Outdoor Life.

Colville, Washington is like a lot of bare-knuckle Western towns, with dusty pickups parked at family businesses, government agencies stabilizing the boombust ranch-and-timber economy, and a string of fast-food franchises along U.S. Highway 395 that heads north to Canada. It’s the late general season for deer this week in northeast Washington, but this year hunters aren’t seeing nearly as many elk or pine-ridge whitetails as usual.

They mostly blame wolves that have moved into this rural corner of Washington over the past decade and the increasing number of cougars that are no longer staying way out in the Colville National Forest. Instead, lions have been coming closer to town, following the scarcity of deer right down to the city limits. Locals cite the ambush of a 9-year-old girl playing hide-and-seek in the town of Fruitland, about 45 miles southwest of Colville, in June as evidence that cougars need to be more aggressively managed by the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife.

When the Fish and Wildlife Commission met in Colville last week, they were welcomed sarcastically to the “center of wolf recovery” by members of a pro-hunting organization called Northeast Washington Wildlife Group. But the commission also heard from predator advocates, represented by members of Washington Wildlife First, a non-profit founded last year whose mission is “transforming the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife from a model of consumptive use” to one that “prioritizes the preservation of natural ecosystems.” For Washington Wildlife First, the increase in predators isn’t problematic; instead, it’s indicative of a healthy ecosystem.

Tension between the two camps was palpable at the Colville meeting, says Commissioner Kim Thorburn, a retired public-health physician from Spokane and self-described “non-hunting hippie from San Francisco.”

“We had people from the community begging us to pay attention to the changes they’re seeing on the ground,” says Thorburn, the longest-serving member of the 9-person commission. “They feel that large carnivores are impacting hunting and livelihoods. We heard people say they don’t let their kids stand out at isolated school bus stops any more. We heard hunters say the deer numbers are going way down. They were asking the department to be more responsive.”

But a new majority of the Washington commission doesn’t recognize those pleas as a problem. They’re among an insurgent type of wildlife official that wants to transform state fish-and-game departments across the country into agencies that “emphasize the intrinsic value of individual animals and healthy ecosystems.” That realignment would deemphasize hunting as a wildlife management tool and devote more agency resources to non-hunted and fished species.

This movement, championed by a small but influential group based in New Mexico called Wildlife For All, borrows from a number of allies, including animal-rights, rewilding, and deep ecology campaigns, few adherents of which have previously been involved in the day-to-day business of fish-and-game management. But with the appointment earlier this year of three “preservationist” commissioners in Washington, reformers now hold a 5-4 majority on the board. In March, they succeeded in closing Washington’s spring bear season, despite recommendations from agency staff that the hunt was ecologically sustainable and despite opposition from Thorburn and three other commissioners.

Now, let’s see what the Almighty God says about this.  “God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

What the hippies in Washington are doing is worshiping the creation over the creator and His law-word.  They don’t care that little children and animals will be attacked by wolves, bears, mountain lions or other predators.  The creation is their god.

I had someone ask me a while back why the hippies get the Northwest and we don’t.  My answer is that it doesn’t matter now, it’s done, and there is no going back.  This fight would have had to be fought long ago while real men were working for a living.  You must do more than work – you must pay attention to the world around you, including human predilections and sins.