Column: Due West by Dan Whipple

The Wolf’s At the Door

By Dan Whipple, 1-30-07

John B. Kendrick was a classic rags-to-riches western story. A penniless, half-educated, Texas orphan, he moved to Wyoming, rising in the livestock industry until by the beginning of the 20th century he was one of the region’s biggest cattleman, with nine separate ranches in two counties in Wyoming and four counties in Montana.

In 1910, Kendrick was elected to the Wyoming state Senate. He became governor in 1914 and the first popularly elected U.S. Senator in 1916. He served in the Senate until 1933, when he died of a brain hemorrhage.

Like other ranchers of that era, Kendrick was plagued by wolves. In 1912, Kendrick paid a trapper $10 for dead pups and $20 for killing grown wolves, according to Cynde Georgen’s biography, One Cowboy’s Dream. His records indicate he paid out about $1,000 a year—somewhere between 50 and 100 wolves annually removed from the gene pool.

Yesterday, in a widely expected action, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed removing the timber wolf in the Rockies from its list of threatened and endangered species. (This process is usually called “delisting,” but those of us attuned to the music of the English language have a hard time employing the word.) The outcry from the cattle and sheep producing states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming when the wolf was originally reintroduced was shrill. The reaction to the “delisting” (sigh) proposal is nearly as shrill, though spread a little more evenly among the population.

While Rocky Mountain conservationists view the wolf as a regional totem animal that, along with the grizzly bear, symbolizes the freedom and fascination of wilderness, the ranching community sees its absence as a different totem. To ranchers, killing off the wolf was a triumph of the 19th century civilizing crusade, the conquest of the wilderness, the taming of the West, as much as the hanging of the outlaw Tom Horn.

This attitude remains strong. It is as ingrained among some livestock owners as the tidy township and range system of land. Wolf reintroduction was a slap in the face to four generations of ranchers who have tried to bring civilization to the West.

This reaction must be based entirely on wolf mythology, because the hatred for the animal is far out of proportion to any damage to livestock or wildlife that Canis lupus has done. Since 1987, the group Defenders of Wildlife has reimbursed ranchers for animals lost to wolves. Last year, they paid $181,765 in 101 payments for just 400 cows, sheep and “other.”

Now this could sound like a lot, I suppose. But remember that in 1910 a single rancher paid $1,000 to prevent livestock damage from wolves. That computes to about $20,000 in 2005 dollars. That’s nearly ten percent of the modern total—from a single rancher. The first year that Defenders outlay equaled Kendrick’s in 2005 dollars was 1997, ten years after the wolf was reintroduced. And nowadays, ranchers don’t pay for their own predator control. Ranchers who lose livestock to wolves may continue to be compensated after ESA protection is lost—at least if legislation being considered in Montana passes—by that state. Other states could adopt this enlightened approach if they wanted to.

Wyoming, for instance, has seen total livestock losses of about $235,600 from wolves in the entire history of the wolf reintroduction program, according to Defenders’ figures. That’s a little less than $12,000 a year. This is roughly the amount that Gov. Dave Freudenthal spends on phone calls complaining that he can’t get any attention from the New York Times. But they fawn over Brian Schweitzer.

Anyway, Wyoming’s attitude is neatly summed up by the last sentence of Freudenthal’s statement on wolf delisting: “This raises the interesting question of whether any packs outside Yellowstone in Wyoming are even necessary.” In other words, “we don’t want ‘em.”

Freudenthal also raises the harvestable wildlife banner, calling for “the flexibility to manage wolves that are causing and unacceptable impact on our elk and moose population.”

This is political hogwash of the first order. Since wolves have been reintroduced there has been virtually no impact on ungulate populations. Wolves do take a lot of elk—about 22 per wolf per year. But the elk they take average 13 years of age. They take cows in a smaller proportion to their prevalence in the general population. Since they don’t take breeding age animals, the impact of wolf predation of the vast overpopulation of elk in the Yellowstone ecosystem is minuscule.

While they don’t affect overall populations much, wolves do keep the elk herds moving, or hidden deeper in the woods. Studies from Oregon State University have found that this results in restoration of riparian plant communities, especially increasing the health of the willow stands along rivers and creeks. Willows are the moose’s favorite food. Since moose are large and hard for wolves to take, this animal’s population seems likely to benefit from the presence of wolves rather than the reverse. In any case, from the scientific work that’s been done the overall “trophic cascade,” the presence of wolves will almost undoubtedly improve the health of the ecosystems the wolf is allowed to inhabit.

But we can’t give the conservationists a free pass on this issue, either. Most don’t want the wolf removed from the endangered species list. There are several arguments for the position, but the one heard most often is that wolves now occupy only five percent of their original range in the lower 48. The government, so the argument goes, has a responsibility to restore it to this historic range.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service justifies its decision based on its reading of the Endangered Species Act. Wolf populations in the Yellowstone recovery area have exceeded the goals set for them for several years. USFWS is not, they argue, required by the law to restore the wolf to its pre-persecution territory.

Their position seems to meet both the letter and the spirit of the ESA, which is not to restore a wilderness character to the West, but to keep species and subspecies from going extinct. Under the criteria that nearly everybody agreed to at the start of the game, the wolf is ready for delisting.

The real issue for conservationists is that they simply don’t trust the states to manage a predator for that predator’s benefit. With statements like Freudenthal’s and the recent outbursts from the governor of Idaho, it’s hard not sympathize with this position. And the state political maze to be navigated on these issues is messier than dealing with a single federal agency that carries a large hammer to enforce its decisions.

But once the political rhetoric has fizzled, state wildlife agency personnel are hardworking, reasonable and dedicated to both the health of the wildlife and the ecosystems they inhabit. They can usually be counted on to do approximately the right thing by each species. In any case, this is the wave of the future. If the ESA is effective in meeting its goals—as we all fervently hope it is—the wolf won’t be last controversial species handed over the states for management. 

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