WILD BILL
The Most Pro-Wolf State of Them All
By Bill Schneider, 12-21-06
Mirror, mirror, on the wall.What is the most pro-wolf state of them all?
What state has done more for wolf recovery than any other? What state made it possible to have twice as many wolves than even avid wolf fans expected? What state wants the feds to keep the wolf on the endangered species list for years longer than expected. What state prevented state agencies from unleashing aerial gunners to kill more than half of the wolf population? And most of all, in a wolf lover’s dream-come-true, what state is making it possible for the wolf to expand its range into Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Utah where it will be considered endangered for many years into the future?
My answer might surprise you. I think it’s the Cowboy State, Wyoming. I am not a person who goes to the Wolf Shrine every morning, but if I were, I’d be saying “with enemies like Wyoming, who needs friends.”
Wyoming purports to worry about having too many wolves and about the Big Dog expanding into an ever-widening range, but ironically, the state’s actions--or lack of actions--have become its self-fulfilling prophecy.
Right now, the Fish and Wildlife Service appears to be finally caving into Wyoming’s bull-headed attitude. The agency recently had closed-door meetings with Wyoming officials to offer a secret compromise that appears to accomplish almost everything Wyoming has always wanted--namely, the right to kill wolves almost everywhere in the state, but too late to avoid an even messier controversy than we’ve had so far.
During the past few years while the Nation of Wyoming has been pouting and wanting its way, the wolves have been rapidly expanding numbers and pioneering more and more habitat. With delisting at least a year away (and that would be quite optimistic) we can expect another 300 or more wolf puppies. Two years, a more likely timeline for delisting, another 300. You get the picture.
In New West, the wolf is all about political control, not science. Wyoming wants control, but what does the state do with it? Well, it seems like thee state’s actions belie its words and that it doesn’t really want control. Now, the state has the luxury of laying all blame on the evil feds, but when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the federal agency in charge of endangered species programs, hands off wolf management, we’ll see what happens. In recent news reports, Wyoming politicos say they want the feds out of their state, but wouldn’t mind them leaving their money behind so they can use it to “manage” wolves.
Meanwhile, the big issue really hasn’t hit the media fan, yet. Upon delisting, at least in Wyoming and Idaho, the states plan huge reductions in wolf numbers. And I mean huge! Wyoming plans to kill, probably with aerial shooters, roughly two-thirds of the wolf population--9 out of 16 packs outside the national parks. And Idaho plans to drastically reduce wolf numbers with the final count still under debate. Wait until that hits the network news!
So what’s the difference between the Idaho, Montana and Wyoming? Why can’t the three states work together and come up with a joint plan that accomplishes wolf recovery and allows delisting? That question has been bugging me for a long time, so I made some calls. Geographically, there isn’t much difference, of course, but politically, it looks like way too much provincialism and not enough common sense.
As currently proposed and made into state law, the wolf management plan proposed by Wyoming would designate the wolf as a trophy game animal in a small corner of the state, almost exclusively in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks and contiguous wilderness areas, and a predator elsewhere. For the non-hunters among us, the trophy game status means the state will have a wolf hunting season, but not require hunters to eat the meat, as is required with most big game animals. The predator status means an animal can be killed on sight by anybody for any reason--reminiscent to the Old West when wolves and any other animal with canines were vermin.
I emphasized contiguous because the trophy game area where the wolf would have at least minimal protection would not include several wildlands not directly connected to the parks, such as the Wind River or Wyoming Ranges. I have spent many days hiking the wild backcountry of the Wind Rivers, and if there is any place in the country where we should have wolves, this is it.
Idaho’s plan might not be much better than Wyoming’s, but more politically astute apparently, since it won approval from the FWS. Suzanne Stone of Defenders of Wildlife, the green group that reimburses ranchers for depredation losses to wolves, called Idaho’s plan “a control plan, not a management plan. It’s incredibly vague, and I’m amazed the FWS approved it.”
Concerning the FWS effort to compromise with Wyoming, Stone said the new proposal only has “superficial differences” from the original plan that the agency rejected several times.
Robert Hoskins, president of the Dubois Wildlife Association, agrees that the FWS proposal only slightly expands the size of the trophy game area. Plus, he notes, most key winter ranges for elk, the wolf’s main prey species, are outside of the area, and wolves will follow their prey all year around. They might enjoy some protection in the trophy game area during warmer months, but the minute they step over an invisible line, they become predators.
“If Wyoming gets away with this,” Hoskins predicts, “the reintroduction will fail. We’ll be constantly whacking wolves, and what is the biological impact of this? Boxing wolves into one area and not letting them go anywhere else won’t work.”
Hoskins also believes the Wyoming plan is so complicated that it will be impossible to implement. “But it’s politically incorrect for anybody in the Game and Fish Department to say that.”
Montana’s plan takes a completely different approach than Wyoming’s proposal. It designates the wolf as a “nongame species in need of management” throughout the entire state, according to Chris Smith, chief of staff at the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. Upon delisting, he notes, the Montana Fish and Game Commission will designate the wolf either as a big game animal or a furbearer. In either case, there will be “a regulated take.” That still means killing wolves, but at least not the onslaught we can expect in Idaho and Wyoming.
Smith agreed that Wyoming is delaying delisting, but that his department has finally reached an agreement with the FWS to proceed with delisting in Montana and Idaho by the end of January ‘with or without Wyoming.” This agreement hasn’t been made public yet and is something Idaho and Montana have been pushing for two years. To date, the FWS has refused, saying the original recovery plan required that all three states be joined.
So what has suddenly changed? Why is the FWS suddenly caving into Wyoming’s demands when many times earlier the agency said the approach failed to create a viable wolf population? Why is the agency suddenly reversing its long-stating opinion that all three states should have approved management plans in place before proceeding with delisting?
That’s an easy one to answer. We have a new kid in charge of the FWS, former Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne, appointed as Secretary of the Interior by President Bush last February and confirmed by the U.S. Senate two or three months later. And yes, he’s re-writing the rules to accommodate his agenda, with delisting being one of his highest priorities. The Wyoming concession (hard to call it a compromise) also has Kempthorne tracks all over it.
So what happens now? “They’re forcing it all into the courts,” Stone predicts. “Delisting is extremely premature because we have not addressed the issues that caused wolf eradication in the first place, such as not having good management plans in place.”
And we all know what will happen while a flawed delisting proposal mires in the court system, right? Hundreds of wolf puppies every year, and endangered wolf populations popping up in Colorado and Oregon and elsewhere to keep the controversy alive forever.
To me, watching the wolf war is like watching the Iraq war. Every time I say it can’t get any worse, it does. We had an opportunity, long ago missed, for the three state wildlife agencies, federal agencies, stockgrowers and environmentalists to sit down and work out a plan that accomplished everybody’s goal, wolf recovery and delisting. Too bad Wyoming botched it for every other stakeholder, including itself.
[End of article]
Bill,
Interesting article. I wonder if you looked at the states of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Michigan – and their respective attitudes and policies towards wolves – when you considered the most pro-wolf state of them all? I grew up in rural Wisconsin and saw my first wolf "up north" as a child. Wisconsin's current wolf population is between 400 and 500 and the state even has a popular, state-issued Endangered Resources licence plate featuring the timber wolf. The state of Michigan has another 400 to 500 wolves and Minnesota has between 2,600 and 3,000 wolves, easily placing it as the state with the most wolves, outside Alaska. What this means is that the upper Great Lakes region has nearly 4,000 wolves, which is much greater than the wolf population of expansive states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho combined.
Matt is correct about Great Lakes wolf populations, and there seems to be little furor and angst about them, compared to the Northern Rockies and especially Wyoming.
Part of the reason might be that wolves were never entirely exterminated -- there was a pack on Isle Royal and Canadian wolves were in and out. Also, there's a huge food resource for wolves -- deer -- so many in fact that not even local hunters oppose sharing. If anything, deer populations have been over populated and the wolves are bringing the ecology back in balance.
There are livestock operators, but conditions are very different in the Great Lakes, where high moisture levels created abundant forage right next door to farm houses. As a result, livestock are kept close at hand so producers can actively defend livestock from predators, keeping losses pretty low. That's in marked contrast with the West, where low moisture makes for poor forage and the need to have hundreds of acres for just a few cattle. When cattle (or sheep) are that spread out, they're viewed as easy pickings by predators.
Not only were wolves never entirely exterminated from the Upper Great Lakes, but from these refuges -- like the Boundary Waters country of northeastern Minnesota -- wolves dispersed on their own, gradually spreading across northern Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the mid- to late-1970s. Therefore, although the wolves were granted federal protection, no outside agency directly reintroduced them, and I think this has some effect on the perception of wolves in these states. There's certainly anti-wolf sentiment, but apparently not to the degree as farther West. Now there's a healthy wolf population in the swampy pine forests of central Wisconsin, only an hour and a half from the capitol at Madison.
I grew up in Wisconsin, and now live in northeastern Oregon, a region on the cusp of wolf recolonization (and certainly with enough lonesome spaces and ungulate herds to support it). While I wholeheartedly welcome this return, I can only imagine the savage controversy barreling down upon us.
First of the all the first mistake was when some idiot refused to give any to those who wanted them, and instead hauled them down to prey on ranchers cattle in the three states, why pick those states...perhaps because they didn't have enough people to fight back being very low population states.
Can some one tell me why the 10 expert wolf biologists that evaluated the Wyoming plan and approved it as being scientifically sound were considered too dumb to know what they were talking about, as opposed to the one guy who didn't like it? Why were none of you consulted, obviously you know and understand wolves much better than the likes of Dr. Mech?
The agreement that was forced on us was supposed to be 300 wolves between the three states, but of course just like the Indian treaties signed 150- 200 years ago, you didn't really mean it, you just didn't want any arguments.
FWS is talking now because they have no real argument as to why they feel their experts do not know about wolves. The other thing is wolf management has become **** expensive and they hate to palm the bill off on 300 million people and possibly turn them against all of these schemes, so it is better to dump the bill onto half a million people to pay for. That way they can spend their money cooking up some other ponzi scheme.
Bill
A very perceptive piece. Those of us who know both the science and the politics of wolves have long known that science has no place in the debate, as much as we try to bring it into the debate. All that happens is that the science is politicized and thus marginalized and grossly misrepresented.
A perfect example is the constant referrence to the scientific "peer reviews" of the Wyoming wolf plan. I've included the URL for these reviews below.
http://gf.state.wy.us/downloads/pdf/wolf_peer_review.pdf.
I challenge anyone with a basic knowledge of biology, ecology, and wildlife management to read this document and come away with the reasonable conclusion that Wyoming's dual status plan is scientifically sound. There are a number of problems that many reviewers found with Wyoming's plan, the chief one being that it intends to deny wolves the full range of their suitable and necessary habitat even in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. The other problem the reviewers had was the extreme complication of the plan as well as its expense.
The great confusion with the "peer reviews" comes when the majority of the reviewers found that the three state plans in conjunction with each other would tend to conserve wolves, with the reviewers relying heavily on the excellence of Montana's plan, noting problems with Wyoming and Idaho's plans, the latter being extremely vague, as Suzanne Stone notes in your article above.
There are good scientific reasons to challenge this conclusion about the three state plans working in conjunction to conserve wolves; it's just as reasonable to conclude, from the information provided by the state plans and from a basic knowledge of wolf ecology and biology, that wolves would be conserved only in Montana, and possibly Idaho, but not in Wyoming, given the extreme restrictions on the distribution of wolves in Wyoming, which deny wolves any protection on the winter ranges of their chief prey, elk, and ensure considerable disruption of pack social behavior through efforts to keep an irrational cap on wolf numbers.
I will point out that David Mech's review took all of one page; it's quite clear that he didn't study the three state plans in detail. I believe he didn't think the process was important enough to spend any time on it, and he didn't spend any time on it. He did note a serious conflict between Wyoming's plan and the State law that dictated the plan in detail, something which is a violation of the principles of wildlife management--management details don't belong in statute. He also noted that Wyoming's plan would be very expensive to implement, if implemented as laid out in the plan, and that funding was not assured.
The fact is, Wyoming's plan is neither scientifically sound nor can it be implemented operationally even on its own terms. That's the point of my comments that you quoted in your article.
It is unfortunate that the State of Wyoming, the Wyoming Game & Fish Department, the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association, and assorted multiple use groups have latched onto the this deliberate misrepresentation of the peer reviews as if they were gospel. They've gotten away with this misrepresentation because no in the public has read them, and that's because few people understand the science well enough to judge the reviews on their own merit.
One thing we can all agree on: the political struggle for control of wildlife in general, and wolves in particular, will go on on for a long, long time, to the detriment of both wildlife and ourselves.
Robert
Well Mr. Hoskins, let's start with the scientific basis for hauling wolves in. First of all we now know there were at least 2 wolves in the park documented when they brought in the new ones.
Second is the number of wolves hauled in, 34 Canadian wolves and 10 cattle killers relocated from Montana in 2 years. Now these were to replace those that were "extirpated" right? That number was 56 adult wolves and 80 pups over a period of 42 years. The early expeditions did not report wolves, President Roosevelt stated in 1903 that coyotes were the only canines present in the park in any numbers. From all of the records I can find, there appears to only be occasional wolves showing up. There were a noticeable number of lions mentioned in all of the early accounts....and lot's of elk. The wolves have taken care of that haven't they? We presently have several times the number of adult wolves extirpated over those many years right now, is that what you call scientific balance?
The sensible thing to do when any animal is planted somewhere is have the end point laid out to begin with, no courts, no lawsuits by environmentalists, just we are bringing you x number of wolves or whatever they are to be protected, when they reach xx number you may regulate them as you wish as long as you keep xx number. Of course that would not make nearly so much money for environmental lawyers which is very big business.
I am working on preliminary design for a Wolves of Yellowstone poster field guide. --We're illustrating the different species that are affected by the reintroduction of wolves - focusing on ecology of fear in elk herds, return of aspen in Yellowstone because grazing in open fields is reduced, return of beaver because aspen is back along streams, other interesting biodiversity changes.
Thanks for the political map you laid out -- interesting to see how Wyoming's decisions create the unintended side effect of more wolves ranging into other Rocky Mountain states. I didn't know what what was going on in Wyoming.
Keep in touch.
Timothy
You probably don't have to worry about showing the elk. Based on the count last winter of 3649 elk left out of a herd of 19,000, there probably won't be many to worry about, showing fear or otherwise. Instead you could show the unafraid wolf watchers lined up on the hills degrading the vegetation.
Comment By Douglas Schleis, 12-27-06Mr. Schneider
Where did you get this load of scat? you need to check your facts. where or from who at Idaho Department Fish and Game (IDFG), Idaho office of Species Conservation or ANY Idaho state government agency did you get the pipe dream that Idaho would "slaughter from above" 56 of the 64 listed packs in this state?
Nowhere in the listed plan does it state this is a goal or even an option, nor is it the intent of IDFG to even begin to manage the wolves in this manor.
Also check the facts on delisting- rules for listing are to be the rules for delisting. it is Stone and her group that has tried to get the rules expanded and changed. 150 wolves and 10 packs were to be the basis for delisting. We will soon have ten times that amount.
When I asked Stone point blank, "how many wolves will be enough?" her answer was," there will never be enough"
try putting facts out for debate, not blatant lies.
call if you care to discuss
The exact extent of the wolf reduction in Idaho is, as it turns out, yet to be determined, so this correction has been made in the column....Bill Schneider
Comment By Joe Vandal, 1-31-07We have started a discussion of the wolf issues at IdahoFallz.com, along with a poll asking what you would do with them.
There seems to be a lot of anecdotal stories about the wolf population's effect on Idaho game, but we are hoping to gather facts together and apply logic to guide decisions. The site nor the article is actively for or against the wolves.
We invite your comments on this issue at http://idahofallz.com/2007/01/27/idaho-wolf-discussion/.
Thank you.
Sorry for the double comment, but there is an issue with the link above. It is written correctly, but after publishing on the newwest site, some code has been added that makes it fail. If you copy and paste the URL, it will work correctly (or if the site admins here can fix the code, I'd appreciate it greatly). Thanks again.
http://idahofallz.com/2007/01/27/idaho-wolf-discussion/