Hunting

Canada's annual seal hunt started Monday, under pressure from a possible European Union ban on imported seal products. The world's largest marine mammal hunt was called "inherently inhumane" this month by a European Parliament committee that endorsed the bill to ban the import of seal products to the 27-member union. Animal rights groups say the hunt is cruel and difficult to monitor and ravages the seal population.

An Idaho Republican gubernatorial hopeful said he was only joking when he said he would buy a license to hunt President Obama. Rex Rammell, a long-shot candidate slated to run against incumbent C.L. "Butch" Otter in the May GOP primary, made the comment at a Republican rally Tuesday in Twin Falls, where talk turned to the state's planned wolf hunt, for which hunters must purchase an $11.50 wolf tag. When an audience member shouted a question...

Vicente Padilla, who revived his career in the Dodgers' run to the National League Championship Series, was treated for a minor self-inflicted gunshot wound in his right leg at a hospital in his native Nicaragua on Tuesday, his agent Adam Katz said. Katz described the incident as a "hunting accident," saying that Padilla was grazed in his right thigh by a bullet. Katz said that Padilla spent 30 to 40 minutes at a hospital and was discharged. "He's fine," Katz said. News reports out of Nicaragua stated that Padilla was hurt at a shooting range.

The gray wolf, virtually exterminated in the West in the early 20th century, will be hunted once again in Idaho beginning today after a successful reintroduction program saw populations of the predator bloom across much of the northern Rocky Mountains. Though a federal judge has been asked to intervene, new state laws call for wolf hunts to begin today in two parts of Idaho, followed by hunts in much of the rest of the state and in Montana later this month. Protected under the federal Endangered Species Act since 1973, when they were nearly extinct in the continental United States, wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and parts of Idaho in the 1990s and have since formed a large number of hunting and breeding packs that are beginning to range as far as Oregon.

With four gray wolves having been killed in Idaho since Sept. 1, a federal judge has cleared the way for legal hunting of the once-endangered predators to proceed. U.S. District Judge Donald W. Molloy in Montana found that there would be no irreparable harm if the limited hunt in that state and Idaho were allowed to go forward. But the judge also wrote that the Fish and Wildlife Service, in continuing to list Wyoming wolves under the Endangered Species Act while delisting them in the two neighboring states, "has distinguished a natural population of wolves based on a political line, not the best available science."

The U.S. is initiating a closed-door negotiation that could open new areas to whale hunting for the first time in decades, part of an attempt to end a long-standing impasse over whaling limits with Japan, the world's most avid whaling nation. The tentative plan, outlined in documents obtained by the Washington Post, seeks to achieve a breakthrough in the dispute that has raged since the International Whaling Commission voted in 1986 to ban commercial whaling.