Palin's Cruel Streak: Aerial Hunting of Wolves

Of course, Sarah Palin's no animal lover. She's put extraordinary effort into undoing federal wildlife protections for polar bears, beluga whales, and pretty much any other animal that gets in the way of the oil industry's plans.

But her wolf bounty really takes the cake for animal cruelty. One of Palin's first acts in office was to put a $150 bounty on the heads of her state's wolves, allegedly with the goal of increasing the moose and caribou population. But this was no ordinary hunt: it was meant to incentivize the aerial killing of wolves, in which private hunters take a small plane and chase down wolf packs until they're exhausted and can't move any more, when they either shoot them from the air or land and execute them at point blank range.

Here's a video from Defenders of Wildlife that shows what aerial wolf hunting is all about:

As if this wasn't enough, now Palin's administration is allowing its "Department of Wildlife Conservation" to enter into wolf dens and slaughter wolf pups; in July, her henchmen went to retrieve adult wolf carcasses they had shot a month earlier from a helicopter and then found the wolves' pups in their den and so dispatched them one-by-one with pistol shots to the head.

They then tried to conceal their actions from the public. When they were exposed, they said they had tried to place the orphaned wolves with zoos. Then the zoos said no one had contacted them.

Meanwhile, Palin's government spent $400,000 in taxpayer money on an aerial wolf hunting "education" program to lobby for the program. Which, I guess, is the type of thing all our tax money will go towards if Palin becomes president or even a vice president.