Word: arnett
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Much of the environmental community would also prefer to keep Arnett out in the woods. He is not only supervisor of the Fish and Wildlife Service but is also in charge of enforcing the Endangered Species Act. Though Arnett is a former president of the National Wildlife Federation, the country's largest conservation organization, many environmentalists feel he has allowed his zest for hunting to get in the way of protecting nongame animals. Says Wildlife Specialist Michael Bean of the Environmental Defense Fund: "Arnett figures that if it isn't worth shooting or trapping or putting a hook...
...part, Arnett encourages such animosity with his cantankerous, profane, macho manner. Even a hunting pal, Dale Whitesell, executive vice president of Ducks Unlimited, a national conservation organization, admits, "Where James Watt would never say a four-letter word, Ray would say every one you ever heard and some you haven't." Arnett, a Californian who headed that state's department of fish and game for seven years, likes to twit his environmentalist foes, calling them "tree huggers," "Chicken Little extremists" and "prairie fairies." Some months ago, he supported a tax on the binoculars, books and film used...
...addition to his anachronistic "bwana, great white hunter" image, as Wildlife Federation Executive Vice President Jay Hair derisively puts it, environmentalists have substantive differences with Arnett. Under his auspices, the Fish and Wildlife Service openly talks of encouraging the hunting of wolves, mountain lions and other endangered predators. Arnett backs a bill that would open up millions of acres of national park land in Alaska to hunters. Like Watt, he has also promoted oil and gas drilling, grazing and lumbering in the national wildlife refuges...
Perhaps the most emotional issue involving Arnett is his unyielding stand on the fatal ingestion by waterfowl of spent lead shotgun pellets that hunters scatter in marshlands. Hair, a wildlife biologist, and other environmentalists say that the lead-shot toll may be as high as 4 million ducks annually. They contend that the deaths could be avoided by switching to steel pellets. Arnett's answer: "It's not that easy." Accepting the argument of many hunters that the lighter steel pellets have less stopping power and that consequently more ducks would be injured, he has cut back...
...Arnett's convictions have made the 60-year-old former oil company geologist, who won a battlefield commission in the Marines during World War II, a hero to his fellow hunters. In Arnett, says National Rifle Association President Howard Pollock, who shares a Virginia apartment with his divorced buddy, "the hunter, the outdoorsman, the fisherman have a real champion." Adds Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska: "Ray's done a damn good job. Those extreme environmental groups were spoiled under President Carter. They never paid any attention to hunters." In fact, even some environmentalists give the flamboyant Arnett...