WI GOP-led Assembly thumbs unmasked nose during wolf hunting hearing

Wisconsin Republicans keep proving they will ignore science when they are legislating meddling in public policy.

Look no farther than their years of denying the realities of climate change or promoting water pollution or substituting ideology or special interest privileges over science when public health and welfare were at stake.

33 times Walker disregarded, dismissed science

So it was not surprising Wednesday that the Republican-run state legislature would again display its primal dedication to power and core contempt for science when it held a public hearing in the era of meeting-via-Zoom without offering Democratic legislators the opportunity to attend remotely...while in-person legislative attendees were free to go without pandemic-blunting face masks. 

Unlike in the Senate, the Assembly isn’t offering lawmakers the option of calling in to meetings or floor sessions remotely, leaving it up to Democrats to either show up and face intermittent mask wearers, or not show up at all.

Mind you, this is the same GOP crew which already had its own in-house COVID19 outbreak that it tried to cover up - and yet they get to set their own rules regardless of known risks because exercising power is more important to them than is exercising good judgment or social consciousness.

I'd refer GOP Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and his caucus to this article, How Masks Can Help Prevent The Spread of COVID-19, but it appears on TheScientist website and we've repeatedly documented what Wisconsin Republicans in the Assembly and elsewhere think of annoying facts and sciency-things like that:

The 10 worst things WI GOP/rightists said & evaded about COVID

The hearing Wednesday was not about COVID19; it  concerned the reintroduction of a state-sanctioned wolf hunt.

And the science-denigrating atmosphere in the room connected back to the GOP-run legislature's state sanctioned wolf-hunting plan that was rushed to adoption in 2012 and avoided science as well as mainstream ethics.

 

The plan was thrown together by legislators with so little regard for science that a judge had to delete the legislators' legalized blessing of hounds in the wolf-chase before it led to a lot dead dogs in the Wisconsin woods.

[Though hunters during bear season get paid handsomely by the state - $845,000 and counting so far - when their hounds chase bears through wolf territory and pay the ultimate and reimbursed price.]

Back to the previous wolf hunt which was the sort of policy you get when the state relied for 'advice' from a hunter-heavy advisory committee which the DNR had stripped of wolf-hunting opponents.

The wolf hunt continued through three hunting seasons characterized by broken kill quotas until a Federal judge stopped grey wolf hunting nationally after 2014, but the way Wisconsin's legislators kept science and good practices from the bill  had not gone unnoticed, as I had written in a blog post several years ago -

...about the politics and realities of Wisconsin's lobby-driven and especially cruel practice (leg traps allowed, along with pursuing hounds), and one of the very early items from July, 2012 is on-point...

While a Journal Sentinel editorial wants the proposed Wisconsin wolf hunt green-lighted with policy outcomes autopsied after the fact, environmental legal advocate Jodi Habush Sinykin makes a good case that the hunt is being hurried to a cruel and sloppy start this fall.

Here was the heart of Sinykin's position, which is echoed in the court ruling Friday:

Rushed through the legislative process with no notice to Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources wildlife experts, no input from the state's Wolf Science Advisory Committee and no tribal consultation, the law prescribes a first hunting season for wolves. The law is drawing significant opposition from scientists, mainstream hunters and conservationists alike, owing to an excessively long, 4½-month season that allows hunting of breeding females and to the array of hunting and trapping methods viewed as out of line with traditional values of fair pursuit and public safety considerations... 

So I find it unsurprising and more than a little ironic that the same Legislature which ignored the pandemic throughout much of 2020 as it infected more than a half-million people in Wisconsin and killed over 5,000  - data here - and had disregarded science the last time it set up a controversial wolf hunt in Wisconsin would re-launch itself back into that science-demanding wildlife issue by thumbing its unmasked nose at COVID science, too.