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Wolf Attack on a Human: Only a Palin Story Would Get More Replies

By: Achance (Diary)  |  March 12th, 2010 at 06:10 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

There was a tragic event in a small Alaska village a couple of days ago; a young female teacher went on a run outside the village after work.  In Alaska “outside the village” is wilderness that would be unimaginable to most of you.  A few hours later a couple of men returning to the village on their snow machines saw blood in the trail and a pair of gloves.  They stopped saw the bloody trail where something had been dragged into the woods and found the young woman’s body, her throat torn open and other “evidence of predation” on her body to quote the original report.  Today the Alaska State Troopers released their report in which they concluded after the State Medical Examiner’s autopsy that the young woman had been attacked, killed, and partially eaten by two or more wolves.  This is reputedly the first documented human death as the result of a wolf attack.

And now there is outrage!  We’ve endured PETA and other crazies for years over wolf hunting issues.  The greenies and animal rights types, most of whom live in cities with no non-human predators, seem to genuinely believe that a 125 pound wolf is just a cuddly creature like a domestic dog.  They aren’t, and every PETA member should have to watch a film of a pack of wolves taking a moose – over and over until they retch out breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  So, linked is the Anchorage Daily News’ story and the reader comments.  Since Palin’s rise to prominence, the ADN has a large Outside audience, so I don’t know how much of the commentary is our crazies and how much is yours.  Well, some of the Alaskans are pretty obvious; they’re the ones who want to go kill all the wolves around Chignik Lake, Alaska.  So, here’s the story: http://www.adn.com/2010/03/11/1179368/teacher-likely-killed-by-wolves.html

Please keep this young woman, her family, and her friends in your thoughts and prayers; I can’t think of many worse ways to go.

COMMENTS

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  • hickorystick

    can be very tough. She must have been a loving gal to make the sacrifice to go so far from home to teach.

    • Achance

      By all accounts she was very good at what she did and highly respected.

      I’ve been down there but it was twenty years or so ago. There’s the village and there’s the wilderness. The rules are different in the wilderness.

      • hickorystick

        your state is massive. the distance from Anchorage to Chignuk Lake is farther than crossing corner to corner in Washington; and that’s just a small section for Alaska.
        The pictures look like the terrain Costner shot Dancing with Wolves in. Lot of brush, no trees.

        • Achance

          it is two hours from Seattle to Ketchikan, a little less than an hour from KTN to Juneau, an hour and a half from JNU to Anchorage, an hour from ANC to Fairbanks, and an hour and a half from FAI to Barrow. Going northwest, west and south, it is an hour and a half from ANC to Kotzebue or Nome, an hour to Bethel, an another hour or so by Otter or Caravan from BET to the Bering Sea coast, and an hour or so to Dillingham in Southwest Alaska. Its two hours and change from Anchorage to Dutch Harbor out in the Aleutians and I don’t know how long it takes to get all the way to Adak because Dutch is as far as I’ve been.

          If you ask anybody here who’s traveled much how far it is from A to B, the answer will always be in time and aircraft type as in from ANC to BET is an hour by jet or from BET to St. Mary’s is forty minutes by Cessna 207.

          • hickorystick

            -”If you ask anybody here who?s traveled much how far it is from A to B, the answer will always be in time and aircraft type as in from ANC to BET is an hour by jet or from BET to St. Mary?s is forty minutes by Cessna 207.”-

            Alaskans vocalbulary for travel is entirely different than than any other state. Commuter trains, Amtrak, et al just doesn’t work for a State as large as Alaska. Eastern seaboard states are so tiny, they can leach off the Federal government for decades to pay for there transportation costs. Joe Biden never did a commute that wasn’t paid for by every other state. Like you say, the rules for the Wilderness are completely different from the village, and I’ll add from whatever you find in modern Pennsylvania. The poor girl was probably as much a victim of ‘Americanism’, the idea all 50 states are the same, and the idea the legal rules of America protect her wherever she goes, as she was of the reality of real wolves.
            That eastern seaboard states have a say over western states and how they manage the environment is annoying. They don’t have a clue about environments. They should look at their own track record with the environment and Indian affairs (think trail of tears), before offering us any advice. Being that there are no Indian Reservations east of the Alleghenies, perhaps they should return Manhattan Island to the Indians. Then they would have credibility to counsel Alaska on how to utilize it’s natural resources.

            side note: If you take the nationalism out of it, it is more properly ‘The First Frontier’. Clovis People travelled the Land Bridge and lived throughout the West 10,000 years before the Pilgrims. they left a nice cache of Clovis Points in East Wenatchee, Washington.
            http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=7966

            The stories coming out of the west are far more interesting than the tired old stories of the Pilgrims. Perhaps Alaska could consider changing it’s motto to ‘The First Frontier’ or ‘North to the Past’.

          • Achance

            is the Chesapeake Bay region. They’re starting to rethink a lot of the notion that all Native Americans came over the Land Bridge from Siberia. Maybe the Irish did save the World. Anyway, it is an interesting notion. The Dark Ages extinguished so much knowledge that the Canon sort of teaches us that the Creation was the Renaissance. There was a lot of sea traffic over very long distances in very ancient times; the Polynesians all over the Pacific, the Mayans in the Caribean and the Pacific, the Irish/Scots/British and the Norse in the North Atlantic, evern the Egytians, Greeks and Romans in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. We humans have been “getting around” for a very long time.

          • http://www.examiner.com/x-1597-Charlotte-Law--Politics-Examiner Mike gamecock DeVine

            attacked wolves?

          • Achance
          • http://impudent.blognation.us/blog kyle8

            with boats and rafts. Thor Heyerdahl theorized about these ancient links and was laughed at in his day.

            There a lot of evidence that the first people in the new world were Caucasian Solutrean culture. While there is some tentative evidence that the east coast of South America was inhabited by African peoples.

          • hickorystick

            was determined to be either Polynesian or Inui from Japan. Much of what is known about these cultures get’s destoyed by whatever New Regional order that comes in, regardless of where on the globe it comes in. I enjoyed Thomas Cahill’s book How The Irish Saved Civilization too. I’m not into the all controlling centralized authority thing either. Besides copying and saving libraries, they did Yeoman’s work sticking it to Rome.
            In some of the Irish chronicles, they have Legends of a an African group coming to Ireland and building huge structures. Others suggest an Ancient Kingdom of Frisians.

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grianan_of_Aileach

            There are a lot of interesting stories to be found in Northern Ireland that have nothing at all to do with Buckingham Palace, and whatever scheme it was cooking up. So much of history is written centered on monarchical plans and follies. The history that really changes the world, usually happens outside the corridors of established power. Government sponsered and payed for a disk operating system (DOS), but didn’t know what to do with it any more than the Chinese knew what to do with the compass.

          • ashland_avenue

            nt

          • streetwise

            I don’t think these Electras are used any more, but the video provides a fascinating glimpse of the terrain

          • Achance

            They could have had jets but the props were better in the steep landings and takeoffs. They’ve finally gone jet but they use old Alaska Airlines 727 Combis that are especially equipped for STOL – at least STOL by passenger/freight jet standards, we ain’t talking Maule or Super Cub.

            I watched the most dramatic landing I’ve ever seen in person and one second only to the Miracle on the Hudson that I’ve seen period when a Reeve IL-2, a Japanese Electra, landed at AIA with the engines at cruise power and no attitude controls other than the elevator trim tabs. Shortly after it reached cruise speed and altitude out of Dutch Harbor, the stbd. inboard prop hub exploded and a prop blade severed the control cabling and hoses. The only thing the pilot could do was change course slowly using rudder only, slightly change is attitude with the trim tabs on the elevators and ailerons and cut the throttles altogether.

            I was taking a customer to look at some projects I’d done out in the airport area and I saw a Reeve Electra flying in formation with a CG C-130, something you don’t see and which alerts you that something is going on. The Captain treats it like a VFR landing and does a downwind and a wide, sweeping turn to set up his approach, which must be set up with wide turns because he has no ailerons. He can’t use elevators or flaps so he can’t flare a landing so he has to pretty much just fly it into the ground, cut the throttles, and pray. He pulled it off using all but about 100 yards of AIA’s almost 12,000 feet of runway. He burned out the brakes and couldn’t keep it straight at the end, so he wound up in the median between the main and the taxiway with the wheels on fire, but that was the extent of it. Everybody walked away without a scratch! He got a Presidential Citation of some sort and all sorts of accolades and just went back to flying the Chain. Ironically, a few years later he was killed in a crash on a recreational flight in bush plane.

  • azaeroprof

    Let’s see if someone can find an email address for Ashley Judd and forward this new article to her.

    • Achance

      sometimes doesn’t it? Her fault in lots of ways; she was a small, furry creature running down the trail; she had her iPod so she never had any awareness of them until they attacked. Large, dangerous animals are dangerous; you can’t get away from that.

  • Richard Mullins

    they are something that you take a rifle with you when you see on. I wonder if this teacher had a rifle when she went out in wolf country?

    • Achance
      • Richard Mullins

        or a Bear. In West Texas, they have both. You must be armed if your around these critters(that the only way to go). She could have packed a good .45 too. That would have put some hurt on the wolves(I see that she doesn’t like guns).

  • Finrod

    By the way, I’m in full favor of your idea of reintroducing wolves to Central Park. I can’t think of a faster way to get NYC gun control laws overturned, personally.

    • mbecker908

      starkly blue climes, I would advocate confiscating all weapons for a period of time.

      And I would opt for the Capitol Mall as the first place to introduce them.

      • Richard Mullins

        and have shipped to some blue city on the east coast. I was thinking of setting them out in Austin, but that isn’t a good idea. Wolves,Bears,Coyotes,Javalena and many other mean critters out to big blue bastions.

      • Achance

        along the Potomac and elsewhere. I think every park in every big city should be “returned to its natural state” and a part of that would be restoring the predators that were eliminated centuries ago. Running from wolves, bears, mountain lions, or panthers would add just the right motivation to your jog.

        • mbecker908

          metro Phoenix. The coyotes rule the golf course at night, we can hear them singing.

          • Achance

            17 Million acres of mostly wilderness and ice fields. The face of the Mendenhall Glacier is a couple of miles from my front door. There really isn’t much game because you only have a thin strip of land along the coast and then mountains and the ice field. There are a few wolves and I’ve heard them a few times. There was one black wolf that became very familiar in the flats around the Mendenhall Glacier lake. He came to even have a name, Romeo, because he was always trying to socialize with people and dogs. ‘Course he was “accused” of having eaten a few dogs as well. He hasn’t been seen in a year or so now so it is thought that he has died. He had to be at least eight or ten years old, so either killed by a younger wolf or simply dead of old age wouldn’t be surprising. Here’s a YouTube of Romeo near the Glacier and about a mile and a half from my house: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H98D23Eb9Ow

            There are lots of Black Bears but there’s never been a confirmed sighting of a Brown or Grizzly Bear. The Black Bears used to be a real problem and several were killed every year for either threatening humans or simply becoming too pesky for having lost their fear of people. They used to be around my house constantly even though we were pretty careful with garbage. We got chased out of the hot tub one night when one came shuffling up the steps to the deck; luckily we’d left the front door unlocked so we just bailed and went around the house. We really tightened up the rules on garbage storage and disposal a few years back and that has pretty much eliminated the bear-human confrontation issues, though the rules are a pain.

          • David123

            Remember, polar bears are an endangered species. It would be a tragedy if one starved to death because some polar bear food was wasted.

        • nessa

          That would be the second step right?

          • http://www.dcworksforus.com Kenny Solomon

            …….. the ability to conVINCE someone – let’s arbitrarily say a former Senator / current Secretary Of State to stay in DC in order to FOSTER a level of awareness amongst the flock.

          • Richard Mullins

            since they don’t seems quite smart and will do anything if you ask them. I want to send wolves,bears,coyotes and Javalena’s(it’s like a wild pig with tusks) out to DC so they might get closer to nature. I’m also considering putting them in a wooded area in East Texas with all the Predators that there are. That might get rid of the problem.

          • nessa

            …”That’s right Mrs Speaker, jogging along the Potomac is part of the First Lady’s anti-obesity plan. The American people need to see their beloved politicians leading this effort. What? Oh, a university did a study, its healthier if you jog while covered in rancid lard and honey. I read about it in Runners Journal, or maybe it was in The American Rifleman, I forget which.”

          • Richard Mullins

            but toss them in a vat of honey before the run around with the Bears. West Texas Black and Brown bears should work well. All the good critters should be out there. I think we should have a photo-op of Speaker Pelosi running from the bears.

  • http://thesandsinstitute.org Vassar Bushmills

    That is wolf territory more than human, and the teacher-lady sounds like a non-Alaskan, not fully aware of the severity of the penalties for violating nature’s rules. It was she who erred.

    But down here, if a bear does that, they have to put it down, no matter, simply because it may have developed a “taste”. No one really knows if that’s so, but drawing blood is a capital offense in most places. I guess. They may try to capture and relocate. Who knows.

    That said, let the crazies proceed.

  • Achance

    human flesh, it must be put down. I don’t know the right of it either; she was in wolf territory and acting like prey, completely unattuned, iPod, and defenseless. The wolves were just being wolves. Yet this one ain’t just us nasty, insenstive white guys; a tiger in India, a lion in Africa, all get treated the same way. If an animal kills a human, it is killed. The reader comments to that story in the ADN just go to show you what whackjobs inhabit the left and unfortunately a fair number of them are Alaskan whackjobs.

    When I first came to Anchorage in ’74, the Daily News was the smaller, more lefty locally owned morning paper and the Anchorage Times was the big, bad conservative evening paper owned by a guy who was one of the archetypal Alaska “got off the boat in Valdez with 37 cents” success stories, Bob Attwood. He was a big time Capital Mover and it isn’t a coincidence that the State Office Building in Anchorage has his name on it. So, the family that owns the ADN sells it to McClatchey. Attwood sells the times to Bill Allen of Veco, Ted Stevens trial, and Alaska corruption trials notoriety. The News and the Times go at it hammer and tong for several years, both hemoraging money. Ultimately, Allen sells the Times to McClatchey which ceases publication of the Times but part of the deal is that the Times editorial staff keeps a half page of the editorial section of the “new” Daily News. That goes on for several years with the News being pretty firmly left wing and the “Voice of the Times” being the conservative counterpoint. When all the scandals involving Allen came down a couple of years ago, McClatchey ended the joint publishing agreement so now the largest print voice in Alaska is the voice of California whackjobs. The Fairbanks and Ketchikan papers are reasonable local voices but have very little circulation outside their hometowns.

    • Achance

      I think the Times was the morning paper back then and the News was the evening. Remember when every town of any size had a morning and evening paper? Sometime after McClatchey bought it the News became a morning paper too and the battle was joined. The people of Alaska certainly benefitted from them going at each other but the net worth of the owners didn’t.

  • Achance

    http://www.adn.com/2010/03/15/1184827/officials-kill-wolves-responsible.html

    You’ll no doubt find the comments entertaining. I find spittle-flecked lefties entertaining anyway.

    • kyoufuu