Wildlife and People

Wolf ‘reintroduction’ still rankles

By Mike Satren, Outdoors editor, Coeur d’Alene Press [here]

Clash of worldviews pits rural versus urban

When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conducted its Feb. 21 conference call to brief the media that wolves would be delisted from the Endangered Species Act on March 28, USFWS leaders and Interior officials patted themselves on the back.

“Gray wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains are thriving and no longer require the protection of the Endangered Species Act,” said Interior Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett. “The wolf’s recovery in the Northern Rocky Mountains is a conservation success story.”

Many of the rural folks in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming don’t share this rosey view now and they didn’t like it back when the Canadian grey wolves were first turned loose in central Idaho in 1996 and 1997.

They counter that the real conservation success story was much earlier during the 20th century when hunters and fishermen put their tax money where their mouths were. Angry at the severe depletion of herds and flocks caused by the unchecked market hunting of the 19th century, President Theodore Roosevelt - supported by sportsmen - worked to pass laws to implement game regulations throughout the states heralding an era of wildlife abundance.

The species-abundance approach, known as the North American Wildlife Management Model, holds that hunters and fisherman should support and fund policies that allow sustainable game numbers, sufficient for hunting and fishing, but controlled by state fish and game agencies that use science for guidance rather than politics.

In 1937 the Pitman-Robertson Act was passed to tax the sale of sporting arms and ammunition (archery equipment was added later). That self-imposed tax fell on the fraction of North Americans who hunt but it benefited all who enjoy an abundance of wildlife.

Under the implementation of that theory North American game rebounded in the later half of the century with breathtaking success.

“Mountain lions, wolves and other predators, and their supporters, simply do not and will not, foot the bill,” said Dr. Charles Kay, Ph.D., wildlife ecologist at Utah State University in his article, The High Cost of Predation.

When the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, wolves were one of the first species to be placed on the list, not because of low numbers as a species - there were plenty of them in Canada and Alaska - but because they were no longer present in many places where they had once lived historically.

The idea that they should be restored to prior habitats was fostered by followers of the Balance of Nature non-management model. Its adherents, also known as wildlifers, claim that nature - unimpeded by man - finds an equilibrium, much like what existed in North America before the Europeans.

“They (wildlifers) proclaim … that predators in general and wolves in particular are an ‘ecological good’ no matter how many, and that ‘wilderness’ is the ‘natural’ pre-Columbian state of North America, then presided over by noble natives who selflessly maintained its ecological integrity, which ecologically insensitive Europeans subsequently destroyed,” he said.

But the native people had all but destroyed the mega fauna in colonizing the continent and they practiced highly skilled horticulture to escape starvation leaving a well settled, quite severely exploited land, he said.

Wildlife is not a free gift of nature (as wildlifers claim) but a resource painfully restored by human hand over the last 80 years in North America.

The Balance of Nature worldview also holds that humans should not be considered higher than any other life form.

“For the sportsman to depend upon this type of person for advice and help would be a little like a sick person consulting a physician who considers the welfare of the virus, the bacterium and the parasite on the same level with the patient,” said Dr. Lester J. McCann, professor of biology at the College of St. Thomas, in his book, Time to Cry Wolf.

In the 13 years since Canadian grey wolves were released in central Idaho, they have multiplied and spread through many of the state’s mountain regions. Particularly in rural areas like the St. Joe River basin and other parts of the Clearwater, families must now worry about their livestock, their pets and even their children.

John Walters of Calder knows people who have lost dogs, he has seen the wolves up close and the carcasses of elk scattered in numbers he hasn’t witnessed before - right in back of his house.

“Wolves do change your behavior, they change my behavior, they change everybody’s behavior,” said Panhandle IDFG Regional wildlife manager Jim Hayden.

He is frustrated by his lack of control of such a primary piece of the wildlife puzzle.
“I’m a wildlife manager, I can control for populations of bears, lions, elk, they all mesh together,” he said. “When one piece of that is pulled away and I have to compensate, it makes it a very difficult chore.”

During the last decade rural residents, visitors, hunters and the animals themselves have had to adjust to a different way of life all because of the federal government and the ESA.

“With wolves in the country, it’s like opening day of rifle season for elk every single day,” said licensed guide and large predator hunter Brian Farley. “That’s the way they live now.”

Most sportsmen and rural dwellers are acutely aware of the growing wolf populations and many don’t buy official numbers or explanations.

“I’m hearing that elk numbers are still high, but I’m not experiencing that,” Farley said.
He hunted in Unit 28 four years ago where he shot a huge 5-point bull elk. Last fall he and his son camped in the same spot and hunted in the same manner but with even better conditions, there was snow every day.

“I had no wolf activity around me four years ago but last fall we had them around camp, we could hear them howling around the tent,” he said. “The elk populations have been impacted quite a bit there.”

In ‘92-93 the Intermountain West suffered a big winter kill that wiped out the mule deer in southern Idaho, eastern Oregon, eastern California, all of Nevada and Utah.
“For three years the director, a representative of Fish and Game, claimed that we had no problem,” Farley said. “He refused to cut back on the deer tags, to cut back the season limit lengths.”

For many western states the bulk of fish and game revenue - besides the Pittman-Robertson Act and instate licenses and tags - comes from out-of-state licenses and tags.

“They just tried to bull$#!+ their way through and hope that the deer would rebound magically somehow,” he said. “After about two years people quit coming, there were no deer.”

When it comes to wolves, Farley doesn’t like to be lied to and he doesn’t like the extraordinary influence that out-of-staters have on his way of life.

“Every wolf lover from Connecticut to California can sue and disrupt my life,” he said. “That just seems a little over the top to me.”

The Idaho Wolf Management Plan calls for wolves to be managed at 2005-2007 numbers.
“Because IDFG estimates Idaho had a minimum population of 732 wolves in the fall of 2007, that means IDFG intended to maintain a minimum of at least seven times as many wolves in Idaho as we were told would exist after recovery,” said George Dovel, editor of The Outdoorsman in Horseshoe Bend.

An initiative relating to wolf regulation is being circulated by Idaho sportsmen to try to keep the state of Idaho from taking over management - and responsibility - for what they foresee to be an impending disaster brought about by federal mandate.

“It’s a hot potato,” said Boise attorney John L. Runft who drew up the document. “The feds would love to get rid of this thing and turn it over to the states.”

Tony Mayer is a leading proponent of the initiative to rescind approval of the Idaho Wolf Conservation and Management Plan, discontinue all wolf recovery and classify wolves as unprotected predatory wildlife.
“Our ballot initiative is the only ‘ray of hope’ that we have to proactively deal with this ecological wolf management disaster and take our state back from the wolves,” Mayer said.

The initiative petition must have 45,893 signatures by April 30, 2008, in order to get on the general election ballet Nov. 4.

“Anybody that’s familiar with federal law versus state law knows that federal law supercedes state law,” said IDFG large carnivore coordinator Steve Nadeau. “The Endangered Species Act is a powerful piece of legislation that requires the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to recover all species on the list and that started in 1974 with wolves.”

But by creating proof of public sentiment about the wolves, initiative supporters see a chance to keep Idaho state agencies from becoming complicit in the “disaster.”

“Since it is increasingly clear that meaningful ‘delisting’ is a myth, this is the only viable course of action,” Runft said. “Essentially, it is a boycott.”

Should the initiative qualify for the ballet and be passed by the people of Idaho, it would disallow the state Department of Fish and Game to implement the Wolf Management Plan.

“The state should get out of these federal programs, demand that the feds perform their duties, be in a position to sue them if they do not and … sue them for damages for mismanagement on behalf of its citizens when disaster strikes,” Runft said.

Mayer hosts a Web site, saveourelk.com, which collects graphic examples of wolf depredation and disseminates information regarding the effects of wolves, including a downloadable copy of the Petition about Wolves.