Reposted from The Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-usa-wolves-rally-20140628,0,3551677.story
June 29. 2014
CONSERVATIONISTS RALLY OUTSIDE YELLOWSTONE TO PROTEST WOLF HUNTING
The Yellowstone River winds through the Hayden Valley in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming (Jim Urquhart Reuters, / June 28, 2014)
Reuters
7:03 p.m. CDT, June 28, 2014
(Reuters) - A rally to protest sport hunting and trapping of wolves in the United States drew about 150 participants on Saturday outside the gates of Yellowstone National Park, an organizer said.
Demonstrators at the event in Gardiner, Montana, at the northwest entrance to the park called for an overhaul of government wildlife management policies for the animals.
Thousands of wolves have been legally hunted, trapped or snared in the three years since the predators were removed from the federal endangered and threatened species list in the Northern Rockies and western Great Lakes.
"We need some places out West where wolves can be wolves without fear of being shot, trapped, strangled or beaten to death," rally organizer Brett Haverstick said in a telephone interview.
Haverstick said roughly 150 people attended the rally, with participants coming from a range of U.S. states such as Idaho, Montana, California and Florida.
Wolves neared extinction in the Lower 48 states before coming under U.S. Endangered Species Act protections in the 1970s. Federal wildlife managers two decades ago released fewer than 100 wolves in the Yellowstone area over the objections of ranchers and hunters, who complained wolves would prey on livestock and big-game animals like elk.
Wolves in the park and its border states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming were estimated at nearly 2,000 at the time of delisting and now number about 1,700 due to liberal hunting and trapping seasons and population control measures by states such as Idaho.
Ranchers and sportsmen say wolf numbers must be kept in check to reduce conflicts.
"Livestock producers have made many concessions to accommodate wolves on the landscape and the result is we have a healthy wolf population and yet a decrease in cattle depredations," said Jay Bodner, natural resource director for the Montana Stockgrowers Association.
(Reporting by Laura Zuckerman in Salmon, Idaho, Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis, Bernard Orr)
Copyright © 2014, Reuters
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http://www.timberwolfinformation.org/uk-no-ecological-reason-against-reintroducing-wolves/
UK: “NO ECOLOGICAL REASON”
AGAINST REINTRODUCING WOLVES
http://keepwolveslisted.blogspot.com/p/wolf-news.html
Posted on May 17, 2014 by TWIN Observer
A landscape conservation charity has said there was “no ecological reason” why wolves could not be reintroduced to Scotland.
In the latest edition of its journal, the John Muir Trust (JMT) said the animal had been demonised in the UK. It has raised the issue of bringing back the wolf as part of a wider discussion on “rewilding” the UK. JMT said that over the next few months it hoped to stimulate debate on returning areas to more natural states.
In the John Muir Trust Journal, chief executive Stuart Brooks said the charity wanted to help develop a practical vision on rewilding. Rewilding includes controlling grazing by domestic and wild animals so native trees and plants can flourish.
Mr Brooks also said: “We want to establish a more cohesive context for species reintroductions based on what is possible as well as desirable.” His comments accompany an article by the charity’s communications chief Susan Wright and head of land and science Mike Daniels. In the article, they said wolf ecotourism was growing in other parts of Europe, but also noted a cull of wolves in Sweden.
They said: “There is no ecological reason why wolves couldn’t come back – we have the climate, the habitat and the food. “Many are afraid of the ‘big bad wolf’ even though they are far more likely to be harmed by their pet dogs, or indeed their horses, than by a wolf, if it were present.”
In Scotland, wolves can only be seen in captivity
The wolf was hunted to extinction in Scotland in the 1700s with some of the last killed in Sutherland and Moray. Today, European wolves can now only be seen in captivity, such as at the Highland Wildlife Park at Kincraig, near Aviemore.
However, wolves have continued to feature on a list of Scottish wildlife that people have concerns about in terms of conservation. A small number of respondents to the latest Scottish Nature Omnibus Survey mentioned the mammal when asked what wildlife they were most worried about. Deer, red squirrel and Scottish wildcat topped the list.
Commissioned by Scottish Natural Heritage, the survey is held on a regular basis to gauge public awareness of Scotland’s natural world, and the efforts to protect and manage it.
Wolves have featured in the survey since 2011. Just 1% of respondents mentioned the predator in the latest survey. However, people did rate it ahead of creatures that do inhabit Scotland and have conservation issues, such as puffins, voles, red kites and ptarmigan.
WOLF TRAP
Wolves were driven to extinction by persecution and hunting. Chieftains and royalty led some of the hunting parties.One attended by Queen Mary in 1563 employed 2,000 Highlanders and ended in the deaths of five wolves and 360 deer.
Huge swathes of forest in Perthshire, Lochaber and Argyll were systematically destroyed to deprive wolves of their habitat. The remains of a wolf trap have also been found at Moy, near Inverness, dating from between the 16th and 18th centuries. Wolves were lured by bait onto a carefully weighted plank above a deep pit covered with brush wood. Animals killed near Brora, in Sutherland, in 1700 and another at Findhorn, in Moray, in 1743 were among Scotland’s last.
More recently there has been debate on the re-introduction of wolves to Scotland, including at the Alladale Estate in Sutherland.
Source
PAUL LISTER PLANS TO PUSH AHEAD WITH ALLADALE WOLVES
Paul Lister has plans to bring wolves and bears to his estate in the Highlands
By David Miller
28 October 2013 Last updated at 09:48 ET
BBC Scotland environment correspondent
Paul Lister, the heir to the MFI furniture fortune, bought Alladale Estate 10 years ago, with the goal of creating a wilderness reserve.
Elk and wild boar were introduced on a trial basis to the 23,000-acre estate, but Highland cattle are the biggest animals to be found there today.
His proposals to bring in wolves and bears have drawn criticism. Farmers, walkers and legal experts have all expressed their opposition to the scheme.
More than 800,000 native trees have been planted, and the estate is involved in projects to protect native species including the Scottish wildcat and the red squirrel.
Large Predators
Mr Lister says he still has more ambitious plans. He told BBC Scotland: "We're going to do a feasibility study on the big vision and the vision is to have a minimum area of 50,000 acres, have a fence around it, and bring back wolves and bears into that area.
"We'll assess the socio-economic impact that will have and also the environmental impact. The presence of these large predators really changes the landscape for the benefit of nature.
Paul Lister
Paul Lister owns a large estate at Alladale in Sutherland "We're talking about maybe two packs of 10 wolves, maybe a dozen bears. These animals create the environment. It's not humans who create the environment, it's nature."
Mr Lister will need more land if his dream of creating a huge 50,000 acre enclosure is to become a reality. He may have to rely on the help of other landowners.
Drew McFarlane-Slack of the landowners' organisation, Scottish Land and Estates, said: "We would support what Mr Lister is doing in terms of peatland restoration, work with red squirrels and Scottish wildcats, which are native animals.
"But the reintroduction of big carnivores would require great care and it'll be many years before we can get to a point where there could be a general release of these."
'Got bears'
Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the United States in 1995.
The wildlife expert, Roy Dennis, who is based in the Highlands believes Scotland could follow suit. He said: "Many of us now go on holiday to Italy, Spain and France and what have they got there? They've got wolves and they've got lynx and they've got bears.
"But you don't feel frightened walking in the Pyrenees. It's just something we've got in our heads and that's why we don't want it to happen."
Highland cattle roam Alladale at the moment
Alladale Estate
Malcolm Combe, of the Rural Law Research Group at the University of Aberdeen, said there could be legal challenges to Mr Lister's plans.
He said the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, which gives everyone a right of responsible access over most of the land and inland water in Scotland, could be an issue.
Mr Combe said: "Although landowners have a certain margin of appreciation as to how to manage their land, management activities cannot unreasonably interfere with access takers exercising their rights responsibly.
"Given the large area involved, it seems possible that any scheme at Alladale that has the effect of restricting access to the whole area could be subjected to a legal challenge."
He said the proposal could fall within the remit of zoo legislation, and also Europe's Habitats Directive. "In terms of licensing of zoos, having predator and prey in the same enclosure would introduce animal welfare issues that would need to be carefully considered," said Mr Combe.
He added: "Human-management of protected species requires special consent from the European Commission. This would need careful consideration as the re-introduced grey wolf would have no natural predator in Scotland."
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-24705203
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-24705203
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CALL OF THE WILD:
MILLIONAIRE HAS PLANS TO BRING WOLVES BACK TO THE HIGHLANDS
The spine-tingling, moonlit howl of wolves is set to echo over the wilds of Scotland for the first time in hundreds of years.
Exclusive by Rob Edwards Environment Editor
Sunday 27 October 2013
Paul Lister wants to re-introduce wolves and bears to a Highland reserve
Main picture: Peter Jolly
Main picture: Peter Jolly
Flat-pack millionaire and Scottish landowner, Paul Lister, has ambitious plans to bring Canis Lupus back to the Highlands within the next three years. However, he is facing anger and opposition from politicians and Ramblers Scotland.
Lister, the outspoken heir to the MFI fortune and laird of Alladale estate, 60 miles north west of Inverness, says he is also determined to witness the return of bears. He will commission a feasibility study next year, followed by consultations with the Scottish Government, environmental groups and local communities.
His plan is for a huge, 20,000-hectare Highland reserve enclosed by a fence, initially containing up to a dozen wolves. "If you don't have an ideal to die for you have nothing to live for," he says. "My ideal is that I want to hear the wolf howl again in Scotland."
But his vision has provoked angry accusations that he is being selfish. There are also concerns that public access to the hills could be restricted. Lister has also been warned by an expert that he will have to confront deep-rooted ancient fears about evil, man-eating wolves.
Lister, whose father reportedly sold his share of the MFI business for £52 million in 1985, bought Alladale 10 years ago.
Since then he has often been in the public eye with plans to protect and enhance wildlife, including red squirrels, boars, elks and wildcats.
Now he says that, after all the talking, he is serious about reintroducing wolves, which were hunted to extinction in Scotland by the 18th century. After next year's feasibility study and consultation, he hopes to be in a position to bring 10-12 of the beasts back into an enclosed wilderness reserve in 2016.
Alladale is less than half the area he thinks the wolves need, so he would require the co-operation of neighbouring landowners or needanother location in the Highlands. A reserve would attract 20,000 people a year and could include overnight accommodation for 80 visitors, he says.
"At Alladale we believe that wolves and bears will create a huge attraction for Scotland's tourism industry, especially in a region where livestock farming and deer stalking offer little in the way of employment," Lister says.
Lister stresses he does not want to release the animals into the wild as humans have long forgotten how to live with them. Rather, he is trying to emulate South African game reserves to create "a thriving industry based on nature and wildlife".
But he has been given short shrift by Rob Gibson, the SNP MSP for Caithness, Sutherland and Ross, and convenor of the Scottish Parliament's environment and rural affairs committee. Gibson said: "He treats his land as a private kingdom and that goes against Scottish access laws".
Dave Morris, director of Ramblers Scotland, accused Lister of trying to create a massive zoo. The restrictions on people's right to roam and the damage to the landscape caused by fences and tracks would be too great, he said.
Garry Marvin, professor of human-animal studies at the University of Roehampton in London, thought bringing back wolves was "a really fantastic idea". But he warned Lister he would have to deal with profound cultural and emotional fears about the animlas.
In Aesop's fables, the Bible and fairytales, wolves have been vilified as a "unique symbol of evil" because they kill the livestock on which communities rely for food, he argued.
"The wolf has been demonised so much that we have tried in the past to eradicate it from the face of the planet," Marvin said. "For any successful conservation strategy it is vital to engage with local people to understand their feelings and attitudes, or they will simply feel alienated and disempowered and be much less likely to co-operate."
Others were cautiously positive about the plans. "This undoubtedly presents challenges, but could also offer a unique ecotourism opportunity for Scotland," said Anne Gray from Scottish Land & Estates, which represents landowners.
Jonathan Hughes, Scottish Wildlife Trust conservation director, said there was a moral and ecological imperative to reintroduce species lost to Scotland by human persecution.
But suitable habitat, an understanding of impacts on other species, and support from affected communities were all needed, he said.
PUZZLING QUESTIONS OVER
ALLADALE WOLF PACK PLANS
ALLADALE WOLF PACK PLANS
OutdoorsHills May 20, 2010
Rather puzzling developments at Alladale estate with regard to its much-touted wildlife reserve. For the best part of a decade, estate owner Paul Lister has adopted a high-profile approach to his vision of reintroducing various long-gone species to the Scottish Highlands. He wants his estate to become home to elk and wild boar (both of which have already arrived, in small numbers), and to wolves.
The wolf proposal has caused ructions. Wolves would mean high and/or electrified fences, and any fenced enclosures, no matter how large in area (Alladale covers 23,000 acres), would contravene the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003. This requires landowners to maintain free access pretty much everywhere apart from gardens and other specified areas.
Since Lister bought Alladale in 2002, the reintroduction story has never strayed far from the Scottish outdoor-news agenda. It presses all the right buttons in terms of creating interest – exotic(ish) wildlife, conservation, land issues, wealth – and the estate’s media operation, using London-based PR firm Indigo PRCo, has done well in terms of generating coverage. Whatever one thinks about Lister’s proposals, he could never be accused of trying to sneak the wolves in by the back gate.
Take the Alladale website, http://www.alladale.com/
for instance. This is classy, with enticing scenes of high-grade Highland living: fine stone lodges, comfortable lounges, beautiful wooded glens. Idyllic (so long as no mention is made of the midges). The “Wilderness Reserve” part of the site is of similar standard, and whoever took the photograph of the endearing-looking elk surely earned their Christmas bottle of malt from the estate factor.
While the quality of the digital presentation – the swish photography, the serif fonts – was never likely to win over the detractors with their demands for free access to the land, there has been a feel of inevitability to things, as in so many investment-versus-objection stories. Just as new roads tend to get built no matter how many letters are written to councils and newspapers, and just as Donald Trump’s golf-and-bad-trousers scheme for Menie Estate will likely come to fruition no matter how many bearded and beaded eco-types wave placards and shout slogans, so it seemed likely that Lister’s lupines, for better or worse, would arrive in due course.
This certainly seemed the case in February, when Alladale’s licence to keep dangerous animals was renewed by Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross Council. This opened the way for the estate to apply for a zoo licence.
Yesterday, however, the BBC reported that the “estate has shelved a plan to introduce four wolves from Romania into a secure area. Alladale Estate, at Ardgay in Sutherland, said the proposal had been dropped in the interests of the animals’ welfare.”
Hugh Fullerton-Smith, the Alladale general manager, was quoted as saying: “We studied very carefully small enclosures throughout Britain and to be frank we weren’t comfortable about bringing them into very small enclosures on welfare grounds.”
This seems odd. Just four days earlier, the Scotsman had published an interview with Lister – Fullerton-Smith’s boss – outlining difficulties but without implying any major snag. No mention of “shelved”, or “dropped”.
“I don’t think we will ever see wolves running around without fences or without some kind of control,” Lister told Scotsman writer Nick Drainey. “There is way too much livestock, there are way too many people’s pets, and there is way too much fear.”
A certain amount of caution there, for sure. But the piece went on: “Undeterred, Lister plans to engage adjoining estates and in time possibly acquire enough land or work with his neighbours to bring the predator to Sutherland.” Which sounds like the standard Alladale long-term thinking: in time, howls of protest will be replaced by howls of the wolf pack.
Both Fullerton-Smith and Lister mentioned links with neighbouring estates, with a view to creating a viable area for the wolves (50,000 acres is the usual figure quoted). But the tone of the BBC piece was markedly different from the Scotsman one, and the various follow-up stories have tended to take an “Alladale rethink” angle.
The walkhighlands site headlined its report “Wolves plan scrapped at Alladale”. The interpretation at grough appears closer to what Fullerton-Smith actually said: “Plan for Highland wolves put on hold.”
http://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/news/wolves-plan-scrapped-at-alladale/001701/
The situation suddenly seems a lot less clear than a few days ago. Has there been some PR glitch, or are the wolf plans genuinely off the Alladale agenda for the short-to-medium term? It is known that the council access officer opposed the fencing proposals – they could hardly be in favour, given the 2003 Act – so has that proved to be a stumbling block even though the council’s licensing committee remains positive about the plan?
Is the Alladale project seen as maverick in the scientific/zoological community, and has pressure therefore been applied behind the scenes? Have Lister and Fullerton-Smith started singing from different hymnsheets? (In which case they should take guidance from Messrs Cameron and Clegg.) Have financial problems arisen, Lister’s MFI-inheritance millions notwithstanding? Has Lister had a change of mind?
Or has there been little or no change on the ground, and it is simply a case of the BBC – which in the past has stood accused of being doe-eyed in its presentation of the Alladale/Lister story – overstating the problems?
These questions were put to Lister and to Fullerton-Smith yesterday, via the aforementioned PR agency. As yet, there has been no response.
ALLADALE ESTATE: WALKING WITH WOLVES
ACCESS ISSUES | CONSERVATION | MAGAZINE
Posted on October 30, 2013 by Cameron McNeish
viewpoint
WOLVES.
The very name stirs the emotions. To some the thought of wolf packs roaming the highlands would be a dream come true, the ultimate in re-wilding. To others the prospect strikes fear, alarm and concern, not only because their childhood bogies are still alive and well and feature a certain Red Riding Hood, but because they have a genuine disquiet about the effect of roaming carnivores on their livelihood. Wolves are natural predators and are as liable to take a sheep as a red deer.
Paul Lister. Millionaire heir to the MFI furniture fortune and a name that, depending on your stance on re-wilding, keeps cropping up like a bad penny. Ten years ago Lister, bought the 23,000 acre Alladale Estate in Easter Ross with the aim of re-wilding the estate and re-introducing various species that have become extinct in Scotland, including wolves and bears.
The proposals sounded exciting and I was invited to visit Lister along with wildlife experts Roy Dennis and Dick Balharry and Ramblers Scotland boss Dave Morris. Lister met us and enthusiastically showed us around and it was very clear he was a multi-millionaire with a vision. The plan was to rejuvenate his remote estate by reducing deer numbers, encouraging the native woodland and refurbishing the 100-year old lodge into a luxury hotel. He also wanted to populate the area with European grey wolves, bears, lynx, boar and European bison. He hoped to convince neighbouring landowners to turn over some of their land to his project, potentially creating a 50,000 acre game park for Scottish indigenous species.
All went well and his little audience was both receptive and encouraging until he mentioned The Fence!
Lister wanted to encircle the estate with a three-metre high electrified fence, a barrier that would not only keep the wild animals inside the reserve but would also prevent the public from accessing an enormous chunk of Highland landscape that includes a remote Corbett called Carn Ban.
Paul Lister has strong links with the Carpathian Large Carnivore Project in Romania and the Shamwari and Sanbona game reserves in South Africa, both of which charge large fees for entrance. He believes his Scottish “Big Five” species could also attract high-paying guests who would be willing to pay up to £20,000 for a week at Alladale Lodge. Day trippers would also be welcome, provided they paid for the privilege. They would be offered conducted tours by rangers.
It was clear that Lister wanted to create a zoo, with exorbitantly high entrance fees.
At that first meeting it became evident that Lister knew nothing of the access provisions of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act. Several times he accused hillwalkers of walking on “his” hills “without permission” and he appeared disinclined to accept that the public could freely roam the estate without his permission, provided they did so in a responsible manner.
We left Alladale that day with very mixed feelings. On the one hand, like much wild land in the highlands, a lot of his property is badly degraded. Many of the hillsides have been over burnt and high numbers of deer have had a serious effect on much of the vegetation but here and there pockets of woodland offer a reminder of what this estate, and many others in the highlands, could be like given sensitive management. Lister clearly intends to create a long-term project that will restore the indigenous Highland flora and fauna of 2,000 years ago, but will his dream of reintroducing wolves, and bears and lynx come to fruition?
I think it could, in time, but our advice to him was to forget about building his 50-mile electric fence. It was highly unlikely that he would get planning permission for such a fence and if he attempted to stop the public from accessing his estate, or indeed charged people for access, there would be public outrage. Our views were supported by Mike Dales of the Mountaineering Council of Scotland who later said; “At a time when we should be having a sensible, calm debate about reintroducing beavers and wolves, this theme park idea threatens to polarize and confuse that debate.”
The reintroduction of wolves is a valid debate but if we are going to reintroduce any indigenous species it should surely be into the wilds, and not into a game park, or a large zoo. That debate has to be carried out in a calm and inclusive way and although Scottish Natural Heritage has its critics, any reintroduction programme should be scientifically controlled and coordinated by that organisation.
Four years later Lister hit the headlines again. His manager, Hugh Fullerton-Smith, had announced plans to apply for a zoo license. Highland Council officials confirmed they received a ‘Notice of Intention’ from Alladale Wilderness Reserve as required under the Zoo Licensing Act 1981.
Since my visit to Alladale, European elk and wild boar had been introduced to the estate and were kept within enclosures. These enclosures have also been the subject of controversy with a local gamekeeper telling me “the boars have rooted granny pines throughout and decimated the beautiful ant hills that used to be in abundance on the Stronukie Ridge. They are gone – wiped out.”
The same keeper told me: “These plans sends alarm bells ringing in my ears. If Lister gets away with it he could set a precedent and every estate in Scotland could get closed off for the same reasons. That would deny freedom of access for the public, allowing Lister and others to control the most beautiful parts of the country for their own pleasures.”
Ramblers Scotland boss Dave Morris shared fears that public access would be wiped out. “Approving such a project would be contrary to the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 as it would prevent people exercising their statutory rights of access over a large area of land,” he said. “There are already problems with his existing enclosure, with its high fence and electrified wires which make it near impossible to cross.
“The Alladale situation suggests that it is time for us to ask the Scottish Parliament to prohibit the use of electric fencing in Scotland in association with deer fencing or other forms of high fencing.”
In papers lodged with the local authority, manager Fullerton-Smith stated: “The Alladale Wilderness Reserve facility will be unlike any present conventional UK zoo, both in types of enclosures it uses and ways in which only a limited number of resident visitors and environmental education groups will view the animals.”
The animals were to be kept in enclosures and fed on a range of carcasses and game off-cuts and only guests staying at Alladale would be allowed to see them. Exclusive guests that is. According to the estate website, if you’d like to book a Christmas holiday at Alladale it will cost you in the region of £300 a night, per person.
It was clear that Lister and Fullerton-Smith had changed their plans. The original idea, as Lister explained it to me, was that the whole 23,000 acre estate would fenced off and the wolves allowed to roam free. There would be access points in the electrified fence for the public. Sometime later that plan appeared to change and it was suggested that the public should be prepared to “sacrifice” access for the sake of the “re-wilding” scheme. Now, the plan had changed again and the wolves, I assume, were to be kept in a smaller enclosure, within a zoo. It seems that the original altruistic motives for re-wilding and re-introductions had been abandoned in favour of a pay-to-see-the-animals zoo.
Highland Council officials told me that there would be a public consultation period regarding the application, with notices advertised in local and national newspapers.
I’ve no idea of what happened to the zoo license application. I assume it was rejected and we’ve heard little from Lister for four years. However, a six-part BBC television series, Monarch of the Glen, didn’t appear to do him any favours. In those programmes he came across as arrogant, impatient, bullying and quite eccentric.
In 2010 it was revealed that the estate had shelved plans to introduce wolves, in the interests of “animal welfare”. According to a BBC report at the time Mr Fullerton-Smith said wolves remained part of Alladale’s vision. Previously, the general manager said two wolf packs could be released into a large, but secure, area but this would require collaboration from neighbouring estates to make available 50,000 acres for the animals.
Grey wolves: is it a reintroduction if they are fenced in?
Wolves: is it a reintroduction if they are fenced in?
In February 2010, the estate had its license to keep 17 wild boar and two European elk renewed. Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross licensing committee unanimously approved the application although Highland Council’s local access officer had warned of concerns from hillwalkers that the animals’ enclosures limited the right-to-roam at Alladale. The Mountaineering Council of Scotland said the licensing committee’s decision was disappointing.
In 2012 Fullerton-Smith left Alladale to become Executive Director of Change for Climate Change, a registered charity, and last month the BBC reported that Lister’s long-term plans remained unchanged. He told BBC Scotland: “We’re going to do a feasibility study on the big vision and the vision is to have a minimum area of 50,000 acres, have a fence around it, and bring back wolves and bears into that area.”
Needless to say his comments have attracted a mixed response. Other landowners are currently challenging the access provisions of the Land Reform Act (at Ledgowan, near Achnasheen) and Lister’s intentions to restrict access at Alladale to fee-paying guests will attract much opposition. Even Scottish Land and Estate, formerly the Scottish Landowners Association, are wary of Lister’s plans and advise caution.
“We would support what Mr Lister is doing in terms of peatland restoration, work with red squirrels and Scottish wildcats, which are native animals.
“But the reintroduction of big carnivores would require great care and it’ll be many years before we can get to a point where there could be a general release of these, said Drew McFarlane-Slack .”
Far be it from me to agree with the landowners’ organization, but Drew McFarlane-Slack is an old pal of mine and I’d be happy to support him on this issue. Paul Lister is to be congratulated on much of the work he is doing at Alladale. I’m pragmatic enough to realize that despite his wealth running such a set-up is expensive and the estate needs to produce cash to keep everything going. But I have two great concerns about Alladale Wilderness Reserve.
Firstly, I would actively oppose any plans to restrict access to 50,000 acres of the Scottish Highlands because someone wants to create a zoo. The access provisions of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act were hard won and there is a grave danger that if Lister built a 50 mile long electric fence around his property others may want to try something similar. Remember the vindictive court case with Ann Gloag of Stagecoach when she wanted to build a fence around her Perthshire Estate to keep people out?
Secondly, with all due respect to Paul Lister, I believe the job of re-introducing large creatures like wolves and bears should be carried out by Scottish Natural Heritage. Such re-introductions are of national importance and shouldn’t be down to the whims and ambitions of individual landowners who may, or may not, have a financial interest at heart. Lister’s proposals fall within the remit of zoo legislation, and Europe’s Habitats Directive.
Having predators like wolves or bears and prey in the same enclosure would introduce animal welfare issues, and human-management of protected species requires special consent from the European Commission. This would need careful consideration as re-introduced grey wolves would have no natural predator in Scotland.
No matter your own viewpoint, it looks as though the re-introduction of wolves or bears into the Scottish landscape is still a long, long way off.
Have your say on our forum.
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6.
#KEEPWOLVESLISTED
Updated Wednesday. March 12. 2014
TAKE ACTION:
OPPOSE A SCIENTIFICALLY FLAWED PLAN TO ABANDON PROTECTION FOR OUR WOLVES
https://secure.earthjustice.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1487
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Updated March 9.2014
RESPECT SCIENCE AND MAINTAIN ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT PROTECTIONS FOR GRAY WOLVES
http://www.credomobilize.com/petitions/respect-science-and-maintain-endangered-species-act-protections-for-gray-wolves?source=ESC
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TAKE ACTION:
OPPOSE A SCIENTIFICALLY FLAWED PLAN TO ABANDON PROTECTION FOR OUR WOLVES
https://secure.earthjustice.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=1487
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7.
#KEEPWOLVESLISTEDUpdated March 9.2014
RESPECT SCIENCE AND MAINTAIN ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT PROTECTIONS FOR GRAY WOLVES
http://www.credomobilize.com/petitions/respect-science-and-maintain-endangered-species-act-protections-for-gray-wolves?source=ESC
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8.
#KEEPWOLVESLISTED
PROTECT WOLVES
FROM FLAWED STUDIES
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9.
#KEEPWOLVESLISTED
WITHDRAW THE DELISTING PROPOSAL
THE TRUTH IS FINALLY OUT - DEMAND THAT FWS WITHDRAW THEIR DELISTING PROPOSAL!
https://secure.defenders.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=2691
Last Friday, a major development in our efforts to stop the irresponsible proposal to delist nearly all gray wolves in the Lower 48 occurred.
An independent peer review board, commissioned to check the facts behind the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s (FWS) delisting plan released their unanimous decision: that the justification for stripping gray wolves of Endangered Species Act Protection is not based on the best available science and is filled with numerous omissions and errors.
The results of the independent peer review of FWS's proposed rule to remove the gray wolf from the list of threatened and endangered wildlife are in, and reviewers unanimously agreed that FWS did not use the best available science in its decision to delist wolves. Below are just a few of the critiques provided by the reviewers:
-Science used by FWS contains significant interpretation errors, key omissions, and a selective use of evidence.
-FWS got the taxonomy and range of wolves all wrong: gray wolves may have lived in the Northeast, wolves of the Pacific Northwest are likely distinct from other populations, and Mexican gray wolves historically had a much larger range than FWS claimed.
In response to questions on the gray wolf delisting you once said "It's about science and you do what the science says". Clearly, the best available science does not provide a basis for saying that wolves need to be delisted. You now have an opportunity to follow through on your stated principles and those set in the Endangered Species Act, to follow the best available science, wherever it might lead, and to maintain protections for gray wolves until they are fully recovered. We urge you to rescind this proposed rule and allow gray wolves the protection they need to fully recover. Thank you for your consideration.
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10.
#KEEPWOLVESLISTED
WOLVES NEED YOU ONCE AGAIN
WOLVES NEED YOU ONCE AGAIN
Gray wolves
From the very start, the Obama administration's proposal to remove federal protections for wolves across most of the lower 48 has been based on politics, not science. The nation's top scientists have said so and the American people have said so -- and now we have to say so again.
In just six states where wolves have been federally delisted, two years of aggressive state hunting and trapping seasons have killed more than 2,600 wolves, or half the total population in the lower 48 known to exist in 2013. Can you imagine what would happen if the wolves' safety net were removed in all states?
Let's demand that wolves get the protections a recovering species needs. Scientists have identified hundreds of thousands of square miles of suitable wolf habitat that still exists in places where wolves once lived and could live again with the help of federal protections -- including the Pacific Northwest, California, the southern Rockies and the Northeast.
Take action now to sound the drum. Tell the Fish and Wildlife Service to rescind its plan to strip protections from wolves, and instead help wolves recover across more of their former home.
~
I am writing to request that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rescind its proposal to strip Endangered Species Act protections from gray wolves in the lower 48.
The best available science demonstrates that wolves are not yet recovered and that lifting protections would end the very measures most needed to ensure wolf recovery. Wolves today occupy roughly 5 percent of their former habitat and exist at only 1 percent of their former numbers. And scientists have identified hundreds of thousands of square miles of suitable wolf habitat that still exists in places where wolves once lived and could return to, with the help of federal protections and recovery programs, including the Pacific Northwest, California, the southern Rockies and the Northeast.
In response to its delisting proposal, Fish and Wildlife has received letters from some of the top carnivore scientists in the country and from science organizations representing members in over 60 countries. These scientists have roundly criticized the proposal for not being based on the best available science and for distorting their research. Additionally, a scientific peer review panel specifically contracted by Fish and Wildlife to review the proposal has issued a report unanimously concluding that the proposal is not based on the best available science.
Wolves remain an endangered species, and a declaration from Fish and Wildlife that wolves are no longer endangered does not make it so. The proposal appears to respond to the concerns of a very small but powerful contingent -- that of livestock operators unwilling or unable to imagine coexisting with wolves. But the majority of Americans want wolves to remain protected until they are fully recovered, as required by the Endangered Species Act, and they want to see wolves restored to significant portions of the species' historic range.
Please rescind your plan to strip protections from wolves, and instead begin to develop recovery plans for wolves across more of their former territory.
Sincerely,
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LEAVE YOUR OWN COMMENT TO USFWS TO #KEEPWOLVESLISTED
3. READ UP:
Access to news articles, and the PEER review report, to inform us about the changes via that caused USFWS to reopen comment submissions.
LEAVE YOUR OWN COMMENT TO USFWS TO #KEEPWOLVESLISTED
#CommentForWolves
http://keepwolveslisted.blogspot.com/p/wolf-news.html
PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT TO USFWS, AND TELL THEM TO USE SOUND SCIENCE AND TO KEEP WOLVES LISTED AS ENDANGERED SPECIES UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE E.S.A.
http://keepwolveslisted.blogspot.com/p/wolf-news.html
PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT TO USFWS, AND TELL THEM TO USE SOUND SCIENCE AND TO KEEP WOLVES LISTED AS ENDANGERED SPECIES UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE E.S.A.
Link to USFWS comment form:
Talking points and comments
to swipe and send:
Postcard Comments.
Just copy the image and "upload file (s) (optional) " on comment submission page ~ add your name and send. Voila!
Review of Proposed Rule Regarding Status
of the Wolf Under
the Endangered Species Act
You are commenting on:
The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) Proposed Rule: Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants: Removing the Gray Wolf (Canis lupus) from the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Maintaining Protections for the Mexican Wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) by Listing It as Endangered
For related information :Open Docket Folder
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3. READ UP:
Access to news articles, and the PEER review report, to inform us about the changes via that caused USFWS to reopen comment submissions.
http://keepwolveslisted.blogspot.com/p/wolf-news.html
Thank you for lending your voice to #CommentForWolves !
GREAT READS ABOUT USFWS AND HOW THEY USED FLAWED SCIENCE TO BASE THEIR PROPOSAL TO DELIST GRAY WOLVES FROM THE E.S.A.
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SCIENTISTS DISPUTE ENDANGERED WOLF DELISTING PLAN
ENVIRONMENT
- February 8, 2014 4:15AM
A plan to end federal protections for gray wolves in vast areas of the U.S. where they no longer exist has alarmed environmentalists.
Source: commons.wikimedia.org
SOURCE: COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG
1
The White House is backing a plan from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to remove gray wolves from the endangered species list, which would remove protections for all but a small population of Mexican gray wolves in the Southwest. Congress is split on the issue.
2
"[The plan to delist the gray wolf] was strongly dependent on a single publication, which was found to be preliminary and not widely accepted by the scientific community."
NATIONAL CENTER FOR ECOLOGICAL ANALYSIS SYNTHESIS STATEMENT
On Feb. 7, independent scientists criticized the FWS conclusion that the gray wolf should be delisted as endangered, saying it was based on one study that has not been widely accepted in the academic community. A group that protects endangered species said that "wolf recovery is far from complete."
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/gray_wolves/index.html
3
"Peer review is an important step in our efforts to assure that the final decision… We are incorporating the peer review report into the public record for the proposed rulemaking, and accordingly, reopening the public comment period to provide the public with the opportunity for input."
DAN ASHE, U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE DIRECTOR
The FWS reopened the public comment phase to March 27, after initially setting the deadline in Dec. 2013. The agency said it plans to make a final decision on gray wolf delisting by the end of 2014.
4
Being listed helped the wolves rebound from trapping and poisoning that left only a colony in Minnesota in 1974. Today, 6,100 wolves roam 10 states (MT, WY, ID, OR, WA, WI, MI, MN, UT, and CO). Environmentalists say that growth doesn't compare to the wolves' historic presence across most of North America.
RELATED STORYLINE ON CIRCA
Lawmakers want to let states opt-out of endangered species protections
http://cir.ca/news/endangered-species-opt-out
5
Opponents of the protections say that wolves kill livestock populations, although they keep a natural check on some animals such as elk, which are overpopulated in Colorado and elsewhere.
SOURCE: COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG
RELATED STORYLINE ON CIRCA
Grand Canyon National Park plans to evict elk after run-ins
http://cir.ca/news/officials-boot-elk-from-grand-canyon
6
Wolves usually live in frontier expanses of forests and mountains, and environmentalists see threats against them as a danger to nature in general. Environmental and animal advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in February 2013 to stop the delisting of the wolf. SOURCE: COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG
Wolves usually live in frontier expanses of forests and mountains, and environmentalists see threats against them as a danger to nature in general. Environmental and animal advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in February 2013 to stop the delisting of the wolf.
7
Michigan started wolf hunting season on Nov. 15, 2013. Hunters purchased 1,200 permits at $100 each. By Dec. 31, when the season ended, they had killed just 22 wolves, far short of the 43 kills the state would have allowed.
RELATED STORYLINE ON CIRCA
Michigan allows wolf hunting
http://cir.ca/news/michigan-wolf-hunting
8
A federal judge on Dec. 27, 2013, ruled that organizers could go through with a wolf- and coyote-hunting derby competition on publicly owned land without obtaining a special permit from the U.S. Forest Service. Participants will hunt formerly endangered gray wolves, among other species.
RELATED STORYLINE ON CIRCA
Judge allows hunting derby for formerly endangered wolf species
http://cir.ca/news/idaho-wolf-derby
9
Researchers published a study in the journal Science on Jan. 10
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6167/1241484
that shows about 75% of large carnivores are in decline. In countries with advanced economies, many big predators like the cougar, or mountain lion, have been declared extinct.
SOURCE: UPLOAD.WIKIMEDIA.ORG
RELATED STORYLINE ON CIRCA
75% of big carnivores are in decline
http://cir.ca/news/big-carnivores-disappearing
http://cir.ca/news/endangered-gray-wolf-delisting
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February 21. 2014 1:48 PM
WOLVES MAY BE LOSING A NASTY POLITICAL BATTLE
By Lance Richardson
There's still time to tell the Fish and Wildlife Service what you think about the latest proposal to remove protection for the gray wolf.
Courtesy of USFWS Pacific Region/Flickr
The Endangered Species Act sounds simple on paper. Its goal is to preserve biological diversity, protect critical habitat, and recover threatened species across the country. But nothing is simple when it comes to the environment. Lobbyists have labeled the ESA both a success and a failure, and a Republican congressman is the latest to try to drastically curtail its protections. The ESA has been argued from all sides, and never more so than when discussions turn to the American gray wolf.
The gray wolf is one of the most hotly contested symbols in the conservation debate today. In June, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service presented a proposal to nudge gray wolves from under its protective umbrella, effectively “delisting” them across the lower 48 states. (Gray wolves have already been delisted in seven states of the Northern Rockies and Western Great Lakes.) The proposal would turn wolf management over to individual states.
The proposal caused a great deal of consternation among scientists and wolf supporters. The Endangered Species Act provides an “emergency room way-station for declining species to regain their footing and the sufficiently recover,” said Don Barry, a former chief counsel for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, now at Defenders of Wildlife. Some of the ESA’s biggest success stories are the bald eagle, brown pelican, and American alligator. But wolves are a long way from the healthy numbers these species have reached: An August 2013 population count found just 5,443 wolves across the entire country (excluding Alaska, where wolves are not covered by the ESA). The Fish and Wildlife Service is tired of the issue, Barry told me, and “they are sort of getting up in the middle of the movie.”
This month, following a brief hiatus, arguments have reignited with the release of an independent review paper from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California-Santa Barbara. It finds that the delisting proposal is not, in fact, based on the “best available science.”
The review vindicates critics who say the Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to de-list the wolves prematurely, finding “problematic conclusions” in the proposal that treat contentious genetic and ecological theories as fact.
The review got at least one big result: the Fish and Wildlife Service responded by reopening its proposal to public comment. You now have until March 27 to weigh in on wolves' future. (Last year the proposal attracted more than 30,000 comments, ranging from passionate personal pleas to analytical legal responses.) The Fish and Wildlife Service has indicated it will make a final determination on the proposal by the end of the year.
What are the scientific arguments actually about, though? Much of the controversy can be traced to the idea of “historic range,” which, broadly stated, refers to the area an animal occupied before humans came along and set about killing it. John Vucetich, a population biologist at Michigan Tech, has argued that wolves currently occupy less than 15 percent of their historic range; along with many other biologists, he has also argued that the Endangered Species Act dictates wolves be restored to a “significant portion” of that original range before they’re ripe for delisting.
The Fish and Wildlife Service has other ideas, though. When I questioned the agency, Gary Frazer, who heads up the Endangered Species Program, called the desire to restore wolves everywhere they used to live “a completely legitimate conservation objective more broadly stated.” But he denied it’s the objective of the Endangered Species Act. He said the ESA’s real objective is “to bring species to the point where they are no longer at risk of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of their range.” Range, in his explanation, is “the range at the time at which we’re making a determination of whether a species is threatened or endangered.” In other words, range is where an animal lives at the particular moment the Fish and Wildlife Service decides to list it, not where it used to live before it was widely persecuted.
That’s an odd argument: If a squirrel species is reduced to living in a single park, does that mean the Fish and Wildlife Service is obligated by the Endangered Species Act only to maintain the squirrel there and nowhere else?
The rationale for delisting also rests on a taxonomical revision—that is, it reconceives what is meant when we say “American gray wolf.” Using a scientific paper co-authored by four of its own scientists and published in its own journal without peer-review, the Fish and Wildlife Service claims that, historically, the United States was home to another wolf species (Canis lycaon), which would mean that the “historic range” of our modern wolves (Canis lupus) didn’t actually include most of the eastern half of the country. That’s a complex point, but perhaps the most important thing to take away is the fact that the Fish and Wildlife Service previously rejected this paper in 2011 as representing “neither a scientific consensus nor the majority opinion of researchers on the taxonomy of wolves.” In other words, most experts didn’t agree with it. And they still don’t, according to the new independent review released this month, which focuses specifically on taxonomy.
If the delisting proposal is not based on the “best available science,” what is it really about?
“There’s no precedent,” Robert Wayne told me. Wayne is a canid geneticist at UCLA who sat on the independent review panel with six other scientists. “I can’t think of another endangered species which has been delisted because of a taxonomic revision. In this case the taxonomic revision is questionable,” he said. “It seems like a convenient way for the US Fish and Wildlife Service to delist the gray wolf in 22 eastern states.”
But if the delisting proposal is not based on the “best available science,” what is it really about? “This was politics masquerading as science,” the New York Times declared last August in an editorial. Nor is it alone in its suspicions. The issue of wolves has always been politically charged, with agricultural and hunting interests pitted against conservationists and biologists.
“I think probably over the decades at least a few of us were lulled into this sense of acceptance, that everything was getting better and that people now understood the importance of predators like wolves,” Don Barry said. But the debate over the delisting proposals has been a reminder of the residual anger towards wolves in the rural West, where influential ranchers have long fought wolves for depredating livestock. “Merge that in with the whole Tea Party fervor against government, and what you end up with in the state legislatures is this race to the bottom to see who can be more anti-wolf. The biology of the thing gets thrown right out the window.”
John Vucetich offered two potential outcomes from here. Either the Fish and Wildlife Service rescinds its proposal in a few months time, which would mean “one or two years of just lying low,” or it pushes forward with proposed plans for delisting, turning its attention to the critically endangered Mexican gray wolf. If that turns out to be the case, the future of the American gray wolf becomes very gray indeed.
Lance Richardson is a writer based in New York. Follow him on Twitter, or visit his website.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/wild_things/2014/02/21/gray_wolf_endangered_species_act_conflict_should_fish_and_wildlife_service.html
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WOLF CENTER FIGHTS TO KEEP WOLVES ON ENDANGERED LIST
Alawa is one of 17 gray wolves at the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem and one of three ambassador wolves that participate in educational programs produced by the WCC. (Maggie Howell photo)
By Reece Alvarez
on February 21, 2014
in Lead News, News
The Wolf Conservation Center (WCC) fights all kinds of dangers that threaten its mission of protecting America’s wolves. The South Salem organization recently claimed a small victory against one of those dangers, when the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s bid to remove the gray wolf from the Endangered Species List was temporarily halted.
Last June the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS) declared it had accomplished its mission of recovering the endangered wolf species across a significant portion of its original habitat, which includes much of the United States outside of the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic.
To remove a species from the endangered list, the USFWS is required to have its proposals reviewed by an independent panel of scientists.
Earlier this month USFWS released the peer review, which included sharp criticisms of the proposal and asserted that the basis on which the USFWS sought to de-list the gray wolf was not supported by the best science available. The report also refutes the USFWS’s claim that the gray wolf is not native to the northeastern United States.
“There is no evidence that shows the Northeast was not a part of the historic range of gray wolves,” said Maggie Howell, executive director of the WCC. “That enables the Northeast to maybe one day down the line welcome gray wolves into the vast habitat that has been screaming for a predator like the wolf for some time.”
The attempt to de-list the gray wolf becomes more complicated, as the peer review revealed that the “scheme” by which USFWS tried to do so was based largely on a reclassification of Northeastern wolf species by scientists employed by the USFWS.
Based in part on preliminary conclusions from a single 2012 paper written by biologists employed by the USFWS, the USFWS contended that the eastern half of the United States was occupied by Canis lycaon, or the “eastern wolf,” a distinct species of wolf that does not belong to the gray wolf species Canis lupus, according to the WCC.
The WCC is home to 22 wolves, including 17 Mexican gray wolves, and much of its efforts involve supporting initiatives and legislation that help protect wolf populations throughout the country. Since the USFWS announced its plan to de-list gray wolves, the WCC has been building opposition to the proposal, including urging people to submit comments to the USFWS. The USFWS has received more than a million comments on the issue, a record for any de-listing proposal, Ms. Howell said.
Representatives from the WCC even showed up in Albuquerque and Washington, D.C., to testify on behalf of WCC’s gray wolves and their estimated 6,000 relatives across the continental U.S.
Wild wolves will never call Westchester County home, but portions of northern New York and the Northeast are suitable for wolf habitation, if the species has the opportunity to expand, Ms. Howell said. Gray wolves were once common throughout the United States, but by the early 20th Century had been all but eradicated from the wild.
Once numbering approximately 2 million, the wolf population has rebounded thanks to conservation efforts, and is now estimated to be between 7,000 and 12,000 strong and increasingly present in such states as Idaho, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
“Wolves are a critical keystone species in a healthy ecosystem. By regulating prey populations, wolves enable many other species of plants and animals to flourish. In this regard, wolves ‘touch’ songbirds, beaver, fish, and butterflies. Without predators, such as wolves, the system fails to support a natural level of biodiversity,” said Ms. Howell, who also shared a quote by the 20th-Century environmentalist Aldo Leopold.
“I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.”
In light of the peer review, the USFWS has reopened the comment period on its proposal to de-list the gray wolf from the endangered species list for a period of 45 days that began Feb. 10.
Information regarding the peer review and the USFWS proposal, as well as how to submit comments, may be found at fws.gov/home/wolfrecovery.
Tags: Gray wolf, Maggie Howell, US Fish & Wildlife Service, USFWS, WCC, Wolf Conservation Center
http://www.lewisboroledger.com/10274/wolf-center-fights-to-keep-gray-wolves-on-endangered-species-list/
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TOP YELLOWSTONE EXPERT TAKES ON THE WOLF CRITICS
SPEAKS TO "NON NATIVE SUBSPECIES" CHARGE AND "SURPLUS KILLING"
01/05/14
Recently, the Montana Pioneer spoke with Doug Smith, Yellowstone National Park Wolf Project Leader and Senior Biologist at the Yellowstone Center for Resources, about the nature of the wolves introduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, including the “non native subspecies” charge advanced by critics, and about ongoing research on wolves in the park.
MP: What were the genetic sources of wolves introduced into YNP—where did the existing wolf population originate?
DS: Forty one wolves were introduced to YNP in 1995. There were 14 in 1995 from Alberta, and 17 in 1996 from British Columbia, and 10 in 1997 from near Choteau, Montana. We have genetic evidence that some of those wolves went on to breed. So, 10 of the wolves that were introduced were from Montana, and 31 were from Canada.
MP: What were the main characteristics that were different between the wolves from Canada and the wolves that pre-existed here in Yellowstone, say 150 years ago? Is that known?
DS: Not really. All we have are skulls to judge it from. What we know from studying the skulls are that the wolves are essentially the same. The Canadian wolves were about 7 to 8 percent larger than the pre-existing wolves of Yellowstone. Seven to eight percent is within the variation of size difference found in wolf skulls all over North America, so the difference is statistically insignificant. It is important to compare apples to apples, so-to-speak. Pups and immature animals are smaller, and males are about 20 percent larger than females, at full size. It is important to compare similar age and gender skulls to each other. So comparing the handful of skulls that were preserved here as museum samples with over 150 skulls of wolves that have died here since they were introduced, the skulls are essentially the same, but the ones from Canada are slightly bigger.
Taxonomically (classifying in categories such as genus, species, and subspecies), you get differences between species when there are limitations on their ability to mix genetically. Wolves are stopped by nothing. They will cross mountain ranges, rivers, even pack ice. That's how good this animal is at moving around. So what we have is this constant intermixing of genes that prevents them from becoming really different subspecies. Wolves origin-ated in North America a couple of million years ago. When glaciers connected Alaska and Russia, they crossed over into Russia. They got bigger over there. In the last 600,000 to 700,000 years differently evolved wolves have crossed back to North America in three waves. The remnants of the oldest wave of wolves returning to North America are now the most southern species, and also the smallest, Canis lupus baileyi, the Mexican wolf. The middle wave of evolved wolves returning to this continent from Asia are the gray wolves we have here now, and the most recent are the largest, the arctic wolves.
MP: Were the wolves introduced into YNP significantly different physically or behaviorally from the wolves that were here?
DS: The short answer is no. Wolves are ecological generalists. They can live on a variety of things. We looked for wolves that were previously exposed to bison and elk. The Canadian wolves had a small percentage of bison hair in their scat, but primarily elk and deer hair. We thought that was ideal, as that is the same diet—primarily elk and deer—as we have here. The available wolves from Minnesota had no experience with mountainous terrain or herds of elk or bison. We selected wolves from the same Rocky Mountain ecosystem, with the same kind of prey, to enhance the likelihood of the introduced wolves surviving. I want to clarify the misconception that larger Canadian wolves were preying on smaller American elk [thereby reducing the elk population inordinately]. In fact, the much smaller southwestern Mexican wolf brings down elk. The elk the Mexican wolves prey on in Arizona and New Mexico originally came from Yellowstone, as did the elk in Canada. The optimal number of adult wolves necessary to bring down an elk is only four, but a pair of wolves can also kill an elk.
MP: We hear reports that there were wolves already in Yellowstone that could have multiplied without reintroduction.
DS: There were no wolves here when we introduced the current wolves in 1995. There were no specially adapted wolves [as critics have claimed] in Yellowstone that did not run in packs, or use trails or roads, that didn't howl, and that preyed on small prey, unlike the wolves we have now. There has simply never been a wolf recorded anywhere that lives like that. Furthermore, there is no better bird dog for a wolf than a wolf itself. We had radio collars on all 41 wolves we released over a 3-year period. If there were extant wolves already on the landscape, they would have found them. The wolves we released never turned up any other wolves, dead or alive. And by the way, they rarely eat other wolves that they kill.
MP: Wolves killing other wolves is the main cause of wolf deaths in the park, correct?
DS: Yes, almost half of the 15 YNP wolves that died in 2012 were killed by other wolves. However, for wolves living outside the park, 80 percent of the wolf deaths are caused by humans, mostly by shooting them.
MP: How many wolves are in YNP now?
DS: Last year at the end of 2012 there were at least 83 wolves occupying YNP in 10 packs (6 breeding pairs). This is approximately a 15 percent decline from the previous three years when the numbers had stabilized at around 100 wolves. Wolf numbers have declined by about 50 percent since 2007, mostly because of a smaller elk population.
MP: Would the 1994 population of gray wolves that lived in Montana have naturally recovered, given the protection of the Endangered Species Act?
DS: That was a big opinion-based debate by wolf biologists at the time, led by Bob Ream of the University of Montana. In his opinion, wolves would have recovered given enough time—50, 60 or 70 years. Other people think they would not have made it. Yellowstone National Park and the five National Forests around it can be likened to a huge island. It's the most impressive wild land we have got in the lower 48, and some people say it's the most impressive temperate zone wild land in the world. But it's got an abrupt boundary to it. I frequently fly over here in an airplane, and at the boundary of a National Forest, it turns into a sea of humanity. And wolves are notoriously bad at getting through seas of humanity. Wolves get shot a lot. When we were dealing with a handful of wolves, maybe 40 to 60, how many of those would have been heading this way? So far, we have not yet documented a wolf coming from northwest Montana into Yellowstone. We have documented them coming from Idaho, but that's a lot closer and the linkages are better, primarily in the Centennial Mountains. Wolves don't do well over huge landscapes dominated by people. By introducing wolves they were legally not a fully protected species under the Endangered Species Act. People wanted to be able to shoot them when they got into livestock, which they could not have done if they were a fully protected species.
MP: Wolves from Idaho have now invaded the original Glacier National Park wolves, right?
DS: The Idaho wolf population is now fully connected to the northwest Montana wolf population. Interest-ingly, a study of historic wolf DNA from pelts and skulls shows that over 50 percent of wolf genetic diversity was lost when the continental United States population was reduced to a few hundred wolves in Minnesota. Wolves were the top carnivores in North America. Wolves evolved to adapt to the local conditions, and they will do so again.
MP: The tapeworm cysts spread by wolves that critics rail about, what risk to humans does this pose?
DS: The Echinococcus granulo sus tapeworm was already here. Wolves didn't bring it in. The coyotes, foxes and domestic dogs likely had it before wolves. The human health risk from tapeworms is almost nil. If anyone should have Echinococcus tapeworm it's me. I've handled over 500 wolves in my career. I take their temperature with a rectal thermometer. That's where the tapeworm eggs come out. I now wear rubber gloves, but I wash my hands in snow, then eat my lunch. I wouldn't worry much about it.
MP: What are the primary benefits and disadvantages of having wild ranging wolf packs in the Northern Rockies?
DS: The simplest way to answer that is that there is no question that wolves made people's lives more complicated, and that's a good reason not to have them. Some people love them, some people hate them, and wolves are a polarizing animal. People have to spend a lot of time dealing with the controversy that comes with wolves. Life is simpler without wolves. I admit that if you are a rancher, having wolves around is worrisome. I understand that it's not just the cows they kill; it's the sleepless nights. I think that's the best argument to not have them.
What's the ecological value of wolves? I don't know. It's a human dominated world. We control everything. So why do we need wolves? Landscapes look the way they do because of agriculture, forestry, hunting, mining, development—all those things trump things like wolves. So you really don't get huge ecological benefits of wolves outside of National Parks. In National Parks you do. So why have wolves on these huge landscapes where there are people? Good question. The best answer is, because people want them there. You know, there are a lot of people that don't like wolves. There is an equally large number that do like them, because living in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming is unique and different than living in places like Illinois, Iowa and Arkansas. You have grizzly bears, you have wolves, you have cougars. And that brings in a lot of tourism dollars. Wolves and grizzly bears are the two top attractions to Yellowstone. Idaho, Montana and Wyoming are perceived as being pristine, just because of the mere existence of the three large, toothy carnivores. It makes visiting or living here more valuable and a better experience. Economics are more important than ecology when it comes to carnivore populations in Yellowstone National Park.
Right now, it's as natural as it's ever been in Yellowstone Park. Now we have more predators than we have ever had, which means we have fewer elk, and fewer elk means we have all these other ecological benefits, like beavers and songbirds and fishes, and generally enhanced riparian habitat, because fewer elk means less browsing of riparian habitat. So it's a more balanced ecosystem. We only get that because we have natural densities of carnivores. As soon as you cross the park line, all the densities of those carnivores go down because humans manage them. And that is fine; it's not a criticism. The carnivores are on the landscape. That's the thing that the tourists like, but they are not at their normal densities that would occur if people didn't manage them.
MP: What about surplus killing by wolves [where, for example, ranchers report wolves killing or maiming a dozen sheep in one night]?
DS: Surplus killing by wolves doesn't really exist, per-se. We have watched wolves when they have killed more meat than they can immediately consume, and they always come back to finish the carcass unless they are spooked off by people. Hunting success rates for wolves are in the 5 percent to 15 percent range with elk. So they actually get about one in ten of the elk they go after. Eighty five percent to 95 percent of the time, the elk wins, and the wolves get nothing to eat. So, from an evolutionary perspective, if the wolves are not highly motivated to kill whenever they can, they will lose out. Of the 500 wolves I have handled, all across America, in the Midwest, Canada, Alaska, Yellowstone and Idaho, most of them are skinny beneath their beautiful fur. When I have felt their backbones and their pelvises, they usually are skinny. They are just getting by. The prey is better at getting away than the wolves are at killing the prey. So it is so hard to get dinner and when they do get a chance to kill, they kill. That's how you get so-called surplus killing, when the elk are weak and in deep snow, wolves will kill more than they can eat. Also, defenseless sheep will be killed in large numbers because the wolves can do so. But I would argue that if the rancher didn't come out the next day with a rifle, the wolves would eat all those sheep, even if it took them weeks to do so.
Wolves don't kill for the fun of it, when they are likely to get their head bashed in getting dinner. We have seen 15 or more wolves that have been killed by elk, bison, deer and moose. Wolves are risk averse. They don't want to try to kill something that's going to get their head bashed in or their stomach kicked in, but when it's easy, they will kill more than they can immediately eat, but those circumstances crop up pretty rarely. The wolves always cycle back to finish the carcass.
MP: What is the effect of wolves on the coyote population?
DS: Wolves kill coyotes when they approach wolf kills. Pre wolf-introduction, coyotes were living in packs in YNP, and that's something that's unusual. When there are wolves around, the coyotes pretty much live in pairs. Coyotes love coming in and stealing from wolves, and that got them killed. According to unpublished research, supposedly the coyote population dropped in half after the wolf introduction. Over 90 percent of the coyotes that are documented as being killed by wolves have been killed at wolf kill sites—they over estimated the wolves being meat drunk. So the coyotes quit running in packs, and went back to living in pairs, and became more wary around carcasses. The coyotes supposedly socially adapted to wolves, and their population went back to pre-wolf levels. This research is incomplete and inconclusive, but fascinating.
MP: Thank you, Doug. We appreciate this opportunity to present knowledge you have gained over the years about wolves, and at the same time address some of the contro-versies.
DS: Wolves are troublesome and controversial. I understand that. A lot of people don't like them, but a lot of people do like them, and they make money for a lot of people. What I am really after is to get as good a quality of information out there as possible, to help the debate to be a little bit better. The extreme anti-wolf person and the extreme pro-wolf person are always going to be problematic; they are never going to be happy. But this big group of people in the middle can come together on more than they think. If we can get an established group of facts about wolves correctly understood, I do think we can make progress in treating wolves just like any other animal, like a cougar, like a bear, like an elk. Sometimes and in some places their numbers need to be cut back, and just like any other form of wildlife, they need to be scientifically managed.
Interview conducted by Quincy Orhai for the Montana Pioneer.
Thank you R.J. Hayden @Wulalowe
_______________________________________
#KEEPWOLVESLISTED
_______________________________________
FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE:
IT'S TIME FOR
A SERIOUS COURSE CORRECTION
ON WOLVES
Jamie Rappaport Clark
President & CEO, Defenders of Wildlife
Posted: 02/18/2014 5:05 pm EST Updated: 02/18/2014 5:59 pm EST Print Article
I cannot say I was surprised by the recent peer review report on wolf delisting from a panel of independent scientists. They unanimously concluded that the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service's (the Service) proposal to strip federal protections for gray wolves across nearly all of the lower 48 states was not supported by the best available science. Ever since the Service announced its delisting proposal, scientists, conservation groups and concerned citizens have been telling the Service that the delisting proposal is premature and shortsighted, and above all, based on bad and incomplete science.
But my lack of surprise does not make the panel's findings any less egregious; the Endangered Species Act (ESA) expressly requires that listing and delisting decisions be made only on the basis of the "best available science." Now, the wolf peer review report proves that the Service has failed to properly implement the ESA because it did not use the best available science to guide its decisions on wolf recovery.
I was director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from 1997 -2001 and have over 30 years of experience with the ESA. Needless to say, I know what it's like to make tough calls on species listing and delisting decisions. But no matter how difficult these decisions were in the past, we always based them on the best available science and an optimistic vision of what species recovery should mean. The gray wolf delisting proposal represents a disappointing and flawed departure from the scientific standards that we embraced when I used to work for the Service.
It's not uncommon for peer review panelists to disagree among themselves during the peer review process. In fact, it's the job of any peer review committee to raise questions and concerns about the science underpinning the issue or proposal under review. But what was most remarkable about the unanimous panel conclusion repudiating the Service's science is that the panel had members who professionally disagreed over the underlying policy question of whether wolves should be delisted at all. Thus, despite their differing views on delisting itself, they found themselves in agreement that the science relied upon by the Service was seriously flawed.
In this case, the peer reviewers criticized the Service for relying on just a single scientific report, the Chambers et al. analysis, as the basis for their delisting proposal. They pointed out that that study was highly selective in the data it used. Evidence that did not support the proposal to delist was criticized and dismissed by Chambers et al., whereas evidence that supported the proposal to delist was accepted uncritically. Peer reviewers also said the Service got the taxonomy and range of wolves all wrong in their delisting proposal. For example: gray wolves may have lived in the Northeast, wolves of the Pacific Northwest are likely distinct from other populations, and Mexican gray wolves historically had a much larger range than the Service claimed.
The process used to generate and publish the Chambers study was also problematic. The study was written by scientists from the Service itself and was only published in a Service publication and not by a respected independent journal as one would expect. Mysteriously, the Service's publication had been defunct for more than 20 years and seemed to have been brought back to life to publish this paper.
If this peer review process tells us anything, it tells us - yet again - that the Service is not treating wolves in the same way it treated the recovery of the bald eagle, peregrine falcon or the American alligator. Each of these species reached recovery throughout their range before being taken off the endangered species list. There is still much unoccupied suitable habitat available for wolves. Delisting should not be considered until wolves reach true recovery.
So now, the Service needs a dramatic mid-course correction on wolves. At each step of this delisting proposal - written comments, public hearings and testimony and now the peer-review process - the Service's delisting proposal has been called into question for being premature and based upon bad science. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe have repeatedly asserted that the Service will base decisions on the status of wolves only on the best available science. In light of this damning peer review report on wolves, the Service should withdraw its current delisting proposal, and instead chart a sustainable recovery path for wolves that is truly based upon the best science on the subject.
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_______________________________________
HOWLS OF OUTRAGE
THE U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE RELIED ON SHAKY SCIENCE IN ITS EFFORT TO BOOT WOLVES OFF THE ENDANGERED SPECIES LIST.
HERE'S THE FULL STORY BEHIND THE BIOLOGICAL BROUHAHA.
Please tell the USFWS they need to #KEEPWOLVESLISTED .
Before March 27. 2014
Link to USFWS comment form:
by Michelle Nijhuis @nijhuism •
February 10, 2014
Photo: Tim Fitzharris/Getty
About 300 wolves live in the nearly 2-million-acre swath of central Ontario forest known as Algonquin Provincial Park. These wolves are bigger and broader than coyotes, but noticeably smaller than the gray wolves of Yellowstone. So how do they fit into the wolf family tree? Scientists don’t agree on the answer—yet it could now affect the fate of every wolf in the United States.
That’s because last June, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing gray wolves across most of the country from the endangered species list, a move that would leave the animals vulnerable to hunting. To support its proposal, the agency used a contested scientific paper—published, despite critical peer review, in the agency's own journal—to argue that gray wolves never existed in the eastern United States, so they shouldn’t have been protected there in the first place.
Instead of the gray wolf, the service said, an entirely different species of wolf—the so-called "eastern wolf," a species whose remnants perhaps survive in Algonquin Park—once inhabited the forests of eastern North America. Canid biologists have argued over the existence of this "lost species" for years. Yet researchers on all sides say that even if the Algonquin wolves are a separate species, that shouldn’t preclude continuing protections for the gray wolf.
On Friday, an independent panel of five leading geneticists and taxonomists came down hard on the agency's proposal to delist gray wolves, unanimously concluding that the service had not relied on the "best available science." Individual panel members described "glaring insufficiencies" in the supporting research and said the agency's conclusions had fundamental flaws.
"What's most significant,” says Andrew Wetzler, director of land and wildlife programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council (which publishes OnEarth), “is that this is coming from a group of eminent biologists who disagree with each other about the eastern wolf—and even so, they agree that the agency hasn't properly understood the scientific issues at hand."
* * *
How did 300 wolves in the Canadian wilderness become central to the debate over protecting their U.S. relations? For years, the Algonquin Park wolves have been something of a scientific mystery. Their coats are typically multicolored, with reddish-brown muzzles and backs that shade from white to black. Visitors from the southeastern U.S. often note their resemblance to red wolves, which are limited to a small reintroduced population in eastern North Carolina.
As biologists began to investigate the relationships among the various North American canids, including Algonquin wolves, red wolves, coyotes, and gray wolves, they collided with one of the most basic—and vexing—questions in their field: what is a species?
"No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists," Charles Darwin himself conceded in On the Origin of Species, adding that "every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species." So do the rest of us. We know that hippos are different from canaries, and that bullfrogs are different from giant salamanders. But the more alike the organisms, the trickier the species question becomes, and thanks to our modern understanding of DNA, the scientific disagreements are—if anything—more passionate today than in Darwin's time.
In 1942, the biologist Ernst Mayr formalized the definition of a species as a group of interbreeding organisms, reproductively isolated from other interbreeding groups. That's the definition that most of us learned in high-school biology, and it remains useful in many cases. But the advent of cheap, fast DNA analysis has exposed its limits: many apparently distinct species hybridize with one another, and few animals hybridize more enthusiastically than wolves, dogs, and other canids.
Genetic samples from the Algonquin Park wolves contain what appears to be coyote DNA, gray wolf DNA, and even domestic dog DNA, creating what Paul Wilson of Trent University in Ontario, one of the first scientists to study the Algonquin Park population, calls a "canid soup" of genetic material.
Biologists studying North American canids fall generally into two camps. Wilson and several of his colleagues in Canada support what's sometimes called the "three-species" model: according to their interpretation of the genetic data, coyotes, modern gray wolves, and the eastern wolf are separate species that evolved long ago from an ancient common ancestor. The eastern wolf, they say, may have once ranged throughout eastern North America, and may in fact be the same species as the red wolf.
Other biologists, including canid geneticist Robert Wayne at the University of California-Los Angeles, support a "two-species" model: it posits that only gray wolves and coyotes are distinct species. According to this model, anything else—a red wolf, Algonquin wolf, or the so-called “coywolf" recently spotted in suburbs and cities—is a relatively recent wolf-coyote hybrid.
Wayne describes the debate between supporters of the two models as "long-running but very polite"—and it's not over yet.
"People on all sides have done some very good work, but it's an extremely complicated issue," says T. DeLene Beeland, author of The Secret World of Red Wolves. "It gets at the heart of the species question."
* * *
Were it not for the U.S. Endangered Species Act, the controversy over the eastern wolf might well have stayed polite. That landmark law is, as it states, intended to protect species, and the murky definition of a species has complicated conservation efforts for jumping mice, pygmy owls, gnatcatchers, pocket gophers, and several other animals. But the debate over wolf taxonomy has become especially fierce.
When the gray wolf was placed on the endangered species list in 1967, it was defined as a single species with a historic range that covered most of the United States, from Florida to Washington state. Hunting, trapping, poisoning, and habitat loss had driven the gray wolf nearly to extinction in the continental United States, and confirmed sightings were rare.
After the species was protected, wolves from western Canada began to venture south, and beginning in 1995, some 41 wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park. They multiplied rapidly, and for the first time in decades, wolf howls were heard in the park. Today, many consider the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction one of American conservation's greatest success stories.
In 2011, the Fish and Wildlife Service took the Great Lakes wolf population off the endangered species list. The same year, a controversial act of Congress delisted gray wolf populations in most of the Rocky Mountains, returning responsibility for wolf protection to the states. But wolves are famously energetic travelers, and these wolves didn't stay put. In recent years, wolves from the northern Rockies have been spotted in Washington, Oregon, and northern California, and are rumored to be ranging into Colorado and Utah. Wolves from the Great Lakes have turned up in Illinois and Iowa.
"The reason why wolves became in endangered in first place is that states allowed people to hunt the hell out of them."
Outside the northern Rockies and the Great Lakes, wolves are still protected by the Endangered Species Act, so these wanderers have raised delicate political questions. Although some states are willing to work with the federal government on wolf management, others want sole control of any wolves that turn up within their boundaries. And the White House's slim margin of support in the Senate relies on centrist Democrats from Western states—many of whom support full wolf delisting, in part because some Western ranchers want the right to shoot wolves that menace their livestock.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for its part, wants to devote its limited money and resource to conservation of the Mexican wolf, a type of gray wolf that was reintroduced into northern New Mexico and Arizona in 1998 and continues to struggle for survival. "The time has now come for the service to focus its efforts on the recovery of the Mexican wolf," agency director Dan Ashe said at a public hearing last year in Washington, D.C.
The Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing the rest of the country's gray wolves from the federal endangered species list last June, protecting only the Mexican wolf as an endangered subspecies. Any gray wolves that roamed beyond the northern Rockies and the Great Lakes, it announced, would no longer enjoy endangered species protection. The delisting proposal set off a contentious public comment period that was due to end in September, after which the delisting would either be finalized or scrapped.
One part of the agency's proposal was especially unusual: it argued that its original listing of the gray wolf, back in 1967, had been flawed. In the delisting proposal, the agency not only recognized the eastern wolf as a separate species but also concluded that its existence required a major revision to the historic range map of the gray wolf—making it far smaller than the initial listing had claimed.
Agency director Ashe argued at the hearing in Washington, D.C., last September that there is "no one set formula for how to recover a species." The law requires only that species be safe from extinction, he said, not restored throughout its historic range, before it can be taken off the endangered species list. The two thriving populations in the Great Lakes and Rocky Mountains, the agency said, were reason enough to delist the gray wolf.
But historic range has long been an important factor in delisting decisions. "If you eliminate the entire East Coast from the gray wolf's range map, it's just much easier to argue that wolves are no longer endangered," says NRDC's Wetzler.
At the D.C. hearing, Don Barry, who served as an assistant Interior secretary during the Clinton administration, took the microphone to speak for himself and two other former assistant secretaries. Barry recalled that the bald eagle, American pelican, American alligator, and peregrine falcon had been removed from the endangered species list only after returning to suitable habitat throughout most of their historic ranges.
"That is how the Endangered Species Act is supposed to work," said Barry. By stark contrast, he said, the proposal to delist the gray wolf reflected "a shrunken vision of what recovery should mean."
* * *
The Fish and Wildlife Service is required to back up its decisions with science, but in this case, the science was hard to come by. When the agency recognizes new species, for instance, it usually relies on the judgment of scientific organizations such as the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature—which doesn’t recognize the eastern wolf as a separate species. Neither does any similar scientific group.
So instead, the agency relied on a 2012 study by Steven Chambers, a Fish and Wildlife Service staff biologist, and three of his agency colleagues. The Chambers study had already caused controversy: it was published in a recently revived agency journal, not a standard scientific journal. When outside researchers reviewed the paper, the majority had significant criticisms, with one going so far as to say that the study's argument "is made in an intellectual vacuum." Although the journal's editors asked Chambers to respond to the critiques, the revised paper was not resubmitted to reviewers, as it would have been at a standard journal.
In 2012, the agency cited the Chambers paper in a proposal to remove the Great Lakes wolf population from endangered species protection. The agency had to remove the citation after outcry from other scientists in the field and acknowledged at the time that the study "represents neither a scientific consensus nor the majority opinion of researchers on the taxonomy of wolves."
Two years later, though, the agency once again used the Chambers paper, this time to support the removal of all federal protections for wolves.
When outside researchers reviewed the paper, the majority had significant criticisms, with one going so far as to say that the study's argument "is made in an intellectual vacuum."
"There's a lot wrong with the process that the Fish and Wildlife Service used that led to the development of the Chambers paper, and to its subsequent policy decisions," says Sylvia Fallon, a senior scientist at NRDC. (Agency officials did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)
Fallon and many other conservationists are also critical of the agency's review process for the delisting proposal itself. Whenever the agency proposes a change to the status of a species, it is supposed to rely on the "best available science." To make sure it is doing that, it convenes an independent review panel of experts to critique the agency’s reasoning.
But this past summer, three respected wolf biologists were dropped from the review panel; all of them had signed a letter opposing the designation of the eastern wolf as a distinct species. "We were delisted," jokes UCLA’s Wayne, one of the excluded scientists. The resulting public outcry forced the agency to extend its comment period and convene a second panel in September. This time, Wayne was on it, along with NRDC’s Fallon. So was one of the leading supporters of the "lost wolf" theory, Trent University’s Paul Wilson.
Despite their continuing disagreement over the provenance of the Algonquin Park wolves, the peer reviewers were unanimous in their verdict on the agency's science. The proposal was too dependent on the Chambers paper, they said, and the paper's central argument was far from universally accepted.
Wolf geneticists also disagree with agency’s use of the eastern wolf as support for shrinking the gray wolf's historic range. The two could easily have existed side by side, they say. In fact, historical accounts from New York State describe two distinct types of wolves—one smaller and more common, the other larger, heavier, and rarer.
* * *
On Friday, when the Fish and Wildlife Service released the review panel's report, the agency also issued a brief statement extending the comment period on the delisting proposal until late March—after which the agency will decide whether and how to continue with the delisting effort.
With the comment period reopened, conservationists are again arguing that the full, nationwide delisting of the gray wolf is too much, too soon, and not supported by current science. The Northern Rockies population fell 6 percent in the year after Congress removed wolves there from the endangered species list—a drop due largely to the revival of wolf hunting.
Idaho Governor Butch Otter is now supporting a bill that would reduce the number of wolves in his state from about 680 to just 150. Advocates fear the same response in other states where wolves lose federal protection. http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2014/jan/28/lawmakers-back-otter-proposed-fund-to-kill-500/
"The reason why wolves became in endangered in first place is that states allowed people to hunt the hell out of them," says Bill Snape, a veteran endangered species lawyer who now works for the Center for Biological Diversity. "Why, after years of effort and a lot of success, would we hand the key right back to the entities that got us in hot water in first place?"
Snape acknowledges that "no one wants wolves to stay on the endangered species list forever," but he points out that the agency could take a more measured approach to delisting, as it has done with other high-profile species.
Whatever path the agency chooses, says NRDC's Wetzler, it needs to heed the warnings of the expert panel and stick to the science. "It's not that the agency has bad intentions, or bad scientists. It's that the idea that gray wolves never existed on the East Coast of the U.S. was a very convenient result—it matched up nicely with their view of wolf recovery and what they wanted to do.
“It's very easy to get caught up in your own story."
This article was made possible by the NRDC Science Center Investigative Journalism Fund.
Like this article? Donate to NRDC to support nonprofit journalism & receive our quarterly magazine.
Michelle Nijhuis writes about science and the environment for National Geographic, Smithsonian, and other publications. Her work will appear in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013. A longtime contributing editor at High Country News, she lives off the grid with her family in western Colorado. MORE STORIES ➔
MORE ABOUT: SCIENCE, GRAY WOLF, WOLVES, COYOTES, FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE, SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY, ALGONQUIN PARK, PEER REVIEW
_______________________________________
US GOVERNMENT COULD DRIVE GRAY WOLF TO EXTINCTION
THE US FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE
IS RELYING ON SHAKY SCIENCE TO
REMOVE THE ANIMAL FROM
THE ENDANGERED SPECIES LIST
Posted on February 15, 2014 by TWIN Observer
MICHELLE NIJHUIS, ONEARTH.ORG
This article originally appeared on OnEarth.org.
OnEarthAbout 300 wolves live in the nearly 2-million-acre swath of central Ontario forest known as Algonquin Provincial Park. These wolves are bigger and broader than coyotes, but noticeably smaller than the gray wolves of Yellowstone. So how do they fit into the wolf family tree? Scientists don’t agree on the answer—yet it could now affect the fate of every wolf in the United States.
That’s because last June, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing gray wolves across most of the country from the endangered species list, a move that would leave the animals vulnerable to hunting. To support its proposal, the agency used a contested scientific paper—published, despite critical peer review, in the agency’s own journal—to argue that gray wolves never existed in the eastern United States, so they shouldn’t have been protected there in the first place.
Instead of the gray wolf, the service said, an entirely different species of wolf—the so-called “eastern wolf,” a species whose remnants perhaps survive in Algonquin Park—once inhabited the forests of eastern North America. Canid biologists have argued over the existence of this “lost species” for years. Yet researchers on all sides say that even if the Algonquin wolves are a separate species, that shouldn’t preclude continuing protections for the gray wolf.
On Friday, an independent panel of five leading geneticists and taxonomists came down hard on the agency’s proposal to delist gray wolves, unanimously concluding that the service had not relied on the “best available science.” Individual panel members described “glaring insufficiencies” in the supporting research and said the agency’s conclusions had fundamental flaws.
“What’s most significant,” says Andrew Wetzler, director of land and wildlife programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council (which publishes OnEarth), “is that this is coming from a group of eminent biologists who disagree with each other about the eastern wolf—and even so, they agree that the agency hasn’t properly understood the scientific issues at hand.”
* * *
How did 300 wolves in the Canadian wilderness become central to the debate over protecting their U.S. relations? For years, the Algonquin Park wolves have been something of a scientific mystery. Their coats are typically multicolored, with reddish-brown muzzles and backs that shade from white to black. Visitors from the southeastern U.S. often note their resemblance to red wolves, which are limited to a small reintroduced population in eastern North Carolina.
As biologists began to investigate the relationships among the various North American canids, including Algonquin wolves, red wolves, coyotes, and gray wolves, they collided with one of the most basic—and vexing—questions in their field: what is a species?
“No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists,” Charles Darwin himself conceded in On the Origin of Species, adding that “every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.” So do the rest of us. We know that hippos are different from canaries, and that bullfrogs are different from giant salamanders. But the more alike the organisms, the trickier the species question becomes, and thanks to our modern understanding of DNA, the scientific disagreements are—if anything—more passionate today than in Darwin’s time.
In 1942, the biologist Ernst Mayr formalized the definition of a species as a group of interbreeding organisms, reproductively isolated from other interbreeding groups. That’s the definition that most of us learned in high-school biology, and it remains useful in many cases. But the advent of cheap, fast DNA analysis has exposed its limits: many apparently distinct species hybridize with one another, and few animals hybridize more enthusiastically than wolves, dogs, and other canids.
Genetic samples from the Algonquin Park wolves contain what appears to be coyote DNA, gray wolf DNA, and even domestic dog DNA, creating what Paul Wilson of Trent University in Ontario, one of the first scientists to study the Algonquin Park population, calls a “canid soup” of genetic material.
Biologists studying North American canids fall generally into two camps. Wilson and several of his colleagues in Canada support what’s sometimes called the “three-species” model: according to their interpretation of the genetic data, coyotes, modern gray wolves, and the eastern wolf are separate species that evolved long ago from an ancient common ancestor. The eastern wolf, they say, may have once ranged throughout eastern North America, and may in fact be the same species as the red wolf.
Other biologists, including canid geneticist Robert Wayne at the University of California-Los Angeles, support a “two-species” model: it posits that only gray wolves and coyotes are distinct species. According to this model, anything else—a red wolf, Algonquin wolf, or the so-called “coywolf” recently spotted in suburbs and cities—is a relatively recent wolf-coyote hybrid.
Wayne describes the debate between supporters of the two models as “long-running but very polite”—and it’s not over yet.
“People on all sides have done some very good work, but it’s an extremely complicated issue,” says T. DeLene Beeland, author of The Secret World of Red Wolves. “It gets at the heart of the species question.”
* * *
Were it not for the U.S. Endangered Species Act, the controversy over the eastern wolf might well have stayed polite. That landmark law is, as it states, intended to protect species, and the murky definition of a species has complicated conservation efforts for jumping mice, pygmy owls, gnatcatchers, pocket gophers, and several other animals. But the debate over wolf taxonomy has become especially fierce.
When the gray wolf was placed on the endangered species list in 1967, it was defined as a single species with a historic range that covered most of the United States, from Florida to Washington state. Hunting, trapping, poisoning, and habitat loss had driven the gray wolf nearly to extinction in the continental United States, and confirmed sightings were rare.
After the species was protected, wolves from western Canada began to venture south, and beginning in 1995, some 41 wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park. They multiplied rapidly, and for the first time in decades, wolf howls were heard in the park. Today, many consider the Yellowstone wolf reintroduction one of American conservation’s greatest success stories.
In 2011, the Fish and Wildlife Service took the Great Lakes wolf population off the endangered species list. The same year, a controversial act of Congress delisted gray wolf populations in most of the Rocky Mountains, returning responsibility for wolf protection to the states. But wolves are famously energetic travelers, and these wolves didn’t stay put. In recent years, wolves from the northern Rockies have been spotted in Washington, Oregon, and northern California, and are rumored to be ranging into Colorado and Utah. Wolves from the Great Lakes have turned up in Illinois and Iowa.
Outside the northern Rockies and the Great Lakes, wolves are still protected by the Endangered Species Act, so these wanderers have raised delicate political questions. Although some states are willing to work with the federal government on wolf management, others want sole control of any wolves that turn up within their boundaries. And the White House’s slim margin of support in the Senate relies on centrist Democrats from Western states—many of whom support full wolf delisting, in part because some Western ranchers want the right to shoot wolves that menace their livestock.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for its part, wants to devote its limited money and resource to conservation of the Mexican wolf, a type of gray wolf that was reintroduced into northern New Mexico and Arizona in 1998 and continues to struggle for survival. “The time has now come for the service to focus its efforts on the recovery of the Mexican wolf,” agency director Dan Ashe said at a public hearing last year in Washington, D.C.
The Fish and Wildlife Service proposed removing the rest of the country’s gray wolves from the federal endangered species list last June, protecting only the Mexican wolf as an endangered subspecies. Any gray wolves that roamed beyond the northern Rockies and the Great Lakes, it announced, would no longer enjoy endangered species protection. The delisting proposal set off a contentious public comment period that was due to end in September, after which the delisting would either be finalized or scrapped.
One part of the agency’s proposal was especially unusual: it argued that its original listing of the gray wolf, back in 1967, had been flawed. In the delisting proposal, the agency not only recognized the eastern wolf as a separate species but also concluded that its existence required a major revision to the historic range map of the gray wolf—making it far smaller than the initial listing had claimed.
Agency director Ashe argued at the hearing in Washington, D.C., last September that there is “no one set formula for how to recover a species.” The law requires only that species be safe from extinction, he said, not restored throughout its historic range, before it can be taken off the endangered species list. The two thriving populations in the Great Lakes and Rocky Mountains, the agency said, were reason enough to delist the gray wolf.
But historic range has long been an important factor in delisting decisions. “If you eliminate the entire East Coast from the gray wolf’s range map, it’s just much easier to argue that wolves are no longer endangered,” says NRDC’s Wetzler.
At the D.C. hearing, Don Barry, who served as an assistant Interior secretary during the Clinton administration, took the microphone to speak for himself and two other former assistant secretaries. Barry recalled that the bald eagle, American pelican, American alligator, and peregrine falcon had been removed from the endangered species list only after returning to suitable habitat throughout most of their historic ranges.
“That is how the Endangered Species Act is supposed to work,” said Barry. By stark contrast, he said, the proposal to delist the gray wolf reflected “a shrunken vision of what recovery should mean.”
* * *
The Fish and Wildlife Service is required to back up its decisions with science, but in this case, the science was hard to come by. When the agency recognizes new species, for instance, it usually relies on the judgment of scientific organizations such as the International Commission of Zoological Nomenclature—which doesn’t recognize the eastern wolf as a separate species. Neither does any similar scientific group.
So instead, the agency relied on a 2012 study by Steven Chambers, a Fish and Wildlife Service staff biologist, and three of his agency colleagues. The Chambers study had already caused controversy: it was published in a recently revived agency journal, not a standard scientific journal. When outside researchers reviewed the paper, the majority had significant criticisms, with one going so far as to say that the study’s argument “is made in an intellectual vacuum.” Although the journal’s editors asked Chambers to respond to the critiques, the revised paper was not resubmitted to reviewers, as it would have been at a standard journal.
In 2012, the agency cited the Chambers paper in a proposal to remove the Great Lakes wolf population from endangered species protection. The agency had to remove the citation after outcry from other scientists in the field and acknowledged at the time that the study “represents neither a scientific consensus nor the majority opinion of researchers on the taxonomy of wolves.”
Two years later, though, the agency once again used the Chambers paper, this time to support the removal of all federal protections for wolves.
“There’s a lot wrong with the process that the Fish and Wildlife Service used that led to the development of the Chambers paper, and to its subsequent policy decisions,” says Sylvia Fallon, a senior scientist at NRDC. (Agency officials did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)
Fallon and many other conservationists are also critical of the agency’s review process for the delisting proposal itself. Whenever the agency proposes a change to the status of a species, it is supposed to rely on the “best available science.” To make sure it is doing that, it convenes an independent review panel of experts to critique the agency’s reasoning.
But this past summer, three respected wolf biologists were dropped from the review panel; all of them had signed a letter opposing the designation of the eastern wolf as a distinct species. “We were delisted,” jokes UCLA’s Wayne, one of the excluded scientists. The resulting public outcry forced the agency to extend its comment period and convene a second panel in September. This time, Wayne was on it, along with NRDC’s Fallon. So was one of the leading supporters of the “lost wolf” theory, Trent University’s Paul Wilson.
Despite their continuing disagreement over the provenance of the Algonquin Park wolves, the peer reviewers were unanimous in their verdict on the agency’s science. The proposal was too dependent on the Chambers paper, they said, and the paper’s central argument was far from universally accepted.
Wolf geneticists also disagree with agency’s use of the eastern wolf as support for shrinking the gray wolf’s historic range. The two could easily have existed side by side, they say. In fact, historical accounts from New York State describe two distinct types of wolves—one smaller and more common, the other larger, heavier, and rarer.
* * *
On Friday, when the Fish and Wildlife Service released the review panel’s report, the agency also issued a brief statement extending the comment period on the delisting proposal until late March—after which the agency will decide whether and how to continue with the delisting effort.
With the comment period reopened, conservationists are again arguing that the full, nationwide delisting of the gray wolf is too much, too soon, and not supported by current science. The Northern Rockies population fell 6 percent in the year after Congress removed wolves there from the endangered species list—a drop due largely to the revival of wolf hunting. Idaho Governor Butch Otter is now supporting a bill that would reduce the number of wolves in his state from about 680 to just 150. Advocates fear the same response in other states where wolves lose federal protection.
“The reason why wolves became in endangered in first place is that states allowed people to hunt the hell out of them,” says Bill Snape, a veteran endangered species lawyer who now works for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Why, after years of effort and a lot of success, would we hand the key right back to the entities that got us in hot water in first place?”
Snape acknowledges that “no one wants wolves to stay on the endangered species list forever,” but he points out that the agency could take a more measured approach to delisting, as it has done with other high-profile species.
Whatever path the agency chooses, says NRDC’s Wetzler, it needs to heed the warnings of the expert panel and stick to the science. “It’s not that the agency has bad intentions, or bad scientists. It’s that the idea that gray wolves never existed on the East Coast of the U.S. was a very convenient result—it matched up nicely with their view of wolf recovery and what they wanted to do.
“It’s very easy to get caught up in your own story.”
Michelle Nijhuis is a freelance writer in western Colorado.
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February 13 2014
GETTING SCIENCE RIGHT FOR WOLVES
Posted by: Chris Haney
On February 7, 2014, panel members of the independent scientific peer-review committee conducted by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara unanimously told the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that the proposal to strip federal protections for gray wolves across most of the U.S. was “not based on the best available science.” NCEAS had assembled a panel of highly-respected scientists that represented a full range of scientific expertise on wolf genetics and taxonomy, yet even with the panel’s diverse backgrounds, the reviewers unanimously concluded that the science relied upon by the Service was not settled nor the best available. In addition, they raised several specific criticisms of the Service’s scientific rationale for the delisting proposal, which have major implications for protection of wolves going forward.
The panel found that the information used by the FWS to justify the delisting decision was selective,
emphasizing certain facts and downplaying those that did not agree with the delisting. Key scientific studies were omitted or interpreted out of context. Some of the major problems identified by the independent reviewers included:
The biological classification system used by FWS was outdated and inaccurate. A more suitable framework was available that would have resulted in 5-6 wolf populations or subspecies with ranges that followed ecosystem boundaries.
The FWS position that eastern wolves (Canis lycaon) are a distinct species from other gray wolves (Canis lupus) is not a settled issue among scientists. Many experts believe that eastern wolves are a distinct sub-species or population of gray wolf, and not a separate species. Regardless of the status of this ‘eastern’ wolf, gray wolves also may have lived in eastern North America. FWS assumed that gray wolves were absent from the east, but this conclusion was based on a misreading of the science. The existence of an eastern wolf does not rule out the possibility of gray wolves living in the Northeastern U.S.
FWS failed to note the genetic, behavioral, and ecological distinctiveness of wolves in the Pacific Northwest. These wolves could represent a distinct subspecies or population.
FWS’s proposed historical range for Mexican gray wolves (C. lupus baileyi) was too geographically restricted, failing to account for documented historical presence of Mexican gray wolves in southern Colorado, Utah, and Nebraska.
Together, these problems led the review team to conclude that the wolf delisting proposal was not based on the best available science, which is the statutory threshold for all Endangered Species Act listing and delisting proposals. Although the reviewers were directed to not comment on policy matters, their comments on the science relied upon for the delisting proposal nevertheless lends strong support to what opponents of the delisting proposal have said all along: that the Service’s proposal is based upon bad science, terribly flawed and premature. Under these circumstances, the Service should acknowledge its missteps and withdraw the proposal.
Click here to send a letter to Secretary Jewell asking her to withdraw the delisting proposal.
Whatever comes next, the independent peer review process showcases the supreme importance of separating endangered species science from undue political influence. Peer review can sometimes be brutally critical of research flaws, but over time the peer review system serves as a means to correct and improve administrative decisions that rely heavily upon scientific research and knowledge. Without even having to step into the policy arena, the NCEAS wolf peer reviewers showed how a scientific consensus can be achieved despite having different disciplinary backgrounds and points of view.
Dan Thornhill, Ph.D., Conservation Scientist
Chris Haney, Ph.D., Chief Scientist
Categories: Endangered Species Act, Gray Wolf, Mexican Gray Wolf, Northern Rockies Gray Wolf, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
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SCIENTISTS BLOW HOLES IN PLAN TO END WOLF PROTECTIONS :
TAKE ACTION
Exciting news for wolves: On Friday top scientists announced that science doesn't back up the Obama administration's plan to strip Endangered Species Act protections from most wolves across the country.
The peer-review decision is a body blow to the feds' disastrous wolf plan. In the six states where wolves have already lost protection, more than 2,600 of them have been killed in just two years; imagine the death toll if wolves lose their safety net across all states -- for good.
Scientists have identified hundreds of thousands of square miles of suitable habitat in regions across the country, from the Pacific Northwest, California and the southern Rockies to New York's Adirondacks. But wolves will never return to those native stomping grounds if the government's intentions become reality.
Get more from KCET News
Take action to tell the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: Keep wolves protected.
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RePosted from Wolf Conservation Center
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The Wolf Conservation Center (WCC) is a non-profit organization that promotes wolf conservation by teaching about wolves and their role in our world.
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SCIENTISTS ALLEGE THAT
USFWS 'S NATIONWIDE
GRAY WOLF DELISTING PROPOSAL VIOLATES ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT
Posted on January 7, 2014 by Maggie
While federal agencies are responsible for the day-to-day enforcement and administration of federal laws, they are not charged with rewriting them!
However, in a compelling academic critique of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s
evolving enforcement of the Endangered Species Act,
Sherry Enzler (University of
Minnesota) and John Vucetich (Michigan Technological University) allege that the USFWS’s proposal to delist the gray wolf is, in fact, a blatant attempt to change the application of the law by repealing two of its most important tenets.
The paper, “Removing protections for wolves and the future of U.S. Endangered Species Act,” published Dec. 30 in Conservation Letters, provides a clear and substantive challenge to federal proposals to delist the gray wolf.
REWRITE OF SPECIES-PROTECTION LAW
SEEN IN MOVE TO TAKE WOLVES OFF
THE U.S.LIST
By Ron Meador
From the journal “Conservation Letters” comes a compelling academic critique of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service‘s evolving enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, through some key rewriting of policy that might appeal to satirists like George Orwell or Joseph Heller.
The paper, published last week in the journal’s “Policy Perspectives” section, is focused largely on the service’s announcement that it will remove gray wolves from federal protection throughout the lower 48 states, following earlier “de-listings” in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, Wyoming and Idaho (as well as states of the northern Rocky Mountains and a scattering of others with few if any wolves).
But the authors — including Sherry Enzler of the University of Minnesota
and John Vucetich of Michigan Technological University, who directs the wolf-moose population study on Isle Royale
— argue that the service’s reasoning in support of its decision on gray wolves changes its application of the landmark wildlife law in two ways that effectively repeal it:
First, by redefining the Endangered Species Act’s notion of natural range from the territory a species historically inhabited to the territory it currently occupies.
Second, by deciding that human activity — especially intolerant activity — in portions of a species’ range can justify reclassification of those areas under the ESA as habitat no longer suitable for threatened animals and plants.
Or, as Orwell might have it, a creature’s natural habitat is natural no longer once the creature is driven out. For his part, Heller might see it as another Catch-22: The ESA exists to protect plants and animals from eradication by humans, except in those areas where humans prefer to eradicate them.
CLEAR PHRASING IN THE LAW
Perhaps the ESA’s most important single passage is its clear, plain-language definition of an endangered species as one “in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range” (emphasis added).
That wording may seem obvious today, but as the law moved toward passage in 1973 it was a significant and deliberate broadening from earlier species-protection laws, especially on what the paper’s authors call the “SPR phrase” italicized above.
Drawing on statements from U.S. Sen. John Tunney, the California Democrat who was a key author of the ESA and the legislation’s floor manager in the Senate, the paper notes his explanation that “a species might be considered endangered or threatened and require protection in most states even though it may securely inhabit others.”
This, too, seems commonsensical and until recently, the paper says, the Fish And Wildlife Service considered a species’ range to be both its current and historic territory — even, at times, resisting pressures to narrow its focus to current territory only.
But now the FWS seeks to redefine the gray wolf’s range as the territory it currently inhabits, and to declare the rest of its former territory as “unsuitable habitat” because people will no longer tolerate wolves there.
HOW WOLVES GOT ON LIST
To understand the significance of this shift, consider that if the newer definition had been in use when wolves were initially listed for ESA protection in 1978 — just five years after Congress passed the law with barely a dissenting vote — they might not have qualified.
At that point, wolves were known to inhabit only two small territories in the lower 48 states — one in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and adjacent Superior National Forest, the other on Isle Royale.
These remnant populations totalling a few hundred wolves, though tiny, appeared to be stable and possibly growing slightly because of wilderness protections. And at that point, of course, Isle Royale had been in their “historic range” for less than three decades.
Today, the paper asserts, federal protections have restored wolves to about 15 percent of their historic U.S. range outside Alaska. Whether an 85 percent loss qualifies as a “significant portion” of that range is, I suppose, a matter of opinion. In the opinion of the paper’s authors,
Although prescribing a precise value to the SPR phrase is challenging, acknowledging egregious violations is not. Today, wolves occupy approximately 15% of their historic range within the conterminous United States. To conclude that this condition satisfies the requirement represented by the SPR phrases sets an extremely low bar for species recovery.
As for redefining "range,"
Interpreting range to mean “current range” is functionally identical to striking the SPR phrase from the ESA’s definition of endangerment and narrowing the definition to being “in danger of extinction
[everywhere].”
EFFECT ON OTHER SPECIES
It is difficult to think of a species whose conservation has inspired disputes more bitter and ceaseless than those that swirl around the gray wolf, with the possible exception of the grizzly bear in portions of the American West.
But the FWS reasoning under challenge in this paper could just have easily been applied in the past — or, more important, applied in the future — to the detriment of such recovered species as bald eagles, whooping cranes and peregrine falcons, not to mention the Kirtland’s warbler, the southern sea otter, the Virginia big-eared bat and the black-footed ferret.
And it is thinking of those species, along with some 2,000 others still listed, that makes one wonder what coherent philosophy or policy of conservation can justify a redefinition of “suitable habitat” to exclude places made inhospitable by human activity.
Indeed, as the authors point out,
In most cases, species are listed as endangered because current range has been reduced by human actions. The ESA is intended to mitigate such reductions in range, not merely describe them.
As such, a sensible interpretation of range in the SPR phrase is historic range that is currently suitable or can be made suitable by removing or sufficiently mitigating threats to the species.
One always wants to hope that sound science underlies federal policy decisions in these matters. Indeed, we appear to be entering an era of changing climate in which habitats are likely to be remade by forces well beyond the science of mitigation and the capabilities of wildlife managers, regardless of the level of empowerment they may choose to find within the ESA or settled case law.
But with regard to gray wolves, climate is not the critical issue. Human persecution is. And here, too, the authors challenge FWS’s fulfillment of their obligations under the ESA, in a section headed “The science of intolerance” (citations omitted):
A central tenet of the proposed delisting rule is: “the primary determinant of the long-term conservation of gray wolves will likely be human attitudes toward this predator.”
Although bound by the ESA to base its listing and delisting decisions on the best available science, the FWS does not refer to any of the scientific literature on human attitudes toward wolves to justify its determination….
The proposed rule also asserts that delisting wolves at this time is critical for maintaining wolf recovery because “keeping wolf populations within the limits of human tolerance” requires humans be allowed to hunt entrap wolves. The best available science does not support this contention.
Indeed, a recent review found no evidence for the claim that the rates of poaching changed with higher quotas of legal harvest, and the recent longitudinal analysis found attitudes toward wolves were more negative during a period of legal lethal control than when the wolves were listed under the ESA...
Ultimately, there is no empirical support for the notion that continued listing would result in a backlash against wolves.
****
This article was published in MinnPost.com’s Earth Journal on January 7, 2014.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Endangered Species Act, John Vucetich, Nationwide delisting, Sherry Enzler, Violation. Bookmark the permalink.
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THE VERDICT:
SCIENCE BEHIND STRIPPING WOLF PROTECTIONS FATALLY FLAWED
Posted: 02/10/2014 11:23 am EST
Updated: 02/10/2014 11:59 am EST
In a damning rebuke of the Obama administration's plans to strip Endangered Species Act protections from gray wolves across most of the lower 48, a panel of five independent scientists has unanimously concluded that it is not supported by the "best available science."
Appointed by the government to review the proposal, the five scientists found that a major underpinning of the proposal to remove protections did not reflect current science. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service argued that the gray wolf never occurred in 29 eastern states, but rather that a different species of wolf known as the eastern wolf did, and thus that the gray wolf should never have been protected at a national level in the first place.
Support for this conclusion was always tenuous -- it was based on an analysis solely by agency staff and published in an agency journal that had not been active in years -- but the review released this week is certainly the nail in the coffin.
The implications of that finding are far-reaching, suggesting that before federal protections can be removed for wolves across most of the country there must be much broader evidence of recovery.
So, what now?
No science, no delisting proposal, right?
That's what the Endangered Species Act requires. But it'll be up to the Obama administration to decide whether to follow the law or the politics.
The facts -- and political motivations -- are now clear: Wolves occupy a mere five percent of their historic range and in places where protections have already been removed, states have enacted aggressive anti-wolf hunting and trapping seasons that in just two-to-three years have resulted in the death of more than 2,600 wolves.
Hatred and persecution of wolves was the primary reason they were nearly driven off the map in the lower 48 states -- down to fewer than 1,000 wolves limited to northeastern Minnesota. Their comeback has been a tremendous success, but it is not complete and although most Americans admire wolves, old prejudices persist among a minority.
Nowhere has this been more obvious that in Idaho, where more than 900 wolves have already been killed, and in recent weeks the state hired a bounty hunter to kill all the wolves in two packs in one of the nation's largest and most remote wilderness areas simply because hunters complained that the wolves were killing too many elk.
It would be unfortunate if we allowed politics and special interests to trump science in guiding our wildlife management policies.
And unless the Obama administration reverses course and follows the advice of the best science to preserve Endangered Species Act protections for America's wolves, we can be sure the bloodbath will continue and wolves will once again be pushed toward the brink of extinction.
Follow Noah Greenwald on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Noah_Ark_757
Poaching Gray Wolves Obama Administration Endangered Species Endangered Animals Wolf Protections Gray Wolf Protections Lifted Green News
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REVIEW PANEL FAULTS FEDERAL PLAN TO REMOVE PROTECTIONS FOR OUR WOLVES
Federal officials propose to remove gray wolves from the Endangered Species lsit.
A panel of scientists asked by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to review the proposal to strip endangered species protections from gray wolves found serious problems with the agency's science. (Gary Kramer / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / April 18, 2008)
By Julie Cart
February 7, 2014, 2:24 p.m.
The federal proposal to remove endangered species protections for all gray wolves in the lower 48 states came under fire Friday from a scientific peer review panel that unanimously found that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision does not reflect the best available science regarding wolves.
The panel’s analysis was released Friday and is the latest in a series of setbacks to the plan, announced last year. When it announced its plan last June, Fish and Wildlife Service Director Daniel Ashe called the recovery of wolves — which were hunted and poisoned to the brink extinction "one of the most successful recoveries in the history of wildlife conservation."
In addition, the new rule would recognize the small population of Mexican wolves in New Mexico and Arizona as a unique subspecies and list the animal as endangered.
Since that announcement, the process of obtaining peer review of the delisting decision has been fraught with charges of compromised scientific integrity and political manipulation.
This is the second panel convened by the federal agency.
An earlier incarnation was disbanded after it surfaced that the wildlife service sought to remove scientists who signed on to a letter expressing concerns about the delisting proposal.
The process was restarted and the new document arrives at many of the same conclusions reached by previous analysis, including the assertion that the delisting rule is based on analysis not universally accepted among scientists and not reflecting the latest data.
One reviewer, Dr. Robert Wayne, a canine geneticist at UCLA, wrote that the wildlife service appeared to cherry pick the scientific record.
“Information contrary to the proposed delisting is discounted whereas that which supports the rule … are accepted uncritically,” Wayne said.
Another reviewer found fault with the federal assertion that gray wolves are not naturally occurring in the Eastern U.S., calling such a statement "unfounded."
Wolves are now legally hunted in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. State and federal biologists monitor pack populations and can reinstate protections if numbers reach levels that officials consider dangerously low.
California is considering imposing its own protections after the discovery of a lone male wolf that wandered into the state's northern counties from Oregon two years ago. This week the state Department of Fish and Wildlife recommended to the California Fish and Game Commission that wolves not be added to the state's endangered species list.
The commission will take up the matter at a future meeting.
In light of the panel’s findings, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Friday announced that it would extend public comment on the matter another 45 days. A final decision is expected late next year.
Comments (8)Add / View comments | Discussion FAQ
evanls at 10:20 AM February 08, 2014
I'm generally supportive of Obama but he has been an abysmal failure when it comes to conservation issues. Remember the appointment of "Rancher Ken" Salazar as Interior Secretary? That was the fox guarding the henhouse. Now they are even allowing Idaho and Wyooming to send wolve killers into federal wilderness areas to slaughter wolves, because the ranchers and hunting guide industry want it. Disgusting. They need to put the wolves back on the endangered species list.
justvisitingthisplanet at 8:56 AM February 08, 2014
Politics and science don't mix. Ranchers get compensation for wolf killed livestock; all part of the generous federal subsidies to agriculture (including exemptions from many environmental laws). Let wolves recover to sustainable levels then come back and disuss delisting.
jackjack5 at 3:05 PM February 07, 2014
While delisting all species of gray wolves may be overkill, delisting gray wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming is fine. The gray wolves in those states were not native to the areas and they never were endangered. There is a heavy population of that species of wolf in Canada and Alaska. In fact, the wolves in those three states were imported from Canada. Since gray wolves had been completely eradicated from those three states in the late 1920s and early 30s, they were not an endangered species. They were like cockroaches and termites, destructive pests, and there eradication was necessary to protect the economies of those states. Unlike other predatory species, wolves are wanton killers that will kill just to kill. If all they killed was for food, that would be OK but all too often they kill just because they like to kill. They are the Nazis of the animal world.
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Heyya Wolves!
Looks like we have new information to work with to keep our Gray Wolves listed under the Endangered Species Act.
USFWS and PEER reviewers didn't see eye to eye on the science that USFWS used to determine that our Gray Wolves should be removed from Federal E.S.A. listing as endangered status species.
USFWS will be taking our new comments starting February 10th, and will continue to until March 27th.
Unless they change the deadline.
Again.
The link for comment submission will be on this page when it is functioning on the 10th of February, 2014. Breaking news is here now, along with the PEER reviewers report.
http://keepwolveslisted.blogspot.com/p/wolf-news.html
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SCIENTISTS CALL B.S. - BAD SCIENCE, THAT IS - ON WOLF DELISTING
by Chris Clarke
on February 7, 2014 3:59 PM
Aw. | Photo: Joachim S.. Müller/Flickr/Creative Commons License
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's move to strip gray wolves from protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is based on insufficient science, according to a report by an independent panel of scientists. In response to the report, USFWS has again opened public comment on its wolf delisting proposal until March, meaning a bit more delay before gray wolves are potentially removed from the Endangered Species List.
USFWS now expects to make its final decision on delisting the wold by the end of 2014.
In the report, produced by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at UC Santa Barbara, an independent panel of wildlife biologists from universities, the California Academy of Sciences, and the Natural Resources Defense Council agree unanimously that more study is needed before the wolf is removed from ESA protection.
According to the report, the delisting proposal was based in part on a single October 2012 paper that contends eastern wolves belong to the species Canis lycaon, distinct from gray wolves in the western half of North America belonging to the species Canis lupus. If the eastern part of the wolf's historic range was occupied by a different species, according to USFWS' rationale, then Canis lupus now occupies enough of its historic range to be considered recovered. It can thus be removed from ESA protection.
But the 2012 paper, "An Account of the Taxonomy of North American Wolves From Morphological and Genetic Analyses" by biologist Steven M. Chambers and three colleagues, is not universally considered valid by wolf biologists. Scientists on the NCEAS panel pointed out that Chambers et al's conclusions were based on a few genetic differences between wolf populations that were potentially valid, but not conclusive.
What's more, Chambers and his colleagues are all biologists in the employ of USFWS, and their paper was published in the USFWS journal North American Fauna. There's nothing necessarily nefarious about that: North American Fauna publishes some fine work, and many USFWS biologists are among the best in their fields.
The panel did not reject Chambers et al's conclusions outright. Nonetheless, the panel agreed unanimously that Chambers et al did not represent the "best available science," which is the usual legal standard to which USFWS rulemaking is expected to conform.
The upshot: if it isn't yet settled that eastern wolves are a distinct species, then it's not yet settled whether the species to which western wolves belong has recovered over enough of its range to no longer need protection. And without that settled science, USFWS' delisting is called into question.
Reaction from wolf defenders was swift and jubilant Friday. "The nation's top wolf scientists today confirmed what we and millions of American's have been saying for months: The job of wolf recovery is far from complete," said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "This peer review is a major blow to the Obama administration's highly political effort to prematurely remove protections for wolves."
"Peer review is an important step in our efforts to assure that the final decision on our proposal to delist the wolf is based on the best available scientific and technical information," said USFWS Director Dan Ashe. "We thank the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis for conducting a transparent, objective and well-documented process. We are incorporating the peer review report into the public record for the proposed rulemaking, and accordingly, reopening the public comment period to provide the public with the opportunity for input."
As mentioned earlier, public comment on the delisting proposal has now been reopened, the third time the comment period has been so extended on the controversial proposal. Members of the public wishing to comment on the wolf delisting now have until March 27, and more information, as well as an online copy of the NCEAS review of the proposal's science, can be found on the USFWS's gray wolf recovery page.
Scientists Call B.S. -- Bad Science, That Is -- on Wolf Delisting
About the Author :
Chris Clarke is a natural history writer and environmental journalist currently at work on a book about the Joshua tree. He lives in Joshua Tree.
Read more:
Please follow Chris Clarke on Twitter : @canislatrans
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US USED UNSOUND SCIENCE IN MAKING RECOMMENDATIONS TO DELIST GRAY WOLF FROM ENDANGERED SPECIES LIST
#COMMENTFORWOLVES
http://keepwolveslisted.blogspot.com/p/wolf-news.html
By James A. Foley
Feb 07, 2014 - 04:35 PM EST
The Obama administration's proposal to bump the gray wolf off the federal endangered species list could lead to the endangerment of other species, according to researchers who warn that, if passed the way it is currently written, the rule would set a dangerous precedent.
(Photo : Reuters) A pair of gray wolves in 1998
After receiving a peer-reviewed analysis of its proposal to remove the gray wolf from the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and add the Mexican gray wolf, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) will reopen its public comment period.
The move comes after an independent analysis by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) concluded that the recommendations the USFWS used to put the proposal forward were not rooted in sound science.
The USFWS proposal was based around the notion that the US Northeast and Midwest were home a separate species, the eastern wolf. If that were the case, then gray wolf recovery would not be needed in those areas and justified the move to delist the species as endangered.
In a statement by the University of California, Santa Barbara, which is home to the NCEAS, the panel members report a unanimous consensus "that the USFWS's earlier decisions were not well supported by the available science."
Furthermore, "the panel highlighted that the proposed rule was strongly dependent on a single publication, which was found to be preliminary and not widely accepted by the scientific community. The panelists identified additional scientific research that should be considered before proposing a change in the listing status of the gray wolf."
USFWS Director Dan Ashe said in a statement
that the peer review process is an important step in the process of evaluating species health.
"We are incorporating the peer review report into the public record for the proposed rulemaking, and accordingly, reopening the public comment period to provide the public with the opportunity for input," Ashe said.
Steven Courtney, an NCEAS panel member involved in the case told The Associated Press that the peer-review process's results were "unequivocal."
"The science used by the Fish and Wildlife Service concerning genetics and taxonomy of wolves was preliminary and currently not the best available science," he said.
Chris Tollefson, a spokesman for the USFWS, told the AP that "we do take the comments from peer reviewers very seriously and we need to take those into account."
Moving forward, another round of public commentary on the gray wolf proposal will be opened on Feb. 10, the USFWS said, adding that "interested stakeholders will have an additional 45 days to provide information that may be helpful to the Service in making a final determination on the proposal."
The public can access the peer-review and make comments at www.fws.gov/home/wolfrecovery.
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/5936/20140207/used-unsound-science-making-recommendation-delist-gray-wolf-endangered-species.htm
________________________________________
PANEL SAYS FEDERAL WOLF PLAN USED UNPROVEN SCIENCE
By Matthew Brown, Associated Press
Updated 11:03 am, Friday, February 7, 2014
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FILE - This April 18, 2008, file photo provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife shows a gray wolf. A scientific review says the U.S. government’s bid to lift federal protections for gray wolves across most of the Lower 48 states is based on unproven claims about their genetics. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service peer review panel released its report Friday Feb. 7, 2014. It represents a significant setback for the pending proposal to take gray wolves off the endangered species list except in the desert Southwest. Photo: Gary Kramer, AP / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — A proposal to lift federal protections for gray wolves across most of the U.S. suffered a significant setback Friday as an independent review panel said the government is relying on unsettled science to make its case.
Federal wildlife officials want to remove the animals from the endangered species list across the Lower 48 states, except for a small population in the Southwest.
The five-member U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service peer-review panel was tasked with reviewing the government's claim that the Northeast and Midwest were home to a separate species, the eastern wolf.
If the government were right, that would make gray wolf recovery unnecessary in those areas.
But the peer reviewers concluded unanimously that the scientific research cited by the government was insufficient.
That could make it difficult for federal officials to stick with their proposal as it now stands, further protracting the emotionally charged debate over what parts of the U.S. are suitable for the predators.
"The process was clean and the results were unequivocal," said panel member Steven Courtney, a scientist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California in Santa Barbara. "The science used by the Fish and wildlife service concerning genetics and taxonomy of wolves was preliminary and currently not the best available science."
Wolves were added to the endangered species list in 1975 after being exterminated last century across most of the Lower 48 states under government-sponsored trapping and poisoning programs.
Hunting for wolves already is allowed for roughly 5,000 wolves in the Northern Rockies and Great Lakes, where protections were lifted in 2011. More than 900 of the animals have been shot or caught by trappers in the two regions during this winter's hunting season.
A struggling population of several dozen Mexican gray wolves in the desert Southwest would remain on the endangered list under the government's plan. The Southeast is home to a separate species, the red wolf, which remains highly endangered.
The release of the peer review findings opens another round of public input on a proposal that has received more one million comments.
"Obviously we do take the comments from peer reviewers very seriously and we need to take those into account," Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Chris Tollefson said.
The Fish and Wildlife Service already faced fervent opposition to its plan from some scientists, wildlife advocates and members of Congress. They've argued that protections should remain in place given that vast areas of potentially suitable wolf habitat remain unoccupied in the southern Rocky Mountains, along the West Coast and in the Northeast.
Carlos Carroll, a wolf researcher at the Klamath Center for Conservation Research in Orleans, Calif., said the problems highlighted by the peer-review panel had been raised previously by others. He said he hoped they would now get more attention from wildlife officials.
"This gives them a chance to re-evaluate their strategy and say it's time to listen to the science," Carroll said.
But feelings run strong on both sides of the issue, and many Republican lawmakers, agricultural interests and hunting groups have pushed equally hard for jurisdiction over wolves to be passed to states so they could manage the population through annual harvests.
Those efforts have been motivated in large part by wolf attacks on livestock and big game herds in areas where the predators have recovered.
An earlier peer-review panel charged with reviewing the delisting proposal was dissolved last summer, after criticisms arose when three scientists who had been critical of the government's wolf plan were told they couldn't serve.
One of the three — Robert Wayne at the University of California Los Angeles — was later named to the panel that came up with Friday's report.
Officials had aimed for a final decision on the matter this summer. That's now uncertain after delays in the peer review and time lost to the federal government shutdown in the fall.
Associated Press Writer Jeff Barnard in Grants Pass, Ore., contributed to this report.
________________________________________
BREAKING NEWS:
PEER REVIEWERS FIND FAULT WITH USFWS SCIENCE ON WOLF DESLISTING -COMMENT PERIOD REOPENS
The US Fish and Wildlife Service just released the following press statement about the independent Peer review (see link at bottom of 2019372475page):
Service Reopens Comment Period on Wolf Proposal
Independent scientific peer review report available for public review
Following receipt of an independent scientific peer review, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is reopening the comment period on its proposal to list the Mexican wolf as an endangered subspecies and remove the gray wolf from the Endangered Species List. The Service is making that report available for public review, and, beginning Monday, February 10, interested stakeholders will have an additional 45 days to provide information that may be helpful to the Service in making a final determination on the proposal.
The independent scientific peer review was hosted and managed by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), a highly respected interdisciplinary research center at the University of California – Santa Barbara. At the Service’s request, NCEAS sponsored and conducted a peer review of the science underlying the Service’s proposal.
“Peer review is an important step in our efforts to assure that the final decision on our proposal to delist the wolf is based on the best available scientific and technical information,” said Service Director Dan Ashe. “We thank the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis for conducting a transparent, objective and well-documented process. We are incorporating the peer review report into the public record for the proposed rulemaking, and accordingly, reopening the public comment period to provide the public with the opportunity for input.”
PEER REVIEW REPORT
THE PEER REVIEW REPORT IS AVAILABLE ONLINE,
ALONG WITH INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO PROVIDE COMMENT AND COMPREHENSIVE LINKS RELATING TO THE PROPOSAL AT:
The Service intends that any final action resulting from this proposed rule will be based on the best available information. Comments and materials we receive, as well as some of the supporting documentation used in preparing this proposed rule, are available for public inspection at www.regulations.gov under the docket number FWS–HQ–ES–2013–0073.
The Service will post all comments on www.regulations.gov. This generally means the agency will post any personal information provided through the process. The Service is not able to accept email or faxes. Comments must be received by midnight on March 27.
The Federal Register publication of this notice is available online at www.fws.gov/policy/frsystem/default.cfm by clicking on the 2014 Proposed Rules under Endangered and Threatened Wildlife and Plants.
The Service expects to make final determination on the proposal by the end of 2014.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service works with others to conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, plants, and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people. For more information, visit www.fws.gov, or connect with us through any of these social media channels:
– FWS –
Gray Wolf Peer Review
- See more at:
________________________________________
http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=FWS-HQ-ES-2013-0073
http://www.fws.gov/home/wolfrecovery/pdf/Final_Review_of_Proposed_rule_regarding_wolves2014.pdf
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U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Nez Perce Tribe, National Park Service, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, Blackfeet Nation, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Idaho Fish and Game, and USDA Wildlife Services. 2009. Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery 2008 Interagency Annual Report. C.A. Sime and E. E. Bangs, eds. USFWS, Ecological Services, 585 Shepard Way, Helena, Montana. 59601. http://www.fws.gov/mountain- prairie/species/mammals/wolf/annualrpt08/index.html Accessed December 17, 2012.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, Nez Perce Tribe, National Park Service, Blackfeet Nation, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Wind River Tribes, Washington Department of Wildlife, Oregon Department of Wildlife, Utah Department of Natural Resources, and USDA Wildlife Services. 2011. Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery 2010 Interagency Annual Report. C.A. Sime and E. E. Bangs, eds. USFWS, Ecological Services, 585 Shepard Way, Helena, Montana. 59601. http://www.fws.gov/mountain- prairie/species/mammals/wolf/annualrpt10/index.html Accessed December 17, 2012.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Idaho Department of Fish & Game, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, Nez Perce Tribe, National Park Service, Blackfeet Nation, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Wind River Tribes, Washington Department of Wildlife, Oregon Department of Wildlife, Utah Department of Natural Resources, and USDA Wildlife Services. 2012. Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery 2011 Interagency Annual Report. M.D. Jimenez and S.A. Becker, eds.. USFWS, Ecological Services, 585 Shepard Way, Helena, Montana. 59601. http://www.fws.gov/mountain-prairie/species/mammals/wolf/annualrpt11/index.html
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From Defenders of Wildlife
Deadline: March 5. 2014
Call your representative and ask them to sign onto the DeFazio letter to Secretary Jewell!
Find your Congress representatives here:
#KEEPWOLVESLISTED
http://keepwolveslisted.blogspot.com/p/wolf-news.html
USFWS Letter on Gray Wolf
March 4, 2013
The Honorable Dan Ashe
Director
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
1849 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20240
Dear Director Ashe:
We understand that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is conducting a status review of the gray wolf under the Endangered Species Act that may remove protections for gray wolves across large areas of the lower 48 states. The reintroduction of wolves into the northern Rocky Mountains and their resurgence in the western Great Lakes region have been important gains for a species once teetering on the brink of extinction , and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service should be commended for its prominent role in these achievements . In other parts of their former range, however, wolves have only barely begun to recover. In particular, wolves have only just begun to return to portions of the Pacific Northwest, California, southern Rocky Mountains and Northeast and continue to need protection in these areas if they are to truly recover. It is our hope that you will retain Endangered Species Act protections for wolves in these areas. A blanket national delisting of the gray wolf would be premature and would not be grounded in peer-reviewed science.
The rebound of gray wolves in the western Great Lakes and northern Rocky Mountains has been a boon for local economies, wildlife enthusiasts, and the ecosystems of these areas that have benefitted from the return of this keystone predator. Studies in Yellowstone National Park found that the presence of wolves benefitted a myriad of species from pronghorn antelope, to songbirds, to beavers and fish.
While there is much to be proud of, there remains considerable progress to be made towards wolf recovery in the lower 48 states. In particular, we are concerned that the same prejudice towards wolves that led to their extirpation across nearly the entire coterminous United States is still present today and, not only is threatening to undo the gains achieved in the northern Rocky Mountains and western Great Lakes, but will prevent their recovery in additional areas. We believe that federal protection continues to be necessary to ensure that wolf recovery is allowed to proceed in additional parts of the country.
Wolves are beginning to make a comeback in Oregon and Washington and a little more than a year ago, a wolf dubbed OR-7 made his way to California to become the first wolf in the state for more than 80 years. Lone wolves have also crossed into Utah, Colorado, and several states in the Northeast. These are all areas that would benefit from continued Endangered Species Act protections.
Wolf recovery in the lower 48 states is a wildlife success story in the making, and we encourage the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to continue to work towards greater recovery of this important and popular species. Specifically, we ask that the Service continue to protect wolves in the lower 48 states under the ESA.
Thank you for the work you and your staff have done over the years to make important gains in the gray wolf recovery program.
http://defazio.house.gov/usfws-letter-on-gray-wolf
_______________________________________
For Immediate Release, January 16, 2014wolf-110006
Contacts:
Amaroq Weiss, Center for Biological Diversity, (707) 779-9613
Nick Cady, Cascadia Wildlands, (541) 434-1463
John Mellgren, Western Environmental Law Center, (541) 359-0990
In Washington, Opposition Mounts to Notorious Federal Program’s Attempt to Grab Wolf-killing Powers
OLYMPIA, Wash.— Eight conservation groups representing tens of thousands of Washington residents filed official comments today opposing a controversial federal agency’s attempt to give itself authority to kill endangered wolves in the state. In December the U.S. Department of Agriculture/ APHIS Wildlife Services published a draft “environmental assessment” proposing to broaden its authority to assist the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife killing wolves in response to livestock depredations.
Conservation organizations are calling for Wildlife Services to prepare a more in-depth “environmental impact statement” because the less-detailed assessment already completed contains significant gaps and fails to address specific issues that will significantly affect wolves and the human environment. The document prepared by Wildlife Services failed to provide data to support some of its core assertions, including whether killing wolves actually reduces wolf-caused losses of livestock. It also failed to address the ecological effects of killing wolves in Washington, including impacts on wolf populations in neighboring states and on nontarget animals — from federally protected species such as grizzly bears and Canada lynx to wolverines, which are now proposed for listing under the federal Endangered Species Act.
“Allowing a notoriously anti-predator program like Wildlife Services to kill wolves will hobble wolf recovery in Washington, where they remain an endangered species,” said Amaroq Weiss, West Coast wolf organizer with the Center for Biological Diversity. “Wildlife Services is nothing but a killing machine for the livestock industry. There are certainly better options to protect livestock than killing these beautiful animals that are so important to ecosystems.”
Wildlife Services is a stand-alone program under the USDA that kills roughly 1.5 million animals per year, including wolves, grizzly bears, otters, foxes, coyotes, birds and many others, with little public oversight or accountability. Thousands of animals killed by Wildlife Services each year are nontarget wildlife species, endangered species and even people’s pets that unwittingly get caught in traps or ingest poisons intended for target species.
“There is no place for Wildlife Services in Washington wolf management,” says Nick Cady, legal director with Cascadia Wildlands. “This unaccountable agency program appears to have one mission only — to sanitize the landscape of America’s wild animals that interfere with agricultural operations.”
Long criticized as a rogue entity, Wildlife Services was recently the subject of a prize-winning newspaper exposé of its shadowy operations, as well as a documentary containing firsthand descriptions by former program personnel of illegal and cruel practices perpetrated on wildlife and domestic animals. Conservation groups petitioned the USDA in December demanding reform of Wildlife Services’ entire operations. Since then there have been congressional calls for an investigation into the program’s questionable operations, nontransparency and lack of accountability.
“Given the pending USDA Inspector General investigation into Wildlife Services, now is not the time to be granting this program new authority to kill wolves in Washington,” said John Mellgren, staff attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. “Broadening its killing authority would introduce new roadblocks to wolf recovery in Washington, and with the use of questionable and inhumane tactics.”
Wildlife Services acted in an advisory capacity in the 2012 killing of the Wedge pack by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. In that instance, the department killed seven wolves after depredations of livestock on public lands, despite the rancher’s failure to take sufficient action to protect his cattle. The public, in Washington and across the nation, was outraged, and a Washington state senator called for an investigation into the Wedge pack’s annihilation.
"Wildlife Services consistently fails to consider the ecological value of wolves and other large carnivores to maintaining ecosystem health, integrity and resilience," said Camilla Fox, founder and executive director of Project Coyote. "It's high time Wildlife Services factored in these values and put its money where its mouth is by implementing and emphasizing non-lethal methods to reduce livestock-predator conflicts."
Wolves were driven to extinction in Washington in the early 1900s by a government-sponsored eradication program on behalf of the livestock industry. They began to return to Washington from neighboring Idaho and British Columbia in the early 2000s, and their population has grown to the current 10 confirmed packs and two probable packs. While this represents solid growth, wolves in the state are far from recovered and face ongoing threats. Wildlife Services’ proposal poses a new, significant threat to the full recovery of wolves in Washington.
The organizations calling on Wildlife Services to prepare a full environmental impact statement include Cascadia Wildlands, the Center for Biological Diversity, Western Environmental Law Center, Project Coyote, Predator Defense, WildEarth Guardians, Kettle Range Conservation Group and The Lands Council.
- See more at: http://www.cascwild.org/in-washington-opposition-mounts-to-notorious-federal-programs-attempt-to-grab-wolf-killing-powers/#sthash.slZkQCiu.dpuf
http://www.cascwild.org/in-washington-opposition-mounts-to-notorious-federal-programs-attempt-to-grab-wolf-killing-powers/
NEW MEXICO DONA ANA SOIL AND WATER CONSERVATION DISTRICT
AND SAN MIGUEL COUNTY COMMISSIONERS
REQUEST PUBLIC HEARINGS FROM USFWS
CONCERNING DOCKETS FOR GRAY WOLF
AND MEXICAN WOLF RECOVERY
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MINNESOTA REDUCES WOLF HARVEST QUOTA BY 45%,
WILL ISSUE FEWER KILL TAGS THAN WISCONSIN
By Paul A. Smith of the Journal Sentinel ~ July 29. 2013
Minnesota wildlife officials on Monday announced they have reduced the wolf harvest quota by 45% for the state's 2013 wolf hunting and trapping season.
The decision to reduce the kill target is in response to a decline in the state's wolf population, according to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. A survey earlier this year estimated Minnesota's late winter wolf population was 2,211 animals, down about 25% from the most recent survey (in 2008).
“The changes are a management response to the most-recent wolf population estimate,” Dan Stark, large carnivore specialist for the Minnesota DNR, said in a statement. “As with other game species DNR manages, adjustments are made to regulate hunting pressure and harvest to ensure long-term population sustainability and provide hunting and trapping opportunities.”
As a result, Minnesota has set its wolf harvest quota at 220 this year, down from 400 in 2012. Hunters and trappers in Minnesota killed 413 wolves in 2012. In addition, about 300 wolves were killed in Minnesota last year as part of a government program designed to reduce depredation near farms and ranches.
Minnesota's wolf management plan seeks to maintain the wolf population above 1,600 animals. Minnesota has the largest wolf population in the lower 48 states.
The wolf in the western Great Lakes region was removed from protections of the federal Endangered Species Act in 2012 and returned to state management.
Like Wisconsin, Minnesota held its first regulated wolf hunt in modern times in 2012. But just one year into the hunt Minnesota is reducing the harvest pressure on its wolf population.
The situation is reversed in the Badger State. Wisconsin has increased its wolf kill target this year. In fact, although it has less than half as many wolves as Minnesota, Wisconsin officials have set a higher wolf kill target than its neighboring state.
Meeting in late June, the Wisconsin DNR recommended and the state Natural Resources Board approved a harvest quota of 275 wolves for the 2013-'14 hunting and trapping season.
The management goal in Wisconsin is to reduce the wolf population toward the goal of 350 wolves listed in the 1999 wolf management plan. Wisconsin had an estimated 809 to 834 wolves in 214 packs in late winter 2013.
Wisconsin wildlife officials are working to update the state's wolf management plan over the next two years. The updated plan may include a new population goal.
The Wisconsin harvest quota for 2013-'14 represents a 37% increase from the level of 201 set last year in the state's first regulated wolf harvest.
Wolf populations are estimated in Wisconsin and Minnesota in winter when populations are at their annual low and snow and other conditions make them easiest to count. Wolf populations typically double each spring after pups are born then begin to decline due to various sources of mortality.
Wolf Investigations Questioned
& WSPC Grant Funding
Program: Washington Ag Today
Date: July 23, 13
I’m Lacy Gray with Washington Ag Today.
Wolf activity in the Wedge area seems to be on the rise again as cattle rancher Len McIrvin, owner of the Diamond M Ranch, reports that wolves killed a three day old calf on his ranch this month. The Diamond M is where Fish and Wildlife officials killed six wolves from the Wedge Pack last September after the wolves had attacked and killed more than sixteen cattle there. Although fresh wolf tracks were found nearby, the WDFW says the case is unconfirmed as the calf was 95% consumed and that the department hasn’t found anything that merits setting a trap to try to collar wolves. Washington Cattlemen’s Association Executive Vice President Jack Field.
FIELD: By increasing the human presence there may be an opportunity to mitigate and prevent some wolf depredations. Without having collars on the wolves though it’s very difficult to have a high level of success because you really don’t know where the wolves are in relation to the cattle and it makes it difficult to effectively really get in and be that buffer between the cattle and the wolves.
Now Rancher McIrvin Wants Washington Wolves Poisoned
By MATTHEW WEAVER
Capital Press
A northeast Washington cattle rancher says wolves killed a three-day-old calf from his operation last week.
Len McIrvin is owner of the Diamond M Ranch in Laurier, Wash. That’s the ranch where Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife officials in September 2012 killed six wolves from the Wedge Pack. The wolves had killed at least 17 cattle from the ranch.
The killed calf was dragged from a barbed wire calving enclosure 200 yards from human presence, McIrvin said. There were fresh wolf tracks nearby in the river, he said.
“We know it was a wolf, but they can’t confirm it because the calf was 95 percent eaten up,” he said, noting coyote tracks were also found in the area.
Stephanie Simek, WDFW wildlife conflict section manager, said the case was unconfirmed as a wolf kill because there were signs of coyotes in the area. The six-strand barbed wire fence did not show signs of a larger carnivore entering the area, she said.
“The issue was the carcass was so far gone, you really couldn’t get a lot of those measurements,” said Dave Ware, WDFW game program manager. “You just couldn’t tell for sure what killed it.”
The department has been monitoring wolf activity, but didn’t find anything that would merit setting a trap to try to collar wolves.
“We’re certain there are wolves in the Wedge area again,” Ware said. “We’re seeing plenty of activity.”
McIrvin said his cattle are on the range, so he hasn’t found other kills or injuries.
“We know the wolves have been harassing them,” he said. “We know they’re there, we hear them howling, they’ve got the cows all chased off the range again. We put them back weekly, but the wolves are running them daily.”
The Stevens County Cattlemen’s Association believes the department’s unconfirmed ruling on the calf shows a “troubling trend” in which the department does not confirm wolf kills, a determination that could lead to killing the predators.
Association spokesperson Jamie Henneman said WDFW needs to clearly outline how they will deal with wolves.
“Right now we are seeing the department buckle under pressure from environmental groups who have absolutely no skin in the game,” she said. “There is no impact to their finances or livelihood if wolf management is done in a poor, watery or slipshod fashion. Band-aid payments of compensation will not solve this problem.”
Ware believes the department’s history proves it is willing to kill wolves, but said it will not always completely be on the same page as ranchers.
“Second-guessing what our field staff does seems to be a popular sport for both sides,” he said. “In their hearts, most (ranchers) feel, ‘Wolves are the things different from the landscape — it must be wolves that caused this.’ In some cases, we can verify that, in some cases, we just can’t.”
McIrvin says killing the wolves is the only solution. He believes the calf carcass should have been laced with poison to get the “culprits.”
“Until somebody gets serious about opening season on these wolves, I don’t know that there is any answer,” he said.
Just as he did last year, McIrvin plans to continue to refuse compensation from the state.
“We are not in the business of raising cattle to feed wolves. We’re in the business of raising cattle to be a cow ranch,” he said.
Information
Washington Department Fish and Wildlife:
http://wdfw.wa.gov/conservation/gray_wolf/
Stevens County Cattlemen Association:
http://stevenscountycattlemen.wordpress.com
Wolf kill fails to placate Washington rancher
'You can't see them, but you can hear them all the time'
Posted: Thursday, August 9, 2012 1:58 pm
By Matthew Weaver East Oregonian Publishing Group
The decision by state wildlife officials to kill a wolf that had been attacking livestock in northeastern Washington is too little, too late, says the rancher who has suffered losses there since 2007.
The state Department of Fish and Wildlife this week killed a nonbreeding female wolf from the so-called Wedge Wolf Pack, officials said. They were unsuccessful in an attempt to kill a second wolf.
HOUSE: e-Edition Apple apps ROS - In Article 1 and 2
Nate Pamplin, assistant director with the department, said at least four adults and several pups make up the pack.
The department took action after a series of wolf attacks on the Diamond M herd dating back to two calves that were killed in 2007. Department officials also cited higher-than-normal calf losses and documented wolf activity around the calving operation. An adjacent ranch had wolf problems at its calving operation this spring, Pamplin said.
Diamond M ranch owner Len McIrvin, of Laurier, Wash., said he remains skeptical of the department's actions and would only believe it when he saw a dead wolf.
"They distort facts so much, they've lied to us continually on this thing," he said. "First they said there was no wolves in the area. We showed them that there was. Then they said there might be wolves, but they'll never eat a cow. We showed them that they did."
McIrvin said wolf activity has been escalating. Last year 11 calves and five bulls were killed, he said. He will tally how many have been killed this year in the fall.
"We know we've had two kills. We know we've had four other calves attacked and severely wounded," he said.
McIrvin said there's no way to protect against wolves on the rough, big timber country range, where he runs roughly 300 pairs of cattle.
McIrvin owns a lot of the area and has state Department of Natural Resources leases and U.S. Forest Service grazing permits in the area.
McIrvin said he's seen wolves in the area. Cowboys coming in after dark with horses have wolves following within several hundred yards, howling.
"You can't see them, but you can hear them all the time," McIrvin said. He has a kill permit for depredation if wolves are caught in the act, but said there's little chance of meeting that requirement.
The environmental organization Conservation Northwest released a statement questioning whether McIrvin made a "good faith effort" to reduce the risk of conflict between wolves and his livestock.
"It's unclear in this case whether the right livestock stewardship steps have first been tried to reduce conflict potential," Mitch Friedman, Conservation Northwest executive director, said in the statement. "If we expect wolves to behave, ranchers need to meet them halfway."
According to the department, state efforts include specialized electric fencing, attaching a radio collar to the pack's alpha male and maintaining a regular human presence in the area.
The ranch employs five cowboys to frequently check on the herd.
Pamplin said the state is implementing its wolf conservation and management plan and committed to working with livestock operators to protect their livestock and minimize impacts.
The department will evaluate its options and continue to monitor the wolf pack's movement and any further depredations.
Under the state's wolf plan, ranchers receive compensation for two animals for a confirmed wolf kill and compensation for one cow for a probable wolf kill, Pamplin said.
McIrvin said his losses are so heavy, including lower weight gain and a lower conception rate, that the only compensation he's interested in is a dead wolf for every dead calf.
"This isn't a wolf problem, we always could take care of our own problems," he said. "It's an agency regulatory problem (with) threats of imprisonment and fines."
McIrvin expects the wolves to spread.
"This is our problem today, but in three years it's going to be every cattleman's problem," he said.
Matthew Weaver is a writer for the Salem-based Capital Press.
© 2013 Blue Mountain Eagle.
via www.adventurejournal ~dot~com
The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission on Friday, July 12, 2013, adopted provisions of a lawsuit settlement that will make Oregon the only state where ranchers must show they have used non-lethal measures to protect their herds before the state will send out to kill wolves preying on livestock.
Gov. John Kitzhaber has signed a bill allowing the state to resume killing wolves that make a habit of attacking livestock.
The governor signed the measure Friday, making Oregon the only state in the West where killing wolves that attack livestock is a last resort.
The measure puts into law provisions of a settlement between conservation groups and ranchers. The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission adopted other provisions of the settlement a week ago.
Ranchers will get new rights to shoot wolves that they see attacking their herd, but only if the attacks have become chronic and the ranchers can show they've taken nonlethal steps to try and stop them.
The Oregon Court of Appeals has blocked the state from killing wolves for more than a year.
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.
Neither Big Nor Bad,
the Wolf Returns to Western Europe
by Kristina Chew July 16, 2013 7:00 am
1869: That was the last time a wolf was seen in the Netherlands. Widespread throughout much of Europe in the 18th century, wolves were for all intents and purposes exterminated from there in the 19th century. By the end of World War II, they had disappeared altogether. The “last wolf” in Germany was said to have been shot in 1904.
Large populations of wolves have continued to exist in eastern Europe, in Romania, Poland and the Balkans. As a result of conservationist policies and world politics, the number of wolves has been gradually rising in Germany, France, Sweden and Norway. Earlier in July, the body of an animal that biologists believe is “almost certainly a wolf” was found. The animal had been run over by a vehicle in Luttelgeest in the Netherlands, just about 30 miles from the country’s densely populated North Sea coast.
News reports like this one in the Daily Mail are suggesting that the “big bad wolf” is knocking on western Europe’s door and that it is time to call in the hunters. With wolves now also turning up in Belgium, northern Denmark and off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa, there has also been talk, and fear, of wolves coming to Britain. But environmentalists and foresters point out that the return of the wolf is a welcome development.
As the Independent notes, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 changed things significantly for wolves in Europe. The reunification of Germany led to a “radical policy switch,” with the wolf becoming a protected species throughout the country, including its formerly communist east. Under the 1979 Berne Convention (which most European countries have signed), hunting wolves is prohibited.
The wolf is “at the top of the predatory chain” in Europe, says Vanessa Ludwig, a biologist who monitors the growing wolf population in Germany’s Lausitz region, which is near its border with Poland. In the 1990s, wolves began to migrate via Lausitz. The region — “vast, uninhabited and largely road and path-less wilderness, covered with half-grown pine and birch trees” — had once been used for military training exercises by the occupying Soviet army; German troops now use the area much less frequently.
In 2000, a night-vision video camera filmed a pair of wolves with their cub, a sign that the wolf has returned. An estimated 40 wolves now lives in the region. Roe deer, red deer and wild boar account for the majority of the wolves’ diet. Environmentalists and foresters have welcomed the wolves’ return as they help to restore an “environmental imbalance” by controlling the numbers of deer: an overpopulation of these has meant that deciduous trees have been stripped of their bark and that saplings have been eaten.
Sheep farmers, having kept flocks for decades without fear of predators, have been highly concerned about the wolves’ return to say the least. Last year, some 50 animals were attacked. Farmers have been installing electric fences and are keeping Pyrenean sheepdogs to guard their flocks.
There are now an estimated 250 wolves in France, which has raised the limit on the number of wolves that can be killed per year from 11 to 22. Last year, farmers reported almost 6,000 cases of attacks on other animals including pigs and goats as well as sheep and there has been talk of recruiting “specialist hunters” from the U.S. and Eastern Europe to “keep the number of wolves stable.”
As Ludwig notes, wolves fear humans and usually run on encountering a person. No one in Germany, she says, has been harmed by a wolf.
The return of the wolf represents a triumph of conservationist policies. A species can make a comeback even after being altogether eliminated from a region. The next step should be to figure out how wolves and humans – modern-day Little Red Riding Hoods, their grandmothers and woodsmen — can live together.
IN DEBATE OVER PROTECTING WOLVES, PUBLIC OPINION RUNS DEEP
Story By Becky Kramer for The Spokesman Review
photo image via fuckyeahwolves.tumblr~dot~com
LAMAR VALLEY, Wyo. – Seeing wolves for the first time left Jimmy Jones awestruck.
Wolves were mythic, larger-than-life creatures to the 59-year-old Los Angeles resident. Yet there they were, two of them, chasing bison at Yellowstone National Park in 2005.
Watching wolves run through a meadow is a sight to behold, agrees Karla Gitlitz, a 35-year-old rancher from Meeteetse, Wyo. Beyond that, she has no kind words for wolves, which she considers ruthless killers.
Wolves have spent the night howling within 200 feet of the house she shares with her husband and 15-year-old son. She’s watched them hamstring cows, and she was heartbroken and furious the day she saw two wolves tugging on a yearling’s intestines.
Two Westerners who cherish the outdoors. Two starkly different views of wolves.
For Jones, who lives in a metro area of 18 million, wolves are a symbol of the nation’s remaining wild lands. “Just the mention of wolves can send a shiver up people’s spines,” says the auto shop foreman, who returns to Yellowstone twice a year to photograph the packs.
For Gitlitz, who lives in one of America’s least populated states, wolves represent an urban agenda thrust upon ranchers and a threat to rural livelihoods.
Nearly 20 years after gray wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone and central Idaho, deep fault lines remain in public opinion on wolves’ presence and the appropriate limits of their range. The divide often separates the horse-trailer crowd from Subaru-driving suburbanites. It was spotlighted last month when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it was ready to get out of the wolf business.
Agency officials have proposed ending federal protections for the 6,100 wolves in the Lower 48 states by the end of the year, with the exception of the Southwest’s Mexican gray wolves. Management would be turned over to the states, which would have more leeway to kill wolves through public hunts, trapping and other actions.
Wolves are already off the endangered species list in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, parts of Eastern Washington and Oregon, and the Upper Midwest. Some environmental groups want federal protections to remain until wolves recolonize other areas, including the Pacific Northwest, Utah and Colorado.
Ultimately, however, “the future is really about state management,” says Martin Nie, a professor of natural resource policy at the University of Montana. “There’s always going to be some conflict over wolves, but I think we can deal with the conflicts in a much smarter way than we have in the past.”
Doing that will require more attention to values, Nie says.
Wolves symbolize “this greater, ongoing struggle in the American West over how resources will be used, how lives will be lived and who gets to decide,” says Susan G. Clark, a Yale University professor of wildlife ecology and policy, in her 2005 book, “Co-existing with Large Carnivores.”
She anticipates more conflicts in rural communities as wolf populations expand. Dispersing wolves will venture into more developed areas where they’ll encounter more cattle, more sheep and more people whose narrative is “My grandparents killed the wolves off … and we don’t want them back,” she says.
There are lessons here for Washington state, where dispersing wolves from Idaho and Canada are re-establishing packs in parts of Eastern Washington and the Cascades.
As wolves become more numerous, public support for them typically wanes, according to a study published in Wildlife Society Bulletin.
The study analyzed three decades of U.S. and European public opinion polls. It found that people with the most positive attitudes toward wolves had the least direct experience with them. People living near wolves had the most negative views.
“Wolves are going to live in the same landscape as local people,” Clark says.
If stakeholders don’t feel like their voices are heard and their concerns acknowledged, it will be difficult to manage wolves in a way that supports the national interest, she says.
Ranchers pitted against tourists in Wyoming
Wyoming epitomizes the clash of values over wolves.
Since their reintroduction to Yellowstone in the mid-1990s, wolves have developed celebrity status in America’s oldest national park. Tourists get up before dawn to set up spotting scopes in the Lamar Valley at the park’s northeastern edge, where a broad floodplain makes it easy to watch wolves, bison and elk.
Most park visitors support the wolves’ return. After grizzly bears, wolves are the wildlife species that park visitors most want to see, according to a 2006 University of Montana study.
But those views aren’t shared by most Wyoming residents. In a 2012 poll, more than half of those surveyed thought wolf reintroduction has been mostly negative for the Cowboy State.
Wyoming is the most rural of the Lower 48 states, with fewer than 600,000 residents scattered across nearly 100,000 square miles. Cattle outnumber people about 2 to 1. Elk, a favorite food for wolves in the Northern Rockies, are also abundant. The state’s 112,000 elk make Wyoming a destination for hunters, who support a $90 million outfitting-and-guide industry.
Gov. Matt Mead brokered the plan that allowed Wyoming wolves to come off the endangered species list last October.
A fourth-generation rancher, Mead’s conference room is dominated by a painting of cows that once hung in the former Cheyenne Club, a watering hole for cattle barons during Wyoming’s territorial days. The painting is a tribute to the industry’s long legacy and deep influence in Wyoming.
“I think if you looked outside the state in urban areas, most people would say there’s never a justification for hunting or killing wolves,” says Mead, 51.
But that doesn’t jibe with the views of the state’s 11,000 ranchers or its outfitting industry. Mead says Wyoming’s plan was crafted with knowledge that not every place wolves roam will be suitable habitat.
Under Wyoming’s management, wolves are classified as predators in most of the state, which means they can be shot on sight. In the state’s northwest corner, which has the best wolf habitat, wolves can be hunted outside of Yellowstone and other protected areas, but those hunts are subject to seasons and quotas.
The state has committed to maintaining at least 100 wolves in areas outside of Yellowstone National Park and the Wind River Indian Reservation, including 10 breeding pairs.
Wyoming’s wolf plan is currently the subject of federal litigation from environmental groups, who say it’s not protective enough – particularly when the federal government has pumped more than $100 million nationally into wolf restoration.
December estimates put Wyoming’s wolf population at a minimum of 277, including those inside Yellowstone.
Urban dwellers sometimes have romanticized expectations of the rural West, Mead says. They don’t understand that the people who live there have to earn a living.
Take ranching: “People love the open space, the clean water, the beautiful meadows that are provided by ranching; they just don’t want any cows,” he says.
Mead also says most Wyoming residents think wolves should be under state control.
Dave Vaughan, a 74-year-old rancher from Lander, Wyo., is one of them. “You can’t have people in Washington, D.C., managing wolves in Wyoming,” he says.
Vaughan says he got out of the cattle business several years ago, when four wolves appeared on the 5,000-acre ranch he manages. That year, he said an unusually high number of cows aborted their fetuses. And six calves turned out to pasture vanished. While he can’t tie either event directly to wolves, Vaughan said he lost 20 percent of his calves and most of the year’s profits.
He’s been working to raise $5,000 for the Wyoming Wolf Coalition, a group of outfitters, counties and agricultural interests that supports keeping Wyoming wolves under state management. The coalition is an intervener in the lawsuits challenging the plan.
“Back 100 years ago, we have room for wolves. They had a place,” Vaughan says. When 30 million bison migrated across the Great Plains, wolves played an important role as scavengers, he says. That was probably true even during the big cattle drives, when a certain percentage of animals were routinely lost to old age, injuries or disease, he says.
But the Wyoming of today is not the Wyoming of 1880, when the state had 21,000 people, Vaughan says.
“These are things that we need to get across to people who live outside the state,” he says.
Advocate: Politics trumps science
Duane Short is a wolf advocate in an anti-predator state. It’s sometimes a lonely job, says Short, 58, who works for the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance in Laramie, Wyo.
The organization is one of the environmental groups that filed a lawsuit challenging Wyoming’s management plan for wolves. At this point, however, the alliance has petitioned to withdraw the suit in favor of another, similar lawsuit that’s moving through the courts.
“We know that wolf numbers are far, far below historic numbers,” Short says. “Their range has been diminished to a few isolated areas in a few isolated states.”
Wolves play invaluable roles in ecosystems, Short says. They keep deer and elk numbers in check and improve the herds’ gene pool by culling diseased animals. Wolves kill coyotes, which benefits ranchers. And their presence also improves fish habitat by keeping deer and elk on the move, preventing them from overgrazing streamside willows and aspens.
In Yellowstone, healthier willow and aspen stands have led to increases in songbird and beaver populations.
That’s all well-documented through scientific research, Short says. As a biologist, “it’s very difficult for me to see the benefits of upsetting a balance that nature pretty well manages on its own.”
Short says politics has trumped science in setting wolf policy. He blames ranchers, a small but powerful lobby in the West. Short says he’s been at public meetings where livestock producers make it sound like wolf attacks result in regular bloodbaths in their herds. “It becomes almost an end-of-the-industry rhetoric, when it’s really a small percentage of losses,” he says.
Confirmed wolf kills represent less than 2 percent of all cattle losses and less than 1 percent of all sheep losses, according to Wyoming agricultural statistics. The big killers are harsh weather, illness and birthing complications.
“There’s maybe a total of 300 wolves in the state,” Short says. “This is tongue-in-cheek, but you have to wonder: If every one of those wolves had a beef steak a day, or a lamb chop, how big of a true economic impact could that possibly be?”
Wolf-kill numbers don’t tell whole story
Smudges under Karla Gitlitz’s eyes in early May indicate that it’s the end of calving season. For 72 straight days, she’s worked the night shift in the calving barn, acting as a midwife to pregnant cows. She’s babied, coaxed and lectured peaky newborn calves until they stand up and nurse.
Though ranchers raise cattle for beef, they forge bonds with their animals that outsiders don’t always appreciate, she says.
Dismissive stereotypes of ranchers irk Gitlitz, who graduated from the University of Wyoming at age 20 with a triple major in accounting, agribusiness and pre-veterinary science. Most of her colleagues also have college degrees, but “people think we’re a bunch of dumb ranchers,” she says.
At the century-old ranch where Gitlitz works, lights are set up at night to deter predators. Ranch hands ride daily to check on the herd’s welfare. Dead animals are buried promptly to discourage scavengers.
She still gets second-guessed. When Gitlitz applied for compensation for a confirmed wolf kill from a Defenders of Wildlife program, she says she got a letter back questioning whether the ranch was “purposefully enticing the wolves.”
While environmental groups cite low numbers of documented wolf kills, ranchers say those statistics don’t tell the whole story.
Gene Jordan, of Riverton, Wyo., started noticing wolves on his ranch about seven years ago. He typically lost a handful of calves every year to pneumonia or black bears. Now, he usually loses about 25 calves. He doesn’t find all the carcasses in the sagebrush and timbered draws. And when he does find them, they’re sometimes too badly decayed to determine the cause of death.
Each calf is worth about $800. If wolves take 20, “that’s $16,000,” he says.
Animals lost to predators also represent reductions in future earnings, Gitlitz says.
Several years ago, she and her husband and dad were moving pregnant cows when they saw a wolf attacking. The cow was so badly mauled that Gitlitz could stick her hand into a cavity in its hindquarters. She nursed the cow back to health, and it had twins she named “Wolf” and “Bite.” But that was the last pregnancy for the cow, which was sold that fall.
Under normal conditions, the cow would have stayed in the herd for 10 years, producing a calf each year. “That’s a decade worth of profits,” she says.
Gitlitz’s dad fired at the wolf but missed it. Government trappers couldn’t catch it, either.
Despite Wyoming’s shoot-on-sight policy, wolves are hard to kill, Gitlitz says.
Elk numbers down sharply
Tim Hockhalter, 58, runs an outfitter service on the northwest edge of Yellowstone National Park. He says he’s lost most of his income since the wolves returned.
He and his wife, Geri, once grossed about $150,000 a year taking out-of-state clients on eight-day elk hunting trips.
But over the last two decades, the North Yellowstone elk herd has plunged from about 19,000 animals to 4,000, and the Hockhalters’ company, Timber Creek Outfitters, now brings in about $40,000 annually. Biologists say multiple factors besides wolves are at work, including harsh winters and predation from other carnivores. They also say the smaller elk herds are more consistent with historic populations.
The end result for Hockhalter and other outfitters, however, is fewer elk tags for out-of-state hunters. The loss of each of those tags represents an $8,000 to $10,000 hit to the local economy, he says.
He’s miffed that people who want wolves back on the Western landscape don’t pay more. In Wyoming, wildlife management is financed primarily through sales of hunting and fishing licenses, though state appropriations pay for wolf management.
“These environmental groups are using their money to drag us back to court,” Hockhalter says. “They don’t put their money where their mouth is.”
‘Social shifts take time’
Environmentalists should put money into wolf recovery, says Barbara Cozzens, a director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a nonprofit conservation group in Cody, Wyo. It would give them “skin in the game,” she says.
Cozzens, 43, moved to Cody two years ago. She’s an avid horsewoman and works a second job as a bartender, both of which help her credibility in this town of 10,000 located about an hour’s drive from Yellowstone’s east entrance. Cozzens says people are more likely to listen to a bartender than her alter ego – a Ph.D. who has spent 22 years in conservation work, mostly in Washington, D.C.
During her time in Cody, Cozzens has worked to find common ground with local politicians, ranchers and other residents. She learned the importance of rural communities’ buy-in when she worked for an arm of the World Bank, monitoring the social and environmental impacts of overseas development projects.
Without rural residents’ support, wolves won’t thrive in the long run, she says.
“For a long time, scientists didn’t really understand that,” Cozzens says. And based on the disparaging remarks in their email alerts, some national environmental groups still don’t, she says.
“I get really offended by the big organizations painting Wyoming as a redneck, bloodthirsty state,” Cozzens says.
Joe Tilden, a local county commissioner, praises Cozzens’ willingness to listen. Their views on wolves couldn’t be more different, but they’ve developed a mutual respect, Tilden says.
The Greater Yellowstone Coalition still has a number of problems with Wyoming’s wolf management plan, says Chris Colligan, the coalition’s wildlife program manager.
Still, the coalition opted not to become part of litigation. “We’re trying to change Wyoming’s plan from the inside out,” Colligan says.
It’s a long-term view, he acknowledges. But he says the kind of comments he hears from ranchers, outfitters and rural residents is gradually changing.
“They say, ‘Wolves are here to stay. We just need to learn how to manage them,’ ” Colligan says. Their version of management includes killing more wolves than his does, Colligan says, but it’s still a shift from all-out opposition to having wolves back on the landscape.
Could environmentalists, ranchers and outfitters ever find common ground on wolves?
“I hope so,” he says. “Wolves have been back for less than one (human) generation. These kinds of social shifts take time and they are hard to measure.”
GRAY WOLF TIMELINE
http://www.conservationnw.org/what-we-do/wildlife-habitat/gray-wolf/timeline-of-gray-wolf-protection
With a particular focus on wolves in Washington State, a brief timeline of the often tumultuous history of gray wolf protection as an endangered species in the West.
1973: Following decades of ongoing and near total extermination, gray wolves are listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in the lower 48.
March 1995: In what became a successful attempt to recover wolves, several dozen gray wolves were captured in Canada and reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park.
April 2003: Gray wolves throughout the eastern and western United States are downlisted from endangered to threatened . The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announces that it established three Distinct Population Segments (DPS) for the gray wolf, including "Northern Rocky Mountain" wolves.
Feb 2007: US Fish & Wildlife Service proposes to delist (and remove from ESA protection) the Northern Rocky Mountain wolf population, which includes Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and parts of northeastern Washington. If delisted, management of wolf populations would fall to the individual states.
July 6, 2007: The agency opens its original public comment period on the proposal to delist gray wolf in the Northern Rocky Mountains.
Feb 21, 2008: A final rule by US Fish & Wildlife Service delists Northern Rockies wolves, citing that “the wolf population in the Northern Rockies has far exceeded its recovery goal.”
Sept 15 - Dec 31, 2008: The state of Montana proposes a “wolf season” (a fall hunting season, followed by a December trapping season). Wyoming and Idaho propose similar wolf seasons.
April 2008: The Natural Resource Defense Council and eleven other wolf advocacy groups challenge the federal government’s decision to delist the wolf by filing for an injunction against the delisting.
June 2008: The Lookout Pack is documented by Conservation Northwest east of the North Cascades, the return of the first documented wolf pack in 70 years to Washington.
July 18, 2008: US District Judge Donald Malloy grants a preliminary injunction to place gray wolves under federal protection until the final ruling. His reasoning agrees with wolf biologists that genetic exchange among subpopulations of wolves is an unmet requirement and that the state management plans set to take over with delisting are inadequate. For example, people would be allowed to shoot wolves on sight in 88% of the state of Wyoming.
Oct 13, 2008: US Fish and Wildlife Service repeals the delisting because it is now obvious that they will lose in court. The litigation is rendered moot.
Oct 28, 2008: US Fish and Wildlife Service re-opens public comment, slated to last 30 days, until November 28. Defenders of Wildlife is successful in increasing the public comment period to 60 days.
Nov 28, 2008: The public comment period for wolf protection closes. A final rule on the delisting of Northern Rocky Mountain wolves is expected by mid-January 2009.
Jan 14, 2009: The Bush administration proposes to strip Northern Rockies wolves of their Endangered Species Act protections.
March 6, 2009: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announces that the US Fish and Wildlife Service follow the lead of the Bush administration and remove wolves in the Northern Rockies and Greater Yellowstone region from endangered species protections. Management now moves to individual states. What it means
Sept 2009: Idaho initiates a wolf hunt and season in its central and northern mountains.
Sept 9, 2009: A federal judge rules that gray wolf hunts in Montana and Idaho may continue, denying a request by conservationists and animal welfare groups to stop the first legal hunts in the lower 48 states in decades. Conservationists may still challenge the decision, on the grounds that the agency violated the Endangered Species Act by making its decision based on political boundaries.
Aug 2010: A court ruling reinstates Northern Rockies’ wolf protections, returning them to the Endangered Species list. U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy rules that the government's 2009 decision to delist wolves in Idaho and Montana was politically, not science, based.
2009: The state of Montana and others appeal Malloy's ruling.
Feb 2011: Legislators introduce Congressional bills that would reduce or strip protections from gray wolves.
March 18, 2011: Wildlife advocates and US Dept of Interior reach an agreement to lift protections in Idaho and Montana allowing hunting of wolves to resume there.
March 24, 2011: 10 conservation groups and the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) ask Judge Malloy to accept a settlement that would lift protections from wolves in Idaho and Montana, but maintain protections for wolves in Washington, Oregon, Wyoming and Utah, where populations are more vulnerable.
April 2011: The agreement falls through. Congress passed a legislative budget rider removing Northern Rockies wolves from Endangered Species Act protections. Included are wolves in Pend Oreille County and elsewhere in the eastern third of Washington State. A state recovery plan for wolves becomes more important than ever.
USFWS delists wolves in the northern Rocky Mountain distinct population segment, except in Wyoming. Wolf management is returned to the states of Idaho, Montana, the eastern one-third of Washington and Oregon, and a small portion of northcentral Utah.
July 2011: Two new packs are confirmed in Washington: in the Teanaway (Cascades) and nearSmackout (northeast Washington).
December 2011: The state Fish and Wildlife Commission approves a state plan for Washington's wolves.
Summer-fall 2012: A pilot range rider program begins on a ranch in northeast Washington, with funding support from Conservation Northwest.
July 2012: There are as many as 9 official packs of wolves in Washington, including the latest, the Wedge Pack.
August 2012: The Wedge Pack are removed entirely for livestock depredations on another ranch.
August 2012: Service declares Wyoming gray wolf recovered under the Endangered Species Act and returns management authority to the state
April 2013: US Fish and Wildlife Service considers eliminating protections for most wolves across the lower 48 states, including Cascades wolves.
June 2013: USFWS proposed to delist from federal protections all wolves in the lower 48. Comment deadline is September 11, 2013.
image via 24.media. tumblr~dot~com
MAP: Which States Hunt Wolves?
Hunting of Canis lupus is making a major comeback.
—By Jaeah Lee and Kiera Butler | Mon Oct. 1, 2012 3:00 AM PDT
MONTANAN HUNTER SPEAKS OUT
June 6~2013 by WolfPreservation
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“A friend of Footloose Montana, a hunter, rancher and 7th generation Montanan speaks out about trapping and ethics in hunting!
I grew up as a member of a 7 generation pioneer Montana ranching family. We were and still are outdoorsmen and spend every opportunity hiking, fishing and hunting in the Montana outdoors. Hunting was not done to acquire trophies to hang on the wall, or a rug to lay upon the floor, it was an opportunity to help supplement the family’s food larder through the winter Months. My grandfather, with whom I spent uncountable hours with in the forests taught me hunting ethics from the time I could fill a pair of boots and had the strength to keep up with him. As hunters, we followed strict personal rules when it came to taking an animal. Take no more than what was legal and no more than what our family could eat. We relied on our expertise in stalking and getting a close to the animal as possible, and if we could not take an animal cleanly, we passed it by. By cleanly, I mean as close as possible to an instant kill. Watching or having an animal suffer due to our poor hunting ability was unthinkable.
It is my belief that most hunters today still maintain those kinds of ethics as it applies to hunting. But there are a few that display conduct that shames the rest of us. These are what I refer to as Slob hunters, and these are the ones that portray the rest of us with a horrible image to the non-hunting population. The slob hunters are the ones that post stickers all over their trucks with slogans such as “Wolves, smoke a pack a day, or the only good wolf is a dead wolf, etc”. The slob hunters are the same type that knowingly put traps out where the contraption is more likely to capture a domestic animal or pet than it is likely to capture the trapper’s intended victim. These are the same guys that post their rantings and pictures of tortured, suffering animals all over Facebook for all to see. These are the same guys who show their lack of upbringing by waving their arms, making faces at Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks commissioner’s meetings while muttering loudly as someone with an opposing view presents their testimony. These are the same guys that who verbally attack others at meetings, within newspapers, or write sick comments on other people’s facebook pages trying to intimidate, all because someone may have a different outlook than their own.
The Slob hunters and trappers are the people that are the biggest threat to hunting in North America. It’s not the non-hunting communities, nor is it the Anti-hunters who threaten the future of hunting. The biggest threat to hunting over all is and will continue to be the slob hunters within the hunting community itself. The Slob hunters are the ones that tear down fences on private land, use Forest service signs and out houses for target practice. These are the guys that run their ATVs off designated roads and trails, tearing up the terrain, these are the guys that gut shoot a rancher’s cow, or horse that happens to be standing out in the middle of a field. These are the guys that feel they need to take semi-automatic rifles into the field with 30 round magazines, along with a few 12 packs of beer in the back seat. These are guys that leave their empty beer cans alongside road ways, or in camping areas for someone else to pick up.
So often I have heard, “Trapping is part of Montana’s heritage and tradition” and to that I must reply, “It may have been a part of our state’s history, but that does NOT mean it needs to be a part of our future!” I detest trapping in all forms, and those that utilize trapping for sport or profit. Sport? What Sport? Trapping, no matter how you look at it is nothing more than blatant cruelty that inflicts needless suffering upon an animal.
The hunting communities should best begin to realize that it’s NOT the non-hunting population or even the Anti-hunting communities that are the biggest threat to hunting in North America. It’s the Slob hunters and trappers within the hunting community itself that is the biggest threat to the hunting tradition.
I strongly believe the majority of the hunters today do care about and maintaining strong conservation values for the land as well as wildlife in general. They believe and follow certain ethics while hunting and the principle of “Fair Chase” is an example.
The Boone and Crocket club defined “Fair Chase” as the ethical, sportsman like, lawful pursuit and taking of any free-ranging wild animal in a manner that does not give the hunter an improper or unfair advantage over such game. Use of any of the following in the taking of game is considered UNFAIR chase:
* Spotting or herding game from the air, then landing, pursuing and shooting those animals
* Herding, pursuing or shooting game from a motor boat or motor vehicle
* Use of illegal electronic devices attracting, locating, or observing game, or for guiding hunters to such game
* Hunting game confined by fences, enclosures, or game transplanted solely for the purpose of commercial shooting
* Taking game illegally or using illegal methods against regulations of the Federal government or any state, province, territory, or tribal lands.
Personally I would add two more to Boone and Crocket’s list and that would be:
* Hunting and shooting of an animal over bait
* Hunting and killing of pregnant animals. What is ETHICAL about that??
We can thank the hunting communities, through their efforts, for the millions of acres of wilderness and wild lands set aside for wildlife. But the hunting community must realize that times are changing and the hunting communities alone can no longer fully support conservation. Our wild lands are constantly under attack by big money organizations, the oil, and livestock industries for example. America is losing its open lands and as the land goes, so does its wildlife. It is IMPERATIVE that both the hunting communities and the non-hunting communities work together and get politics as well as special interests out of our forests. There is absolutely no reason that either side should not be willing to sit down and work together to accomplish our basic mutual goal of preserving wild lands and wildlife for future generations to enjoy.
As I have attended many Fish, Wildlife and Park public and commissioner meetings, I note that the majority of speakers pushing for unethical practices come from the Trophy hunters, the Outfitter association, or domestic livestock associations. We cannot afford to allow these people to continue to dictate policy that will affect the future of our wildlife and wild lands. Its way past the time that Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks puts aside political agendas and begins to manage, and preserve ALL our wildlife as that department was originally tasked to do. Our future and hunting depends on it.
I support Footloose Montana and applaud this organization’s efforts to eliminate trapping upon public lands.
Thank you!
Steve Clevidence”
 |
| via wolveswolves.tumblr~dot~com |
By SEAN ELLIS
Capital Press
McCALL, Idaho -- Sheep and cattle producers and Idaho sportsmen are working on a plan to raise as much as $700,000 annually to help fund wolf control efforts.
Wildlife Services, a USDA agency that solves animal-human conflicts in Idaho, has seen its federal funding cut significantly in recent years.
Three bills that would have raised money to help fund Wildlife Services' predator control efforts failed in the 2013 Idaho Legislature.
Todd Grimm, the agency's state director, told Idaho Cattle Association members June 27 during their annual summer roundup that Wildlife Services' Idaho budget has been reduced from $2.64 million in 2010 to $1.9 million now "and it's headed the wrong way."
He said that reduction has resulted in his office reducing the number of field employees from 28 to 18 and airplane pilots from three to two. In addition, "I've got no money to fly helicopters," he added.
Cascade, Idaho, rancher Phil Davis told fellow ICA members that Wildlife Services plays a critical role in helping livestock producers limit wolf damage.
"As an industry, we have to have Wildlife Services funded," he said. "We are going to have to fund this ourselves because the money isn't going to come from anywhere else."
Gov. Butch Otter, a rancher, vetoed one of the three bills that would have raised money for predator control efforts because it dipped into a Fish and Game account and he feared it could divide livestock owners and sportsmen. But he tasked an Idaho Fish and Game advisory committee with finding a solution.
Dar Olberding, chairman of the committee, said sportsmen have agreed to match the livestock industry dollar for dollar on any additional funding they provide for Wildlife Services.
The group also plans to ask the Idaho Legislature for $400,000 in general fund money. The goal is to raise about $700,000, which would bump Wildlife Services' funding level back to where it was in 2010.
Idaho Wool Growers Association President Harry Soulen told ICA members that his group's board has recommended assessing wool growers an additional 2 cents for every pound of wool shorn, which would amount to about 50 cents for every sheep shorn and would raise about $24,000 toward the effort. Idaho's wool assessment is currently 3 cents.
Soulen, a member of the advisory committee, said industry would have a much easier time convincing legislators to provide general fund money for Wildlife Services "if you show them you have a lot of skin in the game and you put your own dollars in. This is a really good opportunity ... to parlay your money into some additional dollars."
ICA member Carl Ellsworth told fellow ranchers the association needs to hear their ideas on the issue so the group's general membership can decide on a proposal during their annual November meeting.
"We need to step up ... and we need to put some money in the game," he said. "We need to get a feeling about ... how much we are willing to spend.
wolveswolves.tumblr~dot~com
72 Members of Congress Urge U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to Delist the Gray Wolf From the Endangered Species Act
image via funnywildlife.tumblr~dot~com
Mar 25 2013
A bipartisan group of 72 Members of Congress have written to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to urge that the Agency delist the gray wolf from the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in the Continental United States. The letter was spearheaded by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and John Barrasso (R-WY), and Reps. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Doc Hastings (R-WA), Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee.
In the letter, the Members of Congress write that “[w]olves are not an endangered species and do not merit federal protections. The full delisting of the species and the return of the management of wolf populations to State governments is long overdue. As you know, State governments are fully qualified to responsibly manage wolf populations and are able to meet both the needs of local communities and wildlife populations.”
The lawmakers added that an unmanaged wolf population poses a threat to the communities and surrounding livestock and indigenous wildlife, but that “currently State wildlife officials have their hands tied any time wolves are involved.” They add that State wildlife managers “need to be able to respond to the needs of their native wildlife without being burdened by the impediments of the federal bureaucracy created by the ESA.”
In addition to Hatch and Barrasso, Senators signing the letter were Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX), Mike Crapo (R-ID), Mike Enzi (R-WY), Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), Dean Heller (R-NV), Mike Lee (R-UT), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), James Risch (R-ID), John Thune (R-ND), and David Vitter (R-LA).
Members of the House signing the letter in addition to Lummis and Hastings were Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Dan Benishek (R-MI), Rob Bishop (R-UT), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Kevin Brady (R-TX), Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), Howard Coble (R-NC), Tom Cole (R-OK), Mike Conaway (R-TX), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Steven Daines (R-MT), Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Jeff Duncan (R-SC), Stephen Fincher (R-TN), Bob Gibbs (R-OH), Sam Graves (R-MO), Bill Huizenga (R-MI), Duncan Hunter (R-CA), Bill Johnson (R-OH), Steve King (R-IA), John Kline (R-MN), Doug Lamalfa (R-CA), Bob Latta (R-OH), Blayne Luetkemeyer (R-MO), Kenny Marchant (R-TX), Jim Matheson (D-UT), Patrick McHenry (R-NC), Candice Miller (R-MI), Jeff Miller (R-FL), Mick Mulvaney (R-SC), Randy Neugebauer (R-TX), Kristi Noem (R-SD), Alan Nunnelee (R-MS), Steve Palazzo (R-MS), Collin Peterson (D-MN), Mike Pompeo (R-KS), Jim Renacci (R-OH), Reid Ribble (R-WI), Dennis Ross (R-FL), Paul Ryan (R-WI), Steve Scalise (R-LA), David Schweikert (R-AZ), Austin Scott (R-GA), Pete Sessions (R-TX), Terri Sewell (D-AL), Adrian Smith (R-NE), Steve Southerland (R-FL), Chris Stewart (R-UT), Steve Stivers (R-OH), Steve Stockman (R-TX), Marlin Stutzman (R-TX), Glenn Thompson (R-PA), Tim Walz (D-MN), Randy Weber (R-TX), Lynn Westmoreland (GA), Rob Wittman (R-VA), Don Young (R-AK).
To view a signed copy of the letter, click HERE. The full text of the letter is below:
The Honorable Dan Ashe
Director
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
1849 C Street, NW
Washington, DC 20240
Dear Director Ashe:
We understand the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is in the process of reviewing the Endangered Species Act (ESA) recovery status of the gray wolf in the lower 48 States and is preparing to announce the delisting of the species. We support the nationwide delisting of wolves and urge you to move as quickly as possible on making this a reality. We were supportive of the USFWS decision in 2009 when most wolves were delisted in the Northern Rocky Mountains, again in 2011 when wolves in the Great Lake States were delisted, and the 2012 delisting in Wyoming. It is unfortunate that these decisions were met with lawsuits from environmental activists.
Wolves are not an endangered species and do not merit federal protections. The full delisting of the species and the return of the management of wolf populations to State governments is long overdue. As you know, State governments are fully qualified to responsibly manage wolf populations and are able to meet both the needs of local communities and wildlife populations.
Unmanaged wolves are devastating to livestock and indigenous wildlife. Currently State wildlife officials have their hands tied any time wolves are involved. They need to be able to respond to the needs of their native wildlife without being burdened by the impediments of the federal bureaucracy created by the ESA. During the four decades that wolves have had ESA protections, there has been an uncontrolled and unmanaged growth of wolf populations resulting in devastating impacts on hunting and ranching in America as well as tragic damages to historically strong and healthy herds of moose, elk, big horn sheep, and mule deer.
As you consider these much needed changes to federal protections with regard to the gray wolf, we urge you to expand the delisting of the species to all of the lower 48 states. It is critical that the states be given the ability to properly manage all of the species within their boundaries.
Sincerely,
Permalink: http://www.hatch.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2013/3/72-members-of-congress-urge-u-s-fish-and-wildlife-service-to-delist-the-gray-wolf-from-the-endangered-species-act
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| Courtesy Freda Dominy ~Friends of Wolves https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=445111478913810&set=o.115604017540&type=3&theater |
ENDANGERED SPECIES:
How close is close enough for gray wolf recovery?
It's Interior's call
Phil Taylor, E&E reporter
Greenwire: Tuesday, June 4, 2013
The Obama administration is expected to decide soon whether to maintain federal protection for wolves in the lower 48 states, a decision it says will be based on science but which depends largely on how much recovery is enough for the iconic species -- a question science is loath to answer.
In a draft rule leaked months ago, the Interior Department proposed removing Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves everywhere except a small pocket in New Mexico and Arizona, arguing that wolves have mounted a successful recovery in the northern Rockies and western Great Lakes, where they had been nearly extirpated in the early 1900s.
In the past two years, the species was removed from the endangered species list in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, where wolves number nearly 1,700, and Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, where there are more than 4,000 of the animals.
But removing protections in the remaining 42 states has sparked a backlash from environmental groups and some biologists, who argue that the carnivore has yet to return to many parts of the country where it still belongs.
The male wolf known as "OR7" in December 2011 became the first in nearly a century to enter California. Wildlife advocates say wolves could recolonize parts of the state if federal protections are maintained, but livestock groups and hunters say the species' recovery is complete. Photo courtesy of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Amid the blowback, the administration told a federal court in late May that its decision had been indefinitely delayed, a move that raised hope among environmentalists that newly confirmed Interior Secretary Sally Jewell was considering shelving the rule.
But that optimism has faded, according to Don Barry, executive vice president at Defenders of Wildlife, who said yesterday he believes the White House has given Interior the green light to officially propose the delisting.
An announcement could come as soon as this week, he said.
Delisting wolves would turn over management to the states, relieving the agency of much of the political burden of balancing wolves with people. It would effectively end two decades of federal recovery efforts, save for a small recovery program in the Southwest.
"The Fish and Wildlife Service is just tired of this thing and ready to wash their hands of it," said Barry, a former FWS attorney who served as assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks in the Clinton administration. "From our perspective, this is declaring victory prematurely."
While wolves have made a swift comeback in the United States since their reintroduction in the 1990s into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho, wildlife advocates say wolves still need federal protection to recolonize suitable habitat in the southern Rockies, the Pacific Northwest, California and the Northeast.
Barry said environmental groups were hopeful that Jewell would chart a new course from her predecessor, Ken Salazar, whose hand was forced by Congress to delist wolves in Montana and Idaho.
Instead, Jewell appears to have backed the plan, having met with Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber (D) in late May to lobby for his support, Barry said.
Hunters, ranching groups and states are backing the delisting plan, arguing that wolves are fully recovered and that state wildlife agencies are best equipped to prevent the animals from preying on livestock or big-game species like elk and moose.
"The delisting would give state agents more flexibility to deal with problem wolves," said Jack Field, executive vice president of the Washington Cattlemen's Association. As wolves expand farther west into the state, "we're going to have more conflict. There is no doubt about that."
There's no question that wolves have exceeded recovery plans where they exist -- by more than threefold in the case of the northern Rockies. While disagreement remains over what levels of wolf hunts are sustainable, few believe the species is anywhere near risk of extinction.
The Fish and Wildlife Service must now decide how much wolf recovery is enough, a decision that carries high political stakes.
Scores of lawmakers from both parties have tried to sway the agency in recent months, with Democrats pushing continued federal protections and Republicans favoring state control.
How much of the species' historic range -- which includes Maine and New Hampshire, Colorado's Rocky Mountains, and the Coast and Cascade ranges of the Pacific Northwest -- must be inhabited before the wolf can be considered fully recovered?
Science can't easily answer that question, said Keith Rizzardi, an Endangered Species Act attorney who served in the Department of Justice during the George W. Bush administration.
"This is a values contest, not a science contest," he said.
Protections 'far more expansive' than necessary -- FWS
Once common across the West, wolves were hunted nearly to extinction.
From 1827 to 1859, more than 7,700 wolf pelts were traded in the Cascades of Washington state and British Columbia. Provisional governments in the region authorized bounty hunters, known as "wolfers," to poison large numbers of wolves using strychnine, and Congress in 1915 authorized the extirpation of wolves and other animals that threatened domestic livestock.
While wolf recovery in the northern Rockies was relatively swift, the species has grabbed only a toehold in Washington, Oregon and California and barely sniffed potential habitat in Colorado and Utah.
Still, federal biologists never intended for wolves to reoccupy all of their historic range, FWS said in its draft plan. With the exception of the Southwest, recovery goals have been met.
Wolves were granted blanket protections in 1978 "as an approach of convenience ... rather than an indication of where gray wolves existed or where gray wolf recovery would occur," the draft said.
For example, the gray wolf never lived in parts of the mid-Atlantic and Southeast where it is currently protected, and large parts of the Midwest and Great Plains lack suitable habitat for recovery, it said. In addition, wolves in the Northeast are a distinct population from gray wolves that has long been extirpated and therefore doesn't qualify for federal protections, the agency said.
"The current amorphous listing does not reflect what is necessary or appropriate for wolf recovery under the Act," the draft reads. "It is far more expansive than what we envision for wolf recovery, what is necessary for wolf recovery, and even what is possible for wolf recovery in the contiguous United States and Mexico."
While the draft delisting rule acknowledged that wolves are quickly dispersing into Washington and Oregon, it said those wolves are neither "discrete" from their kin in the northern Rockies and British Columbia nor "significant" enough to warrant protection.
"Rather they constitute the expanding front of large, robust, and recovered wolf populations to the north and east," the agency said. "We are confident that wolves will continue to recolonize the Pacific Northwest regardless of federal protection."
Wolves are currently protected by state endangered species laws in Washington, Oregon and California, the agency noted.
Interior officials have declined to discuss the draft, but they have not denied its authenticity.
"I really have nothing to report at this point on wolves," Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe told Greenwire last week, adding that there is no time frame for a decision.
"There's been no decision to pull back on any proposal," he said. "There has been no such decision."
FWS spokesman Chris Tollefson said yesterday that the robust populations of northern Rockies and Great Lakes wolves reflect "a recovery that is one of the world's great conservation successes."
"Building upon this success, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service continues to evaluate the appropriate management status of the gray wolf under the Endangered Species Act outside of these recovered population areas, using the latest scientific and taxonomic information," he said. "The draft proposal is clearly a matter that is still under internal review and discussion, and therefore, it is inappropriate for the service to comment at this time."
'Museum approach to conservation'
State protections for wolves can fall victim to the whims of state politics, Barry warned.
He pointed to the example of Montana, where lawmakers in Helena this year passed a bill prohibiting the state's Fish, Wildlife and Parks agency from establishing buffer zones for hunting wolves along the border of Yellowstone National Park, which is home to valuable research packs.
Hunting and trapping in the northern Rockies led to a 7 percent decline in wolf populations in 2012, a drop that did not concern federal officials (Greenwire, April 15).
"All of a sudden, you have this rush by conservative politicians at the state level to show who's more anti-wolf than the next guy," he said.
Moreover, Barry said federal scientists in the past have waited much longer to delist other endangered species, including the bald eagle and American alligator, so that they could inhabit a larger portion of their historic range.
"You've got excellent habitat throughout the West," he said, pointing to places like Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, where he argued wolves would help restore balance to prey species like elk, which currently lack predators.
In the Yellowstone area, wolves have prevented elk herds from overgrazing native plants, leading to regrowth of tree species and songbirds. They are also a prime tourist attraction at the park, generating an estimated $35 million in annual tourism revenue, Defenders of Wildlife said.
Daniel Rohlf, a professor at the Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, called FWS's decision to recover wolves only in a small portion of their historic range "a museum approach to conservation."
"Buy a ticket, get a passport," if you want to see an endangered species, he said. "As long as Fish and Wildlife Service says the wolf is here and unlikely to become extinct in the foreseeable future, we can call it good."
Without federal protection in the Pacific Northwest, wolves would only exist under "the good graces of the states of Oregon and Washington," he said.
Rohlf noted that the first purpose of ESA was "to provide a means whereby the ecosystems upon which endangered species and threatened species depend may be conserved." But he said FWS has not considered wolves' contribution to the landscape.
Jewell 'not tone-deaf'
Noah Greenwald, endangered species director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said he believes the Obama administration is taking a second look at the delisting plan.
He said the Department of Justice, which is litigating a related lawsuit involving Mexican wolves, is "totally befuddled" over the administration's next move.
He said Interior has received hundreds of thousands of comments opposing the delisting since it was first proposed.
"I think Secretary Salazar was tone-deaf," Greenwald said. "It seems that Secretary Jewell may not be tone-deaf."
In a message to supporters last week, CBD said the agency had "yanked" its plan to delist wolves and urged readers to "mobilize as many people as possible, as fast as possible to convince the new Secretary of the Interior, Sally Jewell, to do the right thing."
"We're reading between the lines a bit here," Greenwald said. "All signals point to this being Jewell listening to all of the opposition to this rule and pulling the plug. We've heard as much from at least one inside source, but true that we don't have official confirmation of such."
But those who support the wolf delisting are calling on Jewell to quickly issue the draft rule.
We "encourage Secretary Jewell to act without delay to remove federal 'protection' of gray wolves nationwide under the Endangered Species Act," said Dustin Van Liew, executive director of the Public Lands Council and director of federal lands for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. "It remains well-documented that the states and on-the-ground managers are the most successful at managing wildlife -- not the federal government."
Anna Seidman, director of litigation for Safari Club International, whose members hunt wolves, said wolves have recovered where there is viable habitat.
"The endangered species list was not designed to be a forever place," she said.
The Fish and Wildlife Service said there are an estimated 10,000 wolves in Alaska and about 160,000 wolves globally, including populations in Russia, Europe and portions of North Africa. The International Union for Conservation of Nature calls wolves a species of "least concern" globally.
Barry said that's no reason not to protect wolves in the United States. If it were, the United States never would have protected grizzlies or bald eagles, which are prevalent elsewhere, he said.
Field, of the Washington cattlemen's group, said a delisting in his state would give the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife the flexibility it needs to manage wolves consistently throughout the state.
Federal protection was lifted in the eastern third of the state -- which contains two wolf packs -- but not in the western two-thirds, where only straggler wolves have been reported.
Washington state in April passed an emergency rule allowing ranchers, farmers and other pet and livestock owners to kill wolves they see attacking their animals. But "right now, we're only able to remove problem wolves in the eastern third of the state," he said.
Moreover, Washington state has adopted a bold recovery plan for wolves -- it must maintain 15 breeding pairs for at least three years to lift state protections -- meaning protections will remain when, and if, the federal government delists the wolf, he said.
The state's plan compares favorably to the federal government's recovery goals in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, which called for 10 breeding pairs in each state.
No packs have been observed in the federally listed areas of Oregon or California, FWS said.
Reporter John McArdle contributed.
http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059982240
Readers howling mad at wolf-hunting bill
Wisconsin Action! Wolves of Douglas County Wisconsin has alerted us that Senator Fred Risser has formally requested that SB93, banning dogs from the WI wolf hunt, get hearing a before the Senate Natural Resources Committee. Please call your WI Senators and urge their support of SB93. Please sign this important petition: http://bit.ly/17gopnB
Bill S. 170: Recreational Fishing and Hunting Heritage and Opportunities Act
Sponsored by Lisa Murkowski - R, AK
Just today, on 23 April 2013
Senator John Thune - R, SD; was added as another Cosponsor to see this Bill get passed.
To recognize the heritage of recreational fishing, hunting, and recreational shooting on Federal public land and ensure continued opportunities for those activities.
(2) HUNTING-
(A) IN GENERAL- Except as provided in subparagraph (B), the term ‘hunting’ means use of a firearm, bow, or other authorized means in the lawful--
Comments
Permalink
(i) pursuit, shooting, capture, collection, trapping, or killing of wildlife; or
(ii) attempt to pursue, shoot, capture, collect, trap, or kill wildlife.
Basically, here, they are trying to expand where and when they can hunt, and have it written that this is their "heritage"
All of these Senators are members of the Political Hunters group
the Congressional Sportsmen's Foundation
Full Text here:
Great resource and essential for keeping up the fight against the relentless and senseless injustice against one of the most iconic animals in the American landscape. . As a European I know that not only is the destruction of wolves by trapping etc cruel but it also leads to other problems. . 'Pest' predators and deer etc are now at a high level, brutal efforts to control this have failed with horrific consequences of poisoning and hunting , the wolves are part of a delicately honed system, the earth as fine tuned as a watch and this interference is like dropping it into a fishtank
ReplyDeleteThank you! You may wish to see this 4 part series about the function that wolves as apex predator play in the ecosystem. It clearly explains trophic cascade, and what happens when the predators are extirpated.
DeleteLord of Nature ~Life in a land of great predators
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dclyi_pCpcg
Lord of Nature ~ Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcbZj6pYIUc
Lord of Nature ~ Part 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDj_7vRRBFA
Lord of Nature ~ Part 4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-cHTkOlFKs