Wiping out Animals and Humans for Fun and Profit

Well, well, well. Thank you, 9th Life Hawaii.

It's official - the wiping out of wildlife, just because they're inconvenient to our every little spoiled-brat wishes. Check out this report. Warning; there are photos.

Here's who to contact:

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack's Email.

Deputy Administrator William H. Clay USDA APHIS - Wildlife Services - Email.

And never be afraid to contact The White House. Remember, this is a Squeaky Wheel Government - don't bitch about lobbyists if you won't stand up.

9th Life Hawaii wrote: "705,468 birds and mammals were murdered by the federal government in Hawaii from 2006-2011. No state is exempt from this massacre."

So get on your stick horse, look up Fish and Game or whatever we call these creatures we use and abuse, and find out what they're doing. Send emails. Send them the address of this blog, if nothing else. Cockroaches run from the light. Light a fire.

And it's "just" animals? Let's examine that.

Now for the daily chaos and screaming button:

To my Jewish friends; don't get your panties in a bunch, but what happened to you came from practice in this country, along with our eugenics studies, because we needed the excuse to do anything to anybody for commercial reasons. Those piles of buffalo skulls? You were next. If you were an animal in the eyes of your persecutors, we'd already warned you how we treated animals.

You Syrians gassed by your government (or wanna-be government)? You were just coyotes to people like us, who want a desert with no life in it, with no mouthful or movement or drop or breath or thought they can't control every single moment. We taught everybody how - hell, we SOLD everybody the nerve gas! And if not us, the Russians. Somebody out to make a buck with a mound of bodies, human or otherwise. The American Dream.

If you're Christian, Joshua ben Josef recited a formula: "I will be with you in my lifetime." + "I am in all things." + "As you do to the least of mine you do to me." = Everything on this planet is Jesus. According to this formula - and it's in your own holy book - that's Jesus in a leg-hold trap.

You're next.

Africa Comes To The Olympic Peninsula

First of all, this page is why I used that title for this post. This has been going on a long time. Newspapers are slow on stories up here, especially any that may blame the logging industry. But the younger generation is beginning to ask: "Why are you destroying our future?" as an out-of-state logging company rips up the area of the upper west end of the Olympic Peninsula. Newspapers are making buggy whips badly enough as it is - they need to be talking to the younger generation, not going to lunch with old farts from the '50's (I'm an old fart from the '50's, but I know why what my generation built is such a growing catastrophe).

The book Tall Timber, very popular up here, is a kind of Mein Kampf  for what logging industries intended to do to our forests - turning them from carbon sinks, oxygen pumps and wildlife homes, among a few of their many purposes, into something on the level of GMO corn - but without fertilizer, care or concern. The science is antique, the ideas utterly out of date, the results toxic on so many levels.

My letter to the Washington State Fish and Game:

"Good morning.

Forks Outfitters makes all my arguments for me.

To let you know some background, ASPCA directed me to the local humane society, who directed me to you.

From rough observation and experience, may I ask this question: are hunters who work in the logging industry using clearcuts to have access to displaced, hungry and confused predators?

In Africa, logging operations often work illegally in conjunction with bushmeat operations to harvest as many homeless wild animals as possible.

After living here for ten years, I'm very much aware of a local predator-hunting culture based on a 19th-century tradition of extermination, coupled with the trophy mentality (as opposed to basic, proper food needs). Mountain lions, especially, are seen as something to be wiped out, along with wolves, and displayed as mere trophies. Local newspapers support this culture, without reference to modern understanding of territorial predator behavior.

Note about me: I'm a writer, but as a commercial sideline, I'm the West End North Correspondent for the Forks Forum. In the course of covering stories, I must say that I've noticed a correlation between clearcuts near neighborhoods and almost immediate lethal (for the predator) interaction between frightened humans and a disoriented animal whose prey source has been driven away. It's hard to mistake the chain of events. Recently, when hearing loggers talk about "killing cats," the evidence became clearer.

I will continue to address this question, whether locally or internationally. To quote a local woman with whom I was discussing the situation, "State Trust Lands, my ass."

Thank you for your attention.

Donna Barr"

Money - The Ultimate Weapon

Okay. Now we know. I called the communities up here a bunch of cowards, wimps and fools for putting up with the logging companies, especially Rayonier.

Ghost trees - going away

I take it all back.

Yesterday, for the local newspapers, I was out covering the Great Strait Sale on Highway 112. Everybody puts out items for sale,  from shops to garage sales to special ed classes trying to raise funds for school supplies (that's a whole 'nother ball of worms, thank you very much, Tim Eyman, NOT). 

I was still shaking over the latest clearcut right beside our neighborhood. This one is right down the wind tunnel and on the flood plain. I didn't expect anybody to be on my side. Too often I'd heard how the logger was the hero up here. I wasn't ready for what I ran into.

The town is furious. People in churches are furious. People who make a living off mature woods and tourism are furious. They're stressed, traumatized, sickened. That's right - they're getting health problems. They face floods and wind damage because the protecting walls are gone.

All over the world, the storms and damage are happening, because our forests and wetlands are no longer there to protect us. Huge industries, unmerciful and bloated with cash, slash through the resources of the world as though they're invading aliens. In many cases they are; Rayonier, for example, is based in Florida.

To tell you how much we're hurting, a beloved neighborhood dog just died in his yard, with his family around him. When his "Mom" discovered I couldn't leave the house during the destruction, and so didn't discover the dear dog was passing, and so couldn't come support the family and say goodbye, she was in tears. 

Riven with grief by the destruction, an entire community could hardly move. The way the animals are being treated after these gigantic slashes - the triumphant hunting down of frightened, starving, displaced mountain lions and bears - makes them sick. One woman was angered because a yearling bear, "Not doing anything, just walking near here," was shot just because he was something to slaughter. She reported that the wolves that the State had tried to replace were shot, "And those hunters were all, 'Oh, we didn't know it wasn't legal!' " 

Logging industry, and the hunting industry attached to you (oh, yes, Rayonier has a hunting RENTAL page, as well as a real estate page!); You're damaging the hearts and minds of entire areas. You're attacking their livelihoods. You're ramming your machines through their lives like airliners into towers. They're waking up. And they're on Facebook, now. Not alone, not isolated, no longer unable to talk to each other, hunkering down in pain and fear.

There's a hungry lawyer out there who wants you. There's a class-action suit, based on your reckless endangerment of anybody who lives near your forest, and flat-out animal cruelty, that this lawyer knows s/he can harvest you with. You know who the most dangerous sharks in the American sea are - because they built the place. Go ahead, line up your own lawyers. Because anybody who does come in on your side will be next in line, for supporting an abusive industry. It's coming. It may not be today, or tomorrow, but you've treated the earth, its people - human and animal - and its breathing forests like garbage for too long.

This isn't a threat. It's a warning. And a promise.

And the paper I freelance for, the Forks Forum, isn't off the hook. Every time I send in an article, it is published near the stories of how animals are something to kill, and the latest piece of vomit-on-paper is a triumphant series of hunter-porn about the ONE wolf "attack" that ever was known up here. Some boob wandered into a wolf territory, and the writer is practically staining his pants about how the Big Bad Alpha Wolf was" exterminated." Yup, that's the word. The guy doesn't even know how Final Solution that sounds.

Now, why do I think the paper is in trouble, too? Because if any of these idiots hear there's a predator in the area - or even, in one case up here, a loose cow - they're out womping through the woods looking to kill something. I'm REALLY getting sick of being told I have to look out for stray bullets while mushrooming or berrypicking or just getting some forest time. I imagine the paper can at least be taken for Contributory Negligence, or something else the lawyer/s will dig up.

My last editor offered this idiot writer a large payment for going to observe salmon-fishing grizzlies - at night. 

"WTF?" I thought "Is he trying to get him killed?"

Then again, this editor also left a crazed story about a mythological Japanese airfield up here, which he told my last editor (or this one, I get 'em mixed up) was "A bomb in the system." It's bad enough having to see my decent articles published in the same rag as crazed paranoids who fear the woods and wild animals - can you imagine being the editor for this chop-shop logging blatt? No wonder these people don't last.

The paper also runs a series called "The Real Forks." Now, I read this thing and think it's hilarious - but it's just some woman doing the little nicey-nice stories. You want the REAL west-end stories - you come here. I don't give a fuck any more.

Rotting Heads - But Not Zombies

Respect? Or White People Values?

Okay, I'm giving my neighbors the benefit of the doubt. The house always has teenage boys running in and out. The person in charge has a laid-back attitude about kids. Yeah, I had to tell them their kids were jumping out of the ditch to run at a car; I really don't want my insurance rates raised when I make red paste out of a little boy. Which is a TAD too laid-back for me, thank you. I'm not paid to raise other people's kids (and I have a contract for that).

So - you tell me what this photo says:

1. Is it an old symbol of respect for an animal people who die - a lot - so we can eat? As in: returning the heads to the woods?

2. Is it trying to get the skulls clean (and I have no idea if respect was shown or not, beforehand).

3. Or is it kids defying the game warden, as one passing biker suggests?

At Ivar's Salmon House this year, a little girl was asking her mother what the First Nations art meant. I asked her mom if I could explain. It went sort of like this:

"Those are spirits."

Her eyes bulged. "EVIL spirits?"

I took a moment to remember what modern religion has done, and said, "No, powerful spirits. See that one? That's a salmon. That one's a bear. If you go into the woods and show respect, they'll feed you. If you disrespect rivers and forests, someday they'll go away, and they won't come feed you. You'll starve. Do you understand?"

She did. Her mom didn't look happy; in our religion, we have a god and a demon (although the western god was originally just one person in a good or bad mood), and one is loving and the other is mean. But when people really live close to nature, if you disrespect nature, the food goes away. This is true. Unfortunately, we've brought in our own selfish beliefs and spread them around.

People up here think they're living "close to nature," but they're what Dan says: "Industrial workers in the woods." Every year they're buying all the things they need to survive while short trips into the woods. They're pretending.*

The woods are full of food, fuel, shelter, medicine, time and quiet. I'm not afraid of them. I circle if I'm "lost," with the natural instinct to find my troop. If I'm hungry or thirsty or need shelter, it appears. I don't run or panic or scream or threaten. It took me ten minutes to make one of those little rock-splinter knives that have been found at a camp on the Hoko River, out of what I found lying around. I'll eat fern roots, if I have to.

Disrespect is death. We've treated the Earth like dirt for several centuries, now. Soon, we shall be reaping our harvest of pride and short-sightedness, and returning to the dirt, ourselves.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

*First Nations people are trying to get their old ways back, mostly realizing we're about to shoot ourselves in the feet. With the clearcut next to our neighborhood, cutting right into the flood and wind tunnel, there will be whining and wailing to their godlet about "WHY?" next typhoon season. Rather than sniffing, "I told you so," I should be getting business cards from a hungry lawyer, for the class-action suite? Hey, the logging companies harvest everything and everybody else - so it's their turn. What goes around, comes around. Call it recycling.

Latest note: evidently somebody must have read this and missed the point entirely, because they've stuck a hunting permit around one of the antlers of the more lifelike of the two rotting heads. Yeah, making sure we all know it's legal - that's the point of how to treat animals. In some states, cock- and dog-fighting are still legal, too. 

Pickin' in the Heart of Evil.

We have a favorite spot for picking chanterelles. We got this nice little haul from areas that would usually be too damp, but this year it's been dry, so we're picking 15 feet to the left or right, beyond the wood sorrels and in the moss.

But like everything else we've loved for years up here, Rayonier is tearing the heart out of it. We were witness to the Heart of Evil as we walked through this usually quiet spot in the woods (well, sort of skinny, stick woods - but Rayonier is panting to put the toxic boiled-down result into your body and lungs).

Because Tim Eyman ripped out the ability of a State to support itself, the State is forced to sell off its timber as fast as possible, in a manner that will cripple it for decades, if not finally make this just another Failed Timber Town area (with the feeling-sorry-for-themselves you always get from resource towns). You can see the desperation in the logging trucks ripping through town. So the trucks were roaring up and down the road by the woods. One driver, stopping to "secure" his load (they're overloading, so don't drive too near them), even stopped to kick the beer cans I'd tossed out into the road, until I could get a bag, back into the woods. He didn't even think of picking them up. To him, the woods are just cash and a garbage dump.

Chanterelles, Hen of the Woods, Oyster Mushrooms. 

I was picking up the usual garbage in the woods. The kind of people who are loggers and hunters throw beer cans and beer bottles around the elk trails. They even shatter window glass where an elk might step. Think about that. 

Dan called me back in from poking around in a thin patch. Usually, I'd have come right out, but this isn't really a bear or mountain lion area. So I said, "Why?" He said, "Just come."

So I did, slowly and carefully. if it WERE a large predator, running and panicking is the dumbest thing you can do. And if I'm in somebody's living room, I don't want to look like I'm wearing a stocking over my head. I don't carry a gun because I usually can't, in most situations, and stupid happens with guns. So I'll rely on my head and moves and mouth, thank you, as I have, so many times before. 

I get to the road, and I see a couple of guys, and one with a deer rifle (I don't know guns, and I don't care to, unless I need to ask my gun geek friends), but Dan says it's what it was. THIS is the thing I need to get out of the woods for? Well, I start to fume. I needed to stop picking because there were testicles with bang-bangs in the area?

Between the garbage and the roaring logging trucks, my hackles really started to go up. I am so goddamn god-vomit tired of men telling me, as a woman, I need to stay out of the woods because I might get shot. Yeah, I mean you, Mr. Forest Ranger who told me that one day. Just try it, boys. The day of the hunting accident is over - you need to be up for manslaughter with reckless endangerment. 

On the one hand, Mom pounded manners into me. I find it extremely hard to be rude to people. So when the hunters said, "Seen any grouse," I just joked, "The last bunch of grouse hunters up here admitted they were just exercising the dogs."

I thought they'd think it was funny. Hey, some of their own had said it, right? But Dan - as a guy able to sus the guy twitches - said they were NOT happy with that. What? I was putting down their hunting prowess or something?

Then, as we were getting into the car, another logging truck stopped. The two hunters immediately got into a conversation with the driver, all excited about the timber sale jobs up in the clearcut. Well, that explained that: loggers. Scared to death of the woods, descended from clerks and European farmers, and out to grab theirs. If they can't be cutting it down, they want to make it bleed.

Then the driver said, "Somebody got a cat up here! 150 pounds!" The guy with the gun joshed, "I"ll bet it's 300 pounds by now!" 

And that's when it hit me. Finally. After ten years up here. D'uh. We're talking facepalm. 

When Dan's dad would clean the garden - with a tractor - the rats would run out, and Dan would run around with a shovel, sharing rat-killing duties with the red-tailed hawk his dad wouldn't let anybody kill. 

The loggers are using clearcuts to drive predators out of their homes, and shooting these starving, disoriented, homeless refugees. 

As we pulled out, I leaned out the door, and said, "So, going to go shoot some more refugee animals?" They waved and looked confused. I hope so.

Even the Masai have stopped killing lions to prove how brave they are, and have become the Guardians of the Lions. But up here - bravery is based on a man named Huelsdonk, who, according to this family, read too many cowboy stories back in Germany. He came out to the Peninsula and lived off government money in the form of bounties (yes, we were really stupid back then), destroying all the predators he could line up in his sights. This crazy Kraut helped drive the wolves to extinction, and called the lions forces for destruction. Evidently, he didn't even own a mirror.

Then I realized who the "cowboy story" writer must have been. A German named Karl May. Who never saw America while writing the stories that, later, would be the model for the Lone Ranger and Tonto. 

Now, can anybody else name another huge fan of Karl May? Who had all his books? And thought the idea of conquest and a place to live for his people, regardless of who stood in the way, was a good idea?

With people like Heulsdonk and Hitler lapping up his nonsense, May may be one of the most destructive writers of all time. 

Since we're talking Germans, one of my best friends, a very enlightened German professor, once told Dan, "In Germany we have the village idiot. In America, you have idiot villages."

(As for shooting cats: go into the local liquor store and see the picture of the kid holding up a dead bobcat. OH, he's so proud of himself. I've seen a grandmother shown a picture of a dead bobcat on a cell phone, and she's cooing over her granddaughter for killing the cat. Why? They're not going to eat it, and we don't need the fur. This must explain the guy in Forks who is trapping and shooting his neighbor's cats, while they whimper in protest and do nothing about it. I think I'm done writing about this area. These people are either monsters or wimps).

Forks might have been accused of having vampires, but what they all have up here is zombies.

(NOTE: One woman who has been reading my blogs says, YES, she KNOWS catch-and release is bad, but she loves to fish so much! I said, I do too, but I don't fish EXCEPT to eat. She said she'd work on it. Look, I boycott beef. Will never buy it; if you swallow the DNA of cows, you want the whole world to be grass. But if I'm at a cookout, I'll have a hamburger. No use being rude. I suggested she gift herself a couple catch-and-release days a year, and she nodded and said she should. At least she means to try. Credit where credit is due.

Re fishing on catch-and-release days, and why sport killers are just stupid: if you fish on a catch-and-release day before a keeper day, and you want to know WHY the place is full of hungry seals on the keeper day, maybe you should deny yourself the nasty pleasure of filling the fishing area up with wounded, bleeding, face-and mouth-ripped fish. I mean, where do you THINK seals get their food? FORKS OUTFITTERS? The border patrol would stop them, along with the Hispanics the Forks mayor is out of his mind scared of.

The other day, I heard some people up here talking, without being able to quite catch their words - and I swear to god, it really DID sound like "hyuk hyuk hyuk." I am so sick to my teeth of the Stupid and Proud of it.)

Looking Up To Avoid Looking Around

There's that whole "Guv'ment be sprayin' us with poison" thang going on up here right now. Of course, nobody can ever show anything except the usual water vapor from jet engines. This is the same gang goes for space ships and Bigfoot.

Of course, if you're convinced - like Pap Finn - that it's the Guv'ment doing the wrong, you don't have to take any action yourself. You're just a poor victim.

No interest in the spraying of roadside plants, or the fact that Rayonier and pulp mills are grinding down trees and treating them with toxic chemicals - before turning them into products that outgas in their homes, or into toilet paper they daily rub against their delicate genital and anal membranes. No, no chance of toxins ending up in anybody's system that way! 

The whole place is weaving with illness and cancer, and so they look up in the sky and try to blame something that doesn't even exist. Well, why not? Their pastors and priests have taught them the Earth doesn't matter, just invisible things in the sky and their own heads. I don't know if they could build new head files if they tried, now.

How did Americans become such mindless industrial serfs? Oh, never mind - I already know how. I grew up in the pulp and logging industry. No IDEA where an entire population could make heroes out of the chest-puffing young men who don't give a damn about anything but their fancy trucks and girls who don't know any better. I'M not the one, up here, who came up with the term, "Logging Camp Whores." Yeah, keep admiring these bozos, as they rip down your future, and the future of your children.

You're either Green, or you and your family are Ghosts. That's just how it's going to be, and if you can't learn, I don't know if we're even going to bother saying, "We told you so." I mean - why bother talking to the Dead? We don't have to do anything to you, or try to convince you any more. If you want to commit suicide, just keep it up. For too many of you, it's too late. Spaceship earth will keep grinding forward without you, and while me and mine will suffer horribly as she eats the disease out of her system (thank you very fucking much - not), if anybody survives, it will be us - and we'll tell stories of how humanity Did It Wrong the first time.

You'll be Grendel.

Doing it Right - and Wrong

On the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, some people are trying very hard to help the natural resources recover, because, after all, only the Green are going to survive. This is why Beaver Creek,

Beaver Creek Falls, Olympic Peninsula, WA

on highway 113, looks like it does in the photo on the right. 

Some people live in the bad old days.

The step trail down to the pool is worn and supported by tree-roots, forming a natural staircase. This is how humans used to live with their support system on this continent. 

Lewis and Clark didn't discover anything - they were led along smooth, footworn trails, such as are seen in national parks, where the forest and humans have had a chance to live together again, as we have for milleania. 

Blind to what was around them, the "explorers" didn't realize that First Nations and animals - all people of this continent - had led the way and made homes before them. This blindness continued as industrial forestry - and its serfs - bumbled into the world with no clue how anything actually worked.

Which is why we get this Budweiser® moment. Suck down the commercial product, and numbly drop the shell onto the earth. I don't suppose Budweiser® promotes such behavior, but its commercials don't even seem to recognize its customers are acting like this. Does the company care? Probably not. Then again, they're not going to survive - ONLY the Green will survive, and this ain't it.

Our ancestors were sloppy feeders; we grabbed fruit, munched a mouthful, and dropped what we didn't want wherever we walked. Our meal leavings and dung simply spread seeds and fertilized, adding back what we'd taken. We harmed nothing.

But - some people don't seem to get that we're not apes in trees any more. If we suck and drop, the thing we leave doesn't add to anything. Perhaps this aluminum can wouldn't, by itself, do a lot of harm. But it's not the only thing being thrown away, and it adds up. 

We're the Thinking Ape - how about we start thinking? And stop lying to ourselves? If this was your kid, your Family Values stink. If you did this in front of your kids - what kind of parent ARE you?

FutureFail - By Name.

Amanda Park says you don't live here.

Why should we leave any Olmpic Peninsula town out of the public shaming? 

Today is the turn of Amanda Park, Joyce, Clallam Bay and Hoquim - and Forks. Like you're fooling anybody.

Merrill and Ring says you don't get to enjoy living here.

They've certainly deserved it. Loggers all over the place are - in barely-disguised language - saying that anybody else who makes a living here off beauty and the future needs to bow down to the logger as the only person who deserves to live here. 

Rayonier - a Florida company - says "Screw you."

Greed, theft and short-sightedness are supposed to live, over beauty and hope?

Hoquim celebrates decades of destruction.

Oh, go to Forks for any festivals and watch them puffing up their chests over dead trees on trucks. The loggers hate the Twilight fandom - they absolutely hate hate hate that ANYBODY might make a living from health and air and beauty. Are they aliens from another planet? Do they breathe ammonia? Nature seems to scare the hell out of them. 

And here's Hoquim, all proud of itself for its traditional Masculine Roles - all based on Everything Is The Enemy and Everything MUST bow down to Our Superior Race. Bison, wolves, First Nations, forests, rivers, prairies - it was ALL put there for us to rape rape rape. What? I didn't make that up. I just had a woman at the food bank tell me we're supposed to have "Dominion" over the earth. She's going to get a fucking big surprise as her grandkids go under the stamping engine of Mom Nature - who is no gentle, giving parent, but a monstrous, integrated spaceship - and them what don't fit in get sent out the garbage chute. 

No, you're not going into the New Frontier of outer space - you can't keep the atmosphere going on this one. Hell, to keep shelter, food and water in place to survive, we all have to work ourselves to death now. In outer space, you and your grandkids will do nothing but fix vacuum links.

I plan to at least be one of the ones who say "We told you not to do this." No "Good German" for me, thank you.

FutureWin - FutureFail

In the future, those who have a whole forest NOW shall survive.

In the future, those who are clearcutting their forests NOW for short-term gain shall fade and die. 

First, here is the link for articles about the Olympic Peninsula, which is well into FutureFail.

Now, here are FutureFails - and, if we can find them, FutureWins.

First, a link to a FutureWin - Dryad's Rest, which has 30-year-old forests on 59 acres of woods. the healing has begun. Right now, they're struggling with predators around their goats, because the clearcutting is driving animals into their woods. They've realized these animals are refugees, and Dryad's Rest is an Ark.

FutureFail, with clueless human.

Here is a FutureFail. A photo taken in Amanda Park, Washington, of an antique person who has killed a mature predator, modeling himself on a culture hero who took government money to wipe out "vermin" species (with "vermin" defined as anything not on a leash to us). This is probably a refugee woman. These days, everything on the planet is becoming a refugee from us.

Amanda Park shows there is hope.

BUT - here is a FutureWin, and it's in Amanda Park, too. One of the Timberlands Libraries in Amanda Park. The logging industry funds libraries on the peninsula, no doubt believing their workers and readers will become logging clones (loose evidence makes one think the North Olympic Library System only hires from logging families). However, what happens when people can actually read and communicate? Go past the downtown, where the antiques are, and just go here. It's beautiful, and the librarians are lovely, intelligent people. I scared them a bit when I blew in as an Angry Betrayed Daughter of the Pulp Industry. It didn't hurt that one of them was a comics fan, and I run the Clallam Bay Comicon.

More to come! Clallam Bay and Joyce, get ready for a big smack in the head. You earned it.