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Safari Club International lobbyist
to head U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service
WASHINGTON D.C.––U.S. Interior Secretary Gail Norton on March
17 appointed former Safari Club International chief lobbyist Matthew J.
Hogan to be acting director of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, succeeding
Steve Williams, who resigned a week earlier.
Williams resigned hours after formally admitting that the Fish & Wildlife
Service used incomplete and misleading data on Florida panther movements
in assessing several high profile land use applications. Most involved
projects favored by Florida Governor Jeb Bush, younger brother of President
George W. Bush.
“Dan Ashe, the service’s top science adviser and a member of
the review panel, said the agency relied too much on data collected only
in late morning hours to establish the panthers’ home range. Panthers
are most active at dawn and dusk,” explained John Heilprin of Associated
Press.
“The agency announced it would revise documents that understated
the panther’s habitat and painted an over-optimistic picture of its
prospects,” added Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel staff writer David
Fleshler. “The review [of panther research] came after an agency
biologist, Andrew Eller, filed a petition last May under the federal Data
Quality Act accusing the agency of knowingly using flawed data to rubber-stamp
eight construction projects in panther habitat.”
Eller was fired, purportedly for missing deadlines, in November 2004.
The Hogan appointment signaled that White House wise-users were anything
but chastened. Both George W. Bush and his father, former President George
H. Bush, are life members of Safari Club International, while Jeb Bush
has consistently favored Safari Club political positions.
“SCI has made a name for itself as one of the most extreme and elite
trophy hunting organizations, representing some 40,000 wealthy trophy
collectors, fostering and promoting competitive trophy hunting on five
continents,” responded the Humane Society of the U.S. “SCI members
shoot prescribed lists of animals to win so-called Grand Slam and Inner
Circle titles. To complete all 29 award categories, a hunter must kill
a minimum of 322 separate species and subspecies––enough to
populate a large zoo. “
Because completing some of the most elite lists involves killing animals
who are listed as endangered or threatened, HSUS continued, “SCI
members have even tried to circumvent federal laws to import their trophies.
Prominent SCI hunter Kenneth E. Behring,” for example, “donated
$100 million to the Smithsonian Institution and according to published
reports, tried to get the museum’s help in importing a rare Kara
Tau argali sheep which he shot in Kazakhstan and had shipped to a Canadian
taxidermist––one of only 100 Kara Tau argali sheep left in the
world. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, now under Hogan’s watch,
is the agency charged with granting or denying trophy import permits.”
In a similar case, involving feathered artifacts, San Francisco Chronicle
reporter Eric Rosenberg disclosed on February 17, 2005 that, “More
than a year after he was convicted of violating endangered species laws,
Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lawrence M. Small is still negotiating
with the Justice Department over exactly what kind of ‘community
service’ he must perform as part of his sentence. The Smithsonian’s
chief executive wants to use the 100-hour punishment to lobby Congress
to change the ‘outmoded’ laws he violated.”
Federal investigators found that Small’s 1,000-piece artifact collection
“held at least 219 items containing feathers protected under the
Endangered Species Act, the Convention on Intentional Trade in Endangered
Species, and/or the Migratory Bird Treaty Act,” Rosenberg wrote.
“Small was sentenced to two years’ probation and community service,
and was ordered to apologize in newspapers and the National Geographic,”
but Smithsonian spokesperson Linda St. Thomas said none of the publications
printed the apology.
As well as using museum collection permits as cover for importing hunting
trophies, which may then remain with the hunters on “loan,”
hunters often claim income tax deductions for “donations” of
trophies to museums at inflated values.
“One of the more active appraisers is Robert Bruce Duncan, founder
of the Chicago Appraisers Association,” Washington Post staff writer
Marc Kaufman disclosed on April 5, 2005, as U.S. Senate finance committee
chair Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) convened a hearing on trophy imports
and tax fraud.
“Duncan was sentenced to 10 months in prison and fined $47,000 in
1991 for helping to place mounts of illegally hunted endangered animals
in the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences,” recounted Kaufman.
“His Chicago Appraisers brochure explains how to ‘Hunt for Free.’
It goes on to say, ‘If you write and tell us where you are going,
we’ll suggest what extra animals to take and donate for tax savings.
We’ll then send you a written guarantee that we have a museum to
accept them upon your return.”
As many as 800 trophy pelts and mounts per year have been donated to the
Wyobraska Wildlife Museum, in Gering, Nebraska, which auctions most of
them off.
“Records show that in 2000, Wyobraska took in mounts worth $1.4 million,”
Kaufman wrote. “In 2004, museum curator Mike Boone said, the value
of donations grew to more than $5 million, even though display rooms and
storage containers were already overflowing.”
Boone admitted to undercover investigators from the Humane Society of
the U.S. that “most people donate for the tax write-off,” Kaufman
reported.
Wyobraska in 2003 sold mounts with an appraised value of $4.2 million
for about $67,000, according to IRS Form 990.
Counter to the Bush administration linkage of conservation with trophy
hunting and collecting, and tax write-offs for the rich, Macedonian President
Branko Crvenkovski in January announced that accredited ambassadors would
no longer be invited to shoot boar, deer, wolves, and bears in the Matka
forest.
Instead, they are asked now to plant symbolic trees, herbs, or flowers
in a newly created Park of Tolerance in Skopje, the national capital.
The idea was quickly endorsed by Donato Chiarini, the European Commission
chief delegate to Macedonia.
