WOLVES dine on moose and caribou, creatures favoured by Alaska's human hunters. Since the number of moose and caribou is falling, hunters are allowed to shoot the competing wolves from the air. The practice, which was common in the 1950s and 1960s, is controversial: often the wolves are chased to exhaustion, then shot when hunters land near the wolves. In 1996 and 2000, Alaska's voters turned down proposals to resume aerial “predator control”. But these votes were reversed in 2003, a move supported by the Board of Game, a citizens' panel with authority over many wildlife decisions.

Aerial wolf-hunting started again late in 2003 and was expanded this winter: around 600 wolves will be killed during the current season. This month, after reviewing several proposals to expand the practice, the Board of Game decided to open up just one area to it, partly because state officials said that it was hard to monitor the current programme.

Aerial wolf-killing is banned in the rest of the country, but it does not lack for supporters in Alaska. Killing wolves costs the state next to nothing: volunteer pilots and hunters perform the task. Alaska's constitution, and the by-laws that govern its Department of Fish and Game, actually require the state to ensure that hunters can find plenty of moose, caribou and other game. Those regulations have their roots in the days before Alaska's statehood, when people hunted for most of their food.

Hunting is still quite popular: about 45,000 of Alaska's 648,800 people buy a moose-hunting permit each year. But the number of hunters is going down, even as the state's population increases. The easy availability of a Costco or Wal-Mart means fewer people must hunt to eat. Even so, an Anchorage man may still roll his mobile home into the country for a few days to get 100lb or so of moose-burgers.

However, shooting one kind of animal so that hunters can shoot another worries a lot of biologists and greens. They are also angry because the state plans to kill about 80 brown bears later this spring. As with wolves, these bears are targeted because they eat moose and caribou in an area where numbers of those animals have declined. But predator control of bears is a first in Alaska, where bears are hunted for sport but have not been killed to improve hunting of moose or caribou.

Vic Van Ballenberghe, a biologist who has studied Alaskan moose for more than two decades, is particularly concerned because bear numbers already seem to be dropping. Bears reproduce slowly, he says, so killing even a few could have large repercussions on the state's population of black, brown and grizzly bears.

There is also the effect on Alaska's tourism, now its second-biggest industry after oil. Around 1.5m people visit the state each summer, many of them coming to see the wolves and bears. This pits those who make a living from taking people to see the animals against those who shoot them.

Tension is particularly high at the McNeil river, 250 miles (400km) south-west of Anchorage, where bears catching spawning salmon draw hundreds of visitors each year. The Board of Game has put off for two years a plan to allow bear-shooting there; it hopes to bully the federal government to open part of Katmai National Park to bear-hunting instead.

Tourists visiting Denali National Park this summer may also be disappointed. There, a group of wolves called the Toklat pack has long been popular with visitors. But in February the Toklat pack wandered a short distance off the park in pursuit of moose, and the “alpha” female was snared and shot. Since then, says Gordon Haber, a biologist who has traced the pack's genetic and social bonds back 40 years, several pack members have returned to look for the female and themselves been caught.

Mr Haber is “over-romanticising” the Toklat wolves, says Jennifer Yuhas, executive director of the Alaska Outdoor Council, a pro-hunting-and-fishing group. It all depends on your point of view. Then again, cars kill some 600 moose in Alaska each year. Time to hunt a few Fords?

Q1--Shooting one kind of animal so that hunters can shoot another--你怎么理解这句话？(中英文均可，说说你的想法)
Q2--缺乏、缺少：lack for/ lack in
Q3--Around 1.5m people visit the state each summer, many of them coming to see the wolves and bears.--只改动2个词，将这句改写成一个非限定性定语从句。
Q4--Then again, cars kill some 600 moose in Alaska each year. Time to hunt a few Fords?--你认为呢？这个类比有道理吗？为什么？