Sarah Palin enthusiastically defends the cruel practice of shooting wolves from the air.

Palin has proposed legislation – and even cash incentives – to encourage this practice. She offered aerial hunters a state payment of $150 for every wolf killed before it was defeated by the state superior court as an illegal use of bounty payments. Back in 2007, she had already approved spending $400,000 of state money to counter a citizens’ initiative at halting the killing of animals from the air. I’m guessing much larger expenditures of taxpayer funds have accrued since then.

Defenders of Wildlife has some pieces on this issue that you might have seen already, one including actress Ashley Judd.

Many hunters oppose the aerial kills as cruel and unfair. Interestingly, the stomach-churning film that is circulating on YouTube (it was produced by Defenders of Wildlife), in fact depicts government hunters shooting wolves with tranquilizer darts, in order to study them. “The reality is much more gruesome,” says Toppenberg. “They get hit with buckshot, it goes right through and their blood splatters all over the snow.” The hunts often take out alpha males, leaving younger animals that don’t know where to make dens or find ungulates at certain times of the year. “Then you have them going into rural villages and eating dogs,” Toppenberg said. “You’re creating wolf problems rather than solving them.”

There are responsible, ethical, and scientific practices of wildlife management. Sadly, Palin and others have no interest in this. There’s not even an acknowledgment that federal law bans airborne hunting. They don’t even realize that much of a wolves diet depends on scavenging, not hunting. Their methods are not only barbaric, but they are also ineffective – even for the tourism they wish to promote.

Any argument about providing food for Alaskans is ridiculously deceitful. If it’s about putting food on the table, then how are these questions from Eye on Palin to be answered?

• Why are sport hunter groups the biggest advocates of aerial hunting as opposed to advocates for the poor or hungry?
• Why does the Palin administration allow 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?
• Why does Palin oppose what is called “rural preference” which would give true rural subsistence hunters priority access over sport hunters to the areas where aerial hunting is conducted?
• Why did she file an appeal in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to block the Cheesh-na Tribal Council from expanding their subsistence hunting in key areas?

This has much more to do with Palin’s political ties, and with their interest in entertainment, than with even the questionable wildlife management theory that has been proposed.

By allowing sport hunters to hunt predators from the air, the state wildlife agency aims to boost the numbers of other game animals such as moose and caribou so that these animals may in turn be killed by sport hunters. Alaskans have twice stopped this circumvention and banned the cruel and unfair practice of shooting wolves from aircraft and twice the legislature has ignored the will of its citizens and overturned the law. Animal advocates, environmentalists and hunters agree. Shooting animals from the air or chasing them to the point of exhaustion and then shooting them violates all standards of fair chase hunting. It is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Last year, 172 scientists signed a letter to Palin, expressing concern about the lack of science behind the state’s wolf-killing operation. According to the scientists, state officials set population objectives for moose and caribou based on “unattainable, unsustainable historically high populations.” As a result, the “inadequately designed predator control programs” threatened the long-term health of both the ungulate and wolf populations. The scientists concluded with a plea to Palin to consider the conservation of wolves and bears “on an equal basis with the goal of producing more ungulates for hunters.”

Palin’s response was to introduce legislation that would further divorce the predator-control program from science by transferring over the program from the state Department of Fish and Game to Alaska’s Board of Game, “whose members are appointed by, well, Palin.”

It was partly because of the issue of the aerial hunting of wolves that the Humane Society Legislative Fund endorsed a president for the first time in their history: Barack Obama.

My dear amazing friend Amanda is livid about all of this. Take a look:

Take action!

Tell Congress to support the Protect America’s Wildlife (PAW) Act, legislation to close a federal loophole and curb Alaska’s brutal aerial hunting program — and prevent programs like it from spreading to places like the Greater Yellowstone region.

While you’re there, find out how your Senators and Representative have voted on conservation issues this year.

And, as always, you can – you can – write to your newspaper, make a video, tell your friends, and contact your congressional representatives.