PAMPLIN
MEDIA GROUP FILE PHOTO - An environmental group claims Oregon lawmakers
misrepresented provisions of a bill adopted by the Legislature that
removed wolves from the endangered species list.
The
environmental group Cascadia Wildlands is accusing three Oregon
lawmakers of knowingly misrepresenting a bill that ratified the state’s
decision to remove gray wolves from the endangered species list.
The
complaint was filed Monday with the Oregon Government Ethics Commission
against Rep. Brad Witt, D-Clatskanie; Rep. Sal Esquivel, R-Medford; and
Rep. Greg Barreto, R-Cove.
Barreto introduced House Bill 4040
during the short legislative session earlier this year. The Oregon
Department of Fish and Wildlife had previously determined wolves no
longer need endangered species protections, and the Fish and Wildlife
Commission followed through with delisting wolves in November 2015.
HB 4040 effectively gave the Legislature’s stamp
of approval, and Gov. Kate Brown signed off on the bill in March.
Cascadia Wildlands argues that in order to secure votes for the bill
Witt, Esquivel and Barreto made false statements that HB 4040 would not
affect a judicial review of the wolf delisting decision.
“There’s
a real concern this bill passed through the House with a fundamental
misunderstanding of what it does,” said Nick Cady, legal director for
Cascadia Wildlands. “Salem can be somewhat of a black box ... We
perceived this as pretty egregious.”
Cascadia Wildlands, Oregon
Wild and the Center for Biological Diversity had all requested a
judicial review of the delisting decision. The case was tossed by the
Oregon Court of Appeals on April 22, which cited HB 4040.
Cady
claims the bill’s sole purpose was to block their review, despite claims
from Barreto, Witt and Esquivel. According to the complaint, Barreto
said during a Feb. 4 hearing that the bill “does nothing more than shore
up the decision by the Fish and Wildlife Commission,” and “Our
objective in this is not to usurp the authority of the commission. It is
only to shore up the decision that they have made and to make the
(wolf) plan a workable plan as was written.” He also sent a written
document to colleagues stating the bill had no language precluding
judicial review.
However, on Feb. 16, the Legislative Counsel
Committee issued a report to Sen. Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, stating
that the only legal effect of HB 4040 was to “validate any real or
perceived irregularities” in ODFW’s decision under state law.
“In
essence, the only effect of the bill was to preclude judicial review of
the commission’s delisting decision,” the complaint reads.
HB 4040 passed the House 33-23, and the Senate 17-11.
Since
then, ODFW shot and killed four wolves from the Imnaha Pack in
northeast Oregon for frequently attacking livestock in the area. There
is still no legal hunting of wolves allowed in Oregon.
Barreto
said he had not seen the complaint as of Monday morning, but reiterated
the intent of the bill was to affirm what ODFW had already done. “All we
did was say yes, we agree with Fish and Wildlife,” Barreto said. “If
that precludes their lawsuit, then so be it.”
Esquivel also said
that he had not received a copy of the complaint, but was not worried
about it because he did nothing wrong. “We didn’t intentionally try to
mislead anyone,” Esquivel said. “It’s our opinion, and our opinion’s our
opinion.”
Environmentalists had asked for a review of the
delisting decision because they argued it was not made with sound
science, and had not been independently reviewed, as required by state
law.
Cady said they are pushing to have the case reconsidered by
the Court of Appeals. “To be very clear, the (wolf) recovery is going
very successfully,” he said. “Our frustration is more just the pushback
this species’ recovery is getting from state legislators and various
lobbying interests.”
Oregon’s wolf population had grown to at least 110 animals by the end of 2015, a 36 percent increase over the previous year.
GeorgePlavenisareporterwiththeEastOregoniannewspaper.Capital Bureau reporter Hillary Borrud contributed tothisreport.
FILE
- In this Dec. 7, 2007 file photo a bobcat trapped in a snare at the
Billings, Mont., airport looks out of his crate before he is released
east of Shepherd, Mont. An environmental group is asking a federal judge
to halt a United States government program that allows the export of
tens of thousands of bobcat pelts and a small number of gray wolf pelts
for sale on the international fur market. (Casey Riffe /The Billings
Gazette via AP, File)
Wildlife advocates on Wednesday said they will seek a court order
halting a United States government program that allows tens of thousands
of pelts from bobcats and a small number of gray wolves to be exported
annually for sale on the international fur market.
Representatives of WildEarth Guardians said the little-known program
should not continue without a detailed study of its effect on wildlife
populations.
Government figures show more than 57,000 bobcat pelts and a handful of
wolf pelts were exported from the U.S. in 2014, the most recent year for
which data was available. Exports over the past decade ranged from a
low of 30,000 bobcat pelts in 2009 to almost 68,000 in 2013.
The pelts typically are used to make fur garments and accessories.
Russia, China, Canada and Greece are top destinations, according to a
trapping industry representative and government reports.
"The government's been allowing this to happen blindly without doing any
analysis. When we're talking about such high numbers, it's just
preposterous," said Bethany Cotton, director of WildEarth Guardians'
wildlife program.
The group filed a lawsuit in federal court in Missoula challenging the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service program. The agency regulates trade in
animal and plant parts according to the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which the U.S. ratified in 1975.
Bobcats are not considered an endangered species, nor are wolves in much of the Northern Rockies including Montana and Idaho.
Nevertheless, the international trade in bobcat and wolf pelts is
regulated because they are "look-alikes" for other wildlife population
that are listed as endangered.
State wildlife agencies have opposed the inclusion of bobcats in the
CITES treaty, arguing the species is thriving and protections are
unnecessary. The animals are about twice as large as house cats and feed
primarily on rabbits and hares. They range across the contiguous U.S.
and portions of Canada and Mexico, according to the Association of Fish
and Wildlife Agencies.
Between 2.3 million and 3.6 million bobcats lived in the U.S., with
populations that were stable or increasing in at least 40 states,
according to a 2010 study from researchers at Cornell University and the
University of Montana.
Cotton said her organization became aware of the scale of bobcat fur
exports when it sued state game officials in Montana over the accidental
capture of another wild cat, Canada lynx, by trappers pursuing bobcats.
Fish and Wildlife Service spokeswoman Laury Parramore said the agency
would not comment on pending litigation. But she said the government
requires exported pelts to be legally acquired and "not detrimental to
the survival of the species."
National Trappers Association President Chris McAllister says the
targeting of exports marks a new tactic in a long-running campaign by
advocacy groups to shut down the industry. Prior lawsuits have focused
on the types of traps used and the inadvertent trapping of protected
species.
"They're trying to use anything they can," McAllister said. "'If they
can shut us down from exporting furs, it would definitely have an
impact."
McAllister could not immediately provide figures on how many bobcats are
trapped across the U.S. annually. He said prices for pelts from the
animals fell drastically over the past several years, from as much as
$1,000 for a top-quality pelt to just $200 today.
TUCSON, Ariz. – It has been 40
years since the Mexican gray wolf was listed as an endangered species,
but conservationists are concerned about what they see as a serious lack
of progress in reintroducing the animal into the wild. In 2015, the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service counted only 97 lobos in the wild in
Arizona and New Mexico.
Fewer than 25 exist in Mexico, making it the most endangered animal in the world.
Eva Sargent, senior southwest representative with Defenders of Wildlife said the wolves need more genetic diversity to survive.
“All the Mexican wolves alive in the world today are the descendants
of just seven wolves that started the captive breeding program,” she
said. “When you have that sort of genetic bottleneck, you really need to
work hard to preserve the genetic diversity you have, and
unfortunately, that has never happened.”
She said Fish and Wildlife officials, who manage the current
reintroduction program, have failed to release enough wolves from
captivity to sustain and grow the population.
“And now we’re to the point where we can see the genetic
repercussions of them losing some of that genetic heritage,” she added.
“They are having smaller litters and they’re having lower pup survival,
and that’s just a recipe for extinction.”
While the wild wolves are waiting for reinforcement, Sargent said there is good news in the form of a settlement
this week between a coalition of conservationists and the Fish and
Wildlife Service. The agreement requires the federal agency to produce a
“legally sufficient” recovery plan for the wolves by November 2017.
“You know, we are racing extinction on the Mexican gray wolf,”
Sargent stressed. “The best available science, not political pressure,
should lead the recovery planning for lobos. We need more wolves and
less politics.”
The settlement is the result of a 2014 lawsuit by an individual and
four conservation groups, including Defenders of Wildlife, to force the
Fish and Wildlife Service to comply with the requirements of the
Endangered Species Act.
I write about paleontology, dinosaurs, and comparative biology.
Game of Thrones/HBO
Dragons. White walkers. Giants. Dire wolves? The mystical world of the Game of Thrones
series is vast and mysterious. Throughout the series, viewers and
readers have been introduced to the furry and often ferocious
horse-sized wolves that the Stark children call their companions. But
are dire wolves real animals? The answer is that they absolutely are, or
rather were, very real.
Dire wolves once walked the land of the New World, but they are now extinct. Known as Canis dirus,
dire wolves lived during the Pleistocene, about 250,000 to 10,000 years
ago, and are close relatives of modern canids like the gray wolf. While
the dire wolves on television are slightly larger than they were in
real life, C. dirus was about 5 feet long and could weigh up to around 200lbs—it was basically a sturdier version of the modern gray wolf (C. lupus).
These animals lived in forests, in
grasslands, at high elevation—essentially everywhere. There are even
dire wolves from both North and South America even though they are more
common in North America. They were a fairly common top hypercarnivorous
predator consuming a wide variety of megafauna that roamed the
Pleistocene landscape.
Dire wolves are well known from the
famous sticky Los Angeles fossil locality, the La Brea Tar Pits, so it
may come as a surprise to learn the first dire wolf fossil was
discovered in 1854 by Joseph Leidy near Evansville, Indiana. Only a few
specimens were found in North America until the intense recovery fossil
recovery effort began at La Brea Tar Pits in the early 20th century. Now
paleontologists had scads of dire wolves to examine.
With lots of skulls and teeth from these
animals, paleontologists could learn more about how they fed and see if
that explained why they went extinct 10,000 years ago with the rest of
the American megafauna. In 2005, biomechanics specialist Steve Wroe
determined that with its massive jaw musculature, the dire wolf had one
of the largest canine bite forces of any living or extinct animal in
the carnivore group.
A comparison between the skeletons of the gray wolf (left) and the dire wolf (right) (Image credits: Mariomassone & Momotarou2012 – Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)
Carnivore paleontologist Blaire Van Valkenburgh
examined breakage patterns in dire wolf teeth to get an indication of
how they ate and how much bone they crunched. She looked at breakage
patterns and tooth fracture in their fossil teeth from the La Brea Tar
Pits and noted that they were far more broken than any modern
counterparts who also feed on bone. This suggests something about the
dire wolf hunting prowess—these fractures could potentially be a marker
for how aggressive they were with each other and other carnivorous
megafauna, as broken teeth can be a measure of competition.
If dire wolves were such fearsome predators, then why did they go extinct? It is hard to say,exactly.
Most North American megafauna went extinct 10,000 years ago because of
climate change and human impact. One hypothesis is that the primary food
source of the dire wolf, large herbivores, was becoming less common and
they were too food-stressed to survive. Although, a 2015 study by paleontologist Larisa R. G. DeSantis
and colleagues examined the microscopic tooth wear on the surface of
dire wolf teeth and saw it indicated no big changes in their diets just
prior to the extinction event. This means there is not much support for
the hypothesis of a food shortage and their extinction still remains
somewhat of a mystery.
An artists reconstruction of the North and South American dire wolves. (Image credit: Sergiodlarosa CC BY 3.0)
Other parts of Martin’s fantasy world of Game of Thrones
might not be real, but dire wolves definitely were, and a 250,000 year
long record of bone-crunching broken teeth proves their fearsome
reputation earned in Westeros is likely no exaggeration.
Shaena Montanari is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh.
A male wolf roams a tundra in Nunavut in this March 2009 file photo. (Nathan Denette / THE CANADIAN PRESS)
Andrew Weichel, Digital reporter/editor, CTV Vancouver
Published Tuesday, May 3, 2016
There were twice as many wolves killed in the second year of B.C.’s
controversial cull than the first, the government revealed Tuesday.
A total of 163 wolves were shot from helicopters over the winter in the
South Selkirk and South Peace regions, compared to the 84 that were
killed the previous year.
The B.C. government maintains the cull is necessary to protect the
province’s caribou herds, but opponents argue the only way to save the
dwindling populations is through habitat protection.
“It’s just an unbelievable amount of cruelty being waged on wolves in
British Columbia, and by all accounts it’s a futile effort,” said Ian
McAllister, executive director of conservation group Pacific Wild.
“It’s not going to bring caribou back.”
According to the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource
Operations, the South Selkirk caribou herd declined from 46 in 2009 to
18 in 2014. By March of this year, the population had further fallen
down to 12.
The four herds in the South Peace region are also shrinking, and the
government blames 37 per cent of adult caribou deaths in the area on
wolf predation.
But the main cause of the declines, according to Pacific Wild, is
habitat lost through logging, mining, and oil and gas exploration.
“The government is using wolves as a scapegoat,” McAllister said.
“They’re continuing to ignore the scientific community that has
expressed extreme concerns about the efficacy of this wolf cull, and
they’re refusing to respond to the vast majority of British Columbians
who oppose it.”
According to a 2014 paper published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology,
a wolf cull in Alberta might have helped stabilize a shrinking caribou
herd, but did nothing to increase its population. The same paper blamed
caribou losses across the country on human disruptions to ecosystems.
The B.C. government said habitat recovery is part of its strategy, and
that it’s already protected roughly 108,000 hectares of caribou habitat
from logging and roadbuilding in the South Selkirk region. It also has a
goal of protecting 498,000 hectares in South Peace, though McAllister
questioned why the province doesn’t start protecting the habitat now.
“Why haven’t they just done it? We’re decades into the planning,” McAllister said.
Pacific Wild launched a court challenge to B.C.’s cull in January, and said its legal action is ongoing.
The cull, which is scheduled to last another three years, gained
international notoriety thanks to attention from celebrities Miley Cyrus
and Pamela Anderson. An online petition calling for its end has been signed more than 216,000 times.
Except
for the uninterested, and there a quite a few of them, the 21-year old
controversy over wolf restoration in the West is not really about
wolves. Unfortunately instead, it has become another “values” contest.
To some degree it has also become another red versus blue dispute.
When
wolves were first reintroduced in 1995, with a second batch in 1996,
there was some genuine debate whether this was the best way to restore
them to their native range in Idaho and Wyoming, or whether it was best
that they slowly come back to the Northern Rockies on their own by
southward migration from Alberta and British Columbia.
Experts
and average folks alike discussed whether a wolf reintroduction would
grow or wither and die, whether the wolves would reduce (or maybe even
increase) elk and deer populations. Would they kill thousands of cattle
and sheep each year?
Much knowledge has now been gained.
There are at least a hundred scientific studies about the reintroduced
wolves. I thought about making this column a summary, but there is way
too little space for that.
At
the outset, there were those dead set against wolves no matter what.
They came mostly from public land ranching and some agricultural related
interest groups like the Farm Bureau Federation.
Other
people were completely in favor of the new wolves regardless, right
from the start. However, many folks seemed genuinely open to new
information. The militant anti-wolf narrative didn’t develop and spread
until about 5 years had passed.
Politicians
played an important role spreading this opposition narrative. In 1995, a
Republican Senator from Montana, Conrad Burns, predicted the wolves
would kill a child within a year. It didn’t happen, nor did anything
like it happen in the wolf recovery zone in the next 20 years. However,
in the U.S. Senate Burns was able to cut off funding for the scheduled
second wave of reintroduction in 1996.
The
wolves were brought south that year anyway using some departmental
excess funds, donations from non-profits, and volunteers. The Democratic
Governor of Wyoming Dave Freudenthal repeatedly told the media that the
30 or 40 wolves then in the state were doing the impossible — literally
destroying Wyoming’s economy. Soon other politicians, almost all from
Western rural areas took up the anti-wolf cause.
This
rural geographic base of political support for anti-wolf gives it a
political advantage because localities can elect people (all American
elections except for the President are from geographic districts).
Pro-wolf opinion is often the majority nationwide and often even in
Western states. It comes mostly from the cities of the West and is
scattered throughout the nation. It is nowhere concentrated enough to
win elections.
Those familiar
with politics will recognize the political logic of a concentrated local
viewpoint in opposition to widespread, and maybe more numerous, but a
nowhere densely clustered view in the other direction. This breakdown is
common in political issue after political issue. This is one of the
most important lessons to be learned about practical politics.
Pro-wolf
groups have also been taken to task by some of their friends for making
mistakes both tactical and strategic, but there is a good reason to
believe that the current situation of a slowly declining wolf population
due to human mortality coupled with very unpleasant anti-wolf rhetoric
would have happened regardless of any moves the pro-wolf groups made.
For
example, from the beginning pro-wolf groups have given financial
compensation to livestock owners who lost animals to wolves. A number of
well executed public opinion surveys have shown that giving
compensation has in no way improved rural perception of wolves or
changed the idea that they drive owners of livestock to the wall
financially. The non-violent demeanor of wolves toward humans — no dead
children, no attacks on people period — has made no difference either.
The
wolf issue fits very well into the quiver of anti-government arguments
at large that emerged after 2008. They served as a scapegoat to take
some folks’ minds off the terrible economic disruptions of the Great
Recession.
The pro-wolf
argument was and remains about the beauty of wolves, the need to restore
a natural ecosystem, and that wolves have few negative impacts and many
positive ones.
On the other
hand, the anti-wolf position hardened into apocalyptic tirades. The
wolves are said to be the worst thing that has ever happened to big game
with the elk and deer in an advanced state of decline. Moreover, they
say the agricultural sector of the economy has been delivered a blow to
the gut.
While no group is
immune to believing conspiracy theories, the anti-wolf position relies
on them. The nice thing (or actually the bad thing) about conspiracy
theories is that they are almost immune to facts. For example,
presenting a clear factual disproval of a conspiracy theory usually just
leads its believers to simply say it shows the fact giver is part of
the conspiracy.
Regarding the
wolf restoration, many anti-wolf people believe it to be a conspiracy to
bring a massive non-native beast to Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, from the
“far away land” of Canada. Instead, they say, efforts should have been
to restore a supposedly timid, never seen, small native wolf of the
Rocky Mountains, canis lupus irremotus.
It
is further said that wolf recovery is part of a greater conspiracy to
end hunting, destroy game animals, bring in more federal control (or
perhaps even United Nations control under something named Agenda 21),
destroy gun rights, and the like. The motivation for the conspiracy is
malice and under Agenda 21 the removal of the residents of small towns
and rural areas.
Wolf advocates have
traditionally relied on the federal government to offset what they saw
as the backward policies of the Northern Rockies states toward
endangered carnivores.
Unfortunately
for them, after friendly President Bill Clinton, there came two
Presidents who were of no help or who aided their opponents, George W.
Bush and Barack Obama. Neither President was personally involved with
wolf policy, but their appointments and nominations to key Department of
Interior positions ranged from being uninterested in to against wolf
restoration.
Despite these
setbacks for those who support wolf restoration, the wolf population has
only declined somewhat in Idaho and Montana since their congressionally
forced delisting.
The wolf
population in Wyoming outside of Yellowstone Park is now growing again
after the Wyoming wolf hunt was stopped by a federal court decision
taking wolf management away from that state. In fact, it is now at its
highest point since the restoration began. Wolves have also naturally
spread to Washington, Oregon, and northern California. These states seem
more favorable to a concept of wildlife that includes more than
animal’s value for hunting and trapping.
While
this is very speculative, perhaps twenty years from now we might see
wildlife distributed not as much by geography and habitat as by
politics. Red states might have big populations of a couple kinds of
large grazing animals, designated as “game,” plus varying numbers of
other animals, deemed to be “varmints.” The game would be managed much
like livestock, e.g., cows are privately owned “slow elk.” Actual elk
are public owned quick cows, good for hunting adventure.
Blue
states might have a much larger variety of kinds of animals. They would
be treated as wildlife as well as game. The category of varmint would
be abolished.
The issue will
remain unpleasant because it is really about the cultural values of
rural versus urban and suburban areas. Reason will not prevail. The
facts be damned!
Dr. Ralph
Maughan of Pocatello is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho
State University. He retired after teaching there for 36 years,
specializing in voting, public opinion and natural resource politics. He
has written three outdoor guides, including “Hiking Idaho” with Jackie
Johnson Maughan. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition.
A settlement
announced Tuesday between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and several
environmental groups that had filed a lawsuit over the agency’s stalled
recovery plan for the Mexican gray wolf could help restart efforts to
boost the endangered animal’s numbers in New Mexico and Arizona.
Under the deal, the Fish and Wildlife Service is required to develop a new wolf management plan before the year’s end.
Michael Robinson of the Center
for Biological Diversity said in a statement Tuesday that the new plan
“should trigger new releases of captive-bred wolves into the wild and
establish new Mexican wolf populations. “After four decades of delay, a scientific road map for recovery of the Mexican gray wolf will finally be a reality,” he added.
The settlement comes just a week
after the federal agency announced it would move forward with wolf
releases in New Mexico this summer, despite the state’s objections, and
the state threatened to sue if the releases move forward.
The Mexican gray wolf was listed
as endangered in 1976, but Western states, including New Mexico, have
recently stalled efforts to reintroduce and protect the animal, citing
the lack of a current management strategy. According to federal data,
there were just 97 Mexican gray wolves in New Mexico and Arizona by the
end of 2015, down from 110 in 2014.
In November 2014, a group of
environmental advocates filed a lawsuit against the Fish and Wildlife
Service to compel the agency to act on the long-awaited recovery plan
based on current science.
Defenders of Wildlife, the Center
for Biological Diversity, the Endangered Wolf Center, David Parsons and
the Wolf Conservation Center were represented by the environmental law
group Earthjustice in the suit against the federal agency and Interior
Department Secretary Sally Jewell, who oversees it. The state of Arizona
filed a similar suit seeking a wolf management plan, and the states of
Colorado and Utah, along with the New Mexico Department of Game and
Fish, intervened in the case.
The settlement says the agency
must release a new recovery plan for the Mexican gray wolf by Nov. 30,
2017. It also requires the agency to pay $56,467 in legal fees to the
environmental groups.
In the ongoing debate over the
federal agency’s plans to release Mexican gray wolves in New Mexico, the
state has cited the lack of current science and the need for a new
federal management strategy. It has twice denied the agency a permit for
wolf releases.
New Mexico Game and Fish Department Director Alexa Sandoval told The New Mexican in January that releasing the wolves without a management plan would be like “driving with blinders on.”
But Fish and Wildlife has said it
doesn’t need state approval to move forward with the wolf recovery
plan. On April 18, it announced it would release wolves in New Mexico
and Arizona this summer.
New Mexico responded with a notice of its intent to sue the federal government over the planned releases.
Wolves
and their canine descendants are among our oldest animal partners, and
yet we continue to hunt and kill them out of irrational fears that blind
us to their many benefits.
Taking
an even longer view of the human—wolf relationship, let’s remember that
this species came to us in friendship perhaps more than 30,000 years
ago, according to an emerging consensus among paleontologists.
Pre-agricultural people and wolves may have viewed each other warily at
first, but eventually an instinctive fear turned into acceptance and
then later into companionship.
Of
the 20 or so wild animals that humans have successfully domesticated
through the ages, wolves were first, by 30,000 years or more—and the
wolf is the only large predator ever successfully domesticated. Though
the other large predators, whether mountain lions or black bears,
generally don’t pose much of a threat to us either, the wolf is the only
one who became a companion. And while the wolf has survived through the
millennia, in a dramatically reduced range as a result of human
persecution, it has also offered an extraordinary array of benefits to
human society by submitting to domestication. At the top of every dog’s
genealogy chart is the wolf, and dogs have provided us with
companionship, security, labor, and enhanced success in agriculture
(guarding) and hunting (tracking and retrieving) over the millennia.
More than any other species, the wolf and the dog enabled us to make the
leap from tribal societies and prehistory to agriculture and the rise
of human civilization.
“Dogs
absolutely turned the tables,” Dr. Greger Larson, director of the
Palaeogenomics and Bio-Archaeology Research Network at the University of
Oxford told the BBC. “Without dogs, humans would still be
hunter-gatherers. Without that initial starting phase of dog
domestication, civilization just would not have been possible.”
The
story of a wolf suckling the abandoned brothers Romulus and Remus at
the creation of Rome may be allegorical, but wolves did forever change
the human story. Their domestication stands alongside language, fire,
and plant cultivation as one of the major innovations that most altered
the fortunes of humanity. “It’s hard to see how early herders would have
moved and protected and guarded their folks without domestic dogs being
in place, and one has to wonder whether agriculture would ever have
really made it as a viable alternative to hunting and gathering,” said
Peter Rowley-Conwy, a professor of archaeology at Durham University.
It’s no exaggeration to say that nearly all human exchange, from early
bartering to the on-line transactions in the information age, have
necessarily been built on the foundation stones of these developments.
The wolf and its descendants have been part of the humane economy longer
than any other species.
While
many Native American tribes revere wolves, and place them at the center
of their creation stories, many other Americans have succumbed to the
cartoonish “big bad wolf” narrative and done the opposite. Throughout
much of U.S. history, wolves have been ruthlessly persecuted. In his
1880 annual report, Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Philetus
Norris wrote that “the value of their [wolves and coyotes] hides and
their easy slaughter with strychnine-poisoned carcasses have nearly led
to their extermination.” Around the turn of the century, the federal
government hired professional hunters and trappers to amass a body count
of wolves, and state governments provided bounties on them. By the
early ’70s, just after the U.S. Congress enacted a comprehensive
Endangered Species Act to protect them and so many other imperiled
species, wolves were hanging on only in the northern reaches of
Minnesota—and at Isle Royale in Lake Superior.
Increasingly
wildlife science is revealing the critical part that wolves play in
maintaining robust ecosystems. Aldo Leopold, the father of modern-day
wildlife management, renounced his killing of wolves in his classic
book, A Sand County Almanac. He came to recognize, even in his
days as a young forester, that wolves were anything but pests. They were
critical actors in maintaining balance in ecosystems, and he saw the
harmful effects of their removal, by predator control programs, in
Arizona’s Kaibab National Forest.
In
their decades of work at Isle Royale, wildlife biologists John Vucetich
and Rolf Peterson have affirmed Leopold’s conclusion beyond all
argument by showing how wolves limit the growth of prey
populations—strengthening them by culling the weak, sick, or young, and
preventing their numbers from expanding to the point where they denude
the forest of saplings or strip bare the leaves of trees. Indeed, upon
their reintroduction to Yellowstone, wolves immediately went to work
reducing the high densities of elk and bison, forcing them to stop
overgrazing meadows and riparian areas. These effects are documented in a
popular video called “How Wolves Change Rivers,” based on a lecture by
journalist and environmental advocate George Monbiot. The video has
attracted more than 15 million views on YouTube.
Art Directors, Trip/Alamy
Native
American dancer at a gathering in Fairbanks, Alaska, displaying
traditional respect for the wolf by incorporating it into his sacred
costume.
The
effects of wolves on livestock are also overblown. Data from Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula and other parts of the country where wolves live show
that they are responsible for a very small amount of killing—between 0.1
and 0.6 percent of all livestock deaths in these areas. A 2014
Washington State University study, conducted over a 25-year period,
found that indiscriminate killing of wolves actually increases the
tendency of wolves to prey on livestock. The reason may be that sport
hunting and commercial trapping of wolves break up stable wolf packs,
creating a younger, less experienced population, inexperienced in
killing traditional prey and more likely to show opportunism and pick
off a sheep or calf. And of course, farmers who deploy guard dogs as a
highly successful strategy of protecting their flocks and herds from
predators can thank the wolf itself for that service.
In
exaggerating the adverse impacts of wolves, the proponents of wolf
killing underreport these good effects. Wolf predation helps maintain
healthy deer populations, to the benefit of forestry, agriculture, and
wildlife management. By killing sick deer, wolves can contain the spread
of diseases that can be catastrophic for deer populations. And what
automobile drivers haven’t been concerned, to one degree or another, by
the possibility of colliding with a deer on the road? The insurer State
Farm reports that there are roughly 1.2 million deer—vehicle collisions
in the United States every year, causing some 200 human fatalities and
about $4 billion in vehicle damage. Michigan typically accounts for
about 50,000 of those collisions a year, with thousands of them in the
Upper Peninsula. If the wolves maintained viable, healthy herds by
taking mainly the young, weak, and sick deer, they might save tens of
millions of dollars in repair and insurance costs, to say nothing of the
incalculable benefits of preventing the loss of human life.
“Wolves
provide a firewall against new diseases in deer,” Rolf Peterson told a
Michigan Senate committee when the issue of wolf hunting was being
debated. “A very obvious example may be chronic wasting disease.”
Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a brain disease, like Mad Cow Disease,
and it’s one of the major threats to deer populations, after it spread
from deer farms and captive hunting facilities to free-ranging deer
populations—another case of reckless trophy hunters visiting more
affliction upon wildlife. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources,
which says there are more than 400 deer farms in the state, notes that
the disease has been spreading in large portions of the southern part of
the state, since a major outbreak of the brain disorder in 2002.
“So
far CWD has not spread into areas inhabited by wolves, anywhere in the
United States,” Peterson said, “and the logical hypothesis is that
wolves simply cull out diseased animals.” The disease is an ugly and
nonselective way of reducing deer populations, and it creates a health
risk to people who eat deer meat since the disease can be transmitted to
people through its human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease.
And
while the indirect economic benefits that wolves bring may provide
their greatest value, there are direct benefits, too. As with Isle
Royale, people also just love to see wolves; to hear wolves; and to
place themselves, even for a short while, in a wild place that harbors
wolves. Each year, thousands of wildlife watchers gaze at the world’s
most-viewed wolves in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone, bringing in $35
million to the Yellowstone region annually. In the Great Lakes region,
the International Wolf Center in Ely, Minnesota, receives $3 million
each year from wolf watchers. With wolves now claiming a more permanent
place in the Great Lakes Region, we can expect tourism-related revenues
to increase in all of the states with wolves.
John
Vucetich is leery of invoking the practical, economic arguments about
wolves, though he readily acknowledges their validity. It’s just that he
believes the moral argument for protecting wolves is the most important
and compelling. He understands, however, that political decisions and
public policy more often turn on economics.
Hemis/Alamy Stock Photo
Grey Wolf (Canis lupus) adult and offspring in Minnesota.
Ethics
and economics are bound together in our decision making, and it’s clear
that many politicians have it upside down when it comes to the economic
analysis associated with predators. It’s not a zero-sum game, where
more wolves mean fewer hunting licenses and increased cattle and sheep
losses. A more comprehensive, fact-based assessment of wolves shows
their multiplier effect—whether in a pure wilderness like Isle Royale or
in a landscape where forests, farms, and human settlements are
commingled.
“I
think there are several areas where wolves are already playing a role
in remaking the Upper Michigan ecosystem,” Peterson told lawmakers in
his testimony. “The total positive economic impact would be measured in
hundreds of millions of dollars.”
For
more than a century, we as a nation had our way with wolves, killing
them off throughout more than 95 percent of their historic range—leaving
a trail of broken bodies and shattered wolf families and a gaping hole
in our ecosystems. Like so many other forms of animal abuse, much of the
killing was driven by ignorance and misguided government action. That
decades-long scorched-earth policy of slaughtering wolves stands
alongside the massacre of bison as one of the most inhumane and
counterproductive chapters in the annals of American wildlife management
and agriculture.
For
too long, government policies toward wolves were driven by fairy tales
and irrational fears. When we see people reverting back to such
arguments, dusting them off for use on the floors of state legislatures
or in meetings of local cattlemen’s associations, it’s time for us to
call them as they are—false, groundless, and shameful. We know too much
now to let claims like these carry the day any longer.
We
cannot be Pollyannish when it comes to the occasional conflicts that
arise with wolves, but we need not be foolish or cruel in our responses
either. We must close the door on the era of indiscriminate killing and
deal with occasional conflicts primarily by nonlethal means, as part of a
multidimensional framework for management that takes reason and
predator ecology into account.
In
recent decades, we’ve tried to undo some of the damage: first, in the
’70s by protecting the small population of surviving wolves in Minnesota
and Michigan through the Endangered Species Act, then two decades ago
by reintroducing wolves to the Northern Rockies and the Southwest. These
toeholds have allowed wolves to reclaim lands lost to them generations
ago. The wolves have demonstrated enormous resiliency, but there’s no
need to continue to test that capacity. They’ve reclaimed forests in
Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, established packs in southern
Arizona and New Mexico, and now in northern California and throughout
much of Oregon and Washington. They’ve even wandered into northern
Arizona and Utah. Yet for all this progress, only 5,000 or so wolves
survive in the lower 48 states.
In
the last few years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed federal
protections under the Endangered Species Act for wolves in a number of
states and turned over management to wildlife authorities there. Without
hesitating, these states authorized trophy hunters and trappers to kill
thousands of wolves, often with steel-jaw traps, wire snares, hounding,
and baiting. In Wisconsin, where the worst of the methods were
permitted, trappers and trophy hunters killed off 17 family units in
just three seasons, or a fifth of the state’s total wolf population.
The
courts have provided a check on recent abuses, repeatedly stepping in
to restore federal protections for wolves in Wyoming and the Great
Lakes. Congress overruled the courts in the Northern Rockies, and
Montana and Idaho treated that act as license to kill wolves in
appalling numbers. Thus far, the Humane Society of the United States and
others have blocked similar efforts in Congress to remove federal
protections for wolves in the Great Lakes and Wyoming. It’s the wrong
move not just as a matter of law, but also as a matter of ecology and
economics.
In
2015, more than dozens of world-renowned wildlife biologists and
scientists wrote to Congress, noting that “the gray wolf occupies a mere
fraction of its historic range.” “In recognition of the ecological
benefits wolves bring, millions of tourism dollars to local economies,
and abundant knowledge from scientific study,” they wrote, “we ask
Congress to act to conserve the species for future generations.”
Having
played a central role in protecting our parks and generating billions
of dollars in tourism, all while preserving the cultural and ecological
assets of our nation, government should now become an agent of the
humane economy, and the protection of wolves, grizzly bears, wolverines,
lynx, and other long-persecuted creatures presents the perfect
opportunity. We now know too much about wildlife science to continue our
old ways, and we have too much evidence of economic benefits to be in
denial any longer. If ecology and economics are not enough, we need only
look to the occupants of the dog beds in our homes, or the ones who
sleep in our beds. They’re not so fierce, but they’re dependent on us.
We can be good caretakers of them and their wild brethren and other wild
animals, who need little more from us than to stop killing them for
sport, bragging rights, or some irrational hatred.
As
president and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States, Wayne
Pacelle leads one of the world’s most effective animal-protection
organizations and one of the highest-impact nonprofit groups of any
kind. Placing emphasis on transforming public policies and corporate
behavior, he has been a primary strategist in securing the enactment of
hundreds of state and federal animal-protection laws and helped drive
reforms adopted by many of America’s biggest companies.
Pacelle is the
author of The Humane Economy: How Innovators and Enlightened
Consumers are Transforming the Lives of Animals and 2011’s New York
Times bestseller The Bond: Our Kinship with Animals, Our Call to Defend
Them. His blog, A Humane Nation, is published each weekday.
FAIRBANKS
— The new National Park Service study concluding that killing park
wolves reduces the success of wolf viewing by park visitors is an
intuitively obvious conclusion and confirms what has been known for
decades. In fact, this simple fact was the primary basis for over a
dozen citizen proposals to the Alaska Board of Game and the Alaska
Department of Fish and Game Commissioner asking to close the boundary of
Denali to wolf hunting and trapping. Unfortunately, the state has
ignored the facts of the situation for many years and continues to do
so.
The number
of wolves in Denali has declined from 147 in Fall 2007 to only 49 now,
and the number of wolf family groups (“packs”) has declined from 20 in
2008 to only nine now. Visitor wolf-viewing success has declined from 45
percent in 2010, when the (inadequate) buffer was eliminated by the
state, to only 5 percent last year. More than 530,000 visitors come to
Denali each year — about 50,000 of these are Alaskans. Many cite the
opportunity to see wolves as one of their primary objectives for
visiting the park. The park is responsible for more than $500 million in
economic activity each year in Alaska.
The
drop in wolf viewing success just since the state eliminated the buffer
has cost as many as 200,000 visitors each year the opportunity to view a
wolf in the park. In fact, some Alaskans now travel to Yellowstone to
see wolves in the wild. Throughout this period of wolf decline, scores
of park wolves have been killed along the park boundary and inside the
park by hunters and trappers. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to
connect the dots.
Yet,
as with the state, the park service remains reluctant to admit the full
impact of killing wolves, both along the boundary and inside Denali, on
this unprecedented decline. Last year, the park service claimed the
decline may be due to low snowfall, and the News-Miner ran a story
asserting such. When we pointed out to both that there was indeed no
correlation between snow level and wolf numbers, neither corrected their
erroneous assertion. Fortunately, the new park study finally corrects
this error and admits the truth on this point.
But
most disappointing in the new park study is its continued assertion
that killing wolves along the boundary has “minimal impacts on the size
of protected wolf populations.” On this, they are simply wrong.
The
National Park Service and the state consistently neglect to mention the
disintegration of two of the park’s largest wolf family groups due to
the kill of just one breeding female wolf. This happened in 2012 with
the Grant Creek family group, when the trapping of the last pregnant
female led to the group not denning, not pupping, dispersing and
declining in number that summer from 17 to only three. Research has
proven that it is the pups and pup-rearing that provides the cohesion in
wolf family groups. Again in 2015, the same tragic result occurred
with the East Fork (Toklat) group, when the last pregnant female of East
Fork was killed at a bear baiting station outside the park, and the
group declined from 15 to only two. These two events clearly resulted in
more than “minimal impacts on the size of protected wolf populations.”
Although
the park service has now admitted the fact that wolf killing diminishes
visitor viewing success, it continues to be unwilling to concede the
full truth — that killing park wolves along the boundary has contributed
to this spectacular decline in the Denali wolf population. And, of
course, wolf take is about the only cause of decline that we can do
anything about.
The
only realistic solution to this ongoing decline is for the state to
trade a wildlife conservation easement along the park boundary in
exchange for a like-valued federal asset elsewhere. This has been
proposed for several years, yet little action has been taken so far.
Let’s hope this new park study rekindles the sense of public obligation
in both the park service and the state and motivates real action to
secure a conservation easement on the boundary of Denali. This is the
only way to secure the park mandate of protecting natural processes
within the park and to restore and sustain the wolf-viewing resource of
the park for all visitors.
Rick
Steiner was a marine conservation professor with the University of
Alaska from 1980-2010, stationed in Kotzebue, Cordova and Anchorage. He
now consults on conservation issues through Oasis Earth.
A male wolf roams a tundra in Nunavut in this March 2009 file photo. (Nathan Denette / THE CANADIAN PRESS)
