“Trophy hunting is often seen as an aberration by a handful of individuals. However this investigation shows it is a large, powerful industry with a well-oiled and generously-funded lobbying machine.”
—Eduardo Goncalves
I had the good fortune to ask Patrick Hemingway about elephants just at the beginning of the worst conservation tragedy of the last decade — the slaughter of 130,000 elephants. “Enormous silly beasts,” as his father Ernest described them in “True at First Light.”He told me from his home in Montana, “For my money the elephant will soon be gone.” He of course recognized the royal “sport” for what it was, a colonial fabrication that belongs to the old days.Humanity lost a third of the world’s elephants due to poaching, often in…
This story was originally published by The Revelator.
Ahailstorm in South Texas. Tornadoes in Tennessee. Wildfires across the West. A barrage of Gulf Coast hurricanes. Those are among the record 22 weather and climate disasters that each topped $1 billion in damages last year in the United States.
In all, the price tag for 2020 hit a whopping $95 billion — and that’s just in the United States. Reinsurance firm Swiss Re put global economic losses at $175 billion last year, including $32 billion for floods in China and $13 billion in damages from Cyclone Amphan across India and Bangladesh.
The worst news? Our profligate burning of fossil fuels means we’re in store for more.
Studies show that climate change is supercharging some weather and climate events and will lead to more severe and longer-lasting heat waves, stronger hurricanes, an increased wildfire risk and a longer wildfire season. We can also expect more heavy rain events and severe droughts, not to mention other extreme events like February’s polar vortex.
“You can’t attribute any particular storm to climate change, but what we do know is that climate change tips the odds of making many of these events more severe,” says Bruce Stein, chief scientist and associate vice president at the National Wildlife Federation.
While experts tabulate the economic losses — homes destroyed, crops ruined, businesses shuttered — ecosystems and wildlife can also sustain damage that’s harder to quantify.
Many plants and wildlife evolved with and have adapted to dealing with large-scale disturbances, but we’re beginning to see “megadisturbances” at levels beyond what we saw in the past, says Stein.
And that can take a toll. Extreme weather can kill animals directly — or indirectly, like by destroying food sources, contaminating water or altering habitat, forcing a species to move into areas where there may be more competition, fewer resources or a greater risk of predation.
“What we begin to find when you get some of these mega disturbances is that it’s beyond the ability of a species — or their adaptive capacity — to bounce back,” says Stein.
The Research
The effects of climate change on the natural world are being felt at two speeds. One is more gradual, referred to by scientists as “ramping” — shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels. The second is quick, like extreme weather events.
Both are problematic, says Sean Maxwell, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation Science. But, he adds, “I think the changes to acute events have the greatest potential to devastate local populations or ecosystems, and the impacts of these events are often more difficult to plan for or avoid.”
Maxwell was the lead author of a 2018 study published in the journal Diversity and Distributions that examined how changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather and climate events affected wildlife. The researchers looked at 519 studies of ecological responses to extreme events — including cyclones, droughts, floods, and heat and cold waves — that took place from 1941 to 2015. They found that the response was negative 57% of the time. (And in those instances where species benefited, they were mostly invasive species.)
“Some of the negative responses we found were quite concerning, including more than 100 cases of dramatic population declines and 31 cases of local population extinction following an extreme event,” says Maxwell. “Populations of critically endangered bird species in Hawai’i, such as the palia, have been annihilated due to drought, and populations of lizard species have been wiped out due to cyclones in the Bahamas.”
Plant species, the researchers found, had the highest number of negative responses to extreme events, followed by reptiles and amphibians.
“Collectively, the studies in our review suggest that extreme weather and climate events have profound implications for species and ecosystem management,” the researchers concluded.
The Most Vulnerable
Species that are already threatened or endangered are of course especially at risk.
Take the Attwater prairie chicken. A million of these birds once ranged across the prairies of Texas and Louisiana.
Today fewer than 100 remain in the wild and scientists have sought to bolster their populations with captive breeding programs. But when Hurricane Harvey walloped Texas with 130-mile-per-hour winds and record rainfall in 2017, the birds were right in harm’s way.
“The Attwater Prairie Chicken National Wildlife Refuge tracked 29 individual birds, mostly hens. Post-hurricane, staff confirmed only five of them still alive,” Texas Climate News reported. “The hurricane also killed roughly 80% of a prairie chicken population on private property in Goliad County.”
Other species with limited ranges, like those on islands, also face big threats.
“If a species is well distributed, then if one part of its range gets hit, there’s the ability for it to recover,” says Stein. “But if essentially all its eggs are in one basket, and that particular place gets hit by one of these big disturbances, that’s when you have a real concern.”
In 2017 Hurricane Maria cut the population of just 200 Puerto Rican parrots in half. The year before, Hurricane Matthew was believed to have wiped out the last Bahama nuthatches (Sitta insularis). It took two years before a few of the birds were found — and then Hurricane Dorian struck in 2019, making their survival unlikely, according to Diana Bell, a professor of conservation biology at the University of East Anglia.
“In fact, Dorian may have not only sealed the fate of the nuthatch but also severely impacted other birds endemic to these islands, particularly the Bahama warbler and the Abaco parrot,” Bell wrote in an essay for The Conversation. “Also known as the Bahama Amazon parrot, this subspecies uniquely nests in limestone cavities on the ground which are likely to have been flooded by the storm surge.”
Compounding Crises
The risk to wildlife from extreme storms can be compounded by the ramping effects of climate change, too.
“If you have increasingly severe hurricanes where you’ve also got sea-level rise essentially providing a higher lodge point for the storm surge, then you start seeing impacts beyond the historical record,” says Stein.
In other places, extreme weather is an extra blow to species already struggling with other environmental pressures, like habitat loss, invasive species or pollution.
Last year the world watched in horror as land-use management, climate change and drought helped push Australia’s bushfires to a terrifying new level, killing 34 people and burning 37,500 square miles.
A study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution found that the fire impacted the critical habitat of 832 native species, with 70 species losing more than 30% of their natural range. Twenty-one of those were already at risk of extinction.
Those that survived could find themselves hard-pressed in future climate disasters. “Multiple extreme events are likely to act in synergistic ways to exacerbate risk of species’ extinction,” wrote Maxwell and the other researchers of the 2018 study.
Australia already has one of the highest extinction rates, and the wildfires could limit the capacity of some species to recover — like the endangered Kangaroo Island dunnart and the long-footed potoroo — and threaten others. Australia’s record blazes last year could push the number of endangered species in the country up by 19%, the study in Nature Ecology and Evolution found.
Solutions
When Hurricane Irma sacked the Florida Keys in 2017, the storm tossed boats ashore, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and left a trail of debris across the islands.
It also endangered one of the region’s beloved endemic species, the tiny Key deer, which today primarily live on Big Pine Key. Some deer were killed in the storm, and surviving animals faced threats to their already limited freshwater supply as the storm surge dumped saline ocean water into freshwater pools.
Island residents responded the way folks often do after a disaster — they offered help to their neighbors.
“What you saw during and shortly after Irma is that these Key deer were coming up to houses looking for fresh water,” says Stein. “And people were putting out kiddie pools of water for them.”
Following Australia’s bushfires last year, the country’s government jumped to the aid of wildlife by dropping 4,000 pounds of carrots and sweet potatoes to starving brush-tailed rock-wallabies who lost their food source in the blazes.
“There’s a lot of things that we can do to help human communities as well as wildlife after these acute disturbances,” says Stein.
But beyond immediate food and water relief, there’s a much bigger task ahead: reducing greenhouse gas emissions to address the ongoing dangers of climate change and the ability of ecosystems to adapt. Key deer, for example, also face a long-term threat to their drinking water supply from rising seas, something no number of kiddie pools can repair. And more severe hurricanes are likely in their future, too.
“As climate change continues to ensure extreme climate and weather events are more and more common, we now need to act to ensure species have the best chance to survive,” says Maxwell. “Wherever possible, high-quality and intact habitat areas should be retained, as these are the places where species are most resilient to increasing exposure to extreme events.”
If such intact habitat doesn’t exist, ecological restoration efforts can be used to help species adapt, his study found.
And the more we know, the better.
“Incorporating extreme events into climate change vulnerability assessments and adaptation plans will be challenging,” the researchers of the 2018 paper concluded. “But by doing so we have a greater chance of arriving at conservation interventions that truly address the full range of climate change impacts.”
And that could give more species a fighting chance in a changing climate.
A love of complex smells and flavours gave our ancestors an edge and stove pped hangoversDonna FergusonSun 7 Mar 2021 01.16 EST
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Human evolution and exploration of the world were shaped by a hunger for tasty food – “a quest for deliciousness” – according to two leading academics.
Ancient humans who had the ability to smell and desire more complex aromas, and enjoy food and drink with a sour taste, gained evolutionary advantages over their less-discerning rivals, argue the authors of a new book about the part played by flavour in our development.
Some of the most significant inventions early humans made, such as stone tools and the controlled use of fire, were also partly driven by their pursuit of flavour and a preference for food they considered delicious, according to the new hypothesis.Advertisementhttps://5037925012011699e0d1c13b2cbcd914.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
“This key moment when we decide whether or not to use fire has, at its core, just the tastiness of food and the pleasure it provides. That is the moment in which our ancestors confront a choice between cooking things and not cooking things,” said Rob Dunn, a professor of applied ecology at North Carolina State University. “And they chose flavour.”
Cooked food tasted more delicious than uncooked food – and that’s why we opted to continue cooking it, he says: not just because, as academics have argued, cooked roots and meat were easier and safer to digest, and rewarded us with more calories.
Some scientists think the controlled use of fire, which was probably adopted a million years ago, was central to human evolution and helped us to evolve bigger brains.
“Having a big brain becomes less costly when you free up more calories from your food by cooking it,” said Dunn, who co-wrote Delicious: The Evolution of Flavour and How it Made Us Human with Monica Sanchez, a medical anthropologist.Advertisementhttps://5037925012011699e0d1c13b2cbcd914.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
However, accessing more calories was not the primary reason our ancestors decided to cook food. “Scientists often focus on what the eventual benefit is, rather than the immediate mechanism that allowed our ancestors to make the choice. We made the choice because of deliciousness. And then the eventual benefit was more calories and fewer pathogens.”
Human ancestors who preferred the taste of cooked meat over raw meat began to enjoy an evolutionary advantage over others. “In general, flavour rewards us for eating the things we’ve needed to eat in the past,” said Dunn.
In particular, people who evolved a preference for complex aromas are likely to have developed an evolutionary advantage, because the smell of cooked meat, for example, is much more complex than that of raw meat. “Meat goes from having tens of aromas to having hundreds of different aroma compounds,” said Dunn.
Prehistoric woolly mammoth hunters. Photograph: North Wind Picture Archives/Alamy
This predilection for more complex aromas made early humans more likely to turn their noses up at old, rotten meat, which often has “really simple smells”. “They would have been less likely to eat that food,” said Dunn. “Retronasal olfaction is a super-important part of our flavour system.”
The legacy of humanity’s remarkable preference for food which has a multitude of aroma compounds is reflected in “high food culture” today, Dunn says. “It’s a food culture that really caters for our ability to appreciate these complexities of aroma. We’ve made this very expensive kind of cuisine that somehow fits into our ancient sensory ability.”Advertisement
Similarly, our proclivity for sour-tasting food and fermented beverages like beer and wine may stem from the evolutionary advantage that eating sour food and drink gave our ancestors.
“Most mammals have sour taste receptors,” said Dunn. “But in almost all of them, with very few exceptions, the sour taste is aversive – so most primates and other mammals, in general, will, if they taste something sour, spit it out. They don’t like it.”
Humans are among the few species that like sour, he says, another notable exception being pigs.
At some point, he thinks, humans’ and pigs’ sour taste receptors evolved to reward them if they found and ate decomposing food that tasted sour, especially if it also tasted a little sweet – because that is how acidic bacteria tastes. And that, in turn, is a sign that the food is fermenting, not putrefying.
“The acid produced by the bacteria kills off the pathogens in the rotten food. So we think that the sour taste on our tongue, and the way we appreciate it, actually may have served our ancestors as a kind of pH strip to know which of these fermented foods was safe,” said Dunn.
Human ancestors who were able to accurately identify rotting food that was actually fermenting, and therefore OK to eat, would have had an evolutionary advantage over others, he argues. If they also figured out how to safely ferment food to eat over winter, they further increased their food supply.
The negative consequence of this is that fermented, alcoholic fruit juice, a sort of “proto wine”, would also have tasted good – and that probably led to horrific hangovers.
“At some point, our ancestors evolved a version of the gene that produces the enzyme that breaks down alcohol in our bodies, which is 40 times faster than that of other primates,” added Dunn. “And so that really made our ancestors much more able to get the calories out of these fermented drinks, and it would also probably have lessened the extent to which they had hangovers every day from drinking.”Advertisementhttps://5037925012011699e0d1c13b2cbcd914.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
Flavour also drove humanity to innovate and explore, Dunn says. He thinks one reason our ancestors were inspired to begin using tools was to get hold of otherwise inaccessible food that tasted delicious: “If you look at what chimpanzees use tools to get, it’s almost always really delicious things, like honey.”
Having a portfolio of tools that they could use to find tasty things to eatgave our ancestors the confidence to explore new environments, knowing they would be able to find food, whatever the season threw at them. “It really allows our ancestors to move out into the world and do new things.”
Still Life with a Turkey Pie, by Pieter Claesz, 1627. Photograph: FineArt/Alamy
Stone tools in particular “fast-forward” the ability of humans to find delicious food. “Once they can hunt, using spears, they have access to this whole world of foods that were not available to them before.”
At this point, Dunn thinks humanity’s pursuit of tasty food started to have terrible consequences for other species. “We know that humans around the world hunted species to extinction, once they figured out how to hunt really effectively.”
Dunn strongly suspects that the mammals that first went extinct were the most delicious ones. “From what we were able to reconstruct, it looks like the mammoths, mastodons and giant sloths all would have been unusually tasty.”Paleolithic diet may not have been that ‘paleo’, scientists sayRead more
To replicate the eating habits of prehistoric humans, the book, published later this month, details how one scientist dropped a horse who had just died into a pond and assessed how it fermented over time. “He would sample some meat to see if it was safe to eat. He described it as delicious – a little bit like a blue cheese,” said Dunn.
Until now, researchers have found no evidence of global tectonic activity on planets outside our solar system. Under the leadership of theUniversity of Bernand the National Center of Competence in Research NCCR PlanetS, scientists have now found that the material inside planet LHS 3844b flows from one hemisphere to the other and could be responsible for numerous volcanic eruptions on one side of the planet.
On Earth, plate tectonics is not only responsible for the rise of mountains and earthquakes. It is also an essential…
The neighbour of a woman whose 14-year-old rescue cat was savagely mauled to death by a group of hunting hounds caught the whole shocking incident on camera.
In the video, which CornwallLive has seen and a screenshot has been taken from above, the huntsman can be seen picking up the body of Mini, a black rescue cat, and throwing it over the fence of one of the neighbours’ gardens, in the usually quiet street…
Photo by Davida G. Breier. Tractor Supply chicks never experience the comfort and care of their own mother hen. They’re nothing but things for this company to make money from.
“I am not sure to whom I should file a complaint. Perhaps you can point me in the right direction. I went to Tractor Supply to pick up sunflower seeds and to my horror I saw baby chicks for sale in a new display that houses the chicks of different breeds stacked on top of each other and they are walking on wire mesh! It was very disturbing and quite different from how they were housed last year. There is no place for them to rest/sleep comfortably and they looked very stressed. Thank you very much for reading my email. Please let me know if there is anything I can do. I am a certified veterinary technician and understand farming and keeping chickens. This new setup at Tractor Supply is inhumane.”
What Can I Do?
Sign and share our Change.org petition to Tractor Supply, which includes direct contact information for the company CEO Hal Lawton. Sign & Share.
Contact Mr. Lawton and tell him what you saw at your local store. Tell him the situation is inhumane and that you will not shop at Tractor Supply until it is rectified.
Speak to the local store manager and urge that the store provide proper bedding, sheltered resting areas and other comforts for these suffering chicks.
Post a comment. Each Tractor Supply store appears to have its own local Facebook page where it is advertising baby chicks for sale.
Write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper(s) about this inhumane situation.
Alert your local humane society and urge them to intervene with the local Tractor Supply to help these chicks.
Tractor Supply and other farm supply stores are notoriously neglectful and indifferent toward the chicks and ducklings they display and sell each spring in thousands of local stores. This new way of keeping these baby birds, in stacked drawers on wire mesh, exceeds even the traditional inhumaneness. In addition, these stores are teaching customers by their example that such inhumane treatment is acceptable, thus encouraging buyers to imitate the abuse.
WILL THE FAIRY TALE MENTALITY OF WESTERN STATES AGAINST PREDATORS HAMPER THEIR ABILITY TO SLOW CHRONIC WASTING DISEASE?
by Todd WilkinsonSUPPORT USGET NEWSLETTERPhoto courtesy NPS / Jacob W. FrankPART FOUR For over two decades, Douglas Smith and successive teams of researchers have watched wildlife predators hunting for prey in Yellowstone. The national park’s senior wolf biologist says there is no mistaking the way that lobos identify and target elk. To the human eye, an individual wapiti might appear perfectly healthy yet there is something—almost a sixth sense— that catches the attention of discriminating pack members searching for their next meal. It might be an elk with arthritis carrying a slight gimp in its gait, or maybe a hint of winter-worn fatigue, a slowness brought on by advancing old age or illness, or perhaps naïve behavior exhibited by the young. There is no doubt, based on the accrued record of wolf behavior documented in Yellowstone—and the significant body of scientific accounts logged across the continent—that under normal conditions, wolves key-in on prey that is meek, infirmed or vulnerable. “Wolves pick up on stuff we can’t see. They are most efficient at exploiting weaknesses in prey because their survival depends on it,” Smith told me recently. “They are predisposed, by instinct and learned behavior, to focus first on animals that are easier to kill rather than those living at the height of their physical strength.” Does having predators on the landscape—wolves, bears, mountain lions and coyotes— provide a protective gauntlet that can help slow the spread and prevalence of deadly diseases? In particular, with ultra-lethal Chronic Wasting Disease now invading the most wildlife-rich ecosystem in America’s Lower 48 states and spreading coast to coast, are these often maligned meat-eaters, frequently dismissed as worthless vermin in western states, actually important natural allies in battling CWD?
“Wolves pick up on stuff we can’t see. They are most efficient at exploiting weaknesses in prey because their survival depends on it. They are predisposed, by instinct and learned behavior, to focus first on animals that are easier to kill rather than those living at the height of their physical strength.” —Yellowstone’s chief wolf biologist Douglas Smith
While the data and the assessments of most scientists clearly suggests yes, there remains fierce resistance by some to acknowledge the beneficial roles predators play. At the recent year-end meeting of the Montana Fish and Game Commission, anti-predator biases were on full display, especially toward wolves. They surfaced as the commission pondered its next move in confronting CWD which this autumn entered Montana via sick wild deer for the first time in state history. Weeks earlier, Ken McDonald, wildlife bureau chief at the Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks Department, raised eyebrows when he claimed the advantages predators bring in weeding out sick prey is merely theoretical and unproved. Dismissing the notion of wolves as effective disease-fighters, he asserted that in order for lobos to truly make a difference in slowing CWD’s advance, they would need to exist in such high numbers that it would be socially unacceptable to humans, namely ranchers and hunters. In terms of Montana’s strategy for dealing with CWD spread in the state through sick wildlife entering via Wyoming from the south and Canada to the north, McDonald said the state’s primary method of confronting disease will involve enlisting hunters to aggressively harvest animals in emerging CWD endemic zones. The state recently approved the issuance of 1,200 additional B tags to kill deer in areas east of Red Lodge, Montana (the northeast corner of Greater Yellowstone) where six dead deer have turned up CWD positive out of 1300 tested there—four mule deer bucks, a mule deer doe and a white-tailed doe. Many claim McDonald’s characterization of wolves demonstrates not only a personal anti-wolf bias, which also permeates the thinking of the department, but it shows a lack of understanding and appreciation for the natural history of the species. In other words, it denies what the very essence of a wolf is. “I was disappointed with Ken McDonald’s nonsensical bureaucratic response,” conservationist and professional biologist Dr. Gary J. Wolfe wrote recently in comments that were widely circulated. Wolfe is a former Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks Commissioner appointed by Gov. Steve Bullock. Notably, he is also the former project leader of the CWD Alliance founded by a number of prominent sportsmen’s’ groups and former national president and CEO of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation for 15 years. He is widely respected in hunting circles. “While I don’t think any of us large carnivore proponents are saying that wolf predation will prevent CWD, or totally eliminate it from infected herds, it is ecologically irresponsible to not consider the very real possibility that wolves can slow the spread of CWD and reduce its prevalence in infected herds,” Wolfe says. “We should consider wolves to be ‘CWD border guards,’ adjust wolf hunting seasons accordingly, and let wolves do their job of helping to cull infirm animals from the herds.”
“While I don’t think any of us large carnivore proponents are saying that wolf predation will prevent CWD, or totally eliminate it from infected herds, it is ecologically irresponsible to not consider the very real possibility that wolves can slow the spread of CWD and reduce its prevalence in infected herds. We should consider wolves to be ‘CWD border guards,’ adjust wolf hunting seasons accordingly, and let wolves do their job of helping to cull infirm animals from the herds.” —biologist Gary Wolfe, former Montana wildlife commissioner and former CEO/president of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation
Strong evidence seems to bear him out. Not only do predators stalking large game species target weak animals, they can mitigate the impact of disease outbreaks, experts say. Further, by removing sick prey species, predators could, over time, though this is unproved, make herds more resilient and stronger, less susceptible to disease. While some may doubt this premise, illustrated in literature below, no one has provided evidence suggesting that having robust and stable numbers of predators will not aid in confronting the most rapidly spreading and fearsome new disease in North America. ° ° ° The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is a region unparalleled in the Lower 48 states. It is known globally as America’s Serengeti for having its full original complement of mammal and bird species, including large native predators, that were here when Europeans arrived on the continent in the late 15th century. Plus, the landscape these animals inhabit, a 22.5-million-acre mixture of private and mostly public land, is intact—meaning not fragmented and enabling migrations of elk, deer and pronghorn (antelope) to occur and which do not exist anywhere else. Lloyd Dorsey, conservation director for the Sierra Club in Wyoming, is a hunter and crusader against Wyoming’s operation of elk feedgrounds. This autumn when we spoke about predators and CWD, he had just returned from hunting in the Gros Ventre mountains east of the National Elk Refuge. He told me of how on the morning that he glassed mule deer and bands of elk, he found grizzly tracks in the snow and heard wolves howling a quarter mile away. Citing reams of scientific studies to back him up, Dorsey says predators play an import ecological role in keeping prey species in check and in serving as vanguards in removing sick animals. Greater Yellowstone’s “predator guild” of wolves, grizzly and black bears, lions and coyotes, he notes, also makes it a draw for wildlife watchers from around the world, helping to fuel a $1-billion annual nature-tourism economy tied to the national parks alone. A disease like CWD that stands to significantly harm the health of deer family members over time—deer, elk, and moose—also has potentially grave implications for species that eat and scavenge their remains. In many ways, the biological integrity of Greater Yellowstone’s large mammal populations depends upon the health of its ungulate herds and the biomass they provide in sustaining other species large and small—those with fur and feathers down to the microbial level. Diseases that threaten to dramatically diminish Greater Yellowstone’s ungulates could have negative, far-reaching consequences for people and the environment. To date, there is no evidence that CWD can infect predators, humans or livestock, though geneticists who have studied the molecular make-up of CWD prions [misshapen proteins] believe it could change. And a recent study in Canada involving macaques exposed to CWD prions has elevated concerns. Macaques are primates with genes similar to humans. With CWD, Wyoming is perilously burning the candle at both ends and it has implications for Montana and Idaho, Dorsey says. Wyoming and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service continue to knowingly operate feedgrounds [read parts One, Two and Three of MoJo’s series here] which makes the state and federal government guilty of game management malpractice by setting up public wildlife for calamity, he says. At the same time, Wyoming persists in destroying a natural ally—wolves—based upon no solid reason other than traditional cultural animosity toward these archetypal animals that earlier generations of settlers took great delight in eradicating to make way for livestock. “Our understanding of wolves has broadened in an age of greater scientific and ecological awareness,” Dorsey told me. “They are not the animals of menacing myth they were portrayed to be in fairy tales. We can—and should—co-exist with them for mutual benefit.” Nonetheless, Wyoming—along with Alaska—is known for having the most notoriously-hostile attitude toward wolves in America. There, in over 85 percent of the state, lobos, like coyotes, can be killed year-round for any reason, no questions asked. Only in the northwest corner of Wyoming within the vicinity of Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks are wolves classified as a game animal and even there it is state policy to keep their numbers suppressed to please outfitters, guides and ranchers. Beyond that small zone, they are classified as “predators” and treated as vermin. They can be trapped, poisoned, shot at any and all hours of the day, and targeted by aerial gunners in aircraft. Even if they are not threatening livestock, it’s open season on wolves. The profound irony is that just as Wyoming condones a campaign of re-eradication against wolves, CWD has been rapidly spreading westward, faster than anyone expected across the state via infected mule and white-tailed deer.Perfect conditions to amplify a CWD pandemic, experts say, exist on the National Elk Refuge and 22 elk feedgrounds operated by the state of Wyoming, many of them on U.S. Forest Service land. CWD’s arrival is considered imminent. When the disease lands in the Wyoming feedgrounds, where more than 20,000 elk are unnaturally concentrated during winters, CWD is expected to not only take hold but have its spread accelerated due to the widely-condemned management practice of bunching up wapiti. The conditions there are similar to game farms where CWD infections have been devastating. This point was made in a letter sent December 7, 2017 from the Montana state wildlife commission (read it at bottom of this story] to counterparts in Wyoming, asking the state to take steps to shut down feeding. “We respect the fact that how Wyoming manages its affairs is up to Wyoming. However, Montana’s ability to combat CWD will depend upon decisions that Wyoming makes about its wildlife management. Over the long-term, the feed grounds make your wildlife populations less healthy, less stable, and much more vulnerable to a catastrophic disease event,” the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission wrote. “We implore you to begin the process of looking at alternatives to the present management regime that unnaturally concentrates wildlife in feed grounds each winter and increases the pace at which CWD infects both states’ wildlife populations.” The letter ends with this warning: “If we do not address CWD, we will all be culpable in leaving a greatly devalued landscape to future generations.” Culpable is a word with many connotations.
While Montana has escaped the intense scrutiny and public rebuke aimed at Wyoming over its operation of feedgrounds and controversial management of wolves, Wolfe and others say Montana isn’t much better with regard to predators. Recently, another case of CWD was confirmed in a deer near Chester along Montana’s Hi-Line south of Canada.
Currently, only three wolf management units in Montana have strict quotas (two located north of Yellowstone and one west of Glacier National Park). But all others allow unlimited wolf harvest “which is probably not the best ecological strategy for containing CWD,” Wolfe noted. “As a wildlife biologist who spent several years working on the CWD issue, I believe wolf predation is an important tool that needs to be recognized and effectively utilized, along with other tools, as part of Montana’s CWD management plan.” Wolves, Wolfe says, ought to have their numbers safeguarded in areas that represent the front line of disease. Stable packs can serve as a barrier. Wolf management units (WMUs) that border CWD infected areas (or have CWD infected herds within the WMU) should have conservative wolf harvest quotas, he notes. Currently, only three WMUs have quotas (313 and 316 immediately north of Yellowstone, and 110 west of Glacier). All others allow unlimited wolf harvest. When the argument has been presented to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, it has been met with deaf ears, though Dr. Mary Wood, the state wildlife veterinarian noted in 2016 that predators can play a beneficial role. ° ° ° Humans can invent any fairy-tale-reason they want to despise wolves and justify their elimination, but that doesn’t change the fundamental time-tested nature of the species, says Kevin Van Tighem, a hunter and former superintendent of Banff National Park in Alberta’s Canadian Rockies. “I don’t know of a single credible biologist who would argue that wolves, along with other predators and scavengers, aren’t important tools in devising sound strategies for dealing with CWD.” Van Tighem says it can be rationally argued that wolves provide the best line of defense since they are confronting infected animals. Van Tighem told me, just as a dozen other scientists and land managers who hunt have—that once CWD is confirmed in the places where they go afield, they will no longer eat game meat from that area and may stop hunting altogether. Dr. L. David Mech, the eminent American wolf biologist, has authored or contributed to hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers on wolves and prey. We’ve been talking about wolves since the late 1980s when he came to Yellowstone in the years before lobos were reintroduced. There’s no tangible argument he’s seen that suggests wolves wouldn’t be useful in combatting CWD. “In the main, the preponderance of scientific evidence supports the view that wolves generally kill the old, the young, the sick and the weak,” Mech said. “There’s so much documented field data behind it.” He then made a point that exposes the limitations of relying on human hunters and sharpshooters alone to remove suspected CWD carriers. Wolves appear to target sick animals that, to the human eye, exhibit no overt symptoms of disease. “There’s a lot more going on than we can detect,” Mech said. “They are killing animals that most people would say, ‘That animal looks pretty healthy to me,’ but in fact it isn’t.” Mech stays out of the political fray, though he says the value of predators is clear. “Based upon everything I’ve seen over the course of my career, I generally stand behind the assertion that wolves make prey populations healthier,” he said. “The evidence to support it is overwhelming.” In Wolves on the Hunt: The Behavior of Wolves Hunting Wild Prey, Mech, Doug Smith and co-author/editor Daniel R. MacNulty undertook an exhaustive, unprecedented review of scientific studies and observations related to wolf behavior. They cite example after example of how wolves choose prey. They use intricately-detailed observations based on the work of park ecologist Rick McIntyre and colleagues who have tracked the wolves of Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley for decades. They also point to hours upon hours of accumulated video footage amassed by award-winning wildlife cinematographer Robert Landis who has recorded numerous wolf predation incidents in Yellowstone.
A series of striking photos of an extremely rare white cougar have recently baffled the Internet. The four images were taken in 2013, but they recently resurfaced as scientists confirmed this was the first ever recorded case of a leucistic puma. The snaps were taken using trap camera in the Serra dos Órgãos National Park, a reservation located in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest.
Even if albinismm, leucism and even melanism is pretty frequent among wild cats, there have never been records of cougars suffering of these genetical conditions. The reason still remains a mystery for scientists.
“That shows you how extremely unusual it is,” executive director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Big Cats Program Luke Hunter told National Geographic. “My best guess is that the distant ancestor of pumas was uniformly colored, and that has been maintained in the species ever since. But that’s just a consequence of the randomness of mutation, the roll of the genetic dice.”
This first case of leucism at cougars would have helped researchers to understand why this genetic color aberration occurs so rarely, but unfortunately after the initial encounter back in 2013, the rare animal has never been seen again. “The camera trap monitoring project restarted last year, but we still have no new record of this animal or any other odd-colored pumas,” Cecília Cronemberger de Faria, environmental analyst for Serra dos Órgãos National Park, told National Geographic.
Even they’re a great sight due to their unique, unlikely coloring, wild animals that suffer of albinism, melanism or leucism face a lot of challenges. They are extremely vulnerable in front predators and sadly, they’re frequently rejected by their groups.
