(The following is part of a report by Wild Earth Guardians)…

1.  Which two user groups caused Northern Rockies wolves to lose their Endangered Species Act protections and why? 

• The livestock industry and some sportsmen’s organizations, each separately opposed to wolf conservation, convinced Congress in April 2011 to delist Northern Rockies wolves from the Endangered Species Act. Their contentions about resource competition are unsupported by data, as described below.

A.  Do wolves kill vast numbers of livestock?  

• No. This constant complaint by the livestock industry is without merit. Wolves have killed less than one percent of the cattle or sheep inventories in the Northern Rockies. Even in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming where most wolves live (and before the commencement of wolf hunting in 2011-2012) and even using unverified livestock loss data (that is, numbers that are based upon livestock growers’ uninvestigated complaints), wolves killed less than one percent of the cattle (0.07 percent) and sheep (0.22 percent) inventories in those states. Verified livestock losses are even lower.

• These livestock loss numbers mirror the national average where all other carnivores (i.e., coyotes, cougars, bears and domestic dogs) killed less than 0.5 percent of the (2010) cattle and (2009) sheep inventory in the entire United States. The biggest source of mortality to livestock actually comes from disease, illness, birthing problems and weather, but not from native carnivores such as wolves.

B.  Do wolves kill too many elk? 

• No, despite the claims of some sportsmen’s organizations. Human hunters have much greater negative effects on elk populations than wolves, according to a host of biologists, who published their findings in peer-reviewed science journals.

• In fact, the level of human off-take of elk populations is considered “super additive” – that is, humanhunting pressures on elk far exceed the levels of mortality that would otherwise occur naturally. Further, human hunters generally kill prime-age, breeding animals, whereas wolves prey upon older, non-breeding elk. Wolves do hold elk populations at levels that mediate starvation, weather, and other stochastic events.

C. Does sport hunting of wolves increase hunters’ tolerance of them?

• No. Two peer-reviewed studies show that hunting wolves does not increase hunters’ tolerance for them, and especially in the case of wolf and bear hunters.

2. Is wolf management by Idaho and Montana sufficient to conserve the species?

• No. These states have set hunting quotas that are too high to be sustainable and are based upon uncertain population data. Both states have estimated populations to be higher than estimates by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Montana’s population censuses, in particular, are criticized by experts as inadequate and inaccurate. Idaho and Montana both offered overlong hunting seasons on wolves for the 2011-2012 season. In fact, Idaho’s 10-month season extends until June when wolves have dependent young.

• Hunters and trappers killed more than 540 wolves in 2011-2012. Biologists, in peer-reviewed literature, have written that wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains have not yet recovered and that hunting them could put their populations at risk.

• Other researchers have warned that hunting could reduce wolves beyond their ability to recover. Killing wolves not only causes direct mortality to individuals, but also creates social disruption in wolf packs, which can cause packs to disband, leading to the loss of yearling animals and pups.

3.  To whom do Northern Rockies wolves belong?

• The public trust doctrine, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, asserts that all wildlife, including wolves, belong to all Americans. Indeed, all Americans contributed to the restoration of wolves in the Northern Rockies, spending approximately $40 million over 17 years to reintroduce wolves in the region. Unfortunately, with the assumption of management by western states (following delisting of the population under the Endangered Species Act), wolves are now primarily managed for the interests of the livestock industry and some sportsmen’s organizations. The interests of these tiny minority groups do not comport with values shared by the broad American public that supports continued recovery of wolves in the West.

4.  How has the news media influenced people’s values about wolves?

• The news media can affect people’s values about wolves, and studies show the media is increasingly publishing negative stories about wolves. At the same time, surveys on people’s attitudes have shown that most still value wolf and habitat conservation. We note that the media often broadcasts inaccurate or exaggerated statements by the livestock industry or sportsmen’s groups about the supposed negative effects of wolves on livestock or native ungulate populations.

5.  How many wolf-hunting or trapping licenses have been sold in Idaho and Montana and how many wolves live in those states?

• Idaho and Montana have sold over 62,000 tags for the 2011-2012 wolf-hunting/trapping season. At the end of 2010, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated the wolf population in those states stood at 1,271 individuals. License buyers are primarily residents of Idaho and Montana, 89 percent and 99 percent, respectively. Those states sell their wolf-hunting tags at prices far below market value. The high level of resident participation might indicate that citizens in these two states are less tolerant of wolves than other Americans.

6.  Are wolves important to ecosystems?

• Wolves and other apex carnivores contribute significantly to increased biological diversity—from beetles to birds to grizzly bears—and to greater ecosystem function (such as indirectly protecting riparian habitats for a host of fauna and flora), staving off effects from global warming by providing carrion as food sources for other species, and facilitating beaver recovery in the West.

7.  How can we both restore wolves and find ways for people to coexist with them?

• States have shown themselves incapable of managing wolves in a manner that supports the interests of the majority of Americans who love and appreciate wolves. The majority deserves input into how wolves are managed. Instead, decision makers cater to two vocal minority user groups, who base their anxieties about wolves on false claims about resource competition. Wolves have become political animals. They need to be shielded from mercurial political processes, especially since the American public has spent tens of millions of dollars on wolf restoration and research.

• More protected refuges should be established to support wolf restoration, such as the designation of more national parks. Refuges promote persistence of rare native carnivores such as wolves and mountain lions. Refuges also serve as source areas to other subpopulations, which maximizes natality and minimizes mortality.

• Livestock producers can produce “risk maps” to anticipate where conflicts may occur and prevent future problems. Producers can also employ a host of non-lethal livestock protections such as keeping sick or pregnant livestock close to humans, housing livestock in buildings or pens (especially to protect small or young livestock), using guard animals and electronic scaring devices, properly disposing of livestock carcasses and more.

• On public lands, another approach is to retire livestock grazing through voluntary grazing permit buyout. This practice allows the government or third parties to compensate ranchers to permanently retire their grazing permits on public lands, leaving the landscape to wolves and other wildlife and saving taxpayers millions of dollars in grazing subsidies over time.

• Finally, wolf policy should privilege wildlife watchers. Wolf watchers in the Northern Rocky Mountains spend millions of dollars each year to view wolves, as compared to the $1 million dollars that hunters and trappers spent to buy wolf tags in Idaho and Montana.

http://www.wildearthguardians.org/site/PageServer#.UkRpRL7n_UM

Here’s the speech my friend and fellow wolf advocate, Oliver Starr, read at the D.C. Wolf Rally:

As the oldest grandson of a well known Colorado cattle man, people often ask me how I came to love wolves. I blame it on my mother. When I was about four years old she read the following words to me: “my birthday, my birthday, my birthday!! a striped box with holes! I hope it’s a wolf! And within the pages of Jan Wahl’s amazing children’s book called “A Wolf of My Own”, wolves took ahold of my soul and in the 41 Years since I heard those words I have not been able to shake their grip.

My mom should have known better than to read me a story where a kid got a wolf. Unlike the child in the book that actually got a puppy and only dreamed it was a wolf, I became obsessed with having a wolf of my own and then as i grew up, with seeing wolves restored to the wild landscape that has been theirs since long before man ever set foot upon this continent.

It hasn’t been an easy journey. Many of you have probably been called a “wolf lover” and it’s likely that the person referring to you this way meant it as an insult. Today I’m proud to call myself a wolf lover, but to a cattleman, having a grandson that loved wolves was nearly as bad as having a grandson that was a vegetarian!

When I was still a child, I’m sure my grandfather wondered what was wrong with me. How could a member of his family have a soft spot for something so awful. Today I wonder how anyone with a soul could knowingly and needlessly destroy something so beautiful, so essential and so rare as a wolf. I wonder how they could fail to see what I do; one of nature’s greatest masterpieces, sculpted by sun and sky and rain and cold and by the animals with which they dance in a duet of life and death.

I don’t blame my grand-dad for his feelings towards wolves. The prevailing sentiment during his lifetime was that wolves were no good. They killed cattle, they killed sheep, they cost us money! By the time my grandfather was in the cattle business, people in this country had been waging war against the wolf for hundreds of years and for hundreds of years before that on the continent we came from. It was simply a way of life, part of our culture.

When our forefathers arrived on these shores they brought with them their fear, hatred and misunderstanding of wolves, and so it was that we killed them and killed them and killed them, until there were virtually none left to kill.

But since those days we’ve learned a great deal about nature and the interconnectedness of all living things. Thanks to visionaries like Aldo Leopold, we’ve learned that a world without wolves is not a deer-hunter’s paradise, but a disaster for the hunter and the deer. We’ve learned that the indiscriminate killing of wolves and their close relatives, coyotes, doesn’t improve nature but impoverishes it. We’ve found new ways to prevent predators from killing livestock and we’ve been able to prove that coexistence is not only possible, but profitable. It costs less to protect livestock from wolves then it does to keep killing them year after year.

Sadly, we’ve been a lot less successful at changing the old ways of thinking, especially among ranchers and hunters. Ranchers still insist that wolves are a huge threat to their livelihoods while hunters claim that wolves are killing all the game — two myths that refuse to die in spite of massive evidence that disproves them.

While it is true that wolves sometimes kill livestock, ranchers grossly overestimate their impact. In fact wolves are near the bottom of the list when it comes to causes of mortality in sheep and cattle. Injury, disease, exposure and death during birthing all kill many times more livestock than wolves do. Even though much of these losses are preventable, they are considered acceptable, while any loss attributed to a wolf or coyote is grounds for a call to federal wildlife killers that come in and wipe out whatever predators happen to be in the area, whether or not they were actually responsible for the kill.

It’s also true that wolves kill elk, deer, moose, rabbit, musk oxen, mice, beaver and many other species. Of course they do! That’s their role in nature. However the claims of certain wolf-hating hunters that wolves are killing all the game is so ridiculous it’s laughable. The very existence of the wolf is predicated upon the fact that they exist in a dynamic balance with the animals they consume. If wolves were to wipe out the species they need to survive, what do these hunters think would happen to the wolf?

In some states the anti-wolf rhetoric has gone to even greater extremes, with people saying they fear for their lives and for the safety of their children as they walk to school.
And while it is true that on incredibly rare occasions a wolf may have hurt a human, the truth is that when wolves and humans collide wolves always lose. We’ve killed them by the hundreds of thousands. In fact little red riding hood has a lot more to fear from a hunter than a wolf!

Over the years I’ve talked to many people about wolves and the one thing nearly every wolf hater has in common is that they’ve never actually met a wolf or taken the time to get to know them as anything other than something to kill. I’ve spent thousands of hours with wolves and high content wolfdogs and I think it’s fair to say I do know them. They’re not the monsters of my grandfather’s fears, nor are they the cute and fuzzy stuffed animals I had as a child. They are, as former government wolf killer now turned wolf advocate Carter Niemeyer says, “neither as good as we hoped nor as bad as we feared. They’re just wolves.”

In the more than four decades since that fateful day when my mom read me a very wolfy bedtime story, I’ve been lucky to actually share my life and sometimes even my bed with wolves. But also, and much more importantly, to have seen the incredible success story of our Endangered Species Act and its required and equally successful effort to let the howl of the wolf — the true wild icon of our country — echo across the mountains of the Northern Rockies, the peaks of New Mexico and Arizona and throughout the Great Lakes region.

With the return of wolf to Yellowstone we have watched in wonder as an incomplete and damaged ecosystem has become healthier, more resilient and more wild. Where a complete suite of the animals that evolved there are once again interacting and shaping each other as evolution intended. It is proof in living form that our wild places need wolves as badly as wolves need a place in the wild.

But amidst this triumph that is both uniquely American and a shining example of how evils caused by human hands can also be undone by them, we’re about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Wolves are not a recovered species in any sense of the word. Today they occupy less than 5% of their prior range and at only a fraction of their former numbers. The very idea that wolves have recovered sufficiently to have their Endangered Species Act protections removed should make every one of us cringe. How can you say a species is recovered when so much of its former habitat is still missing the breathtaking and mournful howl of its undisputed apex predator? And why should politics take precedence over science in determining the fate of such an important part of the natural world?

Over the past few months, many of us have watched in dismay and then horror as the Federal Government has moved forward with it’s plan to strip all but the Mexican Gray Wolf of it’s endangered species status. We’ve held our collective breath hoping a new Secretary of the Interior, a purported conservationist and a non-rancher, would reverse this disastrous course and allow the wolf to continue its path to long term survival. Instead we’ve been deeply disappointed to learn that at every turn politics has subverted science and even the great work of some of this country’s foremost wolf researchers has been turned against the wolf even as the scientists themselves have taken a stand against the delisting.

And it is for this reason that I’ve left my pack in the redwoods and traveled across our vast country to speak to you and to demand that wolves be restored to full federal protection and allowed to recolonize their former range. I demand it on behalf of the rivers and the streams, on behalf of the deer, the elk, the beaver and the bison. I demand it on behalf of the forests and the plains, I demand it on behalf of our children and our children’s children. We all have a stake in this decision and we all have a right to be heard. And so too do the wolves that can’t speak for themselves, but have every right to their own corner of this planet that none of us own but all of us share.