Word: arnett
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...Americans would benefit if G. Ray Arnett, the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks [ENVIRONMENT, April 16], would put down his gun and pick up a golf club...
That we have a man like Arnett in a position of power over our endangered species is the fault of the insensitive and unenlightened President who put him there...
Perhaps the most emotional issue involving Arnett is his unyielding stand on the fatal ingestion by waterfowl of spent lead shotgun pellets that hunters scatter in marshlands. Hair, a wildlife biologist, and other environmentalists say that the lead-shot toll may be as high as 4 million ducks annually. They contend that the deaths could be avoided by switching to steel pellets. Arnett's answer: "It's not that easy." Accepting the argument of many hunters that the lighter steel pellets have less stopping power and that consequently more ducks would be injured, he has cut back...
...Arnett's convictions have made the 60-year-old former oil company geologist, who won a battlefield commission in the Marines during World War II, a hero to his fellow hunters. In Arnett, says National Rifle Association President Howard Pollock, who shares a Virginia apartment with his divorced buddy, "the hunter, the outdoorsman, the fisherman have a real champion." Adds Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska: "Ray's done a damn good job. Those extreme environmental groups were spoiled under President Carter. They never paid any attention to hunters." In fact, even some environmentalists give the flamboyant Arnett...
...Arnett, to be sure, does not see himself as crusty or contentious. Nor, he insists, does he like to get into shouting or shooting matches with his foes. Such squabbling, he says in his best good-ole-boy manner, "is like a pile of horse manure by the side of the road. If you keep stirring it, it will keep stinking and drawing flies. But if you leave it alone, it'll dry and blow away." Alas, in the view of environmentalists, that roadside pile is growing. -By Frederic Golden. Reported by Jay Branegan/Washington