Hickel Calls Temporary Halt to Alaska Wolf Kill : Wildlife: Public outrage, threats of tourism boycott face governor. He plans ‘summit’ with environmentalists.

ANCHORAGE —  Confronted with public outrage, threats of an international tourism boycott and the biggest black eye to its image since the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Alaska on Friday called a temporary halt to its plans to thin the wolf population by shooting 300 to 400 of the wild animals from aircraft.

But opponents of the plan vowed to push ahead to try to bring public pressure on behalf of the wolves.

Looking for breathing room in the stormy clash of values over the future of America’s remaining wild lands, Gov. Walter J. Hickel announced that he would organize a three-day “wolf summit” next month and suspend all predator control in the meantime. He said he would invite conservationists to participate.

“We welcome their input. We want them to come up and see we’re not out to kill wolves, we’re out to manage our wildlife resources,” the governor said in a statement. A source in the Administration added, however, that environmentalists must be aware that “just saying no (to the kill) is an insufficient answer.”

Environmental leaders expressed suspicion that the governor was merely seeking time for public emotions to cool before proceeding anew with the wolf kill.

“I smell a rat. This sounds to me like an effort to ‘educate’ those of us who have gone astray,” complained Nicole Evans of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance.

Cleveland Amory’s New York-based Fund For Animals planned to formalize a call for an international tourism boycott of Alaska on Monday--the group’s first since the 1970s, when it urged a boycott of Canada to protest the clubbing of baby seals. Director Wayne Pacelle said the organization would not back down unless the wolf kill was ended rather than just delayed.

“We don’t believe there needs to be a discussion of wolf control,” Pacelle said.

The furor began last month when the state’s game board voted to sharply reduce the number of wolves across three vast tracts of Alaska wilderness. The plan also called for an increase in hunter kills of grizzly bears, an element that thus far has escaped controversy.

The overall goal was to restrain predators and thereby increase the number of caribou and moose available to hunters.

At the time the plan was made public, state Wildlife Conservation Director Dave Kellyhouse said an additional justification for the predator kill was to increase the numbers of moose and caribou available for out-of-state tourists to see. It was a remark that drew intense controversy, and which Kellyhouse has since come to regret and disavow.

“I can’t soft-pedal it to people,” he said in an interview this week. “No one wants to go out there and kill wolves, but it’s a necessary fate if we’re going to take seriously other people’s values and needs.”

Biologists said the swiftest, most merciful death for the wolves would be to track them and shoot them from the sky. To this end, fish and game officials have been radio collaring wolves in the target areas for some time.

But again, the clash of values has become crystal clear. Environmentalists decried the use of what they call “helicopter gunships” and said it would be a moral misuse of a scientific tool to employ radio collars to hunt down animals for slaughter.

In the Lower 48 states, wolves are designated a threatened or endangered species, but in Alaska they are not. State officials estimate their population at between 5,900 and 7,200, about 1,000 of which are killed each year for their pelts, either in traps or by hunters who chase them through deep snow with snowmobiles or track them with airplanes, then “land and shoot.”

Alaska tourism officials, both private and governmental, said that the preliminary public outcry over the government’s plan to kill 300 to 400 additional wolves each year for several years foreshadowed a backlash that was likely to exceed the one that resulted from the 1989 grounding of the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound.

“It would be at least as harmful, or more so, in terms of people’s perceptions of Alaska,” said Bob Engelbrecht, an executive with Temsco Helicopters Inc. and a vice president with the Alaska Tourism Assn.

The group urged Hickel to call off the kill. The timing could not have been worse, tourism officials added, because these winter months are when Americans begin to make their vacation bookings.

Adding to the worries is knowledge that public outrage has been fueled not so much by news coverage or organized environmentalist campaigns but by the spontaneous reaction of countless thousands of Americans, some of whom first learned of the kill from radio talk shows.

Tourism is the third biggest employer in Alaska, after government and the seafood industry. Nearly a million visitors came to the state last season, each one spending an average of $1,200, according to Hickel Administration calculations.

There is more than just tourism at stake. Many Alaskans believe the wolf controversy means that their state now faces deeper skepticism as it tries to sell itself as a sensitive steward of public lands and therefore trustworthy to open the huge Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling or to proceed with any number of other development projects.

On the other hand, Alaska’s powerful hunting constituency, particularly urban hunters, says there is not enough moose and caribou in easily accessible hunting areas. They believe there are too many wolves killing these animals and too few Americans who are willing to understand the frontier way of life.

“What we’re asking for is wildlife management, and it’s not Dark Ages management, either,” said Mary Bishop, a leader in the hunter organization called the Alaska Outdoor Council. A 30-year resident, she said her family relies on wild fish and game for 95% of its protein. “All we want is a fair share.”

Evans of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance responded that hunters and their supporters in state government “want to turn our public lands into game ranches. . . . This is an outrage, it’s like a military service waging war on these animals.”