"The Human Hunter"

By: Katie McCollum
In a surprising article today in the New York Times by Kirk Johnson, "In the Wild, a Big Threat to Rangers: Humans, it tells the story of how the hunter, the human, is the one to be threatened by; with two recent shootings of wildlife officers, one dead and the other seriously wounded. The one who was killed was in Pennsylvania while confronting an illegal hunter, the second man in Utah at a traffic stop. This has only emphasized what rangers and wildlife managers say is "an increasingly unavoidable fact." With each person confronted in the woods areas, they will, if not definitely, most likely have a gun. Under a law enacted by Congress in 2009, guns became legal in many National Parks this year. It can be imagined by many that a lot of the time it is lonely searching through these large distances alone, and many say it is all about "gut instinct," knowing when to run away. In response to the danger put on rangers and wildlife employees, there has been new equipment and training, along with the addition of tasers in some parks since 2007. What is scary, really, is in mist of the Utah case, the gunman still has not been caught, and these acts are situations that rangers have to come across everyday; checking licenses and maintaining the parks.