Ranchers Face Wolves at the Gate
The Diamond M ranch sits on the Kettle River in northeast Washington State, close enough to the Canadian border that a well-thrown rock might hit a range-riding Mountie and cause an international incident. It is a frontiersman’s dream: acres of prairie surrounded by wooded areas with the pristine Kettle River flowing through the middle of it. It’s an idyllic rural place where rough-hewn cowboys, who love the land as if it were family, gently tend their cattle. It hardly seems the place for a thing as dirty as a political battle.
But a bloody political battle — complete with actual death threats — is exactly what the McIrvin and Hedrick families who ranch the land are embroiled in. They are engaged with people who care little for truth and care even less for freedom. Environmentalist mobsters have targeted the family business because, sometimes, necessary action entails thinning the wolf pack in a lethal manner. And when even a single wolf is killed, environmentalists go predictably insane.
“We get a lot of death threats. My wife had to stop answering the phone,” said Len McIrvin, the patriarch of the family that runs the Diamond M. “They say it would be better if you were dead than a wolf…. Another call comes in that said, ‘If you’d like your kids to come home on the school bus, you’d better leave the wolves alone.’”
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