Why do Republicans in Washington, D.C., want to kill bear cubs and wolf pups? 

I know, that line probably sounds alarmist and blindly partisan. But please stick with me, because it’s worth trying to understand what’s behind a raft of efforts to peel away protections for grizzly bears, wolves, and bald eagles. 

Since the inauguration, the Trump administration and Republicans on Capitol Hill have pushed several ideas that would put wildlife, including endangered species, at greater risk. The most wantonly (and weirdly) cruel initiative would repeal restrictions on carnivore hunting in wildlife refuges in Alaska. In August 2016, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a rule that, among other things, put an end to the airborne hunting of wolves, bears, and wolverines; prohibited the use of traps and snares for killing bears and banned bear baiting; restricted the killing of bear cubs and mothers with cubs; and outlawed the practice of killing wolf pups in their dens. The Alaskan delegation didn’t like those new rules, so Representative Don Young and Senator Dan Sullivan have pushed Congress to use the Congressional Review Act to reverse the agency’s rule. 

The measure to repeal the hunting restrictions passed the House in a party-line vote in February. On Tuesday, the Senate approved the measure on a 52-to-47 vote that broke almost exactly along party lines. 

Senator Sullivan says the Fish and Wildlife Service rule is an infringement on the rights of Alaskans. The rule, he said when it was put in place last year, “severely restricts the state of Alaska’s efforts to sustainably manage wildlife and minimizes the participation of Alaskans in future decisions affecting the use of its refuges.” Others see it differently. The Humane Society of the U.S. says aerial hunting is nothing short of “despicable” and “barbaric.” 

At the same time, House and Senate Republicans are maneuvering to water down the Endangered Species Act, a bedrock of American conservation law. No fewer than 11 bills have been introduced that would weaken the ESA. The Listing Reform Act would prevent the federal government from considering ESA proposals based on the urgency of how close a species is to extinction. The Federal Freedom Land Act, sponsored by well-known climate science denier Senator James Inhofe, would exempt oil and gas operations on public land from ESA requirements. 

Meanwhile, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has moved to roll back other wildlife protections. On his first day in office, Zinke signed a memorandum that repealed an Obama administration rule restricting the use of lead ammunition on federal lands. Lead shot is obviously lethal to any animal on the receiving end—and it can also cause a kind of wildlife collateral damage. When scavengers like bald eagles or endangered California condors feed on carcasses containing lead ammunition, they can get sick—to the point of death—from lead poisoning. According to one study, up to 30 percent of eagles that have been killed in the last 30 years have died due to lead poisoning. 

Although Zinke says the move is about defending the rights of hunters, this has little to do with hunters’ rights. The Sierra Club supports lawful hunting and fishing, and sportsmen and anglers are among the most energetic and effective conservation advocates. One doesn’t need to use dangerous lead bullets to take a white-tailed deer. While copper-tipped and other nonlead ammo are more expensive than traditional lead ammo, some hunter groups say it’s worth it to make the switch. Zinke’s rule change does nothing for hunters while unnecessarily putting wildlife at risk. 

The effort to repeal the carnivore-hunting restrictions, the guerilla campaign against the Endangered Species Act, and the erasure of the lead ammunition rule have left wild advocates fuming. 

“This is not rational. This is not how we manage wildlife in this country,” Jamie Rappaport Clark, the CEO of Defenders of Wildlife and the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service in the second half of the Clinton administration, told me. “We don’t target sows and cubs. We don’t target [wolf] packs right after denning season. And we don’t target carnivores, which hold these ecosystems together. This is not informed wildlife management.” 

If, as Rappaport Clark argues, the latest congressional and administrative rollbacks of wildlife protections are unhinged from the best available science, then what, exactly, is motivating the anti-wildlife agenda? 

Utah representative Rob Bishop—the dark id of conservative thinking about environmental protection—offered a glimpse into the Republican world view when, in January, he told the Associated Press that the ESA “has never been used for the rehabilitation of species. It’s been used for control of the land.” Bishop is right—though not in the way he might think. The ESA is about land management, simply because we can’t save a species without protecting its habitat—which is to say, the land it lives on. 

More often than not, questions of land management set up a conflict of interests. Just look at the controversy over protecting the greater sage grouse, which pitted oil and gas interests against wildlife conservation groups. In many places, a zero-sum game is at work: We can have oil and gas drilling (with all of its roads and noise and lights and other disruptions), or we can have ecological integrity, habitat connectivity, and stable wildlife populations. But we can’t have it all. For many Republicans, oil and gas development trumps wildlife; the animals are expendable. 

Beyond these economic considerations, there is, I think, a deeper ideology at work. Wild animals—especially apex carnivores like grizzly bears and wolves—pose a threat to humans’ desire to command and control the environment. While the instinct for environmental domination runs throughout our culture, it seems especially strong among political conservatives, whose world view tilts toward authoritarian impulses. (By way of evidence, see here, here, and here; in short, while liberals’ political ideology is centered on empathy and fairness, conservatives prize authority and hierarchy.) One of the clearest examples of how a desire for control translates into a dislike of predators is the long-running conservative antipathy toward wolves. Such antipathy was infamously illustrated by Secretary Zinke’s 2011 Christmas card, which featured a dead wolf splayed over his Santa sleigh. While bragging about bagging a wolf struck some people as tasteless, conservatives ate it up, with one conservative website describing it as a “pile of awesomeness.” 

“It’s the whole human domination thing—predators and animals with fur and teeth scare people,” Rappaport Clark said. “They are thinking about controlling them and getting them out of the way. They are not thinking about the role of predators in a healthy dynamic ecosystem. I can tell you, wolves should be more afraid of people than people should be afraid of wolves.”  

The new GOP approach to wildlife in the United States is the logic of the schoolyard bully: If you can shoot bears from a helicopter, go for it. If wildlife pose an obstacle to oil wells and mines, get them out of the way. If killing wolf pups in their dens will bolster populations of game animals like moose, the wolves have got to go. 

Sure, as the most powerful species on the planet, we humans can do as we please. But there’s no honor in that, and not much grace, either. The policy attacks against animals are an unattractive spectacle, like watching the biggest kid on the block punch down. We as a nation can do much better than that.