on the sidebar. For more of his work, see www.monbiot.com.

For more on the ethics of wolf recovery, see Thanksgiving for Wolves? and the other posts in my series on wolves. For a detailed analysis of wolf politics, see The Wildlife News edited by Ralph Maughan.

Video: Wolf Trapping.wmv was posted on YouTube by wolfkillr on 23 December 2011. It’s caption reads, ” Shooting a wolf in a foot hold trap, perfect dispatch”. I first ran across this on the blog Howling for Justice: Blogging for the Gray Wolf.