By David Linn

A couple of months ago, I wrote the following letter to the editor but never sent it. By the time I finalized it, several weeks had passed and the articles that I referenced seemed a bit dated.

However, this past week in the Ocean Shores Community Club newspaper, The Ocean Observer, I read an article that stunned me and reminded me of my unsent letter. In the August 2018 Observer, a writer advocated for the wanton killing of moles through some rather horrific means — body-gripping traps, poisoning and concussion devices. He referred to the current ban on body-gripping traps as “political stupidity” and the use of concussion devices as “human ingenuity.” To refer to moles and any other animal as “nuisance wildlife” just shows the level of depravity to which some humans can sink. I have numerous mole hills in my yard and I am glad that I can provide a safe space for my fellow beings.

Here is the letter I wrote, but didn’t send until now:

As I read the April 17 Daily World article about moles, I was struck by some of the comments included in the story. Statements such as “No better sight than a dead mole” and “How do you get rid of the pests?” are disturbing.

Moles are not pests; their tunneling loosens the soil and improves the conditions for plants to grow. They eat insects and other garden pests and, are themselves a food source for predators. If the sight of a molehill is objectionable, one can simply rake it over and move on. Some of the methods used to try to kill these creatures are ignorant, cruel and destructive of the environment.

Beyond the specific details of this story, I have recently read articles defending the killing of sea lions that locate themselves near dams to catch and eat salmon. The arguments claim that these sea lions are reducing the salmon available to human consumption. What these arguments fail to acknowledge is that the real cause of the falling salmon numbers is the dams that are built on the Snake and Columbia rivers. These dams prevent enough salmon from swimming upstream to their native spawning grounds.

The Daily World had an article on April 4 about the proposed translocation of wolves to the Olympic National Park. While this would be a positive step in re-introducing wolves to their native habitat, the driving force behind the current study is coming from ranchers in Eastern Washington. Because they still believe the mythology of Little Red Riding Hood, they want to move wolves out of their territory.

This belief in mythology leads their representative, Joel Kretz, to make misleading statements such as “I have a rancher that lost 72 head (of cattle) two years ago.” According the WDFW, a total of 35 head of cattle and 30 sheep have been affected (killed and injured) by wolves over the past six years. Over that same time period, a minimum of 65 wolves have been killed by all causes (mostly human). This is on a basis of over one million head of livestock and only 100 wolves.

The common factor in each of these situations is that humans create or perceive a problem and then argue that their only solution is to kill an innocent, sentient being whose only crime is doing what nature designed it to do. Moles are a problem only because humans value a chemically altered monoculture over a natural habitat. Sea lions are a problem only because humans thought that it would be a good idea to stop the natural flow of rivers and streams and interrupt natural cycles. Wolves are a problem only because humans have brought invasive species of farm animals into wilderness areas and have driven out the native ungulates that are prey animals for the predators.

Humans are the only species of animal that cannot live in harmony with its natural world because of its greed and arrogance. It has been said that humans are technology over-evolved and morally under-evolved. It’s time that we learned to live with nature rather than against it.

David Linn lives in Ocean Shores.