Exposing the Big Game

Forget Hunters' Feeble Rationalizations and Trust Your Gut Feelings: Making Sport of Killing Is Not Healthy Human Behavior

Exposing the Big Game

Oregon: Enlightened or Dishonest, Cruel and Corrupt?

 

Robert Goldman's photo.
by Robert Goldman

Oregon’s legislators and governor have a big decision to make regarding the future of wolves in the state. It is a litmus test on whether these leaders are honest, decent and wise and whether they serve the hopes and dreams of a clear majority of Oregonians, or other interests. Will these supposed leaders do the right thing for wolves and for a brighter future for Oregon or will they fall back on the dark side of Oregon’s history?

Honest science, healthy ecosystems and biodiversity, the public trust doctrine, basic decency and respect and the clear will of the majority, all favor wolf protection. 96% of Oregonians told the state wildlife agency they favor wolf protection. Additionally, Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife website makes crystal clear that the presence of approximately one hundred wolves has resulted in a near zero effect on the state’s 1,300,000 cattle, as depredation by wolves is barely out of the single digits per year. No honest person can claim with a straight face that Oregon has anything resembling a wolf problem because it does not have such a problem.

The truth is, just as in nearby Idaho, there is a people problem, but in Oregon it comes from a relatively small number of people. Their long held prejudices and their willingness to demonize and kill vital and innocent wolves while lying about them is well known. Some have no shame in spreading utter nonsense about ‘Canadian super wolves’, snarling monster beings and the end of the world triggered by…. fairy tales.

But Oregon is supposed to be different, isn’t it? Oregon is a green and enlightened state, where honesty, decency and justice rule, right?

I had the pleasure of visiting Oregon for three weeks in June and July of 2014. I arrived in the state with a high regard for its vast natural beauty, its magnificent native wildlife, lush forests and magical coast. The forward thinking reputation of its people resonated in my mind.

After an enjoyable week with a hiking club based in Portland, I rented a car and drove to the Wallowa Valley drawn by my respect for Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce people whose sacred homeland this had been for thousands of years. I hiked into the mountains and canoed, took lots of pretty pictures of horses and deer (they are everywhere), water and forests and people and their dogs. I explored and lingered for many hours in the very field where Chief Joseph gathered with his people as they prepared to flee their homeland, their very lives hanging in the balance. My heart felt heavy and sad, as if the unbearable heart ache of 800 innocent souls still hovers over this valley and the beautiful green field guarded by trees and mountains.

The Nez Perce were the peaceful native tribe who saved the entire Lewis and Clark expedition from certain starvation and death only seventy years earlier. President Jefferson personally promised, in gratitude, that the Wallowa Valley would never be taken from the Nez Perce. Later Presidents re-affirmed that promise, even as more white settlers invaded and threatened to steal the land from its rightful owners. The settlers kept coming and kept threatening. Gold was discovered nearby and the land was taken, the promises broken.

The ancestors of these white settlers are among the 8,000 people who call the Wallowa Valley home today. Some of these people are present day Wallowa cattle ranchers who mythologize and demonize wolves, pressure the state wildlife agency to take action, persistently lobby state legislators and the governor to do something about the wolf problem, the problem that exists in their own minds.

I visited the tourist town of Joseph and its wonderful museums, including the Maxwell Plantation Museum dedicated to African Americans who worked for a time as lumbermen in the region. There I learned that the founding state constitution of 1859 forbade the presence and citizenship of African Americans anywhere in Oregon.

Just east of the Wallowas, I explored the dusty, rugged town of Pendleton. On the Pendleton Underground Tour, I learned of the hard working Chinese men who helped build the early railways of the expanding United States. When their decades long hard labor was done and the rail lines complete, they were not wanted by the white settlers who had only recently established the new town of Pendleton. These human beings, thousands of miles from their native land, excavated a village beneath the streets of early Pendleton, a cavernous and dark place. There they lived, set up small businesses and did their best to survive from day to day. Above ground, it was legal to shoot a “Chinaman” for no reason. These poor souls survived in their underground village into the early 1900’s, which is not much more than a hundred years ago.

This not so distant history is part of Oregon’s past, or is it?

On behalf of ecologically vital, remarkably intelligent and social, deeply family-connected and innocent wolves, on behalf of the hopeful and decent majority of Oregonians you are supposed to serve and who have spoken clearly on this issue, in light of the facts and honest science, with full knowledge of your obligation to at long last live up to the public trust doctrine in which wildlife belongs to everyone and is to be managed (or left alone) accordingly, I am asking Oregon state legislators, the governor and the state wildlife agency, which Oregon will you be? The enlightened Oregon of your reputation or the dishonest, cruel and corrupt Oregon of your past?

Take Action to Protect Our Nation’s Wildlife

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HUMANE ALERT
main-feature
Take Action to Protect Our Nation’s Wildlife
Dear Jim,

The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service is still collecting public comments on a proposed rule to limit predator control activities on Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuges. At stake is an opportunity to stop:

• brown and black bear trapping
• brown bear baiting
• the killing of black bears, wolves and coyotes in their dens
• the aerial gunning of bears

Please send a message to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in support of the proposal.

Cattle kills rare in wolf-occupied areas

copyrighted-wolf-argument-settled

http://methowvalleynews.com/2016/02/18/wsu-study-shows-wolves-favorite-prey-is-deer-but-moose-are-also-on-the-menu/

WSU study shows wolves’ favorite prey is deer — but moose are also on the menu

by on

By Ann McCreary

An ongoing, state-funded study of interactions between wolves and livestock shows that — no big surprise — wolves primarily eat deer, according to a researcher involved in field studies conducted over the past two summers.

The study is documenting, among other things, the types and numbers of animals killed and eaten by wolves, said Gabe Spence, a graduate student at Washington State University (WSU), which is leading the scientific investigation.

The goal of the $600,000 study, which was authorized and funded by the Washington Legislature, is to provide accurate data about wolf depredations on livestock and evaluate ways to prevent conflicts between livestock and wolves.

Spence discussed the research and preliminary findings during a presentation at the North Cascades Basecamp in Mazama last week.

The Methow Valley’s Lookout Pack is one of seven packs in north central and northeast Washington that have been studied during the past two years to develop a more accurate picture of the prey taken by wolves, Spence said. Researchers monitored four packs last year.

A team of WSU researchers conducted field studies during grazing seasons, from May through October, when cattle are turned out on public grazing allotments known to overlap with the territories of gray wolf packs.

Researchers placed radio and GPS devices on calves, cows and wolves to track their locations, determine where wolves and livestock occupy same area, and locate wolf kills to document what wolves are eating.

Over the past two years the researchers have documented 285 “probable wolf kills” by the packs they have studied. Four of the 285 animals killed by wolves were cattle, and involved three different packs.

No cattle were killed in 2014 by the packs being monitored, and none of the four cattle killed last year were in the Methow Valley, Spence said.

Spence said that about 940 cows and calves occupied the same territory as the wolf packs during the 2015 grazing season. That means that the four cattle killed equal .4 percent of the cattle in wolf-occupied areas.

“I don’t know if people realize how often wolves and cows are in the same place at the same time. All the time. Every day,” Spence said.

“Livestock deaths on the range are really small. Of the ones that die, only a tiny fraction are killed by predators, and of those a tiny fraction are killed by wolves,” Spence said.

The cattle kills account for 2.3 percent of the all the prey killed by wolves in 2015, Spence said.

Preliminary results show that over the past two summers deer accounted for almost half the prey killed by wolves. Researchers documented 137 deer that were among the probable wolf kills.

“Deer are by far the most common prey,” Spence said. The second-most common prey is moose, which account for about 22 to 28 percent of the animals killed by wolves.

By tracking wolf kills, researchers determined that the average kill rate for wolves in the Cascades area is about .3 kills per pack per day during the summer grazing season, Spence said.

That equals one kill every 3.3 days, or about 110 kills per year if the kill rate stays the same year round.

Even if kill rate is higher, for instance .5 kills per pack per day — to account for possible error or winter kill rates — it would add up to 183 kills per year, Spence said.

“To put this into perspective, roughly 350 deer are killed on the highway in the Methow Valley every year,” he said.

The study is expected to continue another two to three years and will likely include more packs, including the Methow Valley’s Loup Loup pack, if a collar can be placed on one of the wolves in that pack.

Researchers lost contact with a radio-collared female in the Lookout Pack last fall, and are not sure whether the collar failed or the wolf died or was killed. Spence said wildlife officials would try to capture and collar another Lookout pack wolf in spring or summer.

“Both packs overlap quite a bit with livestock,” Spence said.

One of the biggest challenges in conducting research into wolves and livestock “is how excited people get about this topic, on both sides. It makes it about the politics, not the biology,” Spence said.

“Having large predators on the landscape is really a social issue. The biology is pretty clear. It comes down to what we want for ourselves and our children,” Spence said.

Protect Wolves and Bears on National Refuges

Protect Wolves and Bears on National Refuges

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) recently proposed a new rule sharply restricting certain controversial wolf and other predator control measures on 77 million acres of federal wildlife refuges in Alaska – measures promoted by Alaska state wildlife managers like:

  • Killing wolves and coyotes (including pups) during the animals’ denning season.
  • Taking black bears with artificial light at den sites.
  • Taking brown or black bears attracted to bait.
  • Targeting bears with snares, traps, etc.
  • Using dogs in black bear hunts. State law currently prohibits using dogs to hunt big game, with an exception for black bears. The park service will no longer honor this exception on national preserves.
  • Shooting swimming caribou, a practice primarily used in the Noatak National Preserve in Northwest Alaska.

Federal public hearings are now underway across Alaska to gather public input prior to adopting the final rule. The draft rule, published in the Federal Register, aligns with a similar National Park Service rule that was finalized in October and would formally establish a goal of “biodiversity as the guiding principle of federal management of wildlife refuges.”

That stands in contrast to the goal of the Alaska Board of Game, which is to ensure maximum sustained populations for hunting. Increasingly over the last decade, the Game Board and the federal agencies have clashed over managing predators, largely over the idea that the state manages for “abundance” of moose and caribou. Under state law, the Board of Game focuses on sustaining populations of moose, caribou and deer for hunting and consumption.

The Wolf Conservation Center commends the USFWS for following the law, for managing the refuges as Congress intended, and for excluding extreme measures that are in direct conflict with preserving biological integrity, natural diversity and environmental health. To do anything less would violate public trust in the agency responsible for managing the national wildlife refuges — “special places that belong to all of us.”

The USFWS is accepting until March 8th. Comments can be submitted online through the Federal Register [using docket number FWS-R7-NWRS-2014-0005]

Please Comment Now

Minnesota coyote-hunting tournament is latest to draw opposition

http://www.startribune.com/minnesota-coyote-hunting-tournament-is-latest-to-draw-opposition/369533731/

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Michael Pearce, TNSAs in many places across the country, coyotes are not protected in Minnesota; with some restrictions, they can be hunted without a license.

Publicity about the second annual “Save the Birds” tournament in Marshall, which began Friday and was to run through Saturday, sparked an online petition calling for it to be banned and a heated dialogue between supporters and opposers in the town’s local newspaper.

 

As in many places across the country, coyotes are not protected in Minnesota; with some restrictions, they can be hunted without a license. The tournaments, which are legal, are popular with hunters vying for prizes and enjoying the accompanying social occasions.

But many anti-cruelty groups adamantly oppose them. They include the Minnesota-based nonprofit Howling for Wolves, which along with more than 169,000 signers of a Change.org petition posted by Scott Slocum of White Bear Lake, campaigned for the contest’s suspension, deeming it dangerous to wildlife and criticizing its competitive nature.

The protesters sent a letter to Gov. Mark Dayton, according to Howling for Wolves founder Maureen Hackett. A spokesperson for Dayton said he’s in Washington, D.C., until Monday and sent a response from Linden Zakula, Dayton’s deputy chief of staff.

 “State law provides no protection for coyotes in Minnesota; therefore, no license or permit is needed to take them, and no DNR approval is required,” Zakula said. “Our office has informed Howling for Wolves that the governor has no legal authority to prevent a coyote hunt from taking place.”

Despite their legality, the hunts are still offensive, protesters say.

http://www.startribune.com/minnesota-coyote-hunting-tournament-is-latest-to-draw-opposition/369533731/

Meanwhile:

3 dead wolves found dumped in northern Minnesota ditch; poaching suspected

The hunting of wolves is illegal in Minnesota; federal authorities are offering a reward for information.
By Star Tribune

Gary Kramer, U.S. Fish and Wildlife ServiceThe gray wolf is currently listed by the federal government as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.

The carcasses of three wolves “frozen solid” were found dumped in a ditch along a northern Minnesota highway in what conservation officials are confident is a case of poaching, federal authorities said Thursday.

The discovery on Hwy. 8 near Floodwood, about 35 miles southeast of Grand Rapids, was reported on Jan. 22 to a state Department of Natural Resources poachers tip line, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS).

“The wolf carcasses were discovered in a pile in the ditch just off the shoulder of the road, as though someone had driven up and dumped them off the edge of the shoulder,” agency spokeswoman Tina Shaw said.

The gray wolf is currently listed by the federal government as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, meaning they cannot be hunted except in defense of human life. A conviction for each violation could result in up to six months in prison and a fine of up to $25,000.

The federal agency announced a reward of up to $2,500 for information leading to an arrest and conviction.

More: http://www.startribune.com/3-dead-wolves-found-together-in-northern-minnesota-poaching-suspected/369263491/

Ranchers and hunters intent on wiping out wild horses wolves bison

Wild horse and bison roundup area

Wild horse and bison roundup area
Image: Public Domain

 

Petition on BC Wolves

http://action.sumofus.org/a/stop-wolf-cull/?sub=fb

Nearly 200 wolves are going to be shot from helicopters over the next few weeks — a bloody attempt to save an endangered caribou herd in western Canada. And these killings are likely to go on for five years.

Oil, gas, mining, and logging companies have been trashing the mountain caribou’s habitat for decades — but instead of curtailing this industrial habitat destruction, the British Columbia (BC) provincial government is scapegoating wolves, condemning them to a gruesome death.

This cull is just a stopgap measure and not a viable long-term solution to the caribou’s problems. It will, however, cause immense suffering to the wolves, who are highly social and intelligent creatures.

Tell the BC government to stop the industrial encroachment of the caribou’s and wolves’ territory!

Decades of habitat destruction and human encroachment have led to this tragic situation. The BC government needs to be protecting the caribou’s critical food and natural habitat, such as lichen-rich interior forests.

Part of the problem is the caribou’s natural protection from wolves has been undermined by commercial activity. Normally, thick winter snow is enough to keep them safe from most predators, but the wolves have been using the industrial infrastructure of pipeline corridors, roads, railways and snowmobile trails to move through the landscape and hunt. Some feel the cull is awful but necessary to save the caribous, and others feel the cull should be canceled outright — but fundamentally, the BC government should never have let the problem get to this point.

We need to stand up for nature against profit-making companies who are destroying our wildernesses all over the world. These innocent wolves, who are right now being hunted from the skies, are a powerful symbol of how the long-term future of the natural world is being sacrificed for short-term profit.

Please add your voice to ask BC to place responsibility at the feet of the oil, gas, mining and logging companies who are causing the real damage to caribou and wolves.

Sign the petition asking the BC government to protect caribous and wolves from industrial encroachment.

********** More information:

B.C. wolf cull will likely last 5 years, assistant deputy minister says, CBC News,

Conservationists deal blow to Wildlife Services in landmark WA wolf case

http://yubanet.com/usa/Conservationists-deal-blow-to-Wildlife-Services-in-landmark-WA-wolf-case.php#.VoiWcTZdG1s

By: Cascadia Wildlands

OLYMPIA, Wash. December 21, 2015 – In response to a challenge brought by a coalition of conservation organizations, a federal court rejected plans to escalate cruel wolf killing in Washington state by the secretive federal program dubbed “Wildlife Services.” Federal District Judge Robert Bryan held that Wildlife Services should have prepared a more in-depth environmental analysis of the impacts of its proposed wolf killing activities, finding the program’s cursory environmental assessment faulty because the proposed actions would have significant cumulative impacts that are highly controversial and highly uncertain.

Wildlife Services is a controversial program within the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service responsible for killing millions of wild animals every year, including wolves, grizzly bears, otters, foxes, coyotes and birds, with almost no oversight or accountability.

Judge Bryan vacated the program’s analysis, stating “Wildlife Services shall not take any further wolf management actions in Washington under the proposed action alternative, but shall observe the status quo in place prior to the environmental assessment and [finding of no significant impact].”

“Wildlife Services has long asserted that it need not comply with our nations’ federal environmental laws, such as the National Environmental Policy Act, but this decision rejects those arguments and requires Wildlife Services to comply with all federal laws, not just those it finds convenient to comply with,” said Western Environmental Law Center Attorney John Mellgren.

A 2013 internal audit revealed that Wildlife Services’ accounting practices lacked transparency and violated state and federal laws. The program employs incredibly cruel tools to kill wildlife including aerial gunning, leghold traps, snares and poisons.

“It is long past time that we base wildlife management decisions on the best available science, not on antiquated anti-wolf rhetoric and myth,” said Bethany Cotton, wildlife program director for WildEarth Guardians. “Wildlife Services needs to come out of the shadows, update its analyses and adopt practices in keeping with modern science and values about the ethical treatment of animals.”

The environmental assessment prepared by Wildlife Services failed to provide data to support several of its core assertions. For example, Wildlife Services claimed that killing wolves reduced wolf-caused losses of livestock, yet recent peer-reviewed research from Washington State University directly contradicts this conclusion, finding that killing wolves actually leads to an increase in wolf-livestock conflicts. The environmental assessment also fails to address the ecological effects of killing wolves in Washington, including impacts on wolf populations in neighboring states and on non-target animals, including federally protected grizzly bears and Canada lynx.

“This decision is so incredibly encouraging,” said Nick Cady, legal director of Cascadia Wildlands. “We have been working for over a decade to hold Wildlife Services accountable for its blind, reckless lethal control programs. This decision paves the way for meaningful analysis of the program’s impacts and hopefully a meaningful look at whether or not this wolf killing is worth it.”

Washington has experienced Wildlife Services’ wolf killing program firsthand. In August 2014, Wildlife Services snipers shot and killed the Huckleberry wolf pack’s alpha female during a helicopter gunning operation. The death of the Huckleberry pack’s breeding female threatens the future of the entire pack.

Wildlife Services also “advised” the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife in the contentious 2012 killing of Washington’s Wedge wolf pack. In that instance, WDFW killed seven wolves after predation of livestock on public lands, despite the rancher’s failure to take sufficient action to protect his cattle.

“The Court made a wise and prudent decision that safeguards the legal right of citizens to know what their government is doing in their name,” said Timothy Coleman, executive director of Kettle Range Conservation Group. “The so-called Wildlife Services cannot just grant itself authority to execute an endangered species absent the public interest or best available science.”

Wolves were driven to extinction in Washington in the early 1900s by a government-sponsored eradication program on behalf of the livestock industry. The species began to return to Washington from neighboring Idaho and British Columbia in the early 2000s and the wolf population in the state has grown to 13 confirmed packs. Despite this growth, wolves in the state are far from recovered and face ongoing threats. According to WDFW, Washington currently has at least 68 wolves in 16 packs.

The organizations, Cascadia Wildlands, WildEarth Guardians, Kettle Range Conservation Group, Predator Defense and the Lands Council were represented by the Western Environmental Law Center.

copyrighted wolf in water

The wolves that survived the night

December 22, 2015, 05:00 pm

By Tim Preso

 On a December day in 2012, a collared female wolf known by wildlife biologists as 832F wandered beyond the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park into Wyoming where she was shot and killed. She would be among the first wolves shot in Wyoming since the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service removed federal protections from the species and turned over their management to the state earlier that fall.

At the time, 832F was called the “most famous wolf in the world,” the alpha female of the Lamar Canyon pack, wildly popular among tourists to Yellowstone National Park. She was known for her agile hunting ability, able to take down an elk singlehandedly, a dangerous feat usually undertaken by a whole pack. Unusually large with a thick gray and white coat, 832F was a queen among wolves, leader of her pack, beautiful, lethal, a living expression of what it means to be wild.he move by the Fish and Wildlife Service to take away federal protections for wolves was controversial, but the shooting of this particular wolf unleashed a firestorm of criticism of the Service and shined a harsh light on the state of Wyoming’s wolf management program, which included a hostile shoot-on-sight policy across the vast majority of the state and one wolf-killing loophole after another in the remainder.

Earthjustice took the Fish and Wildlife Service to court over the decision to hand over wolf management to a state with a history of extreme anti-wolf policies and a management program that failed to include essential protections for wolves. Last year, a judge ruled in our favor and restored protections to wolves throughout Wyoming.

But just this past week, the fate of wolves in Wyoming and in three other states in the Western Great Lakes region again hung in the balance. Earlier this year, a cadre of anti-wildlife members of Congress slipped a policy rider into House and Senate versions of government spending bills that would have overridden two federal court decisions (including our 2014 victory for wolves in Wyoming). This rider would have stripped wolves of federal protections and would have prevented any further judicial review of the legality of that decision.

If enacted, that rider would have given Wyoming the green light to resume its hostile management program, including shoot-on-sight management of wolves, with no limit or regulation whatsoever, across 85 percent of that state. Just as a fragile recovery is within reach for wolves in the northern Rockies, Wyoming would have again subjected them to the same unregulated killing that nearly wiped them out in the first place.

In the end, wolves survived the night. Last week, President Obama signed into law an omnibus spending package that did not include the wolf delisting rider. That rider, along with 12 other anti-Endangered Species Act riders and dozens of other anti-environmental riders, were excluded from the final omnibus deal.  The fact that wolves and the Endangered Species Act emerged from the omnibus deliberations and deal-making relatively unscathed is in no small part due to the thousands of Americans who wrote in to their members of Congress, or called the White House, or took to social media to demand that their leaders follow through on the American promise to safeguard the natural world for the sake of our children and grandchildren.  The message of these constituents was heard loud and clear by 25 senators and 92 members of the House who wrote letters to the president urging him to reject any policy riders that undermine the Endangered Species Act, an Act that  serves as a critical safety net for the nation’s imperiled plants and animals.

Today, we celebrate that wolves in Wyoming remain protected. We thank the members of the House and Senate who stood strong for the protection of wolves and recognized that a spending bill is no place to make life-and-death policy decisions for our nation’s wildlife. We will remain steadfast in our commitment to fight for the wolves and other species under threat of extinction. And we will think of the wolf somewhere in the mountains south of Wyoming’s Teton Range that will not be shot this winter, but instead will climb through the snow to a ridge-top at night under a winter sky filled with stars and will throw back her head to send a wild howl across the forest.

Preso is an Earthjustice attorney based in Bozeman, Montana.

Salmon, Idaho Predator Derby Canceled!

As a result of sustained legal and grassroots efforts by a coalition of organizations including Project Coyote, sponsors of the infamous Salmon Idaho “Predator Derby” announced they are canceling the cruel event this winter. This is a huge win for the coyotes, wolves and other predators targeted in this barbaric event that awards prizes to those who kill the most and largest of a given species. You helped achieve this victory!

While we celebrate this hard-fought victory and take comfort in knowing that coyotes and wolves in the Salmon, Idaho area won’t be targeted this winter, the stark reality is that killing contests are still legal in Idaho – and in every U.S. state except California.

To Expose this barbarity, Educate the public and policy makers, and Empower the grassroots to help End this practice, we are producing a film about wildlife killing contests and trophy hunting of predators. Most people have no idea wild animals are being killed for prizes and trophies across the U.S.- and are shocked and horrified to learn such cruelty is legal.

Education is key to changing the way our wildlife is treated in North America. We must raise public awareness and then change the laws to ensure that coyotes, wolves, bobcats and other native carnivores are treated and valued with the kind of respect and appreciation they deserve.

Please watch my message below & thank you for your steadfast support.

Camilla H. Fox
Founder & Executive Director

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Larkspur, CA 94977