October 18, 2016 By Bill Charland, For the Sun-News
Micheal Robinson (Photo: Courtesy Photo)
SILVER CITY — Michael Robinson may have been preaching to the choir at Silver City’s Unitarian Universalist Church last Sunday, judging from the warm applause that greeted his presentation on the Mexican Gray Wolf. But as an advocate for restoring the wolf to the Gila Wilderness, he was probably due a welco
me reception. Robinson represents The Center for Biological Diversity, an activist organization that goes to bat for many species hovering on the brink of extinction.
The Gray Wolf is a special case among vanishing species, Robinson said in a phone interview. “Some 41 animal and plant species are well-documented as having become extinct since 1985. But wolves are unique in that their extinction was intentional.”
In his presentation, Robinson showed photos of federal trappers early in the 20th century who were employed full time to hunt down and kill wolves that had lived in harmony with Native American populations for centuries but threatened the livestock industry of European settlers. Theodore Roosevelt called the wolf “the beast of waste and destruction.”
The Mexican Gray Wolf or “Desert Wolf” of the Southwest was pursued even south of the border, until a growing environmental movement gave rise to the Endangered Species Act of 1973 under President Richard Nixon. Now the federal Fish and Wildlife Service received new marching orders. Instead of tracking down the Mexican Gray Wolf to destroy it, the agency was charged with finding any remnants in Mexico, for a breeding program to bring it back to life.
In 1998, a small pack of Mexican Gray Wolves, bred in captivity, was introduced to the Gila Wilderness of western New Mexico and the Apache National Forest of eastern Arizona. Today there are 97 wolves in the United States, about half in New Mexico, with another 25 or so in Mexico. It’s a precarious population with only six breeding pairs. And the wolves have been consistently under attack from certain ranchers who have felt under duress from their presence (albeit on public lands, Robinson notes) and by Congressman Steve Pearce and Governor Susana Martinez who have represented the livestock industry in legislation. Both have tangled with The Center for Biological Diversity.
Robinson believes that taking up the cause of the Mexican Gray Wolf involves more than making amends for its destruction by our government a century ago. “It’s also a matter of ecological balance,” he said. “Biologists call it the ‘trophic cascade.’ That is, if you remove a predator such as wolves from the top of a food chain, it has consequences all the way down through lower species.”
He cites the case of elk — 90 percent of the wolves’ diet — which have become sedentary around stream beds, consuming plant life and supplanting beavers. “You want elk to be roaming,” added Robinson, “and that requires wolves.” Wolves also contain coyotes. And, he said, in the absence of wolves and other natural predators, over-grazing of cattle denuded the grasslands surrounding Silver City, which contributed to the flood that left us the Big Ditch.
Robinson is the author of a book on the history of wolves in the United States, “Predatory Bureaucracy: The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West” (University Press of Colorado, 2005).
If the October headlines were any indication, the quickest way for a wolf to make the news is to get shot. The Jackson Hole News and Guide reported the story of a Wyoming hunter who bagged a wolf, strapped him atop his SUV, and paraded his trophy through Town Square. A Montana landowner shot what he thought was a wolf (it turned out to be a dog hybrid) amid concerns that the beast was harassing house cats. The Ecologist speculated that hunters were chasing wolves from Oregon, where hunting them is illegal, into Idaho, where it’s not, before delivering fatal doses of “lead poisoning.”
Predictably, these cases raise the hackles of animal right advocates and conservationists alike. Both groups typically view hunting wolves as a fundamental threat to a wolf population that, after a history of near extermination, is struggling to survive reintegration into the Northern Rockies. According to Michael Robinson, a conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, “Hunting is now taking a significant toll on wolf populations.”
Understanding what would address these larger issues requires momentarily looking backward. Historically speaking, wolves got the shaft. When Lewis and Clark explored the American west at the dawn of the nineteenth century, thousands of wolves thrived across the Northern Rockies. Lewis admiringly called them “the shepherds of the buffalo.”
But the systemic destruction and commodification of their natural prey–including the buffalo, deer, elk, antelope, and bighorn sheep–as well as the subsequent replacement of wild animals with domesticated livestock, effectively transformed wolves–who wasted no time attacking helpless livestock–from innocent wildlife into guilty predators. Federally sponsored extermination programs–which included the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey (later the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) hiring hunters to kill wolves en masse–succeeded so well that wolf numbers dropped to virtually nil by 1930. In such ways was the West won. (A similar battle continues, to an extent, in the attempt to remove wild horses today).
Six decades later, buffeted by the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and the emergence of a modern environmental movement, conservationists were working diligently to restore wolves to their former climes. But the livestock industry had, throughout the century, radically altered the old terrain, not to mention the rules governing it. Twentieth-century grazing practices denatured the wolf’s traditional habitat, reducing the landscape to ruins while securing ranchers’ presumed right to continue exploiting the wild west for tame animals. Michael Robinson, noting that the process of land degradation began in the nineteenth century, puts it this way: ”the west was picked clean of anything of value.”
Cattle had indeed wrecked havoc. They destroyed watersheds, trampled riparian vegetation, and turned grasslands to hardpan, triggering severe erosion. To top it off, the livestock industry spent the twentieth century securing cheap access to public lands through thousands of grazing permits now granted by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service. Today, ranchers enjoy tax-supported access to 270 million acres of public land. Seventy-three percent of publicly-owned land in the west is currently grazed by privately owned livestock. Some of that grazing might be done responsibly. Most of it, according to the BLM itself, is definitely not.
No matter what the quality of prevailing grazing practices, one thing remains the same as it did a century ago: ranchers have a clear incentive to kill wolves. As environmental groups worked to form a united front in support of wolf reintegration in the mid-1990s, anti-wolf advocates articulated their opinions with vicious clarity. Hank Fischer, author of Wolf Wars and an advocate of wolf reintroduction, recalled the arguments he confronted as he pushed the pro-wolf agenda in Montana. “The Wolf is the Saddam Hussein of the Animal World,” read the placard of one protester. “How Would You Like to Have Your Ass Eaten by a Wolf?,” asked another.
Politically sanctioned release of pent-up vituperation against wolves came in 2012. It was then when gray wolves were completely removed from endangered species lists. Hunting season commenced with a bang in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Recreational hunters and ranchers–not to mention the federal Wildlife Services–have since shot hundreds of wolves that ostensibly posed a threat to livestock. At times, such as last week, hunts have evinced grotesque, vigilante-like displays. According to James William Gibson, writing in The Earth Island Journal, “The Northern Rockies have become an unsupervised playpen for reactionaries to act out warrior fantasies against demonic wolves, coastal elites, and idiotic environmentalists.”
Fortunately, as the debate over wolf hunting rages, cooler heads are trying to prevail. Camilla Fox , Executive Director of Project Coyote, an organization dedicated to the peaceful coexistence of humans and animals, advocates policies that promote, in her words, “predator conservation and stewardship.”
Working closely with ranchers, she encourages them to have “tolerance and acceptance of wolves on the landscape.” She highlights several non-lethal methods of management, including using guard animals (such as Great Pyrenees and llamas) to deter wolves and coyotes from attacking livestock, better fencing, range-riders, fladry (flags that whip and flap in the wind), and grazing allotment buyouts, a solution that allows private parties to pay ranchers to relinquish their grazing permits. Project Coyote’s work has already had a dramatically successful impact on resolving conflicts between sheep owners and coyotes in Marin County, California.
Whatever techniques are eventually used to keep wolves off the headlines and in the wilderness, critics of wolf hunting should not lose sight of the fact that, while hunters are an easy (and perhaps legitimate) target for their ire, a lead poisoned wolf in 2013 is ultimately the victim of a century of disastrous decisions regarding land use–specifically, the use of livestock on the landscape. Eliminating grazing permits for western cattle ranchers would negatively impact no more than 10 percent of the beef industry in the United States. Ten percent! Seems a modest tonnage of flesh to sacrifice in order to save a species that symbolizes the beautiful essence of a landscape we have lost.
As Camilla Fox notes, “they do a lot better when we leave them alone.”
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Wolf Is My Soul 