Tag Archives: hunting

US Government Sued Over ‘Unethical Destruction’ of Wolf Population

“The Fish and Wildlife Service is thumbing its nose at the Endangered Species Act and letting wolf-hating states sabotage decades of recovery efforts,” said one conservation leader.

By Jessica Corbett Published 4-8-2024 by Common Dreams

Gray wolf. Photo: USFWS Midwest Region/flickr

A pair of conservation coalitions on Monday made good on their threats to sue the U.S. government over its denial of federal protections for gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains, where state killing regimes “put wolves at obvious risk of extinction in the foreseeable future.”

The organizations filed notices of their plans for the lawsuits in early February, after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) determined that Endangered Species Act protections for the region’s wolves were “not warranted.” The Interior Department agency could have prevented the suits in the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana by reversing its decision within 60 days but refused to do so.

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Tanzania is using murder charges to get nomadic Maasai off their homelands

Violence accompanies plans to expand a wildlife reserve at the expense of traditional grazing lands

By OpenDemocracy 50.50  Published 7-8-2022 by openDemocracy

A Maasai family near Lake Natron, Tanzania. Photo: Alex Berger/flickr/CC

Lemoloo Jr*, a Maasai activist in northern Tanzania, says he is running out of hope.

In the last month, 33 people in his community have been arrested, and 25 are now facing murder charges over the death of a police officer on 10 June.

Since the start of June, Maasai people have been protesting against government security forces sent to remove them from Loliondo in Ngorongoro district, northern Tanzania. The ancestral home and grazing lands of the Maasai, a nomadic pastoralist people, start in Kenya and stretch into this area, but the government wants to extend the nearby Ngorongoro Conservation Area and turn 1,500 square kilometres of the land into a game reserve. Continue reading

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How the NRA evolved from backing a 1934 ban on machine guns to blocking nearly all firearm restrictions today

NRA conventiongoers, like these at the gun group’s 2018 big meeting, browse firearms exhibits.
Loren Elliott/AFP via Getty Images

Robert Spitzer, State University of New York College at Cortland

The mass shootings at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, just 10 days apart, are stirring the now-familiar national debate over guns seen after the tragic 2012 and 2018 school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, and Parkland, Florida.

Inevitably, if also understandably, many Americans are blaming the National Rifle Association for thwarting stronger gun laws that might have prevented these two recent tragedies and many others. And despite the proximity in time and location to the Texas shooting, the NRA is proceeding with its plans to hold its annual convention in Houston on May 27-29, 2022. The featured speakers include former President Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican. Continue reading

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