92-lb. (41.82 kg) animal shot October 1, 2006 in Troy, Vermont

Rutland Herald 10/10:

A 92-pound (41.82 kg) canine shot in Troy last October may be the first confirmed wolf to roam the Green Mountains in more than a century, Vermont officials said Tuesday.

A yearlong investigation into the genetic makeup of the large animal, initially mistaken for a coyote, found “a substantial amount of wolf ancestry,” according to John Austin of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department.

“We’re trying to be cautious in how we interpret these results,” Austin said Tuesday. “What the information tells us is that the genetic composition, the size of animal … suggests it’s largely of wolf ancestry.”

The animal, shot by a farmer in a Vermont town along the Canadian border Oct. 1, 2006, could well have been a wolf. But scientists say it likely wasn’t wild. Genetic tests conducted at four laboratories, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s forensics laboratory in Ashland, Ore., traced the ancestry of the animal to two separate and geographically distinct populations of wolves. The animal, according to lab conclusions, was almost certainly bred in captivity.

Peggy Struhsacker, a wolf specialist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, examined the animal after it was shot last October and said Tuesday that laboratory testing supported her initial hunches.

“I looked at all the traits and characteristics of it and believed it was possibly a full wolf or a high-percentage animal because it had all physical characteristics,” Struhsacker said. “That being said, it had too many other characteristics that made me feel it wasn’t a wild wolf.”

The animal’s shoddy coat, uniform nail wear and well-fed gut, she said, all indicated the canine was a domestic pet.

The animal’s origins have significant implications for the state. If the animal was indeed a wild wolf migrating from an existing pack in southern Quebec, it would signal the reappearance of an animal extirpated from the state in the 1800s.

“We’re really interested in trying to determine the origin of large canids when they turn up in New England,” said Kim Royar, a wildlife biologist with the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department. “If it turns out, like the lab suggested, that this animal is of domestic origin, then basically we would assume it had been released into the wild by somebody who had bred it for sale. What we’re interested in is documenting whether there is movement of wolves from wild populations … in eastern Canada down to New England.”

Royar said the state has no evidence that such movement has occurred, though reports of wild wolves in Maine and New Hampshire suggest wolf populations may be crossing into the northeastern United States.

Michael Amaral, endangered species specialist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the discovery should signal a warning to hunters in the state. The wolf is protected by the federal Endangered Species Act and hunters who shoot them, mistakenly or intentionally, he said, face stiff fines.

“Gray wolves, even if they are of captive origin, are a protected species,” Amaral said. “I think the important message for Vermont’s hunters is it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that wolves can get to northern Vermont from existing wolf populations in Canada.”

Charlie Hammond, the man who shot the wolf in Troy, won’t be prosecuted, according to Amaral.

“Because it appears that this animal was of domestic origin … and other circumstances, we are not prosecuting in this case,” Amaral said.

Steve Mcleod is executive director of the Vermont Traditions Coalition, an organization that lobbies on behalf of hunters, farmers and other groups opposed to the reintroduction of the gray wolf to Vermont. He said a resurgence of the animal in the state would signal the decline of deer populations.

“There would be a deer slaughter that would result,” Mcleod said. “The white tail deer is the signature species of Vermont and it would really drastically change the balance of deer in the state over time.”

Austin said the department will have to pinpoint the origin and genetic makeup of the animal before it can fully understand the implications the discovery has for Vermont.

“What we haven’t done is ask an objective wildlife genetics expert … to help us understand what all this information now means to us,” Austin said. “What are the implications of that to wildlife conservation in Vermont? We’re going to work hard to get those answers.”

Vermont Fish & Wildlife Report

A 72 lb. (32.66 kg.) canine was shot in Glover, Vermont in 1997. DNA testing found it was of Gray wolf (Canis lupus) mixed with possibly coyote and domestic dog.

Reports of sightings of unfamiliar canines in Androscoggin County, Maine go back to 1991, and just over a year ago a canine thought to fit the descriptions found in previous accounts killed by an automobile on Route 4 in that county was photographed.

AP:

In an unlikely marriage of desire to secede from the United States, two advocacy groups from opposite political traditions — New England and the South — are sitting down to talk.

Tired of foreign wars and what they consider right-wing courts, the Middlebury Institute wants liberal states like Vermont to be able to secede peacefully.

That sounds just fine to the League of the South, a conservative group that refuses to give up on Southern independence.

“We believe that an independent South, or Hawaii, Alaska, or Vermont would be better able to serve the interest of everybody, regardless of race or ethnicity,” said Michael Hill of Killen, Ala., president of the League of the South.

Separated by hundreds of miles and divergent political philosophies, the Middlebury Institute and the League of the South are hosting a two-day Secessionist Convention starting Wednesday in Chattanooga.

They expect to attract supporters from California, Alaska and Hawaii, inviting anyone who wants to dissolve the Union so states can save themselves from an overbearing federal government.

If allowed to go their own way, New Englanders “probably would allow abortion and have gun control,” Hill said, while Southerners “would probably crack down on illegal immigration harder than it is being now.” …

The first North American Separatist Convention was held last fall in Vermont, which, unlike most Southern states, supports civil unions. Voters there elected a socialist to the U.S. Senate.

Middlebury director Kirpatrick Sale said Hill offered to sponsor the second secessionist convention, but the co-sponsor arrangement was intended to show that “the folks up north regard you as legitimate colleagues.”

“It bothers me that people have wrongly declared them to be racists,” Sale said.

The League of the South says it is not racist, but proudly displays a Confederate Battle Flag on its banner.

Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which monitors hate groups, said the League of the South “has been on our list close to a decade.”

“What is remarkable and really astounding about this situation is we see people and institutions who are supposedly on the progressive left rubbing shoulders with bona fide white supremacists,” Potok said.

Sale said the League of the South “has not done or said anything racist in its 14 years of existence,” and that the Southern Poverty Law Center is not credible.

“They call everybody racists,” Sale said. “There are, no doubt, racists in the League of the South, and there are, no doubt, racists everywhere.”

Harry Watson, director of the Center For the Study of the American South and a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said it was a surprise to see The Middlebury Institute conferring with the League of the South, “an organization that’s associated with a cause that many of us associate with the preservation of slavery.”

He said the unlikely partnering “represents the far left and far right of American politics coming together.”

The Washington Post yesterday reported the latest on the high school history pageant posturings of the moonbat trustafarian invaders of the Green Mountain State.

The winds of secession are blowing in the Green Mountain State.

Vermont was once an independent republic, and it can be one again. We think the time to make that happen is now. Over the past 50 years, the U.S. government has grown too big, too corrupt and too aggressive toward the world, toward its own citizens and toward local democratic institutions. It has abandoned the democratic vision of its founders and eroded Americans’ fundamental freedoms.

Vermont did not join the Union to become part of an empire.

Some of us therefore seek permission to leave.

A decade before the War of Independence, Vermont became New England’s first frontier, settled by pioneers escaping colonial bondage who hewed settlements across a lush region whose spine is the Green Mountains.

All this 18th century folderol is pretty rich coming from a gang of tree-hugging, goat-milking hippies, who are about as popular with the real Vermonters as the Spring black flies.

But personally I hope they succeed with all this pretentious silliness. When they leave they’ll have to take Bernie Sanders and Jim Jeffords with them. Who knows? Maybe they can start a trend, and California will follow.

One of the banes of country life in recent decades has been the arrival in Paradise of the urbanite seeking the rural life style, but who brings his urban attitudes and outlook with him, including the fortress mentality. As soon as the ink dries on the deed to his five acres, up goes the No Trespassing / No Hunting signs.

The aboriginal Yankees in Vermont have found a solution to thwart the inclination of flatlanders to wall off passage to their neighbors. As the Wall Street Journal reports, they are resurrecting town claims to forgotten (“sleeping”) roads.

Vermont has scores of old public roads that haven’t been used as such for decades and haven’t been kept up. Some resemble paths through the woods or private driveways, while others, at least to the casual observer, are indistinguishable from their surroundings. Now, with more retirees and second-home buyers acquiring Vermont real estate, some towns are rushing to stake claims to these “sleeping roads.”

Disputes center on differing perceptions of public and private property here. Known for its woodlands and rolling hills, Vermont has vast networks of trails, some of which run through people’s land. And Vermonters have a long tradition of letting people pass through their property for snowmobiling, hunting, hiking, and other forms of recreation. Locals worry that some of the outsiders now moving to the state are less open to that idea and are too fond of no-trespassing signs.

Some Vermonters are helping to guard this trail network by combing through old records to show that some of these roads are, in fact, still public. The Vermont Association of Snow Travelers, which represents about 38,000 snowmobilers, has been giving PowerPoint presentations to members on how to compare road atlases from the 1850s with today’s highway maps to find roads that might have gotten lost over the years.

That alarms some property owners and has spooked the state’s biggest title insurer, which threatened to stop writing policies in three towns where a number of old-road cases have cropped up.

Some folks think those land-posting flatlanders have a certain amount of highbindery of this kind coming to them.

In Burlington, Vermont, the progress of leftist dementia is so extreme that one Judge Edward Cashman sentenced the confessed rapist of a seven year old girl to a punishment of 60 days in prison, stating that he no longer believes in punishment.

There was outrage Wednesday when a Vermont judge handed out a 60-day jail sentence to a man who raped a little girl many,many times over a four-year span starting when she was seven.

The judge said he no longer believes in punishment and is more concerned about rehabilitation.

Prosecutors argued that confessed child-rapist Mark Hulett, 34, of Williston deserved at least eight years behind bars for repeatedly raping a little girl countless times starting when she was seven.

But Judge Edward Cashman disagreed explaining that he no longer believes that punishment works.

“The one message I want to get through is that anger doesn’t solve anything. It just corrodes your soul,” said Judge Edward Cashman speaking to a packed Burlington courtroom. Most of the on-lookers were related to a young girl who was repeatedly raped by Mark Hulett who was in court to be sentenced.

The sex abuse started when the girl was seven and ended when she was ten. Prosecutors were seeking a sentence of eight to twenty years in prison, in part, as punishment.

The prosecutorial proposal was far too lenient as well. He should have been hanged, and left hanging for 60 days for the crows.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

Since the late 1960s, Vermont, home of Calvin Coolidge and other rock-ribbed Republicans, has found its natural beauty a mixed blessing. The Granite State’s bucolic charms, its green mountains and Christmas card village greens, have attracted a major wave of immigration from the flatlands, bringing to Vermont the equivalent of an invasion of Californians. Vermonter Stephen Morris reports on a recent florescence of exotic political life forms.

In the post-1960s, Vermont, renowned in earlier times for laconic Yankee individualists, became a favored refuge for counter-cultural escapees from more densely populated states located to its south. Today, Vermont is more commonly identified with Ben & Jerry than Calvin Coolidge, and native Vermonters, derisively referred to as “chucks” (as in woodchuck), are regularly outvoted by recent immigrants, spoken of pejoratively in Vermont as “flatlanders.” The once most paradigmatically Republican state in the Union is currently represented in Congress by an Independent self-acknowledged socialist. Carried away by animosity toward the current administration in Washington, a portion of the Vermont flatlander population is talking secession.

‘Vermont still provides a communitarian alternative to the dehumanized mass production, mass consumption, narcissistic lifestyle which pervades most of the United States,” said Thomas Naylor, a former Duke University economics professor who retired to Vermont and has written a book called ”The Vermont Manifesto — The Second Vermont Republic.”

”Vermont is smaller, more rural, more democratic, less violent, less commercial, more egalitarian, and more independent than most states,” Naylor said. ”It offers itself as a kinder, gentler metaphor for a nation obsessed with money, power, size, speed, greed, and fear of terrorism.”