By Kerin Clark, Wyoming Farm Bureau Federation (Written May 2009)

We live in a desensitized world today.  With all we see on television or ideas we hear people propose it is common for most people to ignore what is happening by having the attitude that “it will never impact me.”

“You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of reality,” Harriet Hageman, attorney for the Wolf Coalition, stated at the May 29 WyFB Foundation Symposium.  “We have got to push back and expose the fact that many of the "environmental" actions that are being taken are destroying our environment!”

“The wolves were brought into this state, not to "recover " an endangered or threatened population, but to stop hunting, and to stop grazing on federal lands,” Hageman continued.  “It took them 17 years from when the idea was first floated (in the late 1970s) to get them here, but they got it done.”

“We have become so desensitized to what is going on.  Bad ideas are thrown against the wall, and then we find that in 15 years they have become a reality.  We need to stop pretending that these radical and ridiculous environmental ideas will never go anywhere.  They will and they have.”

“I file lawsuits and I like what I do, but we have got to take a different approach,” Hageman explained.  “If we want to keep the wolves confined to the geographic area where they were supposed to be, then we are going to have to fight back.”

“We can’t fight back with lawsuits alone,” She continued.  “I can’t win that battle alone. I wish I could.  We have to approach this from a much broader perspective, and expose what the "environmentalists" are actually doing -- which has little to do with protecting our environment.”

“So much of this has nothing to do with science or with protecting a recovered wolf population,” Hageman explained.  “These wolves were brought into Wyoming  and designated as non-essential experimental, which was supposed to mean that you could remove the entire wolf population from Wyoming and there would be no impact to the survivability of the species as a whole .”

“So, how did they become so critical to the larger wolf population that Wyoming should now be required to protect them throughout the whole state?  Through regulatory creep; through changing the rules; through misinformation,” Hageman stated.

“The federal government gets away with this type of thing because people have no idea what our federal government has done to us,” Hageman continued.  “We’ve got to start getting that message out -- that the federal government pulled a fast one in introducing wolves in Wyoming, and we can't let them get away with it again.”

“My message today is that we must do a better job of organizing and  following the model pursued by the environmental groups for the past 40 years,” Hageman stated.  “Everyone in this room is mad at what the federal government has done to us; if the people out there knew what all was going on they would be as mad as you are, and perhaps then we would  have a reality check.”

Editor’s Note:  Visit www.hblawoffice.com to read Harriet Hageman’s and Kara Brighton’s June 27, 2009 article “Wolves, Wyoming and Where We Go From Here.”