A Sharpshooter at Interior

By Frederic Golden

The custodian of U.S. wildlife makes the feathers fly

Rising from behind his large wooden desk, G. (for George) Ray Arnett proudly points to the hunting trophies that adorn his Washington office. They include a bobcat skin, the head of a white-tailed deer and a stuffed pheasant. Pausing at a side table, he picks up a two-foot-long bonelike object. "That?" says Arnett, with barely concealed delight. "That's an usuk, the private part of a male walrus. Eskimos use it in their ceremonies as a fertility symbol." Ambling back to his chair, he chuckles: "Some animals are luckier than humans."

Like former Interior Secretary James Watt, his friend and onetime boss, Arnett can seldom resist a wisecrack. Nor is the strapping (6 ft. 5 in.), gregarious Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks shy about his enthusiasm for life in the outdoors. As he showed a visitor around his office, he sported a tie decorated with kangaroos and held in place by an elephant clasp. His 260-lb. frame was partially cloaked by a casual cardigan sweater adorned with a pin that said DUCKS. Says Arnett: "I like the camaraderie of hunting. I like sleeping in tents and sleeping bags. I like the smell of horse manure and horses. If I happen to get a deer, I'm delighted. I'd much rather be sitting in a deer camp than in the President's box at Kennedy Center."

Much of the environmental community would also prefer to keep Arnett out in the woods. He is not only supervisor of the Fish and Wildlife Service but is also in charge of enforcing the Endangered Species Act. Though Arnett is a former president of the National Wildlife Federation, the country's largest conservation organization, many environmentalists feel he has allowed his zest for hunting to get in the way of protecting nongame animals. Says Wildlife Specialist Michael Bean of the Environmental Defense Fund: "Arnett figures that if it isn't worth shooting or trapping or putting a hook in, it probably isn't worth worrying about."

In part, Arnett encourages such animosity with his cantankerous, profane, macho manner. Even a hunting pal, Dale Whitesell, executive vice president of Ducks Unlimited, a national conservation organization, admits, "Where James Watt would never say a four-letter word, Ray would say every one you ever heard and some you haven't." Arnett, a Californian who headed that state's department of fish and game for seven years, likes to twit his environmentalist foes, calling them "tree huggers," "Chicken Little extremists" and "prairie fairies." Some months ago, he supported a tax on the binoculars, books and film used by bird watchers, wildlife photographers and nature lovers, arguing that they should be charged for using the outdoors just as hunters and fishermen are. He makes no secret of where his sympathies lie: when asked once what he liked to hunt, Arnett replied, "Everything."

In addition to his anachronistic "bwana, great white hunter" image, as Wildlife Federation Executive Vice President Jay Hair derisively puts it, environmentalists have substantive differences with Arnett. Under his auspices, the Fish and Wildlife Service openly talks of encouraging the hunting of wolves, mountain lions and other endangered predators. Arnett backs a bill that would open up millions of acres of national park land in Alaska to hunters. Like Watt, he has also promoted oil and gas drilling, grazing and lumbering in the national wildlife refuges.

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 on his department's research into the matter. He has even withdrawn an Interior Department film showing the effectiveness of steel shot. Ironically, one recent victim of lead poisoning was a whooping crane, a member of a highly endangered species (only about 100 whoopers are left) that the Interior Department has been trying to save, at a cost of more than $500,000 a year. Arnett dismisses the death as a "freak occurrence."

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 his due, applauding his battle for more funds for the Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as his quiet scuttling of the appointment of an unqualified Reagan crony as director of the agency. They even appreciate his candor. Says one longtime adversary: "Ray is 100% honest. If he's going to oppose you, he'll tell you before he does, while he's doing it and after he's done it."

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

With reporting by Jay Branegan/Washington