Carter Niemeyer is a former wildlife trapper and wolf reintroduction coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
July 12, 2012 | By Cassandra Profita
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Wildlife trapper and wolf manager Carter Niemeyer answered questions from a large audience at Jam in Portland Wednesday.
Carter Niemeyer was a government trapper who helped capture the wolves that were brought to Yellowstone National Park and Idaho for reintroduction in the mid-1990s. It was the move that started it all – the 66 wolves from Canada quickly multiplied and spread throughout Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. They’ve been moving into Oregon and Washington since 1999. And much controversy has followed over how to manage them.

Niemeyer later worked for six years as the wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. His views on wolves were transformed over the years, and he’s now a vocal advocate of wolf reintroduction.
He’s written a book: Wolfer, A Memoir.  And he came to Portland yesterday to give a talk at an Oregon Wild event.

The crowd filled the back half of the restaurant Jam on Hawthorne, with many people cheering for Neimeyer. One point he kept coming back to: Wolves – and all the politics that come with them – are here to stay.
“They’re on the landscape,” he said. “They’re not going away.”
Niemeyer initially raised a few wolf questions of his own but quickly opened the floor up to questions from the audience. Here are the 10 questions he answered:

1. Are wolves a problem?

“I’d say people are a bigger problem,” Niemeyer said. “They are a problem for some people, sure. But probably not very many.”
Niemeyer said wolves are responsible for a very small percentage of total livestock losses – by his calculations, it’s less than a quarter of 1 percent.
“If you’re the individual who loses the livestock to them, wolves are a problem,” he said.
Wolves are preying on deer and elk herds, he said. But that’s not necessarily a problem.
“Elk herds in Montana and Wyoming are doing great,” said Niemeyer. “In Idaho, the herds in 21 out of 29 hunting districts are are at or above their management objectives.
… I don’t see them being annihilated, but wolves do have an impact. It takes 16 elk-sized animals to feed a wolf for a year. They have to eat. They’re here. Their natural prey are deer and elk.”

2. Are they dangerous?

There have only been two cases of people being killed by wolves, he said. Mountain lions, grizzlies and black bears cause many more fatalities.

3. How are they doing since re-introduction?

“They’re doing great,” he said. “Their range is spreading and Oregon and Washington are the beneficiaries.”
Niemeyer spent most of his time on stage answering questions from the audience at Jam in Portland Wednesday.

4. Are these wolves bigger than the ones that used to be here?

It’s hard to find anyone who remembers, he said, but studies show the Canadian wolves that were reintroduced are the same size as other species that have been documented in the West.

5. How much of an impact is Idaho’s wolf hunting having on the population?

Current rules in Idaho allow up to 10 wolf kills per person, he said.
“Any one of you could come to Idaho this year and kill up to five wolves apiece,” he said. “The state is already setting seasons without knowing what survived from last year. But wolves are very prolific. They’re very resilient. They can sustain this killing.”
The states will have to do a five-year review now that gray wolves have been removed from the Endangered Species List, and they’ll have to show that they’re maintaining the minimum number of wolves for delisting. It’s not clear that the states have good methods of counting the wolves, he said, so that makes it hard to determine how much of a dent wolf hunts may be putting on the population.

6. Have wolves ever hurt you?

Niemeyer said he has handled nearly 300 wolves through helicopter capture and foothold trapping.
“And I’ve never had a wolf show me aggression,” he said. “I’ve never been bitten by a wolf. Wolves do not like to face off with people.”
Niemeyer said he has camped in wolf country and had wolves within 100 yards of him “many, many times.”
“I don’t carry a gun,” he said. “And I’ve never had the notion that they were going to hurt me.”
He said wolves are not inclined to attack and kill people. When there are pups around, though, they will growl and bark and circle to keep people away.

7. How should Oregon deal with the pending order to kill two members of the Imhaha wolf pack?

Niemeyer said if people care about how wolves are being managed, they should get involved and talk with legislators about their views.
“Wolves have definitely gone political,” he said. “Oregon is having growing pains now. A lot of people would like to see things continue in the same old way: Wolves kill livestock. We kill wolves. A lot of urban folks see things differently from rural people.”
Niemeyer said when he was a manager he would require ranchers to “jump through some hoops” to deter wolf depredations in a non-lethal way. Cleaning up “bone yards” of animal carcasses that can attract wolves, for example.
“Wolves can be a problem,” he said. “I was a manager once upon a time, and I had to make tough decisions,” he said.

8. What should we do about chronic depredations of livestock? Is there a middle ground between the conservation and ranching communities?

Niemeyer defined chronic depredation as “persistent damage by a predator that won’t stop.”
As a wolf reintroduction coordinator, he said, “my job was being the judge, jury and executioner. I’ve had to authorize lethal removal of problem wolves. Make no mistake: Wolves are going to die. There are going to be wolves that have to be removed because they’re a problem.”
In the Northern Rockies, he said, managers have killed about one wolf for every dead cow: Roughly 1,700 of each.
“The politics in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho is for aggressive wolf control,” he said. “If wolves become a chronic problem, sometimes the best thing to do is to get it off the front page of the paper and end the controversy.”
He thinks of the issue in terms of the biological concept of carrying capacity, which is the limit to population growth for any species.
“How many wolves will people tolerate on the landscape?” he asked. “If you have too many, you start having problems with poaching.”

9. Why do wolf killings make front-page news while other wolf stories do not?

“It’s sensationalism,” he said. “And I don’t know how you’d ever turn editors around on that.”

10. What do you think about wolf hybrids?

“I look at them as dogs,” he said. “And like other dogs, there are responsible and irresponsible people who own them.”
If you’re a responsible dog owner and you’re up to the task, he said, go for it. But if you’re not, you could be writing a death sentence for the dog. If the relationship doesn’t work out and you give the dog away, it has already formed a pack relationship with you and won’t easily adjust to a new home.

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