Dear HCN,
Your piece on the
mountain goats in Olympic National Park perpetuates the myth that
environmental groups should stick by Park Service propaganda (HCN,
3/3/97).
Park officials continue to declare the
goats were brought to the Olympic Peninsula by settlers in the
1920s. They were embarrassed, however, when the Fund for Animals
unearthed an 1896 National Geographic feature article that
irrefutably listed mountain goats among the wildlife of the
Olympics. Further research led to other discoveries, including that
two of the three major expeditions to the area reported the
presence of mountain goats.
The park has not been
able to document that goats have a significant impact on any
plants. There are no endangered plant species in the park – none!
Seattle Times outdoor writer Ron Judd summed it
up best when he wrote in an open letter to park officials: “After
decades of research costing millions of dollars, the best reason
you can offer for your radical solution is that rare plants have
the “potential to be impacted” by goats. Potential to be impacted?
… If this were an eighth-grade science project, you’d be sent
back home to try again.”
Most importantly, the
population of mountain goats in Olympic is declining naturally –
the fuzzy critters are perhaps the slowest reproducing of all
ungulates. If the Park Service couldn’t prove that 1,200 goats were
a threat to park plants, how can they possibly believe that the 200
remaining goats are any threat whatsoever? The mountain goats – and
the park’s perceived problems – may soon disappear on their
own.
Eating or trampling a few plants should not
be grounds for capital punishment, especially when those plants are
not even endangered. The park wants to shoot hundreds of majestic
mountain goats based only on fear and
paranoia.
Environmentalists should question the
claims of the Park Service rather than believe them blindly, and
the Park Service should terminate its goat-killing plans rather
than continue to waste taxpayer dollars on their conjured-up
threats.
Mike Markarian
Silver
Spring, Maryland
The writer is
the director of campaigns for the Fund for
Animals.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Greens should not stick to their guns.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
