Related
stories:
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Wyoming
panel explores predator management
Casper Tribune; Sept. 6, 2003
Red
tape, bitter controversy mark Southwest wolf reintroduction
Santa Fe New Mexican (AP): Sept. 2, 2003
Montana's
wolf-management plan published amid broad support
Great Falls Tribune; Aug. 22, 2003
Colorado
ranchers ready to resist wolves
Boulder Daily Camera; Aug. 15, 2003
Wolves,
controversy return to Idaho mountain range
Idaho Mountain Express; Aug. 15, 2003
Idaho
group wants wolves gone
Billings Gazette (AP); Aug. 11, 2003
Wyoming
ranchers to get more for grizzly kills
Billings Gazette (AP); Aug. 4, 2003
Researchers
find Yellowstone wolves easy, rewarding to study
New York Times; July 22, 2003
Wolves
add more elements to Yellowstone's ecosystem
Spokane Spokesman-Review; July 21, 2003
Resentment
rises as wolf packs spread across Idaho
Spokane Spokesman-Review; July 21, 2003
Idaho
wolf opponents ready another lawsuit
Spokane Spokesman-Review; June 1, 2003
Wyo.
rancher struggles to co-exist with wolves, but pays heavy
price
Denver Post; May 18, 2003
Wolves'
biology may exceed human tolerance
Christian Science Monitor; May 1, 2003
Wyoming
snarls effort to take gray wolf off endangered list
Seattle Times; April 29, 2003
New
Oregon governor says he'll protect wolves, environment
Portland Oregonian; March 25, 2003 |
| Backgrounders |
Idaho
Wolf Management Plan;
Montana
Wolf Management Plan;
Wyoming
Wolf Management Plan
Federal
Register: Printing of Rule to Declassify the Wolf
Rocky
Mountain Wolf Recovery Annual Report – 2002
Yellowstone
Ecosystem Subcommittee
Links to Grizzly Bear Management Plan for Southwestern Montana,
State of Idaho Yellowstone Grizzly Bear Management Plan and
Wyoming Grizzly Bear Management Plan
Wolves
and Western Politics - Teaching the World about Wolves
International Wolf Center;
10/08/2002
NOVA
online: Bringing Wolves Home: Ed Bangs
PBS; November 2000
Oversight
Hearing on the Reintroduction of the Grizzly Bear in the Public
Domain National Forests;
June 1997
Diamond
G Ranch in Wyoming
Photos of ranch dogs and livestock killed by wolves
Montanans
for Multiple Use
Environment: People and Predation.
An anti-wolf essay;
1/29/2001
Wildlife
Conservation Society's Science Blog page |
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The biggest barrier to
restoring and maintaining
viable populations of large predators is attitude |
By Steven Hawley
for Headwaters News |
| In 150 years,
there will be no more large predators in the wild on the planet,
writes author David Quammen in his newest book, "Monster
of God."
Examining the habitats of such creatures in places outside
North America, Quammen's musings over Asian lions, Australian
crocodiles, Romanian bears and Siberian tigers raises the
volume of an alarm call that points to ecosystems unraveling
faster than the threads can even be examined or collected.
The notion of a predator-less planet
will doubtless provoke discussion and debate, but the most damning
evidence against the odds of large predator survival globally
is undeniable. According to the most reliable estimates, some
11 billion human souls will crowd the planet by the middle of
the next century, and the insatiable demand for basic needs,
to say nothing of resource-intensive extras like cars and computers,
may well finally fragment and isolate the vast territories non-human
occupants at the top of the food chain require.
Quammen curiously devotes little in his writing to the fate
of North American predators in 2150, perhaps by clever design.
As with any travel, either vicariously through books or via
a frequently-stamped passport, the tendency when back home is
to turn inward, gathering what's been seen and learned
and applying the accrued wisdom to life in more familiar territory.
So then, what about here? Is still possible that an evolving
ecological consciousness could muster the collective wisdom
to preserve and maintain existing tracts of wilderness, and
even return to the wild certain key migratory corridors, as
has been proposed in starry-eyed notions like the Yellowstone
to Yukon initiative?
More importantly, have the attitudes that very nearly eliminated
grizzlies, cougars and wolves from their North American places
in the first half of the 20th century evolved beyond the vengeful
litany of trapping, shooting and poisoning that made western
pasture safe for sheep and cows?
Events of the past decade in the American West offer some hope.
The 66 wolves released in Yellowstone and central Idaho have
experienced a population boom, with some 500-700 wolves roaming
the territory, invoking the ire of certain ranchers and hunters
alike, precipitating a host of inflammatory bumper stickers
and town-hall testimonies, and evoking no less than 21 proposed
anti-wolf bills in various western legislatures.
Yet despite the hyperbolic rhetoric of some western politicians
(most famously, Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana, who predicted
nearly a decade ago that wolves would regularly be devouring
small children in Yellowstone), the scientific evidence seems
to suggest that wolves are actually doing the ecosystems in
which they reside some benefit.
In an irony only a serious Republican could appreciate, it seems
wolves have taken Yellowstone's ungulates off a 70-year cycle
of browsing welfare, forcing them into a
thrifty proletarian diet of grazing over a wider area, not taking
the luxury of eating themselves out of a suddenly-renewed need
for cover.
Research by Oregon State University hydrology professor Bob
Bechta reveals a scenario where wolves keep deer and elk from
eating cottonwoods and aspens year-round. Aspens in areas frequented
by wolves in the park have rebounded, ending a stagnation of
their range that coincides with the extirpation of wolves from
the park around 1930.
This is good news for the whole panoply of critters in such
habitats, leading to a phenomenon known as a "trophic cascade,"
in which thicker vegetation leads to better living for insects,
birds, fish, and myriad meat-eaters and plant-grazers of all
sizes.
But if there is any lesson to be easily gleaned from studying
the natural history of the West, it's that decisions have rarely
been made based on the best possible science. A host of factors
-- cultural, economic, and the deeply ingrained suspicions and
fears, in part hard-wired by humankind's racial memory
of being viewed as "just another flavor of meat" by
large predators, as Quammen would have it -- have revealed an
emerging but deeply divided ecological consciousness.
Wolves have been gone from the Rocky Mountain West for more
than 70 years, and they were in decline across the nation a
long time before that.
Wolf populations actually rebounded in the 1880s, but only as
the result of the slaughter of 80 million buffalo, whose carcasses
were left to rot on the plains, making easy pickings for wolves.
When the massacre was over, wolves turned to livestock, and
were eliminated because of it.
The federal government, through its Animal Damage Control agency,
was in the business of helping ranchers kill wolves, paying
out $340,000 to kill 88,000 wolves in Montana alone, until the
last of them was trapped out of the Yellowstone area.
(The anecdotal evidence recorded from this era, in many cases
from government trappers, has produced a vivid testimony of
the wolf's considerable intelligence in recognizing cleverly
disguised traps, poisons, and bait.)
If the tendency to believe that such indiscriminate killing
for the sake of cows and sheep is a dark chapter from an ecologically
ignorant past, the reality is that the agency, with an Orwellian
name change to Wildlife Services in 1997, still exists, and
still traps, kills, and poisons tens of thousands of predators
and pests every year -- 96,000 animals in the U.S. in 1999 alone,
a a cost to taxpayers of $10 million.
Ranchers who call Wildlife Services to dispatch predators are
not scrutinized for practices that might invite predation, despite
the fact that many hold grazing permits on public lands, a practice
also heavily subsidized by taxpayers.
Another irony, apparent to anyone willing to look at the numbers,
can be found in the combined efforts of federal natural resource
and land-use agencies to save 700 or so gray wolves, and perhaps
roughly the same number of grizzly bears, while simultaneously
slaughtering many times that number of coyotes, badgers, black
bears, cougars and other predators less likely to make the cover
of glossy outdoor magazines.
Such apparent dichotomies aren't limited to the actions
of ranchers or land-management agencies, either. Wildlife Services
also makes house calls on behalf of horrified newcomers to the
urban-wildland interface, dispatching animals who made a snack
of a beloved pet, dug up a flowerbed, or scared the guests by
curling up for a nap under the SUV.
Some hunters, too, seem unable to escape the contradiction in
attitudes toward large-predator survival. Though the available
research suggests elk herds in Yellowstone and Idaho are not
shrinking and have actually increased in size in some years
since wolves were reintroduced, an angry faction of the hunting
lobby continues to push for state control of wolf recovery efforts.
In western states, particularly Wyoming, this remains a thinly
veiled argument for keeping a token population of wolves confined
within wilderness or national park boundaries. In the meantime,
many elk herds are fed by wildlife agencies through the winter
for lack of low-elevation forage.
In addition to habitat loss, the most effective predators of
elk herds are rifle and bow hunters, who in Montana alone in
2002 killed 22,447 elk, according to Department of Fish, Wildlife
and Parks estimates.
While much has been accomplished in the name of habitat conservation
by hunters, the notion of sharing a small portion of the predatory
role, of having to hunt a little slower and harder through re-emergent
stands of aspen and cottonwood, isn't as important in some circles
as the easy possibility of a fast kill. Until both propositions
seem at least equally enticing to the vast majority of hunters,
a full restoration of existing habitat seems unlikely.
Yet, wise ecosystem management acknowledges the possibility
that hunters, as well as the rest of us currently mired in unresolved
conflict over land and the fate of its non-human inhabitants,
could precipitate such a recovery, and that our power to do
so may be far beyond the considerable drama represented by the
reintroduction of wolves.
If the point of reintroducing large predators is to resuscitate
ecosystems that may sorely require them to survive, then it's
worth the effort, even if it fails. But if reintroduction serves
any one of a host of more cynical purposes, a public-relations
sop to tourists, or as a nostalgia trip to appease a collectively
sullied conscience, then the effort seems doomed to fail.
Planning ecosystem health, a brand-new endeavor in human history,
is a complex, serious task that requires honesty, integrity,
patience, and the taking down of fences that closely guard ideological
territories, in the hope that the needs of every organism within
that system get a fair shake at survival.
Old ranches, new vacation homes, dogs and cats wild and domestic,
and hunters of both two- and four-legged variety are all parts
of this larger ecosystem, but as yet, too few people are thinking
of it this way.
Instead, what has proliferated since the big toothy predators
were killed off here not so long ago more accurately mirrors
the disturbing pattern marked in "Monster of God,"
where the short-term benefits of ownership have trumped ecosystem
health for centuries, and where those creatures that survive
in such places scratch out a tenuous living in the tattered
remnants.
With the ecologically devastating path of such an economy already
well-marked, and a healthy share of another 5 billion people
on the horizon, it may take a trophic cascade of human understanding
around here to beat that century-and-a-half deadline.
Steven Hawley is a Missoula-based
writer who specializes in environmental issues. |
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Ranchers'
frustration
rises with wolf numbers |
By Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
Sept. 17, 2003 |
It's nearly become a cliche, but recent
headlines leave little doubt: Of all the divisive natural resource
issues in the West, few are as vitriolic as the debate over
wolves.
Grizzly bears are still controversial, particularly when their
threatened-species status closes roads or restricts activities.
And Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne made headlines with his adamant
opposition to reintroducing the "massive,
flesh-eating carnivores" into his state before the
issue took a back burner under the Bush administration.
But, as
the Spokesman-Review noted, grizzlies are slow to reproduce,
they don't travel in packs, they generally prefer remote country
and their densities are such that even in heavy grizzly country,
they don't earn the enmity that wolves do.
Wolves have been one of the most blatantly successful reintroduction
efforts, and as their numbers have grown, so has the visceral
hatred of a surprising number of ranchers.
Eight years ago, biologists released 15 gray wolves into Idaho
and 14 into Yellowstone National Park, followed by 37 more the
following year.
Estimates this summer had 263 wolves in Idaho, 217 in Wyoming
and 183 in Montana.
At least six wolves have been illegally shot in Idaho since
2000, nine in Montana, and those are only
the ones officials know about.
Skip for a moment to Arizona
and New Mexico, where reintroduction of the Mexican gray
wolf is years behind the effort in the northern Rockies. Eleven
wolves were released in 1998, and while a variety of setbacks
have kept number relatively low, the divisiveness is already
deep.
Ranchers say the odds are stacked against them, and environmentalists
say reintroduction is being undermined by official catering
to the livestock industry.
That's mild compared to the current rhetoric in Wyoming and
Idaho.
"You can have a healthy herbivore population or a healthy
predator population, but you can't have both," said sheep
rancher Bonnie Smith of Johnson County, Wyo., at a recent
forum on predators. She demanded that federal officials
bring back the banned poison 1080 to control, or better yet,
eradicate wolves.
She said sheep ranchers have abandoned mountain pastures, cut
their herds, paid for more shepherds and, in many cases, taken
second jobs to cover their losses.
In
central Idaho, a new pack of wolves has moved into the White
Cloud Mountains to replace one exterminated for killing livestock.
Ranchers' anger has been fueled by a federal court ruling that
forbids federal agents from killing wolves that prey on livestock,
and by wolf advocates' demands to ban grazing on public land
with known wolf dens.
Wolves haven't yet
reached Colorado, at least on a resident basis, at least
as far as anyone knows, but the opposition is prepared for the
day.
"I'm gonna have to buy a backhoe because if I shoot one
in the winter, I can't dig fast enough by hand," Moffat
County Commissioner Les Hampton was quoted last month in the
Boulder Daily Camera.
Wolves are known to have killed 52 cattle, 99 sheep nine dogs
and five llamas across the West last year. Ranchers say the
actual numbers are five to eight times higher, and federal officials
agree many kills are never confirmed.
Some elk hunters contend growing wolf packs will wipe out elk
herds. Biologists reject the notion, but Yellowstone studies
that show packs kill 15 elk per member per year are too tentative
for conclusions.
The argument doesn't sway critics.
"I don't know anyone in this town that hunts or has livestock
who would not kill a wolf if he saw it," said Idaho rancher
Mick Carlson, in the Spokane
Spokesman-Review. |
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Send
your comments
Hawley replies:
Cost of a week's vacation at Tony
Malmberg's Wyoming Ranch: $1,400.
Estimated price, per guest of seeing griz or wolf at Malmberg's:
$2,247.89
Cost of a year's subscription to Headwaters News: $0
Reading Tony Malmberg's treatise on ranching sustainably in
Headwaters: Priceless.
Inconvenient back East
Mr. Edwards likes
to draw many wonderful conclusions (fallacious as they may be)
about wolf reintroduction in the West.
He insists that wolves be restored to their natural habitat.
How come wolf reintroduction hasn't been proposed for the eastern
U.S., also once natural wolf habitat? There is a massive overpopulation
of deer out east and wolf reintroduction should benefit the
ecosystem there as well.
Central Park maybe? How about northern New Jersey and eastern
Pennsylvania?
Oh, that's right...it isn't convenient for those folk to deal
with wolf reintroduction...silly me.
Mike G. Eiselein
Baker City, Ore.
... soon to be wolf country
Rights vs. tradition
Wyoming
county commissioner Allen
joins a chorus that sings songs of property right supremacy
in issues environmental. That chorus ignores these past couple
hundred years of American tradition.
Property rights have always been restricted, and for good reason.
For example, take the case of the person who owns a home with
a main floor, a basement below it, and another floor above.
Assume that this person owns it free and clear, with no debt
to national banking system that feeds local lenders. This property
owner might insist that ownership confers rights to "do
whatever I like with my own property."
There's truth enough in that to permit the currently popular
refrains. But not enough that this homeowner can open a bomb
factory in the basement, a gambling den on the main floor, and
a brothel upstairs. Nor has the property rights movement gone
so far as to say that these legitimate restrictions on property
development would require government (i.e.., everyone, as taxpayers)
to reimburse the owner for loss of income that the bomb factory,
gambling den, and brothel would bring.
There are older traditions at stake here too. Some have Biblical
roots. It is hard to duck the Bible's plain, blunt language
that "The land shall not be sold forever," because
it really belongs to God. That admonition appears more than
once, and puts the property rights movement's most ardent admirers
in a religious bind as well as a social and legal one.
Lance Olsen
Missoula
Time
for balance
Having spent
the better part of a decade working toward repatriating wolves
to the hunting grounds of their ancestors in the Southern Rockies,
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by the shrill rhetoric coming
out of public officials in Moffat County Colorado.
Nevertheless, I was a bit taken aback by the “colorful”
cowboy theatrics of Moffat County Commissioner Les Hampton.
Apparently, he didn't get the memo: Killing wolves is a federal
crime, as well as a state crime. More importantly, it's a crime
against Nature and humanity.
Much as Commissioner Hampton would like to believe that it's
still 1893, biological science now provides a clear picture
of the massive mistake that our forbearers made in exterminating
wolves from the lower 48 states.
As wolves disappeared, so, too, did the processes that they
alone drove; in turn, entire ecosystems have spiraled into degraded,
simplified reflections of what once were diverse, thriving wild
lands.
Look no further than Rocky Mountain National Park for proof.
Aspen and willow systems east of the Divide are now relegated
to small sickly patches, withering under the assault of elk
herds grown sedentary in the absence of wolves.
In contrast, aspen and willow systems in Yellowstone have rebounded
dramatically since wolves were restored in 1995 — even
the songbirds rejoice.
Although folks like Commissioner Hampton would have us believe
that wolves spell doom for the livestock industry, the facts
don't support such rhetoric. In areas where wolves and livestock
share common ground, wolves kill less than one in 10,000 cows—many
more cows perish by lightning strikes in the same areas.
It's time for our colorful cowboys to join the rest of us (including
many progressive ranchers) in the present day.
It's time to return the wolf, and restore the balance.
Rob Edward, director
Carnivore Restoration
Sinapu
Boulder, CO
Shoot first
Any animal that
would unprovoked attack me, I would have no problem shooting.
Ben Bridges
Vernal,Utah
How wild will they be
I don't
know if I agree with Quammen's assertion that in 150 years,
there will be no more large predators in the wild on the planet.
Perhaps a better question might be: In 150 years, will there
be any large predators left that are not collared and tracked
by a GPS unit? Or in 150 years, will the term wildlife management
be a laughable oxymoron, like "jumbo shrimp," "government
organization," "work party," or "Christian
punk rock"?
I think framing the question this way points us in the right
direction: That we must focus on population growth, habitat
and wild lands if we are serious about protecting wildlife for
the long haul and minimizing human-predator conflict. I think
most wildlife biologists would agree.
The "plasticity" of wolves means that they can survive
in the most diminished of natural landscapes. I think we can
have lots of micromanaged wolves in very overcrowded and degraded
environments if humans are more accepting of them. But I'm not
so sure that I want this sort of thing. In the end, choices
need to be made. Martin
Nie
Assistant Prof. of Natural Resource Policy
College of Forestry and Conservation
University of Montana
Author's Blog:
A little fear is good
in an ecosystem
Mediagenic wolves have captured a lot of attention in recent
years, including all 1,500 words in this column last week.
Yet the survival of grizzly bears in the northern Rockies is
perhaps more tenuous than any other predator.
Consider: The silver-tipped bears need much larger uninhabited
areas to roam. Their reproductive cycles aren't as prolific
as wolves or cats. And they've already been eliminated from
the vast majority of their erstwhile habitats in North America.
Last Saturday, a panel of grizzly bear authors and experts,
including "Monster of God" author David Quammen and
legendary bear lover and defender Doug Peacock convened in Missoula,
Mont., in part to assess the odds of survival for Ursus horibilus
in the few areas where they still roam, but also to examine
cultural attitudes and trends regarding the wild places where
the visceral thrill of getting bumped out of the food chain
via tooth and claw still exists.
Panel member Roland Cheek, a former bear hunter turned bear
writer, who by
his own admission became fascinated with bears because he "wanted
a rug,"
gave an impassioned plea for preservation of remaining griz
habitat.
Describing an the animal in almost lyrical terms, Cheek backtracked
to the
days when a $5 tag bought hunters the rights to as many griz
hides as they
could kill, and proceeded from there to the present sadder,
wiser days when
even a glimpse of ursine splendor is a too-rare occasion for
the likes of
Cheek.
Next spoke Quammen, who described how Romanians have managed,
in a
thoroughly over-populated, industrialized landscape, to save
an impressive
number of griz cousins there, partly through careful conservation
measures,
(long-term forestry management decisions that haven't been widely
adapted here) and partly because the ruthless dictator Nicolai
Caucescu loved to kill bears and allowed no one else to do so
in his 30-year rule.
But the last word belonged to Peacock, whose assessment of the
odds of griz
survival was grim. The evidence offered was familiar:
-- The ever downward-spiral of statistics and anecdotes, but
even more alarming is the decline of the cutworm moth, whose
death in midwestern farm fields due to insecticide spraying
means they no longer migrate en masse high into the Rockies
where bears could once rely on them as a source of late-season
protein.
-- Yellowstone factory-hunt outfitters who usher "mostly
ignorant human beings with guns," as Peacock described
them, to kill elk and take only the head and choicest cuts of
meat, practically inviting scavenging grizzlies into confrontations
with hunters.
-- The Bush administration's Healthy
Forests Initiative, the Leave-No-Tree Behind Act that would
preclude the
danger of catastrophic fires by removing the forest.
-- Ominous signs of climate
change, such as an epidemic of blister rust in northern boreal
forests.
" Recreation will not save these animals," predicted
Peacock, offering the
only half-joking advice to save habitat by staying in town.
"In fact, just the
opposite. What's needed here is a little humility, that being
the emotional
posture behind reason.
"Human beings," observed Peacock, "are a species
with nearly bottomless fears of the unknown."
I didn't feel any better for having stayed in town on Saturday,
as Peacock suggested, but I did arrive at a corollary, courtesy
of Aldo Leopold
"It must be poor the life that achieves freedom from fear."
-- Steven Hawley
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