I'll wager a dinner on wolves and elk

By Todd Wilkinson
regional columnist and author

I've never met Robert T. Fanning, Jr., chairman and founder of the group, Friends of the Northern Yellowstone Elk Herd Inc., headquartered north of Yellowstone Park in Pray, Mont., and while my eyesight isn't great, I wonder what he's seeing.

The other day as I drove to Yellowstone to visit a few friends, I was thinking about his declaration — once again recently — that wolves are vile agents of biological destruction rapidly transforming the world's first national park into a blighted death zone, soon to hold as much wildlife as a Wal-Mart parking lot.

"The Yellowstone ecosystem has become a biological desert," Fanning and his organization said, in a letter echoing others he's written, with gullible reporters allowing him to make such assertions unchallenged.

Friends of the Northern Yellowstone Elk Herd Inc. said: "We predict that the largest migrating elk herd on Earth will be completely extinct in three years."

Fanning added: "We predict that entire communities in Montana will vanish because no one spoke up for social justice for the people who were forced to live with wolves."

And he added: "We have correctly predicted everything that has occurred for the past five years. Will someone please prove us wrong?"

Of course, it wasn't that long ago that some of the so-called experts cited by Mr. Fanning to support his claims were suggesting there were too many elk in Yellowstone; that the park was mismanaged as a feedlot for the hunting industry; that elk were devastating the willow and causing a severe cascade effect on moose, beaver, birdlife and a long list of other species.

Because of elk, they said, Yellowstone was becoming desertified.

The antidote, advanced by the "too many elk in Yellowstone" crowd (who included cattle ranchers) was to depopulate the park's wapiti herd; a sanitized way of saying they wanted to knock the number of elk way, way down by many thousands of animals.

That, of course, was before a few rancher neighbors of Mr. Fanning got into the elk hunt guiding business whole hog and switched their world view. Now, instead of the park being overgrazed by wapiti, elk are being wiped out by wolves.

Which is it: too many or too few?

Answer: It is neither.

For a few years, Mr. Fanning and a gaggle of self-proclaimed windshield biologists — some of them who profit directly and handsomely from the public's subsidy of elk production — have predicted ecological havoc caused by the original blood ancestor of Man's Best Friend.

Friends of the Northern Yellowstone Elk Herd Inc. has courted an audience with anyone who will listen, anyone dumb enough to believe that the Lewis and Clark journals were a figment of the explorers' imagination.

As the first extensive natural history field notes written about our corner of the West, their observations on the abundance of animal herds and predators should put to rest the Friends of the Northern Yellowstone Elk Herd Inc's pathetic indictment of wolves.

It should put it to rest, but it won't. In America, a person -- including columnists like me -- can assert practically anything they want, and seldom are such opinions subjected to vigorous scrutiny. So I tell you what: I'm willing to make a wager with Mr. Fanning for a dinner at the famous Chico Hot Springs restaurant in Fanning's tiny home town of Pray.

Since Mr. Fanning himself has made the assertion, I'm taking the bait. Okay, Bob, here's the deal: You say the "largest migrating elk herd on Earth will be completely extinct in three years." You, after all, declared it as fact publicly in a newspaper. I say you're wrong and whaddya say we stake a dinner.

If you're right, then in 2007, all of the migratory elk in Yellowstone Park's Northern Elk Herd will be gone. There will no longer be an elk hunt, (and, based on this line of logic, there will probably be far fewer wolves, too, since their current primary source of prey will be annihilated).

Remember, it is you, Mr. Fanning, who say with assurance: "We have correctly predicted everything that has occurred for the past five years. Will someone please prove us wrong?"

I'm going to let time take care of that. Meantime, would someone please reserve a table for me at Chico Hot Springs in 2007? Mr. Fanning will be dining on crow.