Ignoring animal cruelty is the same thing as accepting it

“The standard you walk past is the standard you accept,” entered the mainstream in 2013 after David Hurley used the aphorism in a speech to call out the rampant mistreatment of women in the Australian military.

Pretend it didn’t happen, or confront it? The question Hurley wanted his audience to contend with echoed around the globe because it’s applicable in so many situations. 

And it’s a question Wyoming needs to ask itself right now. We are about to walk past something obscene. Coyote and wolf mashing, in all likelihood, will continue to be legal in Wyoming. The activity of ‘yote mashing involves deliberately running over a listed predator with a snowmobile. It came into view after Cody Roberts, a Daniel man who’s done contract work for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, ran down a wolf. He displayed the injured animal in a western Wyoming bar and then killed it. Roberts was fined $250 for his trouble. Outrage flooded Wyoming from around the world, but as Mike Koshmrl’s recent WyoFile report makes clear, state lawmakers don’t have the political will to do more to deter animal cruelty particularly when it involves a stigmatized wildlife species.

It appears that some key legislators and other stakeholders have decided it is too tricky to address the central issue raised by the Roberts’ episode: whether deliberate ‘yote mashing should be made illegal. 

Instead, a subcommittee of Wyoming’s Joint Travel, Recreation, Wildlife and Cultural Resources Committee crafted language at a June 25 meeting in Lander to address one of the sport’s complications: Not all animals rammed and run over by a snowmobile die expeditiously. 

A very Wyoming solution is in draft legislative language proposed by Jim Magagna of the Treatment of Predators Working Group, an offshoot of the legislative committee:

“Any person who intentionally directly injures or disables a predatory animal by use of a vehicle, snowmobile or other ground-based mobile device shall immediately make a good faith effort to euthanize the injured or disabled predatory animal.”

It reminds me of a George Carlin joke. Older readers of WyoFile may remember when Muhammad Ali was punished for claiming conscientious objector status during our war on Vietnam. Ali’s punishment was to be stripped of his passport and his boxing license. Carlin’s joke was that Ali was willing to beat people up but he drew the line at killing them.

Here, the legislative committee seems to say, it is acceptable and perhaps useful to run down native predators. Just don’t let them suffer too long afterwards, and then only if you can. It is Wyomingese for: Mash them a second time.

For all the talk about ‘yote mashing, the legislative committee has never publicly shown what it looks like. In 2019, a video of several chase episodes was sent to Wyoming Department of Agriculture Director Doug Miyamoto.. It was ignored. If legislators are going to bless this activity in your name, it’s important for the public to see what it involves from the seat of a snowmobile.

I encourage readers to watch a Zoom recording of the June 25 meeting of the treatment of predators working group. It tells you all you need to know about our state’s complacency toward animal abuse, the manufactured contempt for native predators, and the ranching industry’s dominance in Wyoming. 

Our cruelty is hot-branded in our culture.

If I were to choose which is more pornographic, the chase video from Koshmrl’s piece or the predator working group’s lack of compassion, I propose the latter.

We need to stop walking by.