ANCHORAGE, Alaska — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is firing back at actress Ashley Judd and an animal rights group for an ad criticizing Alaska’s practice of killing wolves and bears from airplanes.

Judd appears in a new Internet video for Defenders of Wildlife, and targets not only the state’s predator control program but also Palin, one of the program’s chief supporters.

“It’s time to stop Sarah Palin and stop this senseless savagery,” Judd says in the video posted on a Web site operated by the political arm of the group, Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund.

Palin, the former Republican vice presidential candidate, countered that the program is scientifically based and an important tool to sustain moose and caribou populations for Alaska subsistence hunters.

Palin said it was “reprehensible and hypocritical” that the group would use the state and her administration as a fundraising tool.

“The ad campaign by this extreme fringe group, as Alaskans have witnessed over the last several years, distorts the facts about Alaska’s wildlife management programs,” Palin said. “These audacious fund-raising attempts misrepresent what goes on in Alaska, and I encourage people to learn the facts about Alaska’s positive record of managing wildlife for abundance.

“Shame on the Defenders of Wildlife for twisting the truth in an effort to raise funds from innocent and hard-pressed Americans struggling with these rough economic times,” she continued.

In Alaska, private citizens are permitted to shoot wolves from the air or conduct land-and-shoot hunting of wolves in rural areas. Defenders of Wildlife says more than 800 wolves have been killed since the program began almost five years ago.

Along with Judd’s videotaped segment, the group asks for donations to help end the predator control program, possibly through federal legislation.

It’s not the first time Defenders of Wildlife has targeted Palin. Last fall, when Palin was John McCain’s running mate, it ran ads in several states denouncing Palin and the predator control program, and raised more than $1 million. Judd had campaigned for President Barack Obama during the campaign.