My friend Sadie Parr of the Canadian Wolf Coalition http://www.canadianwolfcoalition.com/ has alerted me to the fact that British Columbia officials are looking to institute a mass wolf slaughter in an attempt to stave off what appears to be an extinction event of the Mountain Caribou. The Caribou population in British Columbia once numbered several thousand and is now down to 50 individuals--a population crash that Government Officials find easiest to blame on wolf predation.
It is true that Woodland Caribou across North America are considered limited by predation as the proximate factor(Bergerud 1974, Bergerud and Eliot 1986,, Ferguson et al. 1988, Ouellet et al 1997). However, Caribou have co-esisted with their Wolf and Bear predators for thousands of years with Caribou selecting refuge from them in high elevation, mountainous terrain, bog complexes and forests with intermediate size lakes(easy escape routes when frozen in Winter)-- source:Steven Ferguson and Philip Elkie North Eastern Naturalist.
When the human animal significantly logs the Forest....................creates roads through the Forest............allows snowmobiling and heli-skiing in the Forest......................The results are disasterous for the Caribou. The altered habitat that we create allows deer and Moose to spread out from the bottomlands and into the more mountainous Caribou terrain. Let in the moose and deer and you give the wolves significantly easier access with less dense understory to traverse in chasing down the Caribou.
Where once the thickly covered hillsides were in Forest cover, they now are crisscrossed with openings and paths that lead to the wolves prey switching from the harder to kill Moose and deer, to the easier dinner of Caribou.
To slaughter scores of Wolves for our intentional and non-intentional habitat altering activities is DEAD WRONG!
We need to mitigate out logging, skiing, snowmobiling and road building activities and re-create protected habitat that once again restores the balance.......................allowing all of us Wolves, Caribou, Moose, Deer and People to all make a living in British Columbia and across the Northern Tier of the USA and Canada.
Link to Sadie and the Canadian Wolf Coalition for where you can send your letters and direct your phone calls so as to curb the knee-jerk, 'kill baby kill" reaction of the British Columbia Ministry officials.
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