Killing Rare Animals in Order to Save Them

The Interior Department says it cannot keep up with its workload on behalf of animals facing extinction. Just this week, the Bush administration proposed blocking judges from ordering new endangered species inquiries so the agency could set its own priorities for animals.

Surprise, the Interior Department hasn’t been too busy over the years to grant ultra-rich trophy hunters hundreds of exemptions from the Endangered Species Act. For that priority, it finds time.

Consider one of the most majestic and little-known animals in the world. Also one of the rarest. It is a sheep with massive coiled horns. Here is a description of coming across a group of them in the remote highlands of Central Asia:

“The first sighting of the [Argali] Altai rams leaves a person dumbstruck. These rams sport horns historically measuring up to 70 inches, with bases up to 21 inches, and the sight of these leggy legends is close to pure magic. Large rams have been observed resting their heads on boulders as if to relieve over-stressed neck muscles of their burden. The weight of the crown rests uneasily on the head that wears it.”

“Uneasily” is right. For this account appears in Safari, the magazine of Safari Club International, a hunters’ group that beckons America’s elite trophy seekers to the mountains along the northern rim of China for the magic chance to kill one of these legends.

The trouble here is that there aren’t many Argali left. In 1976 and again in 1992, the U.S. declared these animals in jeopardy in their native lands and put them on the American endangered species list, meaning that you can’t bring such a trophy across our border.

But the listing of the Argali was accompanied by a caveat. Hunters could apply for an exemption to import their trophies from three countries--Mongolia, Tajikistan and the Kyrgyz Republic--as long as the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service determined that hunting the Argali contributed to their long-term conservation.

Next Monday, the Humane Society of the United States, the Fund for Animals, Earth Island Institute and the Animal Legal Defense Fund, along with three Mongolian scientists and one former U.S. government scientist, will file suit in Washington, D.C. They will charge that the Interior Department has contributed to the demise of a storied animal by letting American hunters bring trophies home.

After all, what fun is it to drop a sheep with a 6-foot curl if you can’t show off the mount in your den?

The lawsuit says that during the last five years, the Fish and Wildlife Service has issued permits to import 550 threatened Argali sheep without sufficient evidence that killing them is helping the species survive.

Remember, this is the agency that says it has no money or staff to study scores of troubled animals that have been proposed for listing as endangered.

The lawsuit asks for an immediate end to Argali trophy import permits.

Let me digress. I’m not a hunter but I’m not anti-hunter either, at least not all of them. I’ve written more than almost any other big-city newspaper reporter about the subject. And I am keenly aware that hunting supports both habitat conservation and wildlife management.

But sometimes enough is too much.

And the Safari Club crossed that line long ago. It celebrates the killing of the rarest animals on the planet. Hunters who bag the most earn ascending badges of recognition--until, having killed 300 or so species, they reach the top and receive a gold ring.

Club publications speak of conservation, and no doubt members believe themselves to be conservationists.

But I doubt many Americans, hunters or non-hunters, share the conservation philosophy of some Safari Club notables. Like the hunter who in 1997 killed an endangered Argali sheep from a subspecies that had shriveled to fewer than 100 holdout animals. The man said he did not feel he was harming the future of the sheep because there were six rams left standing after he shot one.

That man is Kenneth Behring. His name is in the Safari Club honor rolls. You can see it elsewhere, too. Thanks to his gift of millions of dollars, the Smithsonian Institution named its new Hall of Mammals for him and hung bright red, three-story-high banners on the Capitol Mall in his honor, testament to the swag of the modern trophy hunter and the ethical decline of America’s foremost museum.

Behring, a developer and former owner of the Seattle Seahawks, told an interviewer that he wanted to do something to “inspire people and make them proud.”

Shooting remnants of the great Argali won’t do it.