What’s easier than shooting fish in a barrel? Shooting bears while they sleep.

We have an expression we use when things are too easy. We say it’s “like shooting fish in a barrel.”

So what could be easier than shooting fish in a barrel? How about shooting bears and their babies while they sleep? At least the fish in a barrel would be awake.

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Bear cub and hibernating mother

So I got a call yesterday from the U.S. Humane Society, urging me to ask my senator to vote against Joint Resolution 18, which would allow the brutal killing of animals in Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuge. Under this resolution, which has already passed the House, it will be legal to hunt bears from airplanes, kill wolf pups in their dens and kill mother bears and their cubs while they are hibernating. That means killing them while they sleep.

“Killing hibernating bears…and chasing down grizzlies by aircraft and then shooting them on the ground is the stuff of some depraved video game,” said Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States. “No decent person should support this appalling, despicable treatment of wildlife.”

[Read the Humane Society’s press release here.]

Currently, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service prohibits such egregious killing methods targeting grizzly bears and wolves on the 76 million acres of Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuge – the one category of federal lands specifically set aside for the benefit of wildlife. 

According to polls, most Alaskans object to these barbaric hunting practices.

Also, existing rules do not apply to subsistence hunting or restrict the killing of wildlife for public safety purposes or defense of property, which means you can still kill animals for food and you could still kill a bear if it raided your garbage cans, mauled your children or ate your dog.

On the other side of the issue you’ll find the NRA (of course), the Safari Club International and other trophy hunting lobbyists who leveraged their campaign contributions to convince more than 200 members of the House of Representatives to vote against common sense.

Rep. Don Young of Alaska, a former board member of the NRA and a licensed trapper who conceded on the floor that he used to kill wolf pups in their dens for a bounty, initiated this action in the House while Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska introduced Res. 18 in the Senate.

Young and other proponents claim the federal rule restricts hunting and fishing rights while admitting, strangely, that the forbidden practices don’t ever actually occur. If these activities don’t occur, it’s hard to see how prohibiting them by regulation restricts anything. I mean, if you didn’t smoke and Congress passed a bill that said you couldn’t smoke, would you be harmed in any way?

Here’s a far more likely scenario: Bears and wolves are natural predators of such animals as moose and caribou. Alaska attracts a lot of big-money moose and caribou hunters. If the state can find a way to reduce the population of wolves and bears – say, by killing mothers and their babies in their sleep – that will create more moose and caribou for – wait for it – trophy hunters to kill.

It’s all about killing one kind of animal or another, and it’s hard to hunt a moose that’s been killed by a bear, so they want to kill the bears first. It’s a win-win for hunters and a lose-lose for the animal kingdom…and for basic human decency.

When I first heard about this resolution, I thought it might be one of the 10 most barbaric and inhumane things ever proposed. Now that I have researched the legislation, I’m sure of it. I mean, is this supposed to be sport? What kind of sportsman shoots sleeping bears? What’s the achievement in that? When they mount their trophies, are their eyes still closed? Do they mount them with or without their blanket and pillow?

I became so outraged by all of this that I did what the caller asked. I called Senator Joe Manchin’s office and left a message, asking him to “please oppose SJR 18, which doesn’t sound like hunting to me. It sounds like murder.”

Will he vote against it? I doubt it. This is the same Joe Manchin who regularly votes with Republicans and who campaigned for the Senate by shooting a rifle at a tree to show us he’s a manly man. Or maybe that was to get the NRA endorsement? I forget.

But I called him all the same.

To me, this comes down to a simple issue. The hunting ground in this debate is a national wildlife refuge. A wildlife refuge is, by definition, a sanctuary in which animal species are protected from hunters, predators or competition, so why does anybody think that hunting there is a good idea? Can’t people find somewhere else to kill animals besides the places set aside to protect them?

Seriously, what’s next? Hunting in zoos?