In a statement, Steve Owens, EPA assistant administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said:

EPA today denied a petition submitted by several outside groups for the agency to implement a ban on the production and distribution of lead hunting ammunition. EPA reached this decision because the agency does not have the legal authority to regulate this type of product under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) – nor is the agency seeking such authority.

House Natural Resources Committee ranking Republican Doc Hastings (Wash.) criticized the effort earlier today, arguing that any effort by the agency to consider the petition was the latest “attack on rural America” by the Obama administration.

EPA has opened the petition for public comment, though the agency does not appear to have weighed in on its validity. (A call to EPA for comment was not immediately returned.) In a statement, House Natural Resources Committee ranking Republican Doc Hastings (Wash.) says the effort is the latest “attack on rural America” by the Obama administration. According to Hastings:

This potential ban on lead bullets is another massive power grab by the EPA and the latest example of the Obama Administration’s assault on Rural America.  Mandating non-lead bullets will greatly increase costs for hunters, sport shooters and fishermen and deal a devastating blow to the outdoor sportsmen and recreation industry during these difficult economic times.  The EPA’s job-killing policies are threatening the livelihood of millions of Americans across the country.

The Center for Biological Diversity (as well as the American Bird Conservancy and others) filed a petition to EPA Aug. 3 asking the agency “to revise rules governing toxic substances to ban the manufacture, processing and distribution in commerce of lead shot, bullets, and fishing sinkers.”

In the petition, they groups cite the potential negative health side effects of lead:

Based on information extending back to Roman times more than 2,000 years ago, lead has long been identified as a highly toxic substance with lethal properties and numerous pathological effects on living organisms. Health effects from lead exposure can run the gamut from acute, paralytic poisoning and seizures to subtle, long-term mental impairment, miscarriage and impotence.

“Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama go head-to-head in the October issue of Field & Stream as they compete for the decisive sportsmen’s vote in the upcoming election,” the announcement read. “With over 38 million Americans identifying themselves as outdoorsmen, issues such as conservation, Second Amendment rights and the candidates’ personal histories as hunters and fishermen will play a pivotal role in shaping the minds of voters this November. Historically, sportsmen tend to vote more based on the issues, rather than party affiliation, making it a critical demographic in this contested presidential election.“

Um, yeah. Those of you who have read my contributions to the TWI blog know I come from this demographic, or at least grew up with it. I can recall with some exactness a conversation at the barbershop that my barber, Ray, had with a customer. The customer said that he had 40 to 50 rabbits over the past week, and intended to give the meat to his preacher.

But before I get snippy, the interviews do deal with serious subjects like conservation and the environment. In my time around both serious hunters and fishermen, I’ve often found that they care a great deal about such issues and have great respect for the environment in which they are engaged. They worry about over-fishing of waters and unfair gaming practices. And they loathe the suburban sprawl that depletes our open spaces and strains our ecology.

Both interviews can be read at www.FieldandStream.com. Now, I can return to drawing up plays to create a better protection bubble for quarterback Carson Palmer and open lanes for his two Pro Bowl wide receivers. They’re playing the Super Bowl champion New York Giants this weekend and I’m determined to set this team straight — whether they like it or not.

This morning I found a disturbing new ad from Defender’s of Wildlife Actionfund in my inbox describing Palin’s enthusiasm for the activity.

According to the accompanying press release, the ad will air in swing states to let voters know about her “extreme” side. The ad includes a mention of Palin’s bizarre bounty plan to award wolf hunters $150 for every severed left foreleg they bring in.

Presumably the bleeding paw wouldn’t be slapped on the governor’s desk, but judging by her office decor, who knows.

Here’s the ad:

Alaska’s Board of Game is a seven-member body that meets throughout the year for purposes of “conservation and development of game resources.” Hunting is an important part of the local culture and attracts tourists. You’d think Palin would find the most qualified people to sit on that board.

In Palin’s judgment, one of the most qualified people she could find was her retired middle-school basketball coach, Lewis D. Bradley.

Palin — known these days by her high school basketball nickname, “Sarah Barracuda” — has frequently described her childhood sports career as a formative experience.

To be fair, on Bradley’s resume (here), he notes that hunting, fishing and carving antlers are special interests of his. He also points out that he is working on a sheep hunting guide book, though the writing progress has stalled since he started remodeling his house.

I checked out the payscale for Board of Game members. It looks like there is an hourly rate of $31, for a job that meets 20-25 times a year, according to the description. Travel expenses are also covered, including a per diem — not that it’s possible to abuse that.

The wolf is an intelligent, handsome creature and, for many visitors to Alaska, an integral part of the state’s wild appeal. Wolves live in complex social structures, mate for life and don’t attack humans — it’s easy to see in them the family resemblance to mankind’s best friend.

That’s what makes it so painful to look at the video of an aerial wolfhunt in Alaska that has been circulating since Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was nominated as Sen. John McCain’s running mate on the Republican ticket.

In a program begun by ex-Gov. Frank Murkowski, and intensified by Palin, Alaska has sponsored the aerial hunting of more than 800 wolves since 2002 — out of a state population of perhaps 9,000. Pilots chase the wolves through the deep snow, sometimes for miles, until the exhausted animals have slowed enough to be blown away with shotguns. Then the plane lands and finishes the job, unless the wounded wolf has managed to crawl into the deep woods to bleed to death in solitude.

Palin, who won office with the support of powerful hunting groups, has intensified the “cull.” She pushed to offer a bounty to hunters who brought in a left wolf paw (lopped off with a chain saw) and extended the kill order to grizzly and black bears — including sows and their cubs. Before a state court ruled the practice illegal, she offered a bounty of $150 for every slain wolf.

Hunting groups support the program, arguing that it increases the availability of game for poor Alaskans, and the sporting chances of hunters like Sarah and Todd Palin themselves, who have their sights set on moose. But wildlife viewing brings far more tourist dollars to the state, where only 14 percent of the population hunts.

Grey wolf (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services)

As John Toppenberg of the Alaskan Wildlife Alliance puts it, the 60,000 square miles where the cull takes place are mainly used by “fat-ass trophy hunters on all-terrain vehicles, not Native peoples who need them for subsistence, with rare exceptions.”

Critics say Palin has shown a strong bias for hunters. Her staff recently wrote a statute that would permit her hand-picked Board of Game, whose seven members all favor killing predators, to operate without written guidelines. Another bill, currently undergoing legal review, would prohibit Alaskans from putting pro-wildlife propositions on the ballot, by declaring wildlife a “state asset” whose fate can be determined only by the state .

To fight a ballot measure against the hunt, Palin’s government spent $400,000 to produce a report countering arguments that the hunt is inhumane and scientifically dubious. Meanwhile, 174 members of the American Society of Mammalogists wrote to Palin, unsuccessfully, to ask her to reevaluate the science.

In 1996 and 2000, Alaskans voted in favor of ballot initiatives to end the aerial hunt. This time, Lt. Governor Sean Parnell put the measure on the primary ballot, ensuring that Republicans — who were turning out in larger-then-usual numbers to vote on their scandal-ridden congressman and senator — would make up the bulk of the voters.

In the Aug. 26 primary, the measure to end aerial predator hunting failed winning only 44 percent of the vote. Parnell’s special assistant, Jason Hooley, said the state was obliged by new statutory language to put the measure on the primary ballot.

Many hunters oppose the aerial kills as cruel and unfair. Interestingly, the stomach-churning film that is circulating on YouTube (it was produced by Defenders of Wildlife), in fact depicts government hunters shooting wolves with tranquilizer darts, in order to study them. “The reality is much more gruesome,” says Toppenberg. “They get hit with buckshot, it goes right through and their blood splatters all over the snow.”

The hunts often take out alpha males, leaving younger animals that don’t know where to make dens or find ungulates at certain times of the year. “Then you have them going into rural villages and eating dogs,” Toppenberg said. “You’re creating wolf problems rather than solving them.”

The program was disturbing enough to have provoked Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) last year to introduce legislation designed to curtail predator-control programs, except as a last resort. Palin denounced the bill, applauding her own programs as “widely recognized for their excellence and effectiveness.”

But Steve Stringham, a wildlife biologist and author of six books about bears, says Alaska has never established what numbers of moose and caribou can be sustained by the environment. If they shoot too many wolves and bears, he noted, “the potential for overgrazing may be high.”

Stringham has lived closely with Alaskan wildlife. He spent the winter of 1972 in the Wrangell Mountains, 100 miles from the nearest grocer. Bagging a moose for eating was a matter of life and death. “In those situations you don’t have a great appreciation for wolves, until you bag your moose. Then you don’t mind the wolves so much.”

He has raised orphaned wolf pups, and had friendly wild wolves sit a few feet away from him. He’s also been out snowshoeing when packs of wolves surrounded him, a harrowing experience. “Part of you is saying to yourself, ‘There’s never been a reported case of wolves attacking and killing a human in North America.’ The other part of you is going, ‘Of course, this wouldn’t be a reported case either.’”

“But trophy hunters were a bigger problem. Before I got my moose I felt like shooting the damn trophy hunters out of the air. “

I reached wildlife biologist Vic Van Ballenberghe on his cellphone in vast Denali National Park, where he’s spent parts of the past 28 years observing moose. Van Ballenberghe is sickened by the atavistic hunting of predators from airplanes, but he’s also worried that willy-nilly wolf slaughter will hurt the moose and caribou.

When moose and caribou get too numerous and overbrowse, the plants don’t grow as well and the resulting food shortage can weaken the animals, leading to disease outbreaks. In the 1970s and ’80s, the slaughter of wolves in the Tanana Flats area, south of Fairbanks, led the moose population to explode from about 2,800 to the current level of 17,000. The moose in that area are sick, Van Ballenberghe said. “We’re waiting for a bad winter and that population will crash.”

The current predator-control program reminds Van Ballenberghe of the 1930s, when Alaskans shot, poisoned and ran down as many wolves and bears as they could. “Blasting wolves from an airplane is not something most people think is a good practice,” he says. “ You can call it anything you want but it’s a pretty ugly business.”

And there’s no convincing evidence that moose or caribou populations are particularly low in most of the area where the hunt is taking place. “Hunters always say there’s not enough game,” said Van Ballenberghe. “No matter how much there is, they always want more.”

In the recent campaign, hunting groups sent fliers to every voter in the state — warning that wolves would kill their dogs, threaten their kids and take food off the table. Some voters found the wording of the initiative confusing.

“We got more than a hundred calls from people who said they’d mistakenly voted the wrong way,” says Toppenberg. Hooley, Parnell’s spokesman, said the wording of the measure had been in place since 2005 and was well-reviewed by its proponents.

Palin’s dismal environmental record makes environmentalists cringe. She’s not convinced that global warming is man-made, sued to stop the listing of polar bears as an endangered species, and moved forward a mining plan that some believe threatens wildlife in Bristol Bay—her daughter’s namesake.

None of this seems to bug Alaskans overmuch. “We’ve got a lot of, ‘Kill them all, let God sort ‘em out’ mentality up here,” says Toppenberg, who was a cop in Colorado before moving to Alaska in the 1990s. “Hopefully, the lower 48 will become aware of the extremeness of Sara Palin’s positions. She’s for cut, kill and drill. Frankly, that’s not even good for tourism.”

To him, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin is tapping into something real when she talks about small towns, and Democrats should be thoughtful in the way they counter her comments.

From Thoma:

When you grow up in a small or mid-sized town, over time you come to realize that people from bigger towns, in general, have a condescending attitude about how and where you grew up. I think it starts to really dawn on you in junior high and high school as you begin interact with kids from bigger cities, and college certainly reinforces this feeling. You couldn’t possibly be up on the latest cool trends, be as sophisticated, be as savvy, etc., as they are because you grew up out in the sticks. People who live in these areas are not, however, fools. They think that the people who think this way – the city boys – lack even the basics of common sense, and certainly aren’t as rugged and tough as the country boys. They’d be lost outside the city. And they don’t think these people have anything to brag about in their own lives, not in a relative sense. They have their share of kids out of wedlock, divorces, drug use, whatever. They have absolutely no reason to feel superior to the rest of America, but yet they do. Or that’s how it feels anyway.

Thoma goes on to explain the importance of the culture of hunting, and the need to acknowledge that:

Learning how to dress a deer in the field is something that happens on a hunting trip with your father, grandfather, uncle, maybe a few of their friends. It’s a family time, a time to bond as “men”, and it’s a tradition that has passed from father to son for as long as you can remember (my mom’s family helped to settle the area of California where I grew up). It’s partly men drinking and telling stories around the fire, partly the serious business of hunting (where alcohol is strictly forbidden). But most importantly it’s a family tradition, something that passes from father to son. You bring deer jerky to school to share with your friends as a symbol that you bagged a deer, that kind of thing. It’s embedded in the culture.

When we make fun of knowing how to field-dress a moose, we are also making fun of the family traditions behind it, and we send the wrong message to this constituency. Sarah Palin will appeal to this group, as well as to all the women who had to stay home while their brothers got to go with dad on these trips. She opens doors for their hopes too. All I’m saying is that as we frame the response to her, we should do our best to understand the nature of the appeal she is making so as to avoid strategies that may backfire. The group they are appealing to doesn’t want Washington’s money, though that never hurts, they want respect. I think it’s that simple, and responses that don’t give this constituency the respect they believe they are due will likely be counterproductive.

Small town values versus the big city elites was a major theme in last night’s speech. Thoma offers some useful cautionary advice on tackling this question in a political campaign.