Sex Offender Wants to Save Wolves

With friends like these, who needs enemies? An Oakland man is accused to sending death threats to an unnamed California senator if they removed gray wolves from the endangered species list, according to SF Weekly.

He wasn't hard to find: police apprehended Tras Gustav Karlsson Berg while he was busy pleading guilty to arson charges. The former substitute teacher is also a convicted sex offender, having kissed and harassed at least one teenage girl.

His email read, in part, "I'm going to shoot you with a high-powered rifle and bomb your house with poison gas the way wolf hunters do." He was apparently angry that legislators were considering eliminating federal protection for gray wolves. Berg believed that they still needed protection.

This is a difficult thing to say, but maybe the sex offender is on to something. The wolves' habitat continues to shrink, and livestock owners frequently kill the wild animals to prevent predation. They were nearly driven extinct in most areas in the early 1900s, and only gained federal protection in the 1970s.

Despite some successful reintroduction efforts around Yellowstone, their numbers remain worryingly low. Fortunately, they have plenty of more appealing advocates than the death-threatening sex-offending arsonist.