Wikimedia Commons. The red wolf is critically endangered.
Patricia Randolph's Madravenspeak:
“We
know we are confronting the wildlife establishment but it is our duty
to give the public our best scientific assessment of what happened to
their wolves.” ~ Adrian Treves, UW-Madison, in an interview with Isthmus, May 10, 2016
In 2013, Wisconsin citizens polled 8 to 1 in favor of protecting wolves from a trophy hunt.
Despite public sentiment, state Sen. Tom Tiffany, R-Hazelhurst, and Rep. Adam Jarchow, R-Balsam Lake, are planning a September wolf summit
to attempt to circumvent the Endangered Species Act. Their agenda is to
expand killing of wolves, essential creatures that are critically
endangered.
Both of these hunting activists have Democratic challengers in the fall election. Jeff Peterson, Jarchow's challenger, lays out Jarchow’s overall destructive record here. Peterson
co-founded the Wisconsin Green Party in 1988 and says: “I believe that
wolves have an important place in our ecosystem, including as a check on
the spread of CWD in the deer herd. They have an inherent right to
exist, and we have a responsibility to figure out how to co-exist with
them.”
Dave Polashek, opposing
Tiffany, emailed that he has purchased a hunting license every year
since he moved back to Wisconsin in 1978. He has a utilitarian attitude
toward wildlife. They are a commodity of food and serve a purpose to
human ends. But he is more wolf-tolerant than Tiffany:
“Wolves in the wild are a barometer of a healthy ecosystem. It would be sad if we did not have that measure.”
“Wolves in the wild are a barometer of a healthy ecosystem. It would be sad if we did not have that measure.”
Wolf-killing
advocates have postulated that legal wolf hunts would ease hunter
frustration, acting as a safety valve to “protect” fragile populations
from poaching.
Adrian Treves,
who runs the Carnivore Coexistence Lab of the Nelson Institute at
UW-Madison, collaborated with Guillaume Chapron of the Swedish
University of Agricultural Sciences to test this rationale for killing,
which is also used to justify trophy-hunting grizzly bears and other
large carnivores. They recently published their findings.
Treves,
after 16 years in wildlife management, by 2012 had begun to question
the assumption that hunting is an effective management tool for
predators. A May 10 Isthmus story, Is Hunting Really a Conservation Tool?, quotes Treves: “The more data collected, the less solid is that assumption.” He felt an obligation to speak out.
The
Isthmus article quotes Treves: “On the contrary, killing increases
poaching…. I realized I wasn’t really serving the public. I was serving
special interests and the government.”
The scientists expect blowback since the study
debunks a major fallacy used by state agencies to support hunting. The
scientists say: “When the government kills a protected species, the
perceived value of each individual of that species may decline; so
liberalizing wolf culling may have sent a negative message about the
value of wolves or acceptability of poaching. Our results suggest that
granting management flexibility for endangered species to address
illegal behavior may instead promote such behavior.”
Saving
endangered species requires understanding the relationship between
political policies and illegal killing. The governments of Scandinavian
countries, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota and Western states have
promoted this “safety valve” of killing as fact, under the guise of
promoting tolerance, with absolutely no evidence. The same argument is
being used to delist the 700 grizzly bears barely maintaining their
population in Yellowstone National Park. This bogus argument has been
used in courts and never substantiated.
The
Treves/Chapron study continues: “For example, studies in Wisconsin that
measured intention to poach wolves found those intentions rose in
parallel with liberalized culling and those intentions did not decline
after a period with liberalized culling. … Liberalizing wolf culling may
have sent a negative message about the value of wolves or that poaching
prohibitions would not be enforced." When it allows hunting, the DNR
signals that it does not value wolves and will not pursue or prosecute
wolf poaching.
Chapron created a short cartoon video explaining their research.
We
need to do a lot more investigation into the suspect ways that state
agencies can fudge numbers and manipulate data to support killing more
and more wildlife as their populations continue to plummet. Grizzly
Times has done excellent research on how state agencies manipulate
population data and actively defy science, acting against the health of
ecosystems, showing no respect for wildlife or nonhunting citizens.
On their page “The Problem of State Wildlife Management,” Grizzly
Times echoes the main motivation of this column, so I quote it
liberally as reaffirmation of what we citizens must change:
“The
long-term protection of our wildlife — including large carnivores —
depends on reforming the institutions of state wildlife management. …
Hunting wildlife lies at the core of the ethos of state wildlife
management. … Management of wildlife by state agencies is almost wholly
for the benefit of hunters and fishers.
"Hunters are a shrinking minority,
not the majority of those who care about wildlife and places like
Yellowstone. As the Tribes in the Northern Rockies are fond of saying,
state wildlife management agencies represent a last bastion of the ethos
of Manifest Destiny, which led to genocide and the destruction of
ecosystems during the 1800s and early 1900s.
"The
primary and often stated goal of state management is to produce a
‘harvestable surplus’ of hooved animals such as deer and elk for hunters
to kill. The primary ethos is one of domination, utilization, and
objectification. Goals and problems are defined so that the solution is
to kill something. There is little or no room for valuation of animals
or consideration of welfare and rights. Predators such as grizzly bears
(and wolves) are considered to be competitors for opportunities to kill
elk, deer, and other herbivores. There is essentially little to no
consideration given to other values, and virtually no credence is given
to research showing the ecosystem benefits of healthy populations of
large carnivores.
"By design
and by function, state wildlife management excludes people who care
primarily about the welfare of grizzly bears (and wolves) and value them
because they like to see bears (and wolves) in the wild.…
"Key
elements in state wildlife management reform include: 1. reforming
finances 2. better representation of diverse values among commissioners
3. changing the culture within the academic institutions that train
wildlife managers.
"This will only happen if a new constituency gets engaged.”
Tag — you're it.
Patricia Randolph of Portage is a longtime activist for wildlife. madravenspeak@gmail.com or www.wiwildlifeethic.org
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