My Page: George Wuerthner

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State wildlife agencies and hunting organization demand that predators like wolves should be controlled, preferably by sport hunting. Among the underlying assumptions are that hunting can reduce human conflicts, including livestock depredation, and potential attacks on humans. Yet there is little scientific evidence to back up those assertions. In fact, recent research suggests that sport hunting disrupts social organization among predators, thereby increasing social chaos which manifests itself with greater human conflicts. A self fulfilling feedback mechanism results whereby state wildlife agencies institute hunting of predators, creating more social chaos, which in turn leads to greater human conflicts, and more demands for even greater predator control. 

A year ago I wrote a New West column asking rhetorically if hunters were stupid. In that article I wondered if hunters were aware of the fact that shooting wolves is unpopular with most Americans and if hunting of wolves continued, it might create a backlash against hunting. 

To answer my own question I have to say that hunters are not stupid—but most are clueless.  Hunters don’t seem to have a inkling about how non-hunters perceive them.  Public support for hunting is only luke-warm—the majority of Americans grudgingly accept hunting, but they are not enthusiastic about people killing animals. Only 10 percent or so of Americans hunt. Hunters are in the minority and they are largely older white males. In America older white males are in their twilight years.

Demographically the country is changing to a more diverse racial, religious and age structure.  The majority of Americans who do not hunt only accept hunting if they believe the hunter is killing an animal to eat it. Public support for hunting declines rapidly if hunters kill animals for trophy mounts. When it comes to shooting an animal just to kill it as would be the case for hunters shooting wolves—and/or worse as a matter of vindication as in predator control, public support turns to public opposition.

Both the ESA and wolves are extremely popular with the country as a whole. I suggest that if hunters succeed in this end run around the ESA, and there is the perception of a widespread slaughter of wolves, they are the ones that risk long term public opposition.

Ranchers have successfully externalized one of the costs of business, namely reducing predator opportunity by practicing good animal husbandry, thus transferred one of the real costs of doing business on to the public taxpayers who fund predator control, as well as upon the backs of large predators like wolves which are routinely killed for livestock losses. This is not unlike the externalization of business costs by industries that pollute our air and water instead of paying the real costs of production which would internalize these costs. 

Like the judges with oil company stock who have ruled against a moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, wildlife agencies are incapable in managing predators scientifically and without bias because they have a direct financial conflict of interest and a natural bias against predators that is difficult for any state agency to overcome. The only reasonable way to manage predators is to eliminate all hunting. 

Weeds do not spread by alien spaceships. The primarily vector for weed spread in much of the West is livestock production, yet this cause is seldom mentioned, much less counted as a cost of livestock production. 

If Senator Tester and the timber industry really want to enact legislation that will expedite logging of Montana’s national forests, they are the ones that have an uphill battle. In fact, they could not pass such legislation without at least the tacit support of the Montana’s and Nation’s environmental community. It is the wilderness proponents who hold the cards for passage of any legislation that will change the laws and regulations regarding how logging occurs on national forest lands. 

The Elliston Face logging sale near the town of Elliston, Montana is yet another example of how the Forest Service exploits the public’s misconceptions about wildfire and forest ecology to further its logging agenda. Like the old time physicians who bled the “bad” blood to treat patients no matter what the ailment, the Forest Service seems incapable of doing any management that doesn’t include logging as the solution to any problem—whether real or manufactured. 

There is a real difference between negotiation and collaboration. In negotication one tries to get the best deal for one’s position or goal. In collaboration, those participating generally adopt the least controversial and least disruptive policies. In collboration all points of views are considered to be equally valid. But that is not the case in conservation. The goal of the timber industry to expand profits is not necessarily in the public interest, and/or have the same value as fighting to prevent the extinction of a grizzly or loss of a wild roadless land to development. When dealing with public resources, collaboration almost always means private industry gets to keep or increase access to public resources. And that is exactly what we have seen as the outcome of the collaborative process that has led to Senator Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation bill.

New legislation designated to encourage energy independence and less reliance on oil could backfire and indirectly create new pressures for massive forest destruction. Large scale commercial wood biomass energy poses a threat to our forest ecosystem, human health and will contribute to the production and release of even more global warming gases. 

Column

If the published comments and quotes of David Allen of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (RMEF) are accurate reflections of his attitudes (and I don’t know that they are), one might get the impression that the only reason hunters and anglers helped to recover elk and deer populations was to enable them to claim all future elk and deer as their private property to shoot and consume. Allen even used a bit of hyperbole to declare the restoration of wolves to the Rockies as “one of the worst wildlife management disasters since the destruction of bison herds in the 19th Century.”

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