The Barbarians are at our door and they look a lot like a 14-year-old girl with a cute smile who loves country music and plays clarinet in the school band.
But first, as they say, a little background.
In Wisconsin we now hunt wolves. What was once an endangered species is now fair game for a restricted number of people who want to kill a wolf.
The decision to hunt the wolves is just the latest example of the white man running roughshod over the religion and belief of Native Americans. The Ojibwa consider the wolf a brother and a sacred member of their tribe. And just so you don’t think I’m some crazed Indian lover, I think it’s okay to operate Warriors or Chiefs as school nicknames.
Let’s get back to the sport of wolf killing.
The Department of Natural Resources figures there are too many wolves in the state. Maybe they’re right, but how do you really know? Census workers don’t walk up and knock on the wolf den and ask how many wolves live there.
But OK. We now have a wolf hunt that started in October and runs through February. You can shoot them or trap them. And there are just over 1,000 licenses out there, drawn from a pool of over 20,000 people who want to kill wolves.
This brings us to Megan Loka, the 14-year ancient girl from Tomahawk, which by the way is the Native American word for the thing that sometimes got buried in the heads of white people who misbehaved.
I read about Megan, who seems like a nice enough kid. However, she loves to trap animals and then kill them. She is president of the Future Trappers of Wisconsin, which sounds a lot like the Future Farmers of Wisconsin, except instead of hoes and rakes, they have piercing traps and guns. Another thing is that farmers try to grow things, trappers try to stop things from growing.
Well, as a gift, Megan got a license to trap wolves. And after a couple of days of no luck, she and her dad went to check the traps and, lo and behold, there was a wolf, caught in one of her traps. Megan was quoted as saying “my heart started pumping” when she saw the wolf.
She stopped her heart from pumping, apparently, and also stopped the heart of the wolf entirely when she fired her .22 rifle into the head of the wolf. It was a female and she weighed 62 pounds.
Megan says she is going to have a full body mount made of the pelt, whatever that is. She also said the skull would be displayed, and I know what that is.
Now, I don’t know Megan. She’s probably a great kid. And I am not one of those people who thinks animals are really just people with fur who eat with their hands. I think hunting is OK and fishing is relaxing, although you should probably throw it back if you don’t need it for food.
But this trapping thing and then walking up and shooting the animal, strikes me as a little unfair and a lot barbaric. It’s kind of like one of the effortless games at the carnival, only this animal you have to kill before you get a stuffed one as a prize.
Also I think the wolf is kind of a majestic animal. It gets into a little mischief now and then and a dog or two or a cow or two may end up harmed. But it’s nature, right? And I’ve learned that you “Don’t Mess With Mother Nature.”
And maybe, just maybe, I’ve got a little of that Ojibwa blood running through my veins.
