Durango, Colorado — Friends of Animals (FoA) continues our international boycott against Alaska’s $2 billion tourist industry as aerial gunners have now killed 131 wolves with semiautomatic weapons. Gunners killed 112 wolves in the Nelchina Basin region and 19 in the McGrath region.

Advocates will gather in the Union Building lobby of Ft. Lewis College this Friday, March 26, 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. A second Howl-in will be held Friday night, 8 p.m. – 10 p.m. at the Diamond Circle Theatre on Main Ave.

Howl-Ins are protests where the public can sign postcards pledging to boycott travel to Alaska until the killing is stopped.

“People abhor the Alaska government’s decision to do this,” said Lynne Bruzzese, an attorney organizing FoA’s 122nd howl-in at Ft. Lewis College. “Entire environmental classes have signed postcards.” 80,000 FoA postcards, as well as countless letters, faxes, emails, and phone calls from North Americans and citizens all over the globe, pledge to boycott the state.

March 14 editorial in The New York Times called aerial-shooting “extremist,” and the decision of Gov. Frank Murkowski and his administration “the savagery of humans.”

Murkowski ignores Alaskans, who voted twice — in 1996 and 2000 — to end aerial shooting. Yet Alaska’s Board, with the governor’s approval, recently doubled the “control” area around McGrath from 1,728 square miles to 3,588 square miles, and added additional areas encompassing about 20,000 square miles. The Board also quietly reduced the no-hunting or trapping buffer zone outside Denali National Park, leaving it sorely inadequate for Denali’s wolves. Furthermore, the board added bears to their aerial-killing prey.

“Expanding the killing field exposes the reality that there is a smaller number of wolves in the original area than the state’s biologists had asserted,” says Priscilla Feral, president of Friends of Animals. “We denounce the ethical poverty associated with the killing of each wolf.”