B.C. Premier Christy Clark has responded to Pamela Anderson and Miley Cyrus challenging the province’s wolf cull by mocking their sometimes-skimpy wardrobe choices.
Anderson, a B.C.-born actress and animal rights activist, published an open letter to Clark this week condemning the cull as a cruel and misguided attempt to save dwindling caribou populations.
“Gunning down wolves is not the answer,” she wrote. “Many animals experience prolonged, painful deaths when hunters severely injure but fail to kill them. And hunting disrupts the delicate balance of the ecosystem.”
Anderson shared the letter through her charity, the Pamela Anderson Foundation, a week after pop singer Miley Cyrus used Instagram to raise the wolf cull issue to her 28 million followers.
Clark decided to respond to both women Friday by taking aim at their tendency toward revealing outfits.
“There is another thing they have in common,” Clark said at a press conference Friday. “Both Pamela Anderson and Miley Cyrus, when they open up their closets they probably don’t find a lot of clothes.”
The premier said she believes both celebrities mean well, but suggested they haven’t bothered to learn the justification for the cull.
“We’re trying to defend an endangered species and population of caribou that will go utterly extinct in British Columbia if we don’t do this,” she said. “I just hope that they really work a little to understand the issue.”
In Cyrus’s Instagram post, she directed fans to conservation group Pacific Wild, which has spearheaded opposition to the cull with a petition signed by more than 200,000 people.
The group argues the B.C. government is partly responsible for declining caribou populations because it failed to protect their habitat from logging, mining and oil exploration, and insists similar culls in other provinces have failed.
Anderson told CTV News she agrees the solution to saving the caribou should involve habitat restoration, rather than killing another species.
“Hunting doesn’t resolve the problem,” Anderson said. “It’s the habitat and the forestry that we have to put the money into and create these habitats for the caribou and just not interfere so much.”
She also took issue with the way hunters contracted by the province are targeting wolves from helicopters – a method used to kill 84 wolves from January to April this year.
“Shooting anything from a helicopters, I think that’s the worst way to do it,” she said.
B.C.’s Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources has defended its five-year wolf management program, which launched this year, as a necessary measure to save fast-shrinking caribou herds.
The South Selkirk Mountains herd, for one, has dropped from a population of 46 in 2009 to 18 last year.
The government also said B.C.’s wolf population is plentiful and the animals are “not a species of concern” in the province.
