ISLAND VOICES
Don't kill sheep on Big Island

Scarlet Newton is spokeswoman for Channel Islands Animal Protection Association in Santa Barbara, Calif.

The struggle to protect wildlife from the deadly grasp of the National Park Service on California's Channel Islands keeps our group of activists too busy. Yet, I pause from that effort to speak up on behalf of Hawai'i's wild mouflon sheep. The Park Service currently solicits gunmen to end the lives of 2,000 sheep in the newly expanded Volcanoes National Park.

The killing is scheduled to begin Saturday.

Far from solving a perceived problem, killing only begets more killing. I refer you to magnificent Santa Cruz Island in Southern California. There, the Park Service and the Nature Conservancy, the island's co-owners, conspire to assassinate the entire island pig population.

The Park Service and the Nature Conservancy claim that the island pig attracts the "non-native" golden eagle, which then preys upon the rare island fox.

The island pig has resided on Santa Cruz for two centuries; the golden eagle settled in during the 1990s — huh? Why did it take this raptor 150 years to notice the island pig? "DDT," goes the party line. When that poison wiped out the "native" bald eagle there, the "non-native" golden eagle moved in, the story goes. But the DDT die-off occurred in the '50s and '60s; why did it take 30 years for this eagle-eyed ... eagle ... to notice?

The Park Service and the Nature Conservancy now try to pin on the poor island pig the consequences of their own violent, cruel, deadly acts.

The terms "native" and "non-native" are nothing more than weapons of prejudice used to justify killing misunderstood wildlife. The terms rely upon arbitrarily choosing a date before and after which they apply. They are non-science nonsense. Every plant and animal descends from an ancestor that arrived from elsewhere, whether by transport or migration.

"Restoration" killings (notice the Orwellian oxymoron) are expensive, sometimes pouring your money into no-bid, cost-plus contracts. How much would the "restoration" in Volcanoes National Park cost us?

Stop. Don't shoot. It's wrong. It's wrong to have violated the well-being of the creatures with forced exile, exploiting them for "sport" hunting, blaming them for problems they didn't cause, then targeting them as "invasive" after intentionally introducing them.