No Wolf at My Door

America is the land of loopholes. Set a law, and then watch as folks who don’t like it or want to avoid its burdens find ways for that statute not to apply to them. Expensive lawyers or government officials find ways around and under or through legislation with rather clear intent, be rendered frail by wording that can be twisted and purposely misinterpreted. How about sneaking a repeal of that statute buried as a rider to a massive federal budget bill? Today, I am going to delve into what I will pejoratively call “loupholes,” where avoidance and reversal of statutory mandates could easily spell the end of a once-officially endangered species (canis lupus – the North American gray wolf). Some of the stuff in this blog may be hard to take, but then, so is the practice of killing because you don’t like the subject of your infliction of death.

Wolves have been portrayed as vicious killers, even though all those little loving puppy-dogs we cuddle and care for are their direct descendants. They are evolutionary enforcement agents, culling their prey before their prey can overwhelm their environment. And as they are successful in this mission, as their intended food sources dwindle, likewise the relevant wolf population self-adjusts and reduces as well. It’s nature’s plan. But some folks don’t like wolves or their missions, and they have eradication on their minds. Maybe they have a God complex, inserting themselves as the ultimate natural deciders or perhaps they have just seen too many stupid horror movies based on myth and certainly not fact.

Ranchers and sheep herders obviously hate wolves who stray into their rangelands and backyards to kill their commercial animals. Even when these wolves were officially an endangered species, there was a louphole that allowed “for ‘lethal control’ if they made trouble—if they threatened a human being, which almost never happened, or, more commonly, if they were implicated in attacking cattle and sheep.” Prospect.org, March 13, 2012.

Hatred of these natural predators brought them to the edge of extinction in the United States: “With European settlement and the decimation of its native prey—buffalo, elk, mule deer—the wolf was bound for destruction. It was now killing for its meals the domesticated sheep and cattle that settlers had ranged across the grasslands and the mountains. Hated for its depredations, the wolf was hunted mercilessly—shot, trapped, poisoned with strychnine, fed glass shards stuffed in bait, its pups asphyxiated by fires set in their dens. By 1935, the gray wolf had disappeared almost entirely from the U.S. 

“Decades later, during the high tide of 1970s environmentalism, conservationists began to agitate for a government-sponsored recovery. The evidence suggested that the loss of the wolves had destabilized the ecology of the Northern Rockies. Following the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service undertook the recovery of the wolf in the region. It wasn’t until 1991, however, that Congress mandated an impact study of wolf reintroduction. By 1994, funding had been approved for Fish and Wildlife biologists to remove 66 gray wolves from Canada, where the animals still numbered in the tens of thousands, and truck them south for release in central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park…

“After spending upward of $40 million studying the animals—then capturing, collaring, tracking, and protecting them—the federal government last year scheduled wolves to be killed in huge numbers across the Northern Rockies. In April 2011, following a series of lawsuits and an unprecedented intervention by Congress [protection for the gray wolf was eliminated in a rider hidden in a federal budget bill], canis lupus was removed from the endangered species list… Never before had a species been delisted as a result of congressional fiat. The rider was barely discussed, much less debated. Only one legislator, Maryland Senator Ben Cardin, raised an objection…

“The ranching industry in the American West has been the historic enemy of wolves, so it was fitting that ranchers in Montana and Idaho called for hunting them almost from the moment of their reintroduction. The American Farm Bureau Federation, a nonprofit advocate for farming and ranching interests, had even sued preemptively in 1994 to stop the reintroduction, but a federal court rejected the suit. In 2008, however, Western livestock interests found a sympathetic ear in the Bush administration’s Department of the Interior, which issued what would become the first of multiple orders to remove the wolf from protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA)… 

“Today, as a result of the delisting, anyone can shoot a wolf—you don’t have to be a government trapper. Wolves can in some circumstances be shot on sight. [U.S. government wildlife trapper named Carter] Niemeyer, who is six foot six inches and giant-shouldered, shot 14 wolves in the course of his government career; the Whitehawks [a family of white wolves he “culled” in 2001] were his last. He maintains a taxidermy studio in his garage and says he’s ‘not into the warm and fuzzy thing’ when it comes to wild animals. ‘I’m not grossed out by wolves being hunted, trapped, killed,’ he says. ‘I’d skin one today if you brought it to me. What I’m caught up in is honesty. What you have with wolf delisting is half-truths, untruths, hysteria, and just downright craziness.’” Propsect.org.

The livestock industry, joined by the gun lobby, continues to exert massive political pressure to keep any semblance of protection for the gray wolf from even near bona fide Congressional consideration, not that the deeply dysfunctional House of Representatives would even let such potential legislation out of committee. Wolves continue to be hunted from the air, semiautomatic weapons spraying bullets from a helicopter above. Hideous and cruel traps, poison and a free right to shoot wolves on sight evidence our propensity for cruelty based on what are at best questionable statistics.

“The ranchers’ assertions are reflected in the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, which relies for its data on what amounts to unverified reports from ranchers and the investigations of Wildlife Services agents. In Idaho during 2010–2011, the Statistics Service reported 2,561 cattle lost to wolf attack. When Fish and Wildlife investigated, it found that only 75 of the attacks could be verified. According to the Statistics Service, sheep killed by wolves in 2010–2011 came to 900, but Fish and Wildlife investigators could only verify 148. Even using its own apparently inflated statistics, the USDA found that in 2010, less than a quarter of a percent of U.S. cattle, or 0.23 percent, were lost to predators (the predator list included not just wolves but also coyotes, cougars, bobcats, lynx, bears, and “others”). By contrast, in 2009, Wildlife Services was responsible for killing roughly 12 percent of the total population of wolves in the Northern Rockies.

“Idaho’s current management plan calls for the state’s estimated 750 wolves—about half the Northern Rockies population of 1,600—to be reduced to 150 over the course of a six-month hunting season. [Author Chris Ketcham] asked the Fish and Wildlife Service’s wolf-recovery coordinator, Edward Bangs, about the rationale for this number. ‘The issue has nothing to do with science,’ Bangs said. ‘The issue of how many wolves is enough is totally about what people want and how many wolves people will tolerate.’… ‘Wolves are supposedly costing ranchers hundreds of thousands of dollars annually running the weight off sheep and cattle,’ Niemeyer says. ‘I don’t know where anybody has proved this but anecdotally it sure sounds convincing, don’t it? Bullshit. Document it.’

“[Ketcham] initially stopped at [hunter, restaurant-own Victor Turchan’s] restaurant because the sign out front caught [his] attention: ‘Tag a Wolf,’ it said, ‘Get a Free Pizza.’ ‘It used to be ‘Get a free pitcher of beer’ too, but I couldn’t afford it,” Turchan said as I took a picture of the sign. When I mentioned that I was writing about wolves, he invited me into the restaurant and insisted on opening the kitchen early so I could eat. A middle-aged man and a sharp-dressed woman walked in, and we got to talking about how wolves killed their son’s three dogs—tore one of the dogs pretty much in half. ‘You sure came to the right place for wolf haters,’ the woman told me…

“Her husband chimed in: ‘Wolves are very good at what they do, which is stalking and killing.’ Turchan’s bartender, a jovial, big-chested fellow named Mike, wore a T-shirt that said ‘Got wolves? Shoot ’em.’ On the wall was a sign that said ‘Smoke a pack a day,’ with a bull’s-eye over a wolf silhouette. Above his head, over the bar, was a stuffed wolf mounted in mid-snarl, and next to the bull’s-eye silhouette were trophy photographs of dead wolves held high by men in camouflage. The bodies of the animals hung limp and heavy in the arms of the hunters. Their heads looked almost twice as big as a man’s.” Prospect.org. I think it would be better said if it read: “Human beings are very good at what they do, which is stalking and killing.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes I am deeply ashamed at the blasé acceptance of too many Americans with their belief in cruel but Godlike control over wildlife and the environment.