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hudsonbay wolf IMG_0958, a photo by j.a.kok on Flickr.

Hudson Bay wolves

The WA Legislature vs. Wolves

By Matt Driscoll Thu., Jan. 31 2013

 

There are a handful of bills floating around Olympia this session relating to the gray wolf and the problems the reintroduction of these animals have caused for ranchers and livestock owners in our state - particularly in Eastern Washington. And two of the bills - SB 5187 and SB 5188, both sponsored by Sen. John Smith (R-Colville) - have generated concerns from Conservation Northwest, a group that works to protect area wildlife and forests.
 
In testimony heard Tuesday in the state Senate Natural Resources and Parks Committee, invested parties were able to sound off on Sen. Smith's two pieces of proposed legislation - which would both give ranchers and lawmakers more leeway to kill wolves that threaten livestock.

Specifically, SB 5187 would give livestock owners and their employees the right kill what's termed "mammalian predators" if their livestock is attacked - without permission from anyone. Similarly, SB 5188 would allow county law enforcement officials to kill wolves who pose an imminent threat to livestock, provided some conditions are met: the occurrence of two attacks on livestock by a wolf pack, or if a pattern of attacks against a livestock operation exists.

"We are looking to defend our God-given right to defend our property," Sen. Smith told the committee Tuesday. "The intention is not to declare open season on wolves."

However, these words (and the nod to God) aren't enough to alleviate the concerns of Conservation Northwest. The group has come out against both bills, which, if passed, would work directly against the Wolf Conservation and Management Plan adopted by the state in 2011. The Wolf Conservation and Management Plan - which was modeled after similar efforts in Montana and Idaho - aims to (among other things) restore the wolf population in Washington, minimize conflicts with livestock, and ensure that wolves can repopulate Washington enough to do what they're supposed to do in the state's ecosystem.

"The only way to alleviate [the problems caused by wolves] is to find common ground and begin implementing effective non-lethal solutions upfront that have been proven to work elsewhere, not waste time in the legislature throwing bombs at the wolf plan," says Conservation Northwest's Kit McGurn of the bills proposed by Sen. Smith.

According to Conservation Northwest there are currently as many as 12 confirmed and unconfirmed wolf packs roaming Washington, with state wildlife officials and biologists estimating there are between 50 and 100 wolves currently calling the state home. This comes after a 70-year absence of wolves in Washington.

On its website, Conservation Northwest comes out strongly against SB 5187 and SB 5188.
Of SB 5187 the agency opines:

This bill contradicts the carefully crafted, balanced wolf conservation and management and would harm recovery in the state. Furthermore, the language is sloppy and would allow any livestock owner to kill a wolf without a permit, even if the wolf was not attacking cattle.

And of SB 5188 Conservation Northwest contends:

Oppose this bill with vigor! This plan would take wildlife management out of the hands of the Department of Fish and Wildlife and allow county sheriffs, who are not trained in wildlife biology and management, to manage wolves. This bill is a major affront to Washington's Wolf Conservation and Management Plan.

"Conservation Northwest believes wholeheartedly there is a middle ground in the wolf issue whether it's in the politics of wolf recovery or finding non-lethal solutions that work for those most directly affected by wolves returning to the state," McGurn says when asked if her organization has empathy for the plight of livestock owners. "Everything we've said and done over the past few years supports our efforts to find this middle ground."

As evidence of this work, McGurn cites things like a workshop Conservation Northwest offered in Colville early last year that offered cattlemen "a cost-free opportunity to learn from people experienced with ranching around wolves."

Meanwhile on the wolf-related legislation front, a bill filed by Rep. Joel Kretz (R-Wauconda) has also drawn strong opposition from Conservation Northwest. Kretz's HB 1258 would literally relocate wolves from Eastern Washington to Western Washington, where the state representative says these beasts would be closer to their supporters. Of this effort, Conservation Northwest says on its website: "Translocation is an important tool for wolf recovery and should be taken seriously and this bill doesn't do it justice."

All of this is not to say all the wolf-related legislation circulating Olympia has drawn the Conservation Northwest's ire. For instance, the organization supports SB 5079, an effort sponsored by state Sen. Pam Roach, that would create a dedicated fund for compensation for livestock damage caused by wolves, and has also come out in favor of SB 5299, which would create a special Washington wolf license plate, with proceeds going to fund wolf recovery and conflict prevention.

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Plans in works for grey wolves in California

By RICH GREENE-DN Staff Writer

Updated:   01/31/2013

There's been no evidence California's first gray wolf since 1924 OR-7 has killed any livestock, attacked a human or otherwise overstepped his welcome since he began visiting the state in December 2011, but that hasn't stopped the California Department of Fish and Wildlife from creating a plan in case he does.

Northern Region Wildlife Program Manager Karen Kovacs gave an informational update Tuesday on OR- 7, now known as Journey, to the Tehama County Board of Supervisors focusing on the department's efforts to coordinate the wants of conservation, agriculture and sportsmen groups.

In July the board formally opposed a petition that would list the gray wolf under the California Endangered Species Act and publicly stated it doesn't want the animal reintroduced in Tehama County.

Gray wolves are listed under the federal act, but the state designation would add an extra level of protection.

The State Department is in the process of considering the petition, while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering delisting the animal in some areas as it moves forward with reintroduction projects across the country.

Kovacs said no matter what results from those decisions it is important for the agencies to coordinate their information and get a head start by developing a management plan to deal with wolves in California.

Supervisor Burt Bundy praised the department for getting in front of the issue, including the Farm Bureau during its discussions, and said the wolf issue was already being handled better than mountain lions were.

The wolf can be a big impact here to us in Tehama County and I am concerned about that, Bundy said.

Journey first entered California in December 2011.

At first he spent most of his time in Siskiyou, Modoc, Lassen and Shasta counties.

But in recent months he has moved further south to Plumas, Butte and Tehama counties.

Journey has been exclusively in Tehama since Jan. 9.

Kovacs said Journey has the capability of moving 25 air miles in a single day.

The wolf is outfitted with a GPS radio collar from when he was part of a reintroduction study in Oregon.

Trail cameras have been set up in several locations, but so far none have gotten a glimpse of the wolf.

Wildlife experts have been able to visit where Journey has been and have determined since entering California he has lived on a diet of deer, gray squirrel and deceased wild horses.

Kovacs said he has traveled across every type of habitat Northern California has to offer and across a multitude of land ownerships.

There have been no signs of any other wolf in California, although Kovacs said the department has received several reports from landowners.

She said in every case either a coyote or domestic dog was mistaken as a wolf. Wolf-hybrids, which are easy to obtain in California, may have led to some confusion.

Wildlife officials told the board it is unknown how large a wolf population California could even support.

Wolves in other states have a diet that mainly consists of elk, a species that is 10 times more abundant elsewhere.

California's population is much greater than other states where gray wolves have been successfully reintroduced.

In May the U.S. and California wildlife services issued a Federal- State Coordination Plan to deal with gray wolf activity within the state.

The plan details how the agencies will share information in the wake of a variety of events from a wolf being captured or killed to notifying landowners of their presence.

A gray wolf stakeholders meeting presented by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife is scheduled for Feb. 5 at UC Davis.

Kovacs said she did not expect a decision regarding the petition to list the gray wolf on the state level until the end of the year.

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Image of the Day

source: Christine Campbell Facebook (please follow her)

Image of the Day

Summer Wolves, a photo by MLGreenly on Flickr.

Happy wolves... now this is the way it's supposed to be.

Werner Freund, German Wolfman, Feeds Wolves From His Mouth As Pack's 'Alpha Male' (VIDEO) (PHOTOS)

The Huffington Post  |  By Meredith Bennett-Smith Posted: 01/28/2013

A 79-year-old former military man has devoted his life to the beautiful but dangerous wolves that inhabit his wolf park in Germany.

In order to better learn about the wolves, Werner Freund has tried to become one of them, waking among them and feeding them raw meat from the ground, according to the Daily Mail.
Reuters reports that Freund has been running his 25-acre Wolfspark Werner Freund, located in the German province of Saarland, since 1972. Over the past four decades, he has raised close to 70 wolves.

Often the wolves come to him as cubs by way of zoos or animal parks, per Reuters.
Currently, Freund has 29 wolves living among him; they are divide into six packs. The National Geographic notes that wolves observe a rigid hierarchical structure. In order to assert his dominance over the animals, Freund uses feeding time to act the Alpha by getting to the meat first, according to the Daily Mail. “To earn their respect, one must become a wolf," Freund told the Telegraph. "And that is what I am to them –- their leader."

Wolves, the largest member of the dog family, have long had an "adversarial history" with their human neighbors, according to National Geographic, and have long been considered a villain of the animal kingdom, although they rarely attack humans.

Freund remarked to the Telegraph that he believes wolves have drawn an unfairly short straw.
“Fairy tales, that’s what gave them a bad name,” he said. “Red Riding Hood and all that. These are beautiful animals and the person who says they shouldn’t be in the wild might as well not care about what happens to the elephant on the plains of Africa. We are all enriched by their presence, by the simple fact that they are among us."

While Freund's property stands as a sanctuary for his group, Germans hunted their native wolves almost to extinction in the early 20th century, according to Germany's Spiegel Online. In November, reports of a wolf pack sighted in an area close to the capital city of Berlin was celebrated by conservationists.

On the other hand, governments in some countries -- including Canada, Russia, Norway and Scandinavia -- have authorized intensive wolf hunts to keep down, and in some cases all but eliminate, the impressive predator, according to the Guardian.

 

Wolf researcher Werner Freund, his wife Erika and their cat Max sit in the living room of their home near Wolfspark Werner Freund, in Merzig in the German province of Saarland January 24, 2013.

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Boo Hiss MT-Montana won't limit Yellowstone-area wolf hunts

Anonymous

This image provided by the US Fish and Wildlife Service shows a gray wolf resting in tall grass.

January 28, 2013  •  Associated Press

Montana wildlife officials said Monday that they were abandoning their efforts to shut down gray wolf hunting and trapping just outside the gates of Yellowstone National Park, citing a recent court ruling that threatened to drag out the issue until the season was almost over.

Hunting and trapping were briefly suspended last month on about 60 square miles north of Yellowstone over concerns that too many wolves wandering out of the park were dying. That included the shooting of several wolves collared for scientific research and management purposes.
But after a judge issued an injunction saying not enough notice was given before the closures were enacted, wildlife officials said they would no longer seek to reinstate the closure. A Tuesday meeting in which commissioners had planned to take action on the issue was cancelled.

Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission Chairman Bob Ream said agency personnel decided it would take several weeks at a minimum to get an order from state District Judge Brenda Gilbert dissolving her injunction. Montana's wolf season ends on Feb. 28. "To try and lift the order, at most, there would have been a week left in the season, so there wasn't any sense in doing it," Ream said. Ream added that his concerns over collared wolves being shot or trapped had not gone away, but he said there was unlikely to be harm to the park's overall wolf population even if some of the animals were killed.
Wildlife advocates had pressed the state to give special protections to Yellowstone's wolves, which draw throngs of tourists from all over the world.

Several of the predators that were well-known among wolf watchers were killed in recent months, prompting advocacy groups to lobby state wildlife commissioners to create a no-kill buffer zone east and west of the town of Gardiner. Wolf killing was prohibited in those areas in early December, although commissioners rejected the idea of making the buffer permanent. A lawsuit from hunting groups blocked the closures just a few weeks after they went into effect.

State lawmakers have since stepped in with a proposal to prohibit commissioners from creating such buffers around either Yellowstone or Glacier National Parks. Commissioners only would be able to close down hunting and trapping in such areas if a wolf harvest quota that had been previously established was met.

The Legislative measure, which has received strong bipartisan support in Helena, also would let hunters and trappers buy multiple tags and use electronic wolf calls, reduce the price of a non-resident tag from $350 to $50 and eliminate the requirement that hunters wear fluorescent orange outside of elk and deer season.

Hunters have killed 108 wolves in Montana this season and trappers have killed 66, for a total of 174.
That's already exceeded the 2011-2012 harvest, when 166 wolves were killed, with four weeks still to go in the current season.

Wildlife officials are hoping to reduce the animals' population from about 650 wolves to around 450.
The goal is to reduce wolf attacks on livestock and help some elk herds that have been in decline due to wolf attacks. Wildlife advocates contend that the state is being too aggressive against a species only recently restored to the Northern Rockies after it was widely exterminated last century.

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Newly released Mexican wolf doing well in Arizona

 
The Mexican Wolf Reintroduction Project’s interagency field team successfully released a radio collared 4-year-old male Mexican wolf, designated M1133, last week in the Apache National Forest.

M1133 was brought by snowmobile in a crate to the release site and hard released (released directly from the transport crate upon arrival rather than being placed in a temporary holding pen in that area for a period of time to acclimate). The wolf was released adjacent to the Bluestem pack’s territory in hopes that it will replace the pack’s breeding (alpha) male that was illegally killed in 2012. Surveys were conducted prior to the release to ensure that the Bluestem pack alpha female had not paired with another male wolf. 

The release was timed to coincide with normal early-season breeding activities. The pack currently consists of four collared wolves, including the collared alpha female and three collared pups born in 2012. At least three uncollared wolves have been documented with the pack, likely a yearling and two more pups from the 2012 litter.

M1133, if paired with the genetics of the Bluestem pack, would produce offspring that are genetically different than existing wild wolves in the larger Mexican wolf population, which would help the population’s genetic health.

M1133 was born at the California Wolf Center in April 2008 and was transferred to the Sevilleta Wolf Management Facility in December 2008 along with its parents and littermate. Prior to being released, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conducted taste aversion conditioning on the wolf while it was at the facility. Taste aversion conditioning is used to induce an illness associated with the consumption of cattle.

The release of M1133 is considered an initial release rather than a translocation because the animal was born and raised in captivity. A translocation, such as the two conducted in January of 2011, is when a wolf that was born in the wild, but brought into captivity for some reason, is then released back into the wild. The field team closely manages all initially-released wolves to reduce the potential of nuisance-related behaviors and livestock depredations once they are in the wild. Past experience has shown that initially-released wolves sometimes require intensive management to assist them in learning to avoid situations that may lead to conflict with human activity or with livestock that also utilize the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests.  

All initial wolf releases occur in Arizona in the primary recovery zone of the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area in compliance with the existing federal 10(j) rule covering the reintroduction project. The last initial release of wolves occurred in 2008.

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Wolf Advocates Across the West

Posted: 28 Jan 2013

Suzanne Stone, Northern Rockies Representative

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind for wolf advocates in the West. My colleagues and I have been traveling from city to city and state to state organizing wolf supporters to attend meetings set by state wildlife commissions and agencies. Some of these were set to vote on proposals  that could be particularly dangerous to wolves, while others opened up a broader conversation about wolf management. But for all of these meetings, it was important that people who care about the future of wolves in the region were in attendance to testify, to question, and to learn.

Boise, Idaho

On January 16, the Idaho Fish and Game Commission held a public hearing. There were many important issues on the docket, but we were most concerned about agenda item #6 – a measure to set aside $50,000 exclusively to have the federal government kill more wolves in order to boost elk numbers for hunters. We sounded the alarm to our members in the area, and they answered the call.  I met a group of them at a reception before the meeting, and we talked about the challenges that often come with advocating for wolves in an area where myth and misconceptions about these animals are still widely regarded as fact.

The hearing was amazing. The first hour of public testimony on agenda item #6 was nothing but 100% positive support for wolves.  In fact, everyone who spoke about this issue opposed the measure and supported more protection for wolves. Our members were respectful, eloquent and well-informed, and the commission was visibly blown away by their testimonies. When my turn came, I was able to focus on specific concerns with the measure, including the fact that the proposal could allow for the use of more controversial “management” practices, like aerial gunning. And the fact that lethal control fails to work in the long term – no matter what the reason for wanting more elk, killing wolves is not a solution.

I spoke about our Wood River Wolf Project and its success in protecting 27,300 sheep living among three resident wolf packs with only one incident that resulted in the loss of 4 sheep. I asked them to use the $50,000 for nonlethal methods of preventing predation on livestock instead of just continuing this endless and wasteful cycle of loss and killing. Sadly, when it came to the vote the following morning, the commission approved the proposal. Even though they heard that so many residents were staunchly against it, they still designated $50,000 for federal wolf killing. 

Defenders is working to raise twice that amount to put toward protecting wolves and other wildlife in the region. Though the commission approved the proposal, I think our collective testimony surprised them. To have so many people willing to speak out on behalf of wolves here in Boise is unprecedented, and at a public hearing like this one, it showed the decision-makers that the people of Idaho care about how wolves are managed, and we’re watching their actions closely. The days of passing awful management proposals without public opposition is over.

Seattle, Washington

Later the same week, I set out for Seattle. After the fiasco with the Wedge Pack last summer, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) is making an effort to keep the public better informed about their management methods. We let our members in the area know about this great opportunity to learn more about wolves in their state and to ask questions of the agency in charge of managing them.

The meeting was a bit of a challenge. First, the location of the meeting was moved, so we sent out an update. Then, the new location proved very difficult to find, so we posted signs along the road to point the way. Once WFDW arrived they quickly realized the space was far too small and moved the meeting to a warehouse across the street for the more than 300 people who attended! It was incredible to see so many people interested in wolves in a state that is still welcoming the species back to parts of its native range that have been wolf-free for over a century. Carter Niemeyer, retired wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was one of the key speakers and did a great job answering questions and providing an expert overview of the challenges and opportunities of restoring wolves in Washington.  

Similar meetings took place in Spokane and Olympia, and we were able to have someone from Defenders attend each one. We have some great supporters here in Idaho, out in Washington, and across the nation who are invested in the future of wolves in the U.S. Wolves are still looking at a tough year ahead, with premature hunting paring down their numbers, and dangerous legislation in most states in the region threatening to strip them of their remaining protections. But it’s encouraging to know that despite the misinformation out there about wolves, and the many industries and agencies interested in halting their recovery, there is still a growing number who want to see these majestic animals protected and restored to their rightful place in the ecosystem.

We’re going to have to unite with other like-minded residents in the West and build a great network of activists who will work together to safeguard the future for wolves in the region.

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Image of the Day

Arktischer Wolf, a photo by CROW1973 on Flickr.

Not Dancing With Wolves

27 Jan 2013

Christopher Benfey considers our complicated relationship to wolves:

I have learned a great deal about the systematic extermination of wolves from a beautiful and heartbreaking book called The Lost Wolves of Japan by the environmental historian Brett Walker, who seeks “to explain why one species—our species, Homo sapiens—has worked so tirelessly to destroy another.” Walker points out that before Japan began its rapid modernization during the last quarter of the nineteenth century—under pressure from American forces and with the help of American experts, many of whom came from New England—wolves were considered sacred: “Grain farmers worshiped wolves at shrines, beseeching this elusive canine to protect their crops from the sharp hooves and voracious appetites of wild boars and deer.”

Beef was considered the proper staple of a modern nation, however. With the introduction of so-called “industrial farms” for breeding horses and cattle, especially in the northern island of Hokkaido, wolves were re-categorized as evil predators, and Japan created “a culture of wolf hatred.” So efficient were the Japanese, with guns and traps and strychnine, that the last Japanese wolf was killed, near the beautiful ancient capital of Nara, in 1905, the same year in which the upstart nation won the Russo-Japanese War and took its place among the beef-eating world powers.

(Photo by Flickr user tambako.) 

 

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Images of the Day (Today and Yesterday)

G3 wingham 316, a photo by Fruitbat111 on Flickr.

Asking to please, don't shoot me.

 

Unwarranted fear puts wolves in false light

Posted: Saturday, January 26, 2013 

By BILL BAUM |

I am conflicted over the very complex and controversial wolf issue in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.
I moved near Glacier National Park 10 years ago, after a big city career in aerospace engineering & computer sciences, and settled on a little homestead ranch at the fringe of the wilderness and I have never been bothered by wolves.

I had a lone wolf quietly lope right past me from behind, before I knew it was there, without paying me any mind, right on my front lawn. I watched from my window as a lone wolf tracked two stray dogs in deep snow along the creek running through my property. While using a chain saw to remove a fallen tree right next to my house a wolf silently tread past me, without me seeing or hearing it, leaving its distinctive paw tracks in the snow within three feet of me. My distant neighbors have informed me that they see a pack of three wolves running through my place, periodically, although I have many more bears, lions, deer, and moose on my place than wolves.

I have even slept in a pup-tent in the Kootenai National Forest while collecting bear hairs for DNA analysis and heard wolves howling all night and they were not a threat.

I have decided to share this place with all of the wildlife that got here before me. For whatever reason, wolves (and other wildlife) do not fear me as they “read” my body language and “sense” my emitted energy field and determine I am no threat to them. Similarly, I trust them to not want to harm me as I walk on my forested ranch unarmed doing chores, since we humans are not programmed as prey animals in the DNA of wolves (and other predators). I do not fear going out into the darkness of night.

But I do recognize that some people do fear wolves, much like they fear snakes and spiders and bears, and that fear of wolves is very real to them and is why I am conflicted about what to do to resolve the wolf issue.

I think I can empathize with them and I could probably vote to manage the wolf population if the techniques of doing that were based on honest, professional, wildlife biology concepts of keeping the wildlife ecosystem in balance.

Only one time has an incident of a wolf killing and eating a human in America ever been documented… in the late 1880s. It was a weak, diseased wolf that was shunned by the pack and could no longer hunt its normal prey to survive. But people are still going to fear wolves so this issue must be resolved. Remember, fear is the most powerful emotion in all animals… humans included. It is called the “fight or flight” syndrome.

Having lived all over America while being a tourist visitor to Montana to view wildlife in Glacier National Park, until finally moving here in retirement, I consider the very important Montana tourism industry (10 million visits annually) to be best served with the federal government being the stewards of public lands, such as national forests and national parks and designated wilderness areas and BLM lands, and the management of its wildlife on those lands.

Farming and ranching livestock needs (even though beef is a known carcinogen in humans, and more cattle die from injuries and disease than from wolf predation) and those of residential city neighborhoods are best served with the state of Montana managing wolves on private lands. Some ranches consist of both private and public lands… a dilemma for wolf management.
All management should be under the auspices of the Endangered Species Act.

This would be a compromise position that might end the polarization and be acceptable to both sides of the issue. It is certainly preferable to having “Montana administrative rules and state laws” replace federal regulations, and “excluding these rules/laws from judicial review.”

However, the heinous practice of trapping is unacceptable to me. The unconscionable practice of trapping animals and killing them and marketing their fur for profit must stop! It is time for the ancient Neanderthal Man mind to evolve into modern-day man. Get a real job. Trapping wolves in order to kill them and reduce their population is inexcusable as well. It is cruel punishment.

If the number of wolves estimated by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks were not so ridiculously inflated, due to political pressure, the hunters would, in fact, be harvesting a much higher percentage of the actual number of wolves and both groups would be happier.

The Phony excuse that deer and elk herds are in decline with limited numbers available to hunters to kill is simply not true. They are currently on the rise. Wolves merely keep ungulates on the move and that makes it apparently too challenging for hunters to find them to get a shot at them, like they did in the past from their parked trucks along forest roads. Today it is too much walking, hiking, backpacking, and exercise for most modern-day, out-of-shape hunters so let’s allow trappers to get the allotment of wolves. I think not!

The fact that wolves keep elk on the move has many significant, important ramifications: (1) When elk are allowed to stay around stands of aspen trees and over-browse them, it kills the aspen; (2) Certain types of birds live only in live aspen, and it is those birds that feed on beetles in nearby pine trees, keeping those pine trees alive if the nearby live aspen can house those birds; (3) Dead pine tree stands from beetle kill produce perfect kindling for forest fires to proliferate into raging wildfires; (4) Therefore, wolves reduce the danger of wildfires by keeping elk on the move so aspen don’t die out, and pine trees stay alive. Get it? Hunters don’t get it… foresters don’t get it... only biologists get it.
Another phony excuse is that wolves kill too many livestock. But coyotes, domestic dogs, and mountain lions take many more than wolves do. So why trap wolves?

Former attempts to stop trapping has resulted in no success whatsoever as a pathetically apathetic public has not responded to pleas to defeat the organized forces of the fringe minority trapping group. A mere 22,000 Montanans once stepped up to sign a petition to end trapping via a ballot initiative, and so the initiative failed for a lack of enough valid signatures to get on the ballot. In the meantime, trappers continue to mistakenly trap more of peoples’ pet dogs and cats and children than wolves.
Fish, Wildlife and Parks does not punish trappers, but does punish the general public if anyone removes a trap in order to protect their children and pets. Can you believe it?!

Attempts to save wildlife through the administration of the Endangered Species Act are similarly facing opposition by small, very vocal, fringe groups that are well-financed. It is hard to place all blame on the trappers who are a small minority since the larger majority of apathetic people are not actively opposing them. Perhaps also fear driven? Fear of losing one’s job or having one’s children bullied at school?

My real aggravation is with Fish, Wildlife and Parks since they do not allow environmentalists on their Citizens Advisory Committee, but reserve those seats only for hunters, trappers, outfitters, and ranchers/farmers. I have offered to serve on that committee, as have other environmentalists, and have been turned down. Environmentalists are the only defenders and representatives of the wolf, which is very intelligent and possesses a high, advanced social order. Wildlife constitutes living, breathing animals and should not be dismissed as merely “resources” to harvest at humans’ pleasure.

The filing of electronic commentary is supposed to be available on the “Opportunity for Public Comment “on the “Hunting home page” at the fwp.mt.gov website. I wonder if my environmentalist comments will ever be read and considered of value on a “hunting page?”

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Wolves Under Attack (Video)

For years the Gray Wolf in America was protected by the government and was on the Endangered Species list.  They made a dramatic comeback from the brink of extinction. In April of 2011, the Gray Wolf was taken off the Endangered Species list leaving it up to specific states to manage their population.

Critics say this has led to people playing politics with the wolves and using them as a way to make money.  One of those critics, Brooks Fahy, the Executive Driector of Predator Defense joined Jane to talk about his new film, “The Imperiled American Wolf.”

For more information visit Predator Defense

Or go to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

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Wolf Weekly Wrap-up--Idaho sucks

Posted: 25 Jan 2013

Oregon Wolf Meets His End in Idaho

Wolf OR16 was only one year old, but showed an urge to explore far beyond his age. He was born in Oregon and was part of the Walla Walla pack, but eventually struck out on his own, crossing hundreds of miles into Washington State. He then swam across the Snake River and ventured into Idaho, all the while being tracked by researchers homing in on his GPS collar.

Wolf OR16 wakes after receiving his GPS collar in Oregon’s Union County on November 1, 2012.

But as we all know, Idaho isn’t a great place to be a wolf these days and sadly, after only 33 days on Idaho soil, OR16 was tracked by a hunter on the Boise National Forest outside of Lowman and legally killed during Idaho’s wolf-hunting season.
OR16 was an amazing animal. Wolves disperse into new areas all the time—these movements help keep wolf populations healthy and growing—but OR16’s journeys were extraordinary, even by wolf standards. His loss is even more tragic as researchers were gleaning tons of information on wolf behavior from the GPS and telemetry signals being emitted by his collar.

OR16 is the second Oregon wolf killed as part of Idaho’s wolf hunts. A year ago, OR-9 was illegally shot by an Idaho hunter. Wolves are relatively new to Oregon; recent census data shows the population slowly climbing to 53 last year.

Idaho’s wolf management practices have been taking a devastating toll on wolves in the northern Rockies since their Congressional delisting in 2011. In their latest move, the state has allocated $50,000 to kill wolves in order to inflate elk numbers for hunters.

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Image of the Day

Side, a photo by MLGreenly on Flickr.

Bills introduced to allow livestock owners to kill Wolves

January 24, 2013

Posted by Amelia Dickson

Three months after the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife eliminated a pack of wolves that had been killing livestock in Stevens County, legislators filed three bills allowing farmers to protect their livestock from the predators.

Livestock owners have been concerned about wolves since they began returning to the state from neighboring states in the mid-2000s. They hadn’t been present in the state since hunters eliminated them in the 1930s.

Sen. John Smith, R-Colville, filed two of the bills: Senate Bill 5187 and Senate Bill 5188. Under SB 5187, livestock owners, their immediate family and their employees could kill any “mammalian predator” without permission if their livestock is attacked.

SB 5188 would allow county authorities to kill wolves that pose an imminent threat to livestock – if members of a wolf pack have killed or injured livestock at least twice or if the pattern of incidents presents a threat to the economic viability of a livestock operation.

Rep. Joel Kretz, R-Wauconda, filed House Bill 1337 to change the classification of grey wolves under state law. The wolves are currently listed as endangered in Washington under state law and for the western two-thirds of the state under federal law. The bill would change the state law to match the federal law.

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Here's How Big A Problem Wolves Are For Cattle Ranchers [Infographic]

A visual representation of our earlier plea to stop shooting wolves.

By Dan Nosowitz Posted 01.22.2013 

Prime Cuts Peter and Maria Hoey

 

We got a lot of heat for this essay about problematic wolf-hunting laws in Wyoming. Which, fine! Glad we could start a discussion. As a followup, here's a nice visual representation of all the threats facing cattle in the United States--if you'll notice, wolves are not exactly on the top of that list. Much of the motivation for the laws allowing wolf-hunting in states like Wyoming (though this is national data) come from an assumption that wolves are a major problem for cattle ranchers--that wolves are responsible for significant so-called "unintended" cattle loss. "Unintended" cattle loss, by the way, is the term the USDA uses for cattle who die before they are killed in slaughterhouses.

The data does not support that assumption.

This data comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the infographic was made by the Sierra Club.

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Wolves are top priority

Wolves are top priority

By K.C. Mehaffey
World staff writer

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

OKANOGAN — Okanogan County officials are beginning to more fully engage on wolf-related issues after seeing how fast wolves have repopulated other parts of the West.

Last week, Okanogan County Sheriff Frank Rogers told cattlemen that he’s in favor of training his deputies to investigate livestock kills to determine whether wolves are responsible.

Okanogan County commissioners are working with six other Eastern Washington counties to push state officials to delist the gray wolf based on the federal delisting.

And on Monday, Rep. Joel Kretz, R-Wauconda, introduced a bill to allow state agencies to move wolves from Eastern Washington to west of the Cascades.

Wolves have been a big issue in Okanogan County since 2008, when the state Department of Fish and Wildlife announced the Methow Valley was home to the state’s first confirmed wolf packs with pups in 70 years.

Since then, officials believe several wolves from the pack were poached, and one rancher was the first to be compensated for a calf that officials determined was likely killed by it.

Tribal officials located two more wolf packs living on the Colville Indian Reservation, and opened a hunting season for them. And ranchers throughout the county are reporting livestock losses, although none have been confirmed wolf-kills.

“They’re starting to affect more and more people,” said Okanogan County Commissioner Jim DeTro.
Local officials are smart to be talking about wolf management, and discussing ways to resolve problems before they occur, said Dave Ware, game division manager for the state Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Ware said his agency is surprised by how quickly wolves are moving into Washington. Already, there are five confirmed breeding pairs and eight wolf packs in the state, up from three breeding pairs in just one year. The number of individual wolves increased from 27 to 51, but reports of new sightings are coming in from all around the state — including some in Western Washington, Ware said.

He said his agency encourages county sheriffs to join Fish and Wildlife officers investigate livestock that may have been killed by a wolf, and plans to offer training in the next few months. “The local sheriffs have a good rapport with the local public, so if they understand what it is we’re going to be looking for, they can help protect the site and make sure that an investigation can occur,” he said.
Commissioners met with the Okanogan County Cattlemen last week to talk about their concerns with the state’s wolf recovery plan.

Rancher Dal Dagnon said most cattlemen won’t be able to take advantage of the state’s compensation program for livestock killed by wolves because they turn their cattle out to graze and don’t see them again until fall.

Many cattlemen last fall lost more cattle out on the range than usual, and believe that wolves are to blame.

He said cattlemen want to be compensated for cattle that don’t come home off the range above the numbers they normally lose. Local cattlemen are compiling data on annual losses so they’re ready to show the differences.

Sheriff Frank Rogers said it makes sense to him to train his deputies to investigate whether a predator killed livestock.

He said full compensation is based partly on how soon after the kill a scene was investigated. So if Wildlife officers are unable to respond immediately, local deputies can gather the evidence instead.
Vic Stokes, a Twisp cattle rancher and president of the Washington State Cattlemen’s Association, said they also worry that wolves will be more than fully recovered in Eastern Washington, but they won’t be able to control their population because the state’s recovery plan calls for too many breeding pairs to be spread out across different parts of Washington state.

He said the state doesn’t have enough resources to go out and find and confirm all of the breeding wolf pairs, so many won’t even be counted. A breeding pair means an alpha male and an alpha female who have produced at least two sets of pups.

Kretz introduced his wolf bill Monday and said residents of his district “feel greedy for hoarding all the ecological benefits of wolf packs,” so they’d like to share them with people on the Olympic Peninsula and the San Juan Islands.

Ware said currently, under the state’s wolf recovery plan, any proposal to move wolves across the state would require public scrutiny.

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Bill To Move Wolves West No Joke For Conservationists

By Jessica Robinson

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This week, a Republican lawmaker who represents eastern Washington ranch country introduced what many see as a poke in the eye for his colleagues who support wolf recovery. The new bill would move wolves to the west side of the Cascades. The proposal was immediately taken as a joke. But some conservationists say moving wolves west is not a bad idea.

Credit Washington Dept. of Fish and Wildlife

A male wolf from Washington's Smackout Pack.

Washington's wolf population is now concentrated in the northeastern part of the state. That’s where wolves from Canada and Idaho converge. And that's where they meet the cattle of Rep. Joel Kretz's constituents. And they don’t want the wolves around.

“Most of the support for wolves appears to be in areas where there are no wolves," Kretz says. "They love wolves in the west side of the state. Particularly urban areas. I'd love to see 'em in Volunteer Park, for example.”

… in the middle of Seattle. Kretz's bill includes a provision to send wolves to “islands sized at least 50 square miles.” That’s a not-so-subtle jab at state Sen. Kevin Ranker. He's a Democrat who represents the San Juan Islands. He's also an outspoken wolf supporter. Ranker calls the bill frivolous.
“What we're seeing in this bill, by Rep. Kretz, is a jab," Ranker says. "It's not a real bill. It's a waste of time.”

But Derrick Knowles of Conservation Northwest says, maybe it should be a real bill.
“Yeah, I think Rep. Kretz has a good sense of humor and he's trying to be funny, but he's actually pointing out something that's a really good opportunity for common ground," Knowles says.

Historically, the gray wolf population stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean, where they were known to prey on salmon. Knowles isn't suggesting dropping wolves into downtown Seattle or Orcas Island. But there are other locales ripe for wolves, he says – like around Mt. Saint Helens. In fact, Washington has set a goal to have breeding pairs of wolves in each region of the state.

But it might be politically difficult to move them there. That’s one lesson Carter Niemeyer learned when he helped bring wolves to Yellowstone National Park. Later, he became the federal wolf recovery coordinator in Idaho. Niemeyer says “translocation,” as it’s known has its consequences.
“Suddenly there’s a lot of accountability," Niemeyer says. "You put them here. You’re to blame for these wolves causing problems in our part of the state. Whereas if the wolves walk there on their own, there’s not as much finger pointing.”

So far, Rep. Joel Kretz has three sponsors for his bill. All are Republicans from eastern Washington.

On the Web:
Rep. Joel Kretz’s bill
http://apps.leg.wa.gov/documents/billdocs/2013-14/Pdf/Bills/House%20Bills/1258.pdf

Gray Wolf Conservation and Management in Washington
http://wdfw.wa.gov/conservation/gray_wolf/

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Carbs were key in wolves' evolution into dogs

Comparing the DNA of dogs and wolves shows that dogs' ability to easily digest carbohydrates, originally from starch in scraps left behind by humans, helped enable their domestication, a study finds.

Gray wolves in Rhodes, France. The new analysis examined a mix of DNA from 12 gray wolves and compared it with DNA collected from 60 domestic dogs from 14 breeds. (Jean-Christophe Verhaegen, AFP/Getty Images / December 12, 2012)

By Rosie Mestel, Los Angeles Times

January 23, 2013

Long ago, some brazen wolves started hanging around human settlements, jump-starting events that ultimately led to today's domesticated dogs. Now geneticists say they have identified one of the key changes that turned wolves into the tame, tail-wagging creatures well-suited to living by our sides — the ability to digest carbohydrates with ease.

The report, published online Wednesday by the journal Nature, found signs that dogs can break down starch into sugar, and then transport those sugars from the gut into the bloodstream, more efficiently than can wolves. Comparing dog and wolf DNA, the authors pinpointed several changes in starch and sugar-processing genes that would have made early dogs better able to digest the scraps they scavenged from dumps in early farming villages, helping them to thrive as they gave up the independent life of the pack to entwine their lives with ours.

"That food was obviously the same kind of food that we were eating," most likely a mix of roots, porridge and possibly bread along with bones containing meat and marrow, said study leader Erik Axelsson, an evolutionary geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden.

No one knows for sure when or where the first dogs came to be, but most evolutionary biologists agree that the wolf probably made the first move and that the draw was the food humans discarded. Only much later did people intensively mate dogs of different shapes and temperaments to create today's hundreds of breeds and varieties, from the hulking and noble to the tiny and yapping.
The new analysis by Axelsson and his colleagues examined a mix of DNA from 12 gray wolves and compared it with DNA collected from 60 domestic dogs, including cocker spaniels, giant schnauzers, golden retrievers and 11 other breeds.

The scientists sequenced the dog and wolf DNA and searched for tiny differences. Because they were seeking features that cropped up early in dog evolution, they focused on genetic variations that dogs shared but wolves lacked. They also looked for variations that all, or most, of the dogs had in common.

From this analysis, the team identified 36 places in the genome, containing 122 genes, that seemed to have been important in dog evolution. Ten of the genes are involved in starch or fat metabolism, including three that carry instructions for making a protein that is pivotal to digestion of starch.
One of them makes alpha amylase, an enzyme that breaks starch into the sugar maltose and shorter carbohydrate strands. Dogs carry many more copies of this gene than wolves, the scientists found — and the alpha amylase activity in their tissues is five times greater.

Another gene makes an enzyme for the next step in carb digestion: turning maltose into glucose. This gene is 12 times more active in dogs than wolves, and blood tests showed that maltose is processed into glucose twice as quickly in dogs.

The third gene makes a protein that moves glucose from the gut into the bloodstream. The scientists saw several dog-specific alterations in this gene that suggest the glucose transporter may work more efficiently in dog guts than wolf guts.

Taken together, the data fit with the fact that dogs eat more starch than wolves, Axelsson said. He added that this adaptation would have allowed the first dogs to get more goodness out of the waste food they were drawn to at early farming settlements.

"It makes perfect sense that the most efficient scavengers were the wolves that could cope with this starch-rich diet," he said.

Still, dog domestication may have happened long before humans adopted an agrarian life about 10,000 years ago, said Robert Wayne, an evolutionary biologist at UCLA who wasn't involved in the Nature study.

Perhaps dogs evolved through hanging around hunter-gatherers so they could feed on leftover carcasses of the mammoths and mastodons our ancestors killed, Wayne said. In that scenario, the starch-tolerant changes would have cropped up only after dogs were domesticated, just as genetic changes that help break down starch evolved in human beings after we adopted a farming life.
Part of the reason why the timing of dog domestication is debated is that the fossil record is confusing. The oldest broadly agreed-upon dog fossil is 12,000 years old, of a pup buried with its human in modern-day Israel. More recently, scientists have discovered far older dog-like fossils, including one in Siberia that dates back 33,000 years.

Those remains have skulls that are smaller than wolf skulls but teeth that are wolf-sized, and they are often found alongside specimens that were clearly wolves, said evolutionary biologist Susan Crockford of the University of Victoria in Canada. It will take more study of fossils and ancient DNA to sort out whether these were wolves that had started down the road toward domestication or were merely examples of the natural variation that existed in wolves, she said.

In addition to the starch genes, Axelsson's team found others involved in brain and nervous system development that appear to have been important in the transition from wolf to dog.

That isn't surprising, said Adam Boyko, an evolutionary geneticist at the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., who wasn't involved in the study. Dogs differ behaviorally from wolves in myriad ways, he said — in tameness, curiosity, social structure, tail-wagging, novelty-seeking behavior and their penchant to bark (and bark) well into adulthood.
The next step is to study that list of genes to figure out how they affect behavior and development to make dogs distinct, Boyko said.

Oscar Chavez, director of the veterinary technician program at Cal Poly Pomona, said the findings served as a reminder that dogs don't eat like wolves. He said he and his colleagues were befuddled by the trend toward pricey low-carb dog foods and raw diets, which could stress dogs' kidneys with their extra protein load.

"Dogs are dogs — they're more reliant on starches and grains," he said, which is why commercial dog foods are formulated to contain about 20% to 30% protein and 40% to 50% carbs. "I don't know any veterinarian in my circle of colleagues that would recommend a low-grain diet."

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Image of the Day

WolfMoon3 copy, a photo by puckster55pics on Flickr.

Image of the Day

Arktischer Wolf, a photo by CROW1973 on Flickr.

The Lost Wolves of New England--a Book Review

Christopher Benfey

   

Edward Krumanaker/National Geographic Society/Corbis

The lost wolves of New England have been on my mind lately, as winter settles into the woods below our house and the lives of the local predators—the hawks and owls and the raucous coyotes—are increasingly exposed among the bare-leafed trees. Wolves have not been welcome in our woods for a very long time. Among the first laws instituted by the Puritan settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 was a bounty on wolves, which Roger Williams, who fled the colony for its religious intolerance, referred to as “a fierce, bloodsucking persecutor.” Extermination of the New England wolf is widely believed to have been completed two centuries later; according to the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, the gray wolf has been extinct in our state since about 1840.

Occasionally a wolf that has ranged wide of its natural habitat wanders into our neighborhood, presumably crossing the border from more hospitable Canada. In the fall of 2007, a male gray wolf went on a rampage on a farm in Shelburne, a half hour to the north of where we live in Amherst, slaughtering over a dozen sheep before he was shot by an unidentified gunman and subsequently examined by the astonished local authorities. “When it comes to wolves, never say never,” Peggy Struhsacker, a Vermonter and wolf expert with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Fox News at the time, perhaps alluding to Farley Mowat’s popular account of his own adoption by Arctic wolves, Never Cry Wolf.

Maine Wolf Coalition

A wolf killed near Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2007

By the mid-nineteenth century, our New England sages were already lamenting the loss of wildness in both landscape and society, and invoking wolves rather than eagles as a sort of national icon. In his gnomic epigraph to “Self-Reliance,” Emerson admonished his countrymen to

Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat;
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.

Thoreau expanded the allure of a Romulus-and-Remus education in the wild:

It is because the children of the empire were not suckled by wolves that they were conquered & displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.

Thoreau added, as though throwing down the national gauntlet, “America is the she wolf today.”
New England, and southern Vermont in particular, have had a crucial part in both the idealization of wolves and in their ruthless destruction. Rudyard Kipling settled in Brattleboro, where his wife was from, in 1892, and wrote The Jungle Book there, inventing, amid the wolf-less Vermont hills, the beguiling story of a native child named Mowgli, raised (and suckled) by a family of wolves in the forests of India, just as Emerson (a particular favorite of Kipling) and Thoreau had imagined American children should be raised. “Now, was there ever a wolf that could boast of a man’s cub among her children?” asks Kipling’s Mother Wolf.

The Brattleboro native John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886) imagined a very different human society based on “free love” (he originated the phrase) and communal property. Kicked out of Putney, Vermont, for transgressing local moral codes, the utopian socialist Noyes established the Oneida Community in upstate New York, hoping that agriculture would keep his followers alive. Industry, and specifically animal traps designed by a Noyes adherent named Newhouse, proved far more lucrative. Wolf and bear traps were produced at Oneida beginning in the 1850s and soon dominated the market, as free love and wolf hatred proved compatible with sales pitches. The Newhouse Trap, according to one advertisement, “going before the axe and the plow, forms the prow with which iron-clad civilization is pushing back barbaric solitude, causing the bear and beaver to give way to the wheatfield, the library and the piano.”

Oneida traps were widely used both in New England and in the American West, where strychnine inserted into buffalo corpses virtually wiped out the wild wolf population in the lower forty-eight states, except for a remnant few hundred in Minnesota. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 led to the still controversial reintroduction of wolves in areas such as Yellowstone National Park. Just last week a much-loved wolf wearing a tracking collar, which identified her as 832F and the alpha female of the Lamar Canyon pack, was killed, legally, by hunters in Wyoming after she unwittingly strayed just beyond the protective borders of the park.

Project Gutenberg

Nineteenth-century animal traps made by the Oneida Community in upstate New York

I have learned a great deal about the systematic extermination of wolves from a beautiful and heartbreaking book called The Lost Wolves of Japan by the environmental historian Brett Walker, who seeks “to explain why one species—our species, Homo sapiens—has worked so tirelessly to destroy another.” Walker points out that before Japan began its rapid modernization during the last quarter of the nineteenth century—under pressure from American forces and with the help of American experts, many of whom came from New England—wolves were considered sacred: “Grain farmers worshiped wolves at shrines, beseeching this elusive canine to protect their crops from the sharp hooves and voracious appetites of wild boars and deer.”

Beef was considered the proper staple of a modern nation, however. With the introduction of so-called “industrial farms” for breeding horses and cattle, especially in the northern island of Hokkaido, wolves were re-categorized as evil predators, and Japan created “a culture of wolf hatred.” So efficient were the Japanese, with guns and traps and strychnine, that the last Japanese wolf was killed, near the beautiful ancient capital of Nara, in 1905, the same year in which the upstart nation won the Russo-Japanese War and took its place among the beef-eating world powers.

Our little town of Amherst has an intimate link to all these developments. The best-known figure in the modernization of Hokkaido was William Clark, who led the Massachusetts Agricultural College (now the University of Massachusetts Amherst) and also, at the invitation of the Japanese, founded Sapporo Agricultural College (now part of Hokkaido University), where he built barns for horses and vulnerable cattle modeled on Amherst prototypes. Like his friend and Amherst neighbor Emily Dickinson, Clark had a gift for memorable words. Leaving Hokkaido in 1877, he reportedly admonished his students, “Boys, be ambitious,” words known to every Japanese schoolchild.

(According to some sources, what he actually said was “Boys be ambitious for Christ.”) The boys of Japan and New England were certainly ambitious in exterminating their wolves. It would be more ambitious still to restore them.

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Stop use of dogs in hunting wolves

21 hours ago

We fail to understand the judge’s decision to allow dogs in the actual wolf hunt, given his stated recognition that DNR failed to put forward any evidence to indicate that dogs could be used to pursue wolves safely, humanely or without deadly consequences for the animals involved.

As lifelong Wisconsin citizens and longstanding hunters, we believe in hunting with principles. We do not believe brutality towards wildlife or hunting dogs should be open-ended to the point where nothing is considered too cruel. Wolves can strip a large hunting hound of hide, bone and flesh in a few short minutes. It’s not an easy death because they are often eaten alive. This usually happens while the hound hunters sit in their trucks and ATVs with radios, listening to GPS collar beeps, while their dogs die in the woods.

Not once during the court hearings did (or could) the DNR or hound hunters dispute the fact that hundreds of large hunting hounds have already died this way. The DNR web site keeps a tally of dead dogs, warns hunters to keep their hounds out of those areas and provides a map. Now it wants to sell you a license so you can intentionally pit your dogs against wolves anywhere in Wisconsin. Rhodesian Ridgebacks, Wolf Hounds and Airedales are being considered for use in the wolf hunt. All are fighting breeds with one intended purpose.

Are you also aware that hound trainers can use live bait animals to train hunting hounds? Raccoon, fox, coyotes, bobcats and bear can be kept in captivity and owners can for a fee allow hunters to bring in their hounds and terrorize those animals in pens or roll cages for up to 16 hours a day. While any zoo, rescue, rehab-center or sanctuary that allowed this practice would risk being fined or closed down for inhumane treatment, in the name of “live bait training” it’s legal for hunters. How long will it take before they add captive wolves and wolf dogs to that live animal bait training list?

The hunting lobby has spent decades promoting a shiny public image of ethical hunting. Why, are such principles as respect for wildlife, the hunters’ code of ethics, fair chase doctrine, and the love of hunting dogs so utterly absent? How low will extremists go — and legislators tolerate — in the name of hunters’ rights? There has been discussion of the public’s tolerance level of wolves. Now discussion needs to turn to the public’s tolerance level for how cruel Wisconsin hunting and hound training has become.

Legislators passed this law in the wee hours of their session last year. We wonder if they were clear as to the events they were putting in motion. We ask that legislators remove dogs from the wolf hunt and stop the use of live bait training on captive wildlife in Wisconsin.

Mike and Jayne Belsky, Necedah

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Opposition group could force debate over Michigan wolf hunting to extend into 2014 election

By Tim Martin
on January 22, 2013

This 2006 photo was provided by Michigan Tech University. AP file photo  

LANSING, MI – The Humane Society of the United States is among the groups trying to prevent wolves from being hunted in Michigan, and it’s not the first time the organization has fought a hunting initiative in the state.

The organization was a key player behind a ballot drive within the past decade that derailed a hunt of mourning doves in Michigan.

Now, The Humane Society of the United States is heavily involved with a coalition called Keep Michigan Wolves Protected. The coalition wants to repeal a measure signed into law late last year by Gov. Rick Snyder, classifying the wolf as a game species and allowing the state’s Natural Resources Commission to consider and potentially authorize a hunt.

If a hunt is authorized, it likely would be focused on parts of the Upper Peninsula, where the Department of Natural Resources estimated roughly 700 wolves lived in 2011. That’s up from just more than 500 in 2008 and just more than 200 in 2000. A new population estimate is expected early this year.

But a hunt could be derailed by the Keep Michigan Wolves Protected effort. If the group collects at least 161,305 valid voter signatures by late March, a measure that could overturn the state law could be placed on the November 2014 ballot. If the proposal were to be certified for the ballot, Michigan’s new state law would be suspended until the election.

Farmers say wolves are attacking their livestock, and wolves have wandered into Upper Peninsula towns including Ironwood. Supporters of considering a hunt say currently allowable methods aimed at preventing attacks on livestock -- such as permitting farmers to shoot wolves they catch in the act -- haven’t worked.

It’s an emotional issue that has sparked debate between supporters and opponents of a wolf hunt.
The Humane Society of the United States says there’s no reason to hunt wolves. The organization has said it wants the animals returned to the endangered species list.

“Wolves are only now starting to recover,” Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO for The Humane Society of the United States, said in a statement released during an appearance at the state Capitol on Tuesday. “It’s not right to spend decades bringing the wolf back from the brink of extinction only to turn around and allow them to be killed for sport.”

Some members of the Keep Michigan Wolves Protected steering committee introduced Tuesday include Aaron Payment, chairperson of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians; Vicki Deisner, state legislative director of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; and James Bull, board member of the Detroit Audubon Society.

Payment said the tribe opposes wolf hunting for cultural reasons.

“In our tradition, in our culture, we believe that the wolf is our brother,” he said.

Another reason: “We are hunters, and we eat meat. We generally only eat the meat that we kill. … But nobody eats the wolf,” Payment said. “And so in our rationale, there is no rational justification for killing the wolf.”

Those who support exploring a possible hunt include the Michigan United Conservation Clubs and the Michigan Farm Bureau.

The MUCC says it has started “a strong and unified response” to the ballot drive. An MUCC spokesman, in an e-mail Tuesday, called the Humane Society of the United States “a Washington-based animal rights extremist group.”

The MUCC said it expects The Humane Society will fund the effort “to have signatures collected from a small representation of the state and then use those signatures to try and overturn legislation that most impacts residents living elsewhere in the state by placing yet another senseless referendum on the ballot,” MUCC spokesman Tony Hansen said in an e-mail. “Based on the overwhelming pushback by residents during the last election cycle when a half-dozen ballot proposals were soundly defeated, it would seem that the people of this state have had enough of these special interest groups trying to buy results on the ballot. But, apparently, HSUS feels the citizens will stomach another attempt. We strongly disagree.”

Keep Michigan Wolves Protected says it plans to use a combination of volunteer and paid signature gatherers.

The Humane Society of the United States has been involved in efforts to stop certain hunting programs over the years – including in Michigan.

In 2004, state lawmakers approved a law that would have permitted the establishment of a dove hunt. But a group against the hunt, including The Humane Society of the United States, mounted a ballot drive to overturn the law. Voters in 2006 rejected the law that would have allowed the mourning dove hunt.

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