Pete the moose is dead, but his memory lingers on.
Alas.
Not that there are no valuable lessons to be learned from Pete’s life, his captivity, and his demise. There are some. Most of them are being ignored.
Perhaps that’s because the single most valuable lesson is unfashionable. The lesson is that sometimes the establishment, the law, the authorities — yes, even the government – is right, while the grass roots, the dissenters, the ordinary folks mobilized around their social media outlets are wrong.
Well-meaning perhaps. But still quite wrong.
Here is where the authorities and the law were right: Wild animals are … wild and are best left that way. They should not be fed, moved, confined, or even rescued.
Oh, a small bird with a broken wing can be protected for a few days, after which it might be able to fly away on its own. Even in that case, though, the human who shelters the bird is depriving a deserving predator of a low-energy-consumption meal. That’s nature for you: Bird gets broken wing, can’t fly away, is gobbled up by a fox or skunk, who needs the nourishment.
Oobladee, as the song says, ooblada.
Just as, had Pete not been rescued, he would have provided valuable carrion for scavengers two years earlier than he did.
This moose may have lived a couple of years longer because he was rescued, moved, and confined. Or maybe not. Had he been left alone, the mother who supposedly “abandoned” him when hikers and their dogs came upon the moose two years ago, might have returned to take care of him.
That’s what the wildlife biologists say, and wildlife biologists know more than most other folks about this, ardent though the other folks may be.
What is certain is that Pete died last week precisely because he was rescued, moved, and confined. He died after being injected with a tranquilizer. He needed the tranquilizer so that his “owner,” dairy farmer and hunting park operator Doug Nelson of Derby, could trim his hooves.
There are tens of thousands of moose in the woods of northern New England, not one of whom has ever had a hoof trim. They don’t need one. This moose did because he was not in the woods eating what nature intended moose to eat – leaves, forbs, willow shoots, and aquatic plants (that last for the salt). He was imprisoned and was fed (among other things) grains, doughnuts and ice cream.
A high-carb diet, perhaps useful for a human marathoner, but bad for a moose.
“It’s fairly commonly understood with cervids,” said Fish and Wildlife Commissioner Patrick Berry, “that when they’re fed an unnatural diet they can develop a hoof problem, where the hoof gets long and can even curl up at end like an elf’s cap.” (Cervids are ruminant animals such as deer, elk, and moose).
This lesson – that wild animals should remain wild – does seem to have been learned at least by some, including by one of those who didn’t seem to understand it before – Gov. Peter Shumlin. Wildlife, Shumlin now says, should be left wild.
But last year, then-state Sen. Shumlin helped lead the effort not only to save Pete, but to put him and the other moose and deer that had gotten into Nelson’s fenced elk hunting compound, into private hands – Nelson’s – in violation of several hundred years of Anglo-American legal tradition holding that wildlife is a “public trust,” not private property.
Shumlin and other elected officials were responding to what seemed to be a public uprising to “Save Pete,” the slogan on bumper stickers, Web sites and Facebook pages apparently supported by thousands.
But most of those thousands did not live in Vermont, and since nobody took a poll on the dispute, there is no evidence that any more than a tiny percentage of Vermont voters gave a hoot about the moose. Not for the first time, politicians may have overreacted to a constituency which was adamant, articulate, impressively high-tech, but possibly very small. Berry noted that while he got a lot of pro-Pete mail and email, he also ran into many a Vermonter who wondered why his department was spending so much time on one animal.
But hardly anyone in elected office – and hardly anyone in the Vermont media – had the gumption to point out that, however numerous and spontaneous this “Save Pete” movement might have been, it was based on scientific ignorance.
In other words, the journalism was as bad as the politics, and not just in Vermont. At the height of the tumult, The New York Times sent a reporter to the state to do a story which managed to ignore the central fact that moving and impounding Pete was against the law.
As of Wednesday morning, there was no letup to the hyperbole. More than a quarter of the news hole on the front page of the Burlington Free Press was devoted to a story across the top of the page headlined “Where’s Pete’s body.”
Placement on the top of the front page signals that a story is important. This story was important because … well, it wasn’t. Body or no body, Pete would be neither more nor less dead. His accidental death from the tranquilizer broke no law, so there was no need to conduct an autopsy. The only advantage to finding the body would be to test the brain for signs of Chronic Wasting Disease.
Yesterday, Berry said, a Fish & Wildlife warden found a dead moose on the Nelson property. Presumably, it is Pete. It was too decomposed to test for CWD.
On Friday, on its 6 o’clock news program, WCAX-TV (Channel 3) broke the story of Pete’s death by describing a “stunning reversal…from state wildlife officials– after assuring us for more than a week that Pete the Moose was alive, officials now say the controversial and much-loved moose is dead.”
The clear implication was that Fish & Wildlife had been engaged in a cover-up. It had not. Nelson and his family had kept Pete’s death quiet for weeks, and had assured the Department that the moose was alive.
Before the 11 o’clock news, Nelson’s son Richard had called the station to acknowledge that any cover-up was by the family, not Fish & Wildlife. So Channel 3 just ran the 6 o’clock story again, followed by an audio of a recording of the interview with Nelson.
Then on Monday, in an otherwise fair and thorough report on the whole Pete saga by Jennifer Reading, one of the several young and good reporters Channel 3 has hired of late, Shumlin was quoted as follows:
“You know, I think there has been a lesson for all of this, which is, don’t take publicly owned wildlife and put it in private hands. I think the best way to solve this problem is to make sure it does not happen again. And let’s let the existing wildlife at the farm continue to live; I would like to pardon them all.”
What? Had he forgotten that he had signed into law this year a bill repealing last year’s wildlife privatization law and providing for the destruction of the moose and deer in the compound (except Pete)? Was he cutting the legs out from under the Fish & Wildlife Department and Berry, whom he had appointed commissioner?
No. Shumlin didn’t say that on Monday. He said it last February, and immediately issued a correction acknowledging that the wild animals which had gotten into the compound would have to be destroyed for fear they might spread CWD into the wild herd.
Channel 3 was not being duplicitous here. At the beginning of Shumlin’s remarks, the tape displayed a “February, 2011” label. But the station was being incompetent, and not just because by the time the governor got to “I would like to pardon them all,” the label had faded away, no doubt leading some viewers to think the remarks were new.
Worse, there was no point at all in including that quote. It is not and never has been Shumlin’s policy, as he made clear a few hours after he said it last February. Putting it on the air Monday was simply gratuitous.
But politically and journalistically, that’s what this whole Pete business has been. Gratuitous.
