McCain Sees Pork Where Scientists See Success

Video

USGS Northern Divide Bear Project

This video footage was recorded between 2005 and 2007 at a bear rub tree in Glacier National Park. This clip shows a grizzly bear vigorously rubbing on a tree regularly used by other bears.

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He has criticized the $2 million spent on Oregon's Groundfish Disaster Outreach Program, the $280,000 spent on asparagus technology in Washington state, the $600,000 for peanut research in Alabama.

"One of our all-time favorites, made famous a number of years ago, is money that was spent to study the effect on the ozone layer of flatulence in cows," McCain said in 2003. "One always wondered about the testing procedures used to determine those effects on the ozone layer."

For McCain, bears have been, like cows and peanuts and asparagus, good material.

But he didn't try to block the grizzly funding by offering an amendment to remove it from the 2003 appropriations bill. And ultimately he voted for the bill.

A Senate aide to McCain said the senator objects to the way that pork -- which he views as money not requested by the administration or properly authorized by Congress -- is slipped into bills via add-ons and earmarks. "Senator McCain does not question the merits of these projects; it's the process that he has a problem with," the aide said.

The Dangers of Collecting Hair

Kendall put together a study area of 12,127 square miles, dividing the territory into 640 cells, each about five miles square. Her plan called for workers and volunteers to go into each cell with bait and barbed wire and set up several hair traps. Moreover, they had to revisit each cell three times, collecting hair and relocating the traps.

Can't be done, some researchers thought.

"How are you going to get back there to do it?" wondered Wayne Kasworm, a bear expert with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "You have to go back to these places multiple times."

As a woman in a male-dominated field, Kendall was used to being underestimated. But she also thought of all the things that could go wrong. She would be sending people to places 30 miles from the nearest road. And they'd be carrying bear bait.

The stuff reeked to high heaven. Her recipe: Dump cattle blood and whole fish into separate 55-gallon drums and age for a year. Then blend fish with a sheetrock mud mixer. Strain fish solids from liquid, and mix liquid with the rotten blood.

"It is difficult to convey the stench of this operation to anyone that was not there," Kendall reports.

The bottles of bait sometimes get hot and explode upon opening. Jeff Stetz, Kendall's deputy, has had bear bait sprayed in his face, which quickened his step on the way back to civilization.