Killing The Mascots

I thought this was an interesting article. My (third?) cousin was a recent football hero at Timberline High School. He's attending classes at Boise State these days:

Timberline High School student Annie Birch Wright felt a connection to her school’s mascot because it wasn’t just another generic animal.

The mascot is the wolf, which led to a real pack of wolves living in the nearby Boise National Forest being named for, symbolically adopted by and studied at the high school.

“It is just a really cool thing to have,” said Birch Wright, who is a member of the school’s TREE Club, which stands for Teens Restoring Earth’s Environment. “It was a way for students to connect with the environment and wild species, especially because it is a wolf, which is our mascot, and because of how big of a role wolves play in our ecosystem.”

Before Birch Wright and her friends attended Timberline, some previous students even got to go on field trips with their teacher and a wolf tracker near Lowman, where they looked for wolves, listened for their calls, analyzed their scat and urine and followed their prints in the snow.

...Because of COVID-19 precautions and this year’s usually cold and snowy spring, Birch Wright hasn’t yet had the chance to go out tracking wolves from the Timberline pack in the Boise National Forest.

Now, she’s worried she will never get the chance to track her school’s pack. Based on information from a wolf tracker, Jordan told the TREE Club members that pups from the Timberline pack were killed in 2021, in the wake of the Idaho Legislature’s passage of Senate Bill 1211.

The 2021 law allows Idaho hunters to obtain an unlimited number of wolf tags, and it also allows the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to use taxpayer dollars to pay private contractors to kill wolves, including on public lands. Also in 2021, the Idaho Fish and Game Commission expanded the wolf hunting season and hunting and trapping methods.

“When our pack was killed, nobody knew about it at first, but when we were told by Mr. Jordan, it took all of our breath away. It hit hard,” Birch Wright said.