Wolves in Oregon

I believe that the long-term survival of wolves must include their expansion into more politically progressive areas. And that seems to be happening. Wolf packs have moved from their Idaho homes into the Ochoco Mountains of east central Oregon and even as far as the east edge of the Cascades. This means its almost inevitable that they are going to reoccupy the Cascades from Canada to northern California (and probably then the Sierra Nevada as well). It's possible the heavily developed Columbia River will block them, but no doubt wolves will head into Washington through Montana and northern Idaho regardless. The last wolf sighting in Oregon west of the Cascades was in 1946; bringing back wolves after over 60 years is a real success for rewilding efforts, or bringing a piece of pre-Columbian ecosystems back to the forests.

Getting to the Cascades and Sierra means they are in ranges dominated by large populations of environmentally-minded people. Ranchers in southwestern New Mexico and Wyoming want to wipe their wolf populations out, as we've seen from the failure of the Mexican wolves to reestablish and the recent hunting seasons on wolves in the northern Rockies. If it was up to these states, they would push wolves back to extripation as quickly as they could load their rifles.

But wolf reintroduction was a pet project of left-leaning environmentalists from the beginning and now they are on the cusp of lands people by those people. I am curious to see how this rewilding will proceed. When their own animals are taken out by wolves, will they care? Or will a lot of people see this as just part of the natural process? I suspect the latter and believe this is a huge development in wolf reintroduction.

Ken Salazar--A Bad Choice

I was chagrined when Obama named Ken Salazar as his Secretary of the Interior. With clearly superior choices like Raul Grijalva floating around out there, picking a conservative Democrat seemed unnecessary. I figured it would result in bad environmental policies. And so it has.

Salazar is upholding the Bush Administration's decision to delist wolves from the endangered species list in the northern Rockies and Great Lakes region. This allows the states to adopt hunting plans that I have little doubt will send wolf populations plummeting and force their relisting in the next 10 years. Hatred of wolves among the ranchers who still dominate political life in the Rocky Mountain states is rabid. They opposed reintroduction and continue to oppose the existence of wolves. Delisting becomes an open season on wolves. In New Mexico and Arizona, wolf poaching has not allowed the species to recover; the more isolated lands of the northern Rockies, with significant wilderness areas and national parks, has given wolves a great chance there. Wolves are beginning to expand into their old range, extending as far as Oregon and Colorado.

From a game management perspective, wolves are hated because they kill deer and elk--i.e., animals that hunters like. Much of the West suffers from deer and elk overpopulation. Occasionally, mass starvation of deer takes place because of a combination of drought and eating everything in sight. Wolves play a key role in ecosystem health. But state wildlife departments rarely take such crazy ideas as ecology into consideration. For them, it's all about increasing the size of trophy animal herds to bring in money from hunting licenses.

Defending Hunting

I may be the only vegetarian in the world to defend hunting, but so be it.

Susan Stellin's piece on deer hunting in Maine gets at an important point: the divide between urban people who think of deer as cute little creatures and the decreasing number of people who live in rural places and still survive in part off the land.

Why do I support the hunters in this divide? Humans need to understand that there is no wilderness. There is nothing in the world not affected or managed by humans. Every spot on the planet, every species on the planet has been changed by human beings. We manage everything. So we might as well manage it right.

When it comes to deer, we have three management choices:

1. We can not allow any hunting. The problem is that the deer will starve to death. This can happen incredibly quickly. Once deer hunting became restricted on Arizona's Kaibab National Forest in the 1900s and 10s, animal populations erupted. By the late 20s, deer were dying by the droves from starvation. While lots of urban dwellers would probably like to see all hunting ended, they have to understand that things aren't all fun and cute in the forest. The animals will die, and in a pretty slow and painful way.

2. We can reintroduce wolves to the forests. Reintroducing wolves to the forest would provide the population control needed if we aren't going to have hunting. The reason the deer populations explode is that they are not culled by predators. Wolves are the natural top predator in American forests. So this would go a long ways to solving the problem. The problem with wolves is that rural folks would go completely insane with fury. While wolf reintroductions have had some success in the northern Rockies, in southern Arizona and New Mexico, the reintroductions have been an almost total failure, as the locals demand the states kill the wolves immediately. Wolves will eat cattle as well as deer. That has to be recognized. Plus you have people's instinctual fear of wolves, which is what really drives the opposition here.

I support this option. While there is more support for wolf reintroduction every year, rural people in this country have so much power in relation to their actual population that large-scale reintroductions are quite unlikely.

Thus we have option 3: hunting. This is working pretty well. There are tons of deer everywhere, yet they are not starving. It's sad I guess to kill an animal. I hope I never have reason to do it. But from a larger management standpoint, hunting is a responsible management option. So long as we don't have wolves culling the deer, hunting makes a lot of sense and has my support.

Catron County Strikes Again

I´ve talked before about the insane anti-wolf mania in Catron County, New Mexico. Catron County, long a bastion of anti-federal government sentiment and the worst kind of western hypocrisy of complaining about the government with your mouth while clinging to a government subsidy check in your hands, continues to attack the idea of Mexican wolves.

This time, they are saying they will remove a gray wolf if the government doesn´t do it for them. Although this is quite illegal, most of the story is standard anti-wolf hooha. However, toward the end of the article, we see discussion of a 13 year old girl who has supposedly been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder from dealing with wolves in some unspecified way. They also claim that she can recover but not if there is a chance to see wolves again in Catron County!!! This is almost certainly garbage. In all of recorded history in North America, at least up to the last report I saw about 2 years ago, there has never been a known case of a wolf attacking a human being. Yet, Catron County "claims the right to remove wolves that are accustomed to humans or have a high probability of harming children or defenseless people, physically or psychologically."

All of this is a cynical attempt by out of touch ranchers to keep wolves out by claiming they are a threat to humans. With their statements that wolves will attack humans completely lacking evidence, they are now using the psychological approach. Which can of course mean anything. A person sees a wolf track, or something that maybe might could be a wolf track--in the eyes of locals that might as well be psychological damage.

Pathetic.

Catron County Scares Me

OK, so every state has its redneck counties. California has them, New York has them, Massachusetts has them. But of course we focus on particular places where scary white people live. These rednecks usually get split into 2 camps--the southern racist kind and the western militia kind. The western militia style are said to live in the northern Rockies and particularly in northern Idaho. And there are a lot of these people up there. Randy Weaver lived there. Mark Fuhrman moved there after the OJ trial.

But I'll take southwestern New Mexico's Catron County and put it up against anything Idaho can throw at us. These are some of the most anti-government radicals you will find anywhere. For a decade now, they have been vigorously fighting the federal government's attempt to reintroduce wolves into the Southwest. In the northern Rockies, wolf reintroductions have been a tremendous success, with wolves spreading throughout the region, even with killings of packs that take out too much livestock.

But it's been a total disaster in New Mexico and Arizona because ranchers down there want all the wolves there. Catron County and surrounding areas still believe it is 1880 and that wolves are there to eat your children. Literally. I have heard these arguments made by the wife in a ranching family with my own ears.

Last week, a female wolf was released in Catron County. Local residents are already claiming that the wolf killed 2 cows and they want it dead. They are also threatening to do it themselves, a federal crime, if the government doesn't take care of it.

Now it is possible that the wolf did kill these cows. That's what wolves do after all. And cattle are so stupid that wolves see them as easy pickings. But these aren't cows hanging out behind your yard. These cattle are grazing on Forest Service land. And there are lots of reasons cows die out there. Just because a cow dies, doesn't mean that it was taken out by a wolf.

On the other hand, let's just say the wolf ate these cows. Who cares? There is no, and I mean absolutely ZERO, economic future in ranching these forests. Ranchers are trying to get out all over the place. Globalization and factory farms have completely undermined these ranchers. They are hanging on for cultural reasons more than any. In fact, so many ranchers are looking to get out that environmental organizations are offering to buy their grazing permits and retiring them in order to get cattle out of the forests. This has infuriated western rancher's associations, which are trying to get legislation passed making this illegal, and of course taking the one financial option many ranchers have away from them.

So if the wolf killed the cattle, good. The cattle don't belong there anyway. The wolves do. If ranching was a legitimate economic option in these places, that might be different, but it's not. It's too bad these ranchers are losing their culture and traditions, but I don't see how it's the government's responsibility to prop these people up, particularly at the cost of undermining forest ecosystems, of which the wolf is a vital part.