Wyoming, Frontline in the New War
on Wolves
First published in the
on Wolves
First published in the
“The death of any predator is disturbing.”
Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born
Last year marked the fortieth anniversary of one of the most radically progressive and altruistic attainments in human history, the Endangered Species Act (ESA), signed into law in 1973 by Richard Nixon, who noted that “Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed.” The ESA provides the federal government with the means of assessing the ecological status of the nation’s wildlife and prohibits the “take” of any Threatened (a species “which is likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future”) or Endangered (a species “which is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range”) organism; under the ESA “The term ‘take’ means to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct.”
Given the deadly effectiveness of the predator eradications during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which had effectively rendered the species defunct in the lower 48, upon the ESA’s passage the gray wolf (Canis lupus) was immediately recognized as deserving of full protection and was listed as Endangered in 1974. As the ESA’s explicit purpose is to recover imperiled species in the wild, the chief agency implementing the Act, the US Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS), began in 1995 to transplant a handful of Canadian wolves to former wolf habitat in Idaho and Yellowstone National Park, ninety-six percent of which lies in Wyoming, where for half a century this top predator had been absent. (Montana was also considered before a small population was discovered already established in Glacier National Park.) Under pressure from Western lawmakers, these animals were classified under Section 10(j) of the ESA as “experimental and nonessential,” meaning they could be removed without violation of the Act should their presence prove untenable for nonscientific, economic or political reasons.
The results were remarkable. Within a few years a trophic cascade of ecological corrections had run its course throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Without their major predator, herds of elk had grown unnaturally large and had adopted a more relaxed, lingering grazing pattern along riverbanks, suppressing the growth of willows that retain streamside soils and prevent erosion. With the uncanny howls of their former foe again echoing in their ears the elk reclaimed their former habit of quick visits to wooded, ambush-prone riversides and a prompt retreat back to more open areas. Maturing willows and aspens along waterways provided welcome forage for another keystone species, the beaver, whose dams rapidly undid the ruinous “stream incision” or channelization that suppression of woody growth had encouraged.
The wolves’ success as hunters was immediately felt and appreciated by their sometime competitor the grizzly bear, which when alerted to a wolf kill by the raucous din of scavenging ravens would amble over and with their inimitable bulk simply appropriate the prey, thus contributing to the bears’ survival rate when food sources were scarce. The supremely adaptable coyote, whose lessened dependence on elaborate social groupings and more generalized feeding habits had allowed it to survive the predator pogroms, had in the absence of their feared superiors become the top dogs in Yellowstone, forming loose packs and hunting bigger game than they had evolved with. With the wolf’s return the coyote was quickly downsized – sometimes through wolves digging up their dens and killing coyote pups – to its proper place as a solitary pursuer of rabbits and rodents.
The success of the Yellowstone reintroduction was widely reported in the national media and celebrated as an early milestone in “rewilding” those few areas of the country not yet converted to farms and cities. Images of frisky wolf pups and of hunting packs striding powerfully through montane snowfields excited a generation of Americans whose experience of wolves was practically nonexistent outside of television and fairy tales. The Yellowstone wolves were affirmative proof that the ESA really worked when properly implemented; it furthermore demonstrated that, almost incredibly, there still endured sufficient unimpeded wilderness in the continental US to allow for this far-ranging alpha predator to survive and thrive. The slowly multiplying packs expanded their range as the succeeding generations of wolves began to disperse, following the elk herds on their seasonal migration southward out of Yellowstone and into the Tetons and the Jackson Hole area. And that’s when the trouble began.
~
Just eight years after the Yellowstone reintroductions the USFWS reclassified the gray wolf under the ESA as Threatened, downgrading its federal protective status, and began planning the wholesale removal of the “recovered” Northern Rockies populations from the ESA altogether, devolving wolf management to the relevant states which under law would have to devise and adopt management plans that would ensure the maintenance of minimum sustainable populations.
A series of costly legal losses to wildlife advocates in federal court, who had sued to require state management plans that would assertively sustain the recovery of wolves in the wild, coupled with the unwelcome attention and rampant emotions seemingly unique to this species, had convinced the USFWS to get out of the wolf business once and for all, beginning with the three states of the Northern Rockies. In 2004 the agency approved the transference of wolf management to Idaho and Montana, whose superior habitat had paid off in growing populations, but the proposed plan for arid Wyoming, a state with poorer overall habitat whose smaller population is much more genetically isolated and therefore vulnerable, was rejected as inadequately protective.
Joined by 28 livestock and hunting advocate groups, Wyoming promptly filed an ultimately unsuccessful legal action to compel delisting, and the next year a federal judge ruled the USFWS’s decision to reclassify gray wolves from Endangered to Threatened was itself invalid under the ESA. Tensions were mounting when in 2006 the USFWS declared that it would remove all Northern Rockies populations of the gray wolf from the ESA entirely but only if Wyoming could piece together a management plan that realistically ensured the survival of the species over time. Time passed, and with it the political pressure on USFWS administrators to deliver the gray wolf to the management the Western state legislatures.
In early 2007 the agency announced that it was delisting the Northern Rockies wolves en masse, though in the continued absence of an acceptable management plan from Wyoming a considerable portion of that population would for the moment remain protected. Then in December the agency abruptly announced that it would after all accept Wyoming’s flawed plan, which allowed for managed wolf hunting by state permit in a “trophy zone” in the northwest corner of the state bordering Yellowstone, while in the adjacent “predator zone” – comprising 90 percent of the entire state – wolves could be killed by any means, at any time, by anyone.
In early 2008 the USFWS with a near audible sigh of relief relegated wolf management throughout the Northern Rockies to the state game agencies, washing their hands at last of a problem that was accumulating an uncomfortable amount of media attention. Peace at last, or so it was thought. That spring, the environmental law organization Earthjustice filed suit claiming that the state’s plans were inadequate to fulfill the legal requirements of the ESA, in response to which a federal court again reinstated protections just before the planned wolf-hunting seasons were to begin. With a new and presumably more environmentally aware administration taking office in the new year, there was widespread relief among wildlife advocates that the wolf wars had at last come to a happy end.
Enter the new Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, a former rancher and Democratic Senator from Colorado. Just two months into the Obama Administration’s first term, Salazar confirmed that wolves in Idaho, Montana, and now parts of Washington, Oregon, Utah and the Great Lakes would after all be removed from ESA protections. This time, while noting the doubtful legal merit of the agency’s wholesale delivery of wolf management to the states, the courts sided with the USFWS and nearly 260 wolves were killed by hunters in Idaho and Montana.
In the summer of 2010, US District Judge Donald Molloy reinstated ESA protections yet again, not because he viewed the Montana and Idaho plans as being incompatible with wolf recovery but because the Act required that protections for the species had to be uniform across the affected states. Doubtless exhausted by the seesawing legal environment and the bitter controversy that wolf management had become mired in, the USFWS was looking for a permanent solution to rid themselves forever of this troublesome responsibility, and on April 15, 2011, the agency bureaucrats found themselves with a gift from heaven. Tacked on to the immense and infallible Defense Appropriations Bill was a rider directing Secretary Salazar to remove wolves from federal protection in Montana and Idaho, an order upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the first instance of the United States Congress, a body not renowned for its scientific acumen, legislatively delisting a protected species.
With momentum in its favor the USFWS then announced that Wyoming’s management plan was indeed adequate for all intents and purposes to perpetuate wolves over the foreseeable future, even though a peer-reviewed scientific analysis of the plan, commissioned by USFWS, had found “substantial risk” to the state’s wolf population due to a lack of statutory authority assuring continued recovery. Legal interventions were defeated and on August 31, 2012, Wyoming assumed complete management authority for its wolves, then estimated at 328 animals statewide. The next day, what had been a strictly protected species of charismatic megafauna, one of the signature accomplishments of the modern conservation movement and an icon of American wilderness, could be shot, trapped, or simply run over across 90 percent of the state.
Its greatest exasperation at last almost off its shoulders, in the summer of 2013 the USFWS proposed removing gray wolves (except for the critically endangered Mexican subspecies) from the entire lower 48. The agency based its scientific justification for doing so on a single controversial paper published by four USFWS employees in a USFWS journal called North American Fauna – out of print since 1991 and apparently resurrected solely to disseminate this document – which claimed that Canis lupus was actually two species: the recovering one in the Northern Rockies, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, and a new eastern species dubbed “Canis lycaeon” formerly native to and now conveniently extinct east of the Mississippi.
This splitting of C. lupus into two species was merely “a taxonomical slight of hand,” according to Dr. Robert Wayne of the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, one that would have relieved the USFWS of considering 22 eastern states as being within the historic range of the species, thus making it easier to point to the improving Rocky Mountain and Great Lakes populations as the end of federal responsibility. The proposal to delist wolves throughout the continental US was challenged by Earthjustice and other wolf advocates for allowing political pressure to smother good science, and is now under review by the US District Court for the District of Columbia. On February 7 2014, an independent scientific peer review slammed the USFWS delisting proposal for overreliance on a doubtful analysis (the C. lycaeon paper) and a general failure to use the “best available science” as mandated by the ESA, a fatal flaw that, legally and scientifically, should stop the delisting process in its tracks. But the saga of the gray wolf in America has never been confined to what is merely legal or logical.
~
The primary justification for Wyoming’s wolf hunt is economic: wolves are blamed for livestock depredations in a state and region that is still emotionally and economically invested in the teetering myth of the independent cowboy, despite the fact that many ranchers make sometimes exclusive use of public lands and insist that representatives of the USDA’s Wildlife Services agency employ any number of methods – including per the USDA website “capture, take or relocation methods (trapping, snaring, shooting, and the use of chemical products and immobilization and euthanasia drugs),” to remove or kill offending predators. And indeed, Wyoming ranked fifteenth in the nation for beef production, with around 695,000 cattle raised in 2011, the year the wolf hunt began. But the number of dead livestock positively attributable to wolves has been, at the worst, marginal. According to the USDA, in 2010, when wolves still enjoyed ESA protection but could be killed by ranchers or federal agents for livestock depredation, predators – the great majority of which were coyotes and domestic dogs – killed just 5.5 percent of cattle nationwide. Wolves in the continental US were blamed for only 3.7 percent of this segment, considerably less than dogs or even vultures and infinitely less than the respiratory diseases that killed over a million cattle that year. Unlike most states, Wyoming has waived its immunity from liability for damages inflicted on livestock by native carnivores, and its Game & Fish Commission provides monetary compensation to ranchers with verifiable losses to predators. In an early attempt to deflect anti-wolf sentiment, the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife initiated a private livestock compensation program that similarly reimbursed all producers who had confirmed wolf-caused losses, a program that paid $1,368,043 to livestock producers in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming between 1987 and 2009.
Occasional losses of livestock don’t need to be handled with rifles, leg-hold traps or cyanide mines. Nonlethal forms of addressing depredation have been successfully implemented with Oregon’s nascent wolf population, now up to 64 animals. There, a lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity based on the state’s killing wolves contrary to its own endangered species statute resulted in a lengthy moratorium while the case was pending, during which time nonlethal methods – shepherd dogs, fencing, reducing attractants, actually riding the range (like cowboys) – where put into place that resulted in a net loss of depredations even while the wolf population grew in size.
The second reason for an intensive wolf hunt is the perceived reduction of trophy game animals such as elk, deer and moose. According to Dr. Douglas Smith, leader of Yellowstone National Park’s Gray Wolf Restoration Project, until 1968 Yellowstone actually had to kill or relocate about 77,000 of its excess elk to prevent severe damage to riverine woody growth; there simply weren’t enough predators prevent overpopulation (a healthy predator population keeps prey species below their maximum carrying capacity, which keeps calf mortality and disease in check). With the reintroduction of wolves and a concomitant expansion of grizzly numbers Yellowstone’s bloated elk population decreased by around sixty-five percent, and it was this sudden vanishment of a largess that since the wolf purges had been taken for granted that helped turn some hunters against the resurgent wolves.
Wolves in the Rockies and Great Lakes have once again asserted their role as top predators, pruning the herbivores of their old, sick, injured, and unprotected young through a careful calculation of the costs and benefits of any hunt, a decision typically left to the veteran alpha members of the pack. The trophy bulls that are the chief concern of certain hunting interests – those males with the largest, most impressive rack of antlers – are if not infirmed by age necessarily the healthiest and strongest components of the herd, and anyone who has viewed a cantankerous 1,500-pound bull moose standing seven feet at the shoulder will understand the reluctance of any predator to challenge it.
Jason Williams runs the second-largest ecotourism business in Jackson Hole. He says that as consumptive wildlife uses such as hunting and fishing continue to decline nationally, non-consumptive uses, particularly wildlife viewing, is increasing rapidly. According to a 2011 USFWS census, 37.4 million Americans hunted or fished that year while 71.8 million identified themselves as wildlife watchers (and contributed $54.9 billion to the economy). Williams says that three years ago his clients would have the opportunity to view wolves on about half of his trips – quite an accomplishment with such a reclusive and often nocturnal animal. He describes his successes as practically equal to Yellowstone’s famous wolf tours and was “one season away” from offering clients a tour focusing strictly on observing wolves, which he says was far and away the species tourists were most interested in. With Wyoming’s hunting season, “the wolves’ behavior changed overnight,” he says, and his sightings went from frequent to absolutely none. The wolves weren’t all killed, or course; these canny survivors had simply relearned, with the first gunshot, what their recent ancestors had known all too well. But for entrepreneurs like Williams, and for the four million tourists visiting the Jackson Hole/Yellowstone region annually, one of the area’s most popular draws had disappeared, along with the incentive to spend money on seeing it.
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As it currently stands with the blessing of the USFWS, Wyoming’s wolf management plan requires the maintenance of a 100 x 10 ratio, that is 100 wolves in the state, not including Yellowstone National Park or the Wind River Shoshone/Northern Arapahoe Reservation, with ten confirmed breeding pairs. A “buffer” against this minimum required population, loosely defined by state biologists as an additional 50 wolves and five breeding pairs to be provided, according to Ken Mills of Wyoming Game & Fish, by the aforesaid federal lands. But the buffer is not a legal requirement of the state’s management plan; Wyoming can take the population down to the bare minimum and remain within the law, and it is this haphazard handoff by the USFWS of an invaluable public resource to “the most extreme elements” of Wyoming’s body politic that most energizes Timothy Preso, managing attorney of Earthjustice’s office in Bozeman, Montana. With 90 percent of the state a shoot-on-sight, Mad Max-style killing floor, and the remaining fraction a “trophy zone” where wolves are being managed but still seasonally hunted and where citizens may shoot wolves for ambiguous reasons such as “harassment” and “defense of property,” while ranchers or USDA agents can always kill them for livestock depredation, there is literally no place in Wyoming where wolves are not subject to killing outside of Yellowstone.
Preso says this “dual classification” zoning system, unique to Wyoming, along with the lack of a buffer to support the minimum required numbers of this isolated population and such bizarre interpretations of the ESA as to allow wolves to be tranquilized and trucked (“translocated”) from place to place to encourage genetic exchange in case dispersing wolves failed to survive the gauntlet using natural migratory routes, that is at the heart of his case against the Wyoming plan. “There is huge pressure on the ‘trophy zone’ to maintain a viable population without a legal safety net,” Preso says. Reestablishing wolves was “a huge and successful effort by the American taxpayer,” one that has been sacrificed to extremists who may use any means not already illegal, like certain poisons, to persecute wolves. “They can dynamite pups in their dens, run them over with snowmobiles, shoot them, trap them … there’s not a rational discussion underlying the management of wolves in Wyoming. They’re such a symbol of different things. To some people they epitomize wilderness and freedom; to others they’re pure evil, even somehow scapegoats for dislike of the federal government.”
“Wolves carry a lot of political baggage,” agrees Dr. Carlos Carroll, Director of the Klamath Center for Conservation Research and a participant in the highly critical scientific peer review of the federal delisting proposal (and the public has until March 27 to comment). Carroll specifically cites Wyoming’s “predator zone” and the use of translocation for genetic exchange as dangerous precedents that if allowed to stand will essentially mean the undoing of the ESA. And this seems to get to the heart of the delisting saga: from an agency weary of performing its statutory duties in a demanding political climate we are now confronted with an apparent abandonment through bureaucratic subterfuge of the very essence of the country’s premier safeguard against extinction.
At the close of 2013 several respected biologists published a paper in the journal Conservation Letters lambasting the USFWS delisting proposal in no uncertain terms, particularly its constricting of the natural range of a listed species to that which it currently occupies rather than its historic range; in the case of the gray wolf’s shrunken and scattered population this is a minute fragment of its original habitat. Even more brazen was the agency’s notion that the huge swaths of the wolf’s natural range were “unsuitable habitat,” not because of environmental conditions but because of an alleged antipathy by people there toward wolves, a claim the researchers say “entirely ignores a significant body of scientific knowledge that suggests otherwise.”
These two unsubtle revisions alone, concocted in contempt for the public trust, the law, and its own exceptional and honorable biologists, are demonstrative of the depths the USFWS officialdom is willing to sink to rid itself of wolf management. Acceptance of the delisting proposal as written would leave the ESA’s congressional charge to protect and restore species in the wild a sickly shadow of itself, if not a mockery of legislative intent. Meanwhile, while bureaucrats vacillate, academicians pontificate and legislators fume and threaten, hunters and trappers have killed nearly 2,600 gray wolves in the contiguous United States since 2011.
~
Years ago, between college and graduate school, I was employed as an interpretive ranger at Bryce Canyon National Park in southwest Utah. One of the several tours we were charged with providing took visitors down to the bottom of a precipitous canyon at night, guided only by the vibrant stars. On my last of these nocturnal rambles before I departed for the master's program I brought with me a “boom box” and a cassette recording of wolves howling that I’d borrowed from the park gift store. When the dozen or so tourists from all over the country and beyond were comfortably assembled on the canyon floor among the standing hoodoo formations and spangled starlight, I concluded my usual lecture about the area’s natural and human history with a few words about wolves, a general recitation of their feeding and reproductive habits, their social structure, their former range, their role in a fully alive ecosystem, and, at the time, their imminent return to Yellowstone. I too spoke of the vicious persecution of wolves that had been brought over like a deathly shroud from the Old World, then answered a few questions and turned on the tape player. We stood there for a time, a pack of strangers, listening to the desolate undulating howls reverberate in the darkness and climb up the roseate walls of the canyon to disappear into the final emptiness of space. Then I shut off the machine and we filed back up to the star-lined rim in silence, straining to hear echoes of the past.
Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man Was Born
Last year marked the fortieth anniversary of one of the most radically progressive and altruistic attainments in human history, the Endangered Species Act (ESA), signed into law in 1973 by Richard Nixon, who noted that “Nothing is more priceless and more worthy of preservation than the rich array of animal life with which our country has been blessed.” The ESA provides the federal government with the means of assessing the ecological status of the nation’s wildlife and prohibits the “take” of any Threatened (a species “which is likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future”) or Endangered (a species “which is in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range”) organism; under the ESA “The term ‘take’ means to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct.”
Given the deadly effectiveness of the predator eradications during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which had effectively rendered the species defunct in the lower 48, upon the ESA’s passage the gray wolf (Canis lupus) was immediately recognized as deserving of full protection and was listed as Endangered in 1974. As the ESA’s explicit purpose is to recover imperiled species in the wild, the chief agency implementing the Act, the US Fish & Wildlife Service (USFWS), began in 1995 to transplant a handful of Canadian wolves to former wolf habitat in Idaho and Yellowstone National Park, ninety-six percent of which lies in Wyoming, where for half a century this top predator had been absent. (Montana was also considered before a small population was discovered already established in Glacier National Park.) Under pressure from Western lawmakers, these animals were classified under Section 10(j) of the ESA as “experimental and nonessential,” meaning they could be removed without violation of the Act should their presence prove untenable for nonscientific, economic or political reasons.
The results were remarkable. Within a few years a trophic cascade of ecological corrections had run its course throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Without their major predator, herds of elk had grown unnaturally large and had adopted a more relaxed, lingering grazing pattern along riverbanks, suppressing the growth of willows that retain streamside soils and prevent erosion. With the uncanny howls of their former foe again echoing in their ears the elk reclaimed their former habit of quick visits to wooded, ambush-prone riversides and a prompt retreat back to more open areas. Maturing willows and aspens along waterways provided welcome forage for another keystone species, the beaver, whose dams rapidly undid the ruinous “stream incision” or channelization that suppression of woody growth had encouraged.
The wolves’ success as hunters was immediately felt and appreciated by their sometime competitor the grizzly bear, which when alerted to a wolf kill by the raucous din of scavenging ravens would amble over and with their inimitable bulk simply appropriate the prey, thus contributing to the bears’ survival rate when food sources were scarce. The supremely adaptable coyote, whose lessened dependence on elaborate social groupings and more generalized feeding habits had allowed it to survive the predator pogroms, had in the absence of their feared superiors become the top dogs in Yellowstone, forming loose packs and hunting bigger game than they had evolved with. With the wolf’s return the coyote was quickly downsized – sometimes through wolves digging up their dens and killing coyote pups – to its proper place as a solitary pursuer of rabbits and rodents.
The success of the Yellowstone reintroduction was widely reported in the national media and celebrated as an early milestone in “rewilding” those few areas of the country not yet converted to farms and cities. Images of frisky wolf pups and of hunting packs striding powerfully through montane snowfields excited a generation of Americans whose experience of wolves was practically nonexistent outside of television and fairy tales. The Yellowstone wolves were affirmative proof that the ESA really worked when properly implemented; it furthermore demonstrated that, almost incredibly, there still endured sufficient unimpeded wilderness in the continental US to allow for this far-ranging alpha predator to survive and thrive. The slowly multiplying packs expanded their range as the succeeding generations of wolves began to disperse, following the elk herds on their seasonal migration southward out of Yellowstone and into the Tetons and the Jackson Hole area. And that’s when the trouble began.
~
Just eight years after the Yellowstone reintroductions the USFWS reclassified the gray wolf under the ESA as Threatened, downgrading its federal protective status, and began planning the wholesale removal of the “recovered” Northern Rockies populations from the ESA altogether, devolving wolf management to the relevant states which under law would have to devise and adopt management plans that would ensure the maintenance of minimum sustainable populations.
A series of costly legal losses to wildlife advocates in federal court, who had sued to require state management plans that would assertively sustain the recovery of wolves in the wild, coupled with the unwelcome attention and rampant emotions seemingly unique to this species, had convinced the USFWS to get out of the wolf business once and for all, beginning with the three states of the Northern Rockies. In 2004 the agency approved the transference of wolf management to Idaho and Montana, whose superior habitat had paid off in growing populations, but the proposed plan for arid Wyoming, a state with poorer overall habitat whose smaller population is much more genetically isolated and therefore vulnerable, was rejected as inadequately protective.
Joined by 28 livestock and hunting advocate groups, Wyoming promptly filed an ultimately unsuccessful legal action to compel delisting, and the next year a federal judge ruled the USFWS’s decision to reclassify gray wolves from Endangered to Threatened was itself invalid under the ESA. Tensions were mounting when in 2006 the USFWS declared that it would remove all Northern Rockies populations of the gray wolf from the ESA entirely but only if Wyoming could piece together a management plan that realistically ensured the survival of the species over time. Time passed, and with it the political pressure on USFWS administrators to deliver the gray wolf to the management the Western state legislatures.
In early 2007 the agency announced that it was delisting the Northern Rockies wolves en masse, though in the continued absence of an acceptable management plan from Wyoming a considerable portion of that population would for the moment remain protected. Then in December the agency abruptly announced that it would after all accept Wyoming’s flawed plan, which allowed for managed wolf hunting by state permit in a “trophy zone” in the northwest corner of the state bordering Yellowstone, while in the adjacent “predator zone” – comprising 90 percent of the entire state – wolves could be killed by any means, at any time, by anyone.
In early 2008 the USFWS with a near audible sigh of relief relegated wolf management throughout the Northern Rockies to the state game agencies, washing their hands at last of a problem that was accumulating an uncomfortable amount of media attention. Peace at last, or so it was thought. That spring, the environmental law organization Earthjustice filed suit claiming that the state’s plans were inadequate to fulfill the legal requirements of the ESA, in response to which a federal court again reinstated protections just before the planned wolf-hunting seasons were to begin. With a new and presumably more environmentally aware administration taking office in the new year, there was widespread relief among wildlife advocates that the wolf wars had at last come to a happy end.
Enter the new Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, a former rancher and Democratic Senator from Colorado. Just two months into the Obama Administration’s first term, Salazar confirmed that wolves in Idaho, Montana, and now parts of Washington, Oregon, Utah and the Great Lakes would after all be removed from ESA protections. This time, while noting the doubtful legal merit of the agency’s wholesale delivery of wolf management to the states, the courts sided with the USFWS and nearly 260 wolves were killed by hunters in Idaho and Montana.
In the summer of 2010, US District Judge Donald Molloy reinstated ESA protections yet again, not because he viewed the Montana and Idaho plans as being incompatible with wolf recovery but because the Act required that protections for the species had to be uniform across the affected states. Doubtless exhausted by the seesawing legal environment and the bitter controversy that wolf management had become mired in, the USFWS was looking for a permanent solution to rid themselves forever of this troublesome responsibility, and on April 15, 2011, the agency bureaucrats found themselves with a gift from heaven. Tacked on to the immense and infallible Defense Appropriations Bill was a rider directing Secretary Salazar to remove wolves from federal protection in Montana and Idaho, an order upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the first instance of the United States Congress, a body not renowned for its scientific acumen, legislatively delisting a protected species.
With momentum in its favor the USFWS then announced that Wyoming’s management plan was indeed adequate for all intents and purposes to perpetuate wolves over the foreseeable future, even though a peer-reviewed scientific analysis of the plan, commissioned by USFWS, had found “substantial risk” to the state’s wolf population due to a lack of statutory authority assuring continued recovery. Legal interventions were defeated and on August 31, 2012, Wyoming assumed complete management authority for its wolves, then estimated at 328 animals statewide. The next day, what had been a strictly protected species of charismatic megafauna, one of the signature accomplishments of the modern conservation movement and an icon of American wilderness, could be shot, trapped, or simply run over across 90 percent of the state.
Its greatest exasperation at last almost off its shoulders, in the summer of 2013 the USFWS proposed removing gray wolves (except for the critically endangered Mexican subspecies) from the entire lower 48. The agency based its scientific justification for doing so on a single controversial paper published by four USFWS employees in a USFWS journal called North American Fauna – out of print since 1991 and apparently resurrected solely to disseminate this document – which claimed that Canis lupus was actually two species: the recovering one in the Northern Rockies, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, and a new eastern species dubbed “Canis lycaeon” formerly native to and now conveniently extinct east of the Mississippi.
This splitting of C. lupus into two species was merely “a taxonomical slight of hand,” according to Dr. Robert Wayne of the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, one that would have relieved the USFWS of considering 22 eastern states as being within the historic range of the species, thus making it easier to point to the improving Rocky Mountain and Great Lakes populations as the end of federal responsibility. The proposal to delist wolves throughout the continental US was challenged by Earthjustice and other wolf advocates for allowing political pressure to smother good science, and is now under review by the US District Court for the District of Columbia. On February 7 2014, an independent scientific peer review slammed the USFWS delisting proposal for overreliance on a doubtful analysis (the C. lycaeon paper) and a general failure to use the “best available science” as mandated by the ESA, a fatal flaw that, legally and scientifically, should stop the delisting process in its tracks. But the saga of the gray wolf in America has never been confined to what is merely legal or logical.
~
The primary justification for Wyoming’s wolf hunt is economic: wolves are blamed for livestock depredations in a state and region that is still emotionally and economically invested in the teetering myth of the independent cowboy, despite the fact that many ranchers make sometimes exclusive use of public lands and insist that representatives of the USDA’s Wildlife Services agency employ any number of methods – including per the USDA website “capture, take or relocation methods (trapping, snaring, shooting, and the use of chemical products and immobilization and euthanasia drugs),” to remove or kill offending predators. And indeed, Wyoming ranked fifteenth in the nation for beef production, with around 695,000 cattle raised in 2011, the year the wolf hunt began. But the number of dead livestock positively attributable to wolves has been, at the worst, marginal. According to the USDA, in 2010, when wolves still enjoyed ESA protection but could be killed by ranchers or federal agents for livestock depredation, predators – the great majority of which were coyotes and domestic dogs – killed just 5.5 percent of cattle nationwide. Wolves in the continental US were blamed for only 3.7 percent of this segment, considerably less than dogs or even vultures and infinitely less than the respiratory diseases that killed over a million cattle that year. Unlike most states, Wyoming has waived its immunity from liability for damages inflicted on livestock by native carnivores, and its Game & Fish Commission provides monetary compensation to ranchers with verifiable losses to predators. In an early attempt to deflect anti-wolf sentiment, the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife initiated a private livestock compensation program that similarly reimbursed all producers who had confirmed wolf-caused losses, a program that paid $1,368,043 to livestock producers in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming between 1987 and 2009.
Occasional losses of livestock don’t need to be handled with rifles, leg-hold traps or cyanide mines. Nonlethal forms of addressing depredation have been successfully implemented with Oregon’s nascent wolf population, now up to 64 animals. There, a lawsuit filed by the Center for Biological Diversity based on the state’s killing wolves contrary to its own endangered species statute resulted in a lengthy moratorium while the case was pending, during which time nonlethal methods – shepherd dogs, fencing, reducing attractants, actually riding the range (like cowboys) – where put into place that resulted in a net loss of depredations even while the wolf population grew in size.
The second reason for an intensive wolf hunt is the perceived reduction of trophy game animals such as elk, deer and moose. According to Dr. Douglas Smith, leader of Yellowstone National Park’s Gray Wolf Restoration Project, until 1968 Yellowstone actually had to kill or relocate about 77,000 of its excess elk to prevent severe damage to riverine woody growth; there simply weren’t enough predators prevent overpopulation (a healthy predator population keeps prey species below their maximum carrying capacity, which keeps calf mortality and disease in check). With the reintroduction of wolves and a concomitant expansion of grizzly numbers Yellowstone’s bloated elk population decreased by around sixty-five percent, and it was this sudden vanishment of a largess that since the wolf purges had been taken for granted that helped turn some hunters against the resurgent wolves.
Wolves in the Rockies and Great Lakes have once again asserted their role as top predators, pruning the herbivores of their old, sick, injured, and unprotected young through a careful calculation of the costs and benefits of any hunt, a decision typically left to the veteran alpha members of the pack. The trophy bulls that are the chief concern of certain hunting interests – those males with the largest, most impressive rack of antlers – are if not infirmed by age necessarily the healthiest and strongest components of the herd, and anyone who has viewed a cantankerous 1,500-pound bull moose standing seven feet at the shoulder will understand the reluctance of any predator to challenge it.
Jason Williams runs the second-largest ecotourism business in Jackson Hole. He says that as consumptive wildlife uses such as hunting and fishing continue to decline nationally, non-consumptive uses, particularly wildlife viewing, is increasing rapidly. According to a 2011 USFWS census, 37.4 million Americans hunted or fished that year while 71.8 million identified themselves as wildlife watchers (and contributed $54.9 billion to the economy). Williams says that three years ago his clients would have the opportunity to view wolves on about half of his trips – quite an accomplishment with such a reclusive and often nocturnal animal. He describes his successes as practically equal to Yellowstone’s famous wolf tours and was “one season away” from offering clients a tour focusing strictly on observing wolves, which he says was far and away the species tourists were most interested in. With Wyoming’s hunting season, “the wolves’ behavior changed overnight,” he says, and his sightings went from frequent to absolutely none. The wolves weren’t all killed, or course; these canny survivors had simply relearned, with the first gunshot, what their recent ancestors had known all too well. But for entrepreneurs like Williams, and for the four million tourists visiting the Jackson Hole/Yellowstone region annually, one of the area’s most popular draws had disappeared, along with the incentive to spend money on seeing it.
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As it currently stands with the blessing of the USFWS, Wyoming’s wolf management plan requires the maintenance of a 100 x 10 ratio, that is 100 wolves in the state, not including Yellowstone National Park or the Wind River Shoshone/Northern Arapahoe Reservation, with ten confirmed breeding pairs. A “buffer” against this minimum required population, loosely defined by state biologists as an additional 50 wolves and five breeding pairs to be provided, according to Ken Mills of Wyoming Game & Fish, by the aforesaid federal lands. But the buffer is not a legal requirement of the state’s management plan; Wyoming can take the population down to the bare minimum and remain within the law, and it is this haphazard handoff by the USFWS of an invaluable public resource to “the most extreme elements” of Wyoming’s body politic that most energizes Timothy Preso, managing attorney of Earthjustice’s office in Bozeman, Montana. With 90 percent of the state a shoot-on-sight, Mad Max-style killing floor, and the remaining fraction a “trophy zone” where wolves are being managed but still seasonally hunted and where citizens may shoot wolves for ambiguous reasons such as “harassment” and “defense of property,” while ranchers or USDA agents can always kill them for livestock depredation, there is literally no place in Wyoming where wolves are not subject to killing outside of Yellowstone.
Preso says this “dual classification” zoning system, unique to Wyoming, along with the lack of a buffer to support the minimum required numbers of this isolated population and such bizarre interpretations of the ESA as to allow wolves to be tranquilized and trucked (“translocated”) from place to place to encourage genetic exchange in case dispersing wolves failed to survive the gauntlet using natural migratory routes, that is at the heart of his case against the Wyoming plan. “There is huge pressure on the ‘trophy zone’ to maintain a viable population without a legal safety net,” Preso says. Reestablishing wolves was “a huge and successful effort by the American taxpayer,” one that has been sacrificed to extremists who may use any means not already illegal, like certain poisons, to persecute wolves. “They can dynamite pups in their dens, run them over with snowmobiles, shoot them, trap them … there’s not a rational discussion underlying the management of wolves in Wyoming. They’re such a symbol of different things. To some people they epitomize wilderness and freedom; to others they’re pure evil, even somehow scapegoats for dislike of the federal government.”
“Wolves carry a lot of political baggage,” agrees Dr. Carlos Carroll, Director of the Klamath Center for Conservation Research and a participant in the highly critical scientific peer review of the federal delisting proposal (and the public has until March 27 to comment). Carroll specifically cites Wyoming’s “predator zone” and the use of translocation for genetic exchange as dangerous precedents that if allowed to stand will essentially mean the undoing of the ESA. And this seems to get to the heart of the delisting saga: from an agency weary of performing its statutory duties in a demanding political climate we are now confronted with an apparent abandonment through bureaucratic subterfuge of the very essence of the country’s premier safeguard against extinction.
At the close of 2013 several respected biologists published a paper in the journal Conservation Letters lambasting the USFWS delisting proposal in no uncertain terms, particularly its constricting of the natural range of a listed species to that which it currently occupies rather than its historic range; in the case of the gray wolf’s shrunken and scattered population this is a minute fragment of its original habitat. Even more brazen was the agency’s notion that the huge swaths of the wolf’s natural range were “unsuitable habitat,” not because of environmental conditions but because of an alleged antipathy by people there toward wolves, a claim the researchers say “entirely ignores a significant body of scientific knowledge that suggests otherwise.”
These two unsubtle revisions alone, concocted in contempt for the public trust, the law, and its own exceptional and honorable biologists, are demonstrative of the depths the USFWS officialdom is willing to sink to rid itself of wolf management. Acceptance of the delisting proposal as written would leave the ESA’s congressional charge to protect and restore species in the wild a sickly shadow of itself, if not a mockery of legislative intent. Meanwhile, while bureaucrats vacillate, academicians pontificate and legislators fume and threaten, hunters and trappers have killed nearly 2,600 gray wolves in the contiguous United States since 2011.
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Years ago, between college and graduate school, I was employed as an interpretive ranger at Bryce Canyon National Park in southwest Utah. One of the several tours we were charged with providing took visitors down to the bottom of a precipitous canyon at night, guided only by the vibrant stars. On my last of these nocturnal rambles before I departed for the master's program I brought with me a “boom box” and a cassette recording of wolves howling that I’d borrowed from the park gift store. When the dozen or so tourists from all over the country and beyond were comfortably assembled on the canyon floor among the standing hoodoo formations and spangled starlight, I concluded my usual lecture about the area’s natural and human history with a few words about wolves, a general recitation of their feeding and reproductive habits, their social structure, their former range, their role in a fully alive ecosystem, and, at the time, their imminent return to Yellowstone. I too spoke of the vicious persecution of wolves that had been brought over like a deathly shroud from the Old World, then answered a few questions and turned on the tape player. We stood there for a time, a pack of strangers, listening to the desolate undulating howls reverberate in the darkness and climb up the roseate walls of the canyon to disappear into the final emptiness of space. Then I shut off the machine and we filed back up to the star-lined rim in silence, straining to hear echoes of the past.
