[MUSIC PLAYING] I’ve watched wolves take down moose.

I’ve watched wolves take down caribou.

I’ve watched a pack of wolves work on 15 or 20 calves, kill them, kill those calves, and never at that time to be one of them.

A wolf pack needs about a moose every two days.

That’s a big animal.

That’s, of course.

Probably the most missed common notions about predators and predator-free relationships is that predators are interested in taking only what they only take this sick.

The concept that wolves and bears are only take weak animals really just call the bigger rovers down to the prime genetic material.

That’s hogwash.

Wolves would definitely work on the calves and I observed that.

The death of a moose or caribou to a wolf is not a free imperture.

They don’t necessarily kill them before they eat them.

They start eating more than they can, if the things alive, well, so what it’s alive.

It’s a brutal environment out there.

Game of fish can’t manage the wolves there.

So if the caribou are moving away from their traditional cabin ground, they’re moving away because of I agree to predation because we can’t help the caribou.

And they move to areas than where there are fewer wolves.

Wolves can not run a caribou.

Pack of five animals will follow a band of caribou around and pick one off each day.

But eventually they’ll get the whole band.

So let’s say the moose population begins to dwindle and there’s wolves in the area that like moose calves, they starve or they eat other things.

They get too stressed for food, they’ll just eat their offspring.

More than half of wolves are eaten by their own pet.

Anyone that’s seen a wolf do its job, it’s an island.

The The The Great North American model is something that has been revered by, you know, countries all over the world.

Alaska has set the standard for the world and environmentally responsible development.

The efficient game is very important to Alaska.

We’re very conservation-minded.

We’re the envy of the world and that we have sustainable numbers of animals for perpetuity.

State managers have a constitutional mandate to manage our sustained yield basis.

If you look at our track record, especially here in Alaska, the managers have done a really good job.

We have a loss in these species that we’ve been in charge of managing.

Managing our game takes some predator control in order to manage for a abundance.

This is a very hot issue.

Predator control.

And that’s a very nasty word in some circles.

Our managers go in and, you know, try to keep track of how many bears are in area, how many wolves are in area.

We do an awful lot of aerial surveys just to be able to even count survey and inventory the wildlife that we have here.

My name is Corey Rossi and I’m a former assistant commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, as well as director of the Division of Wildlife Conservation.

Prior to that, I spent nearly 20 years working for USDA’s Wildlife Services program.

This idea that the deer and the coyote and the and the moose and the wolf all just stay in this perfect balance on a continuum is nonsense.

Wildlife populations are dynamic.

They are ever changing.

There’s huge swings in in the populations and they allow the hunting to happen.

Hunting pressure happened to kind of keep it balanced.

There has to be some kind of a balance.

We have to take control over it.

And oftentimes predators are the shortest path back.

If we can reduce them at least temporarily, give the prey populations enough time to recover.

We can get back where we need to quicker if we don’t hold one species sacred above the other.

And instead say, look, let’s let’s just manage the whole system as a whole.

One of the things that’s really confounded wildlife management in Alaska is that we have a dual management system in many parts of the state where the federal government has come in and you served the state’s authority to manage wildlife for subsistence uses.

As the federal government owns two-thirds of the state of Alaska, but the federal government has a little different idea, a different philosophy on how this land should be managed.

The federal government doesn’t manage for Alaska and they admit that they don’t manage for Alaska.

Alaska is a very unique situation now.

Alaska’s greatest asset is number one is people and number two the resources that we’ve been blessed with.

Alaskans are a integral part of our environment up here more than the lower 48.

There’s only 750,000 Alaskans.

We have very specific rights.

What happens is that a lot of the managers that come into Alaska don’t know about the protections that are there and the philosophy differences between the state of Alaska and the federal government.

So they come in and they end up really walking on the rights of the people of Alaska.

Hello, I’m Charlie Lee.

I’m a fisheries biologist from Noma, Alaska.

I worked 25 years with the state of Alaska.

Five years with the National Park Service is through the feds.

Even though I was the local manager, I didn’t manage.

I made recommendations in someone in Washington DC approved or disapprove.

I’ve didn’t feel biology was the primary criteria they made their decisions with.

You know, it’s micromanaged by an absentee landlord.

I am my role as am executive director.

I really urge people that make decisions about land management and plasticity and regulation to come up to Alaska and see it for themselves.

It’s a very unique place.

It’s really hard to understand how unique Alaska is.

It’s really frustrating when the federal regulations come in and say, “Oh, you’re going to recover it this way.”

And you’ve just created a desert.

And so these guys have been working here for 30, 40, 50 years and they understand that land intimately.

Unfortunately, the federal government has taken over the management of fisheries and on subsistence hunting on federal lands.

Federal managers have a very hands-off policy.

Their idea of managing is taking numbers, counting heads.

If the species are out of balance and the wolves have killed off most of the most of the care of them, they refuse to do anything to manipulate those numbers and they do not manage game for abundance.

Our resources are managed from special interests outside of Alaska and from Washington, D.C.

It’s really hard to understand when you’re in Washington, D.C. or in Seattle or in New York and you’re trying to set rules.

There’s areas like Alaska Peninsula, for example, that the care move have declined to the point where the cast’s survival rate is very, very, very low.

As a young man, I remember flying over Alaska Peninsula and seeing care move as far as you can see, tens and tens and thousands of them.

Now there’s hardly any care we left and that’s because of the federal management or the federal mismanagement.

What kind of stewardship is that?

That’s highly offensive to me.

Yeah, I’m Wes Keller.

I’m a state representative at the state of Alaska.

I had the honor of being appointed to a group called the Citizens Advisory Commission on Federal Areas.

I’m a member of the American Alliance Council, for example, and that is a western state’s working on the you know, title cranes for back to the states.

And the issue is that all the western states have huge amounts of assets that would be available to them if they can control and own them, not just a tax base, but also the natural resources that would naturally by the standards of the United States of America belong to the people of the various states.

But in western states, much of that has been retained by the federal government.

My name is Scott Ogand.

I live in Palmer, Alaska.

I served 10 years in the Alaska legislature in both the House and the Senate.

And after that, I had a 10-year-career and the Department of Natural Resources as a natural resource manager.

The whole intent of statehood was for us to become independent, having enough of a land resource base that we could provide for ourselves without having to rely on the federal government.

And part of that promise was a very large land bank of over a hundred million acres of the state received with express purpose of being able to develop it and make it available for settlement to the maximum benefit of the people.

It’s right in the Alaska Constitution.

The federal government has broken those promises that they made to us when we became a state.

And all the while they hydrated a great deal of land, the prime hunting lands, recreation lands, and lands that are asking us for resource development.

Specifically, they they went after the mineral lands and they locked up a great deal of the historical mineral lands in Alaska.

Federal law passed in 1979 called an Ielka, this is an Anilka, the federal law that withdrew all these federal lands.

Stole Alaska’s right to manage its fishing game.

I think BLM is the biggest pain in the rear end, but to be fair it’s because they’re the federal land market.

BLM has a lot of land in Alaska and unless the lands are withdrawn for a specific purpose, BLM’s are generally a multiple use, multiple purpose lands.

And so all of a sudden these general use lands stop being generally used lands, even though that concept violates the promises made in Anilka.

I think it’s crazy, it’s nuts.

But that’s the kind of thing that’s happening to us all over.

The management policies by well-meaning, probably people in the federal government become chains around our necks.

That is emotionalism, that is not logic, that is not science.

It does a brave action, and there’s a very passionate issue.

In fact, it’s again the David and Klayah thing.

If I have the American public understand anything, regulations and our national environmental laws are incredibly important, but they need to be reasonable, they need to fit the reality situation and not just be laws for state to be laws.

The increasing number of regulations and restrictions and lack of access is getting worse and worse.

So I think that there is a way that the federal government and the state that remain in private owners in Alaska can all effectively manage the lands.

I think Alaska does do outstanding job of managing its resources.

And we do it with constitutional mandate to make our resources available for the maximum development and settlement of the land in the public interest.

That’s Article 8, Section 1 of the Alaska Constitution.

People can still come to Alaska and pursue the American Dream.

It’s like it is the last frontier.

We want to manage it with Ken Manage it and we’re doing a good job managing.

And understand how unique that this area is and there are people that understand how unique it is and there are regulations that don’t at all understand how unique it is.

People have just about had enough to derive all this with this.

People came to Alaska because they wanted to explore, they wanted to do things on their own, they wanted to participate in the last frontier.

And then they did to get here and to find out that it’s micromated by an absentee landlord.

It’s time for us to start acting like a sovereign state.

We are insisting that Alaska has the authority to manage our own game, our own fish.

But we need to put an emphasis on handling bees.

We can responsibly live in harmony with the earth.

Let the state of Alaska manage it so people can feed their families in the last good culture and Alaska way life can survive.

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