Carter Niemeyer's Wolfer, and Thoughts on the Wolf Wars
- Each day, I get as many e-mails from wolf expert Carter Niemeyer as live in an average wolf pack: anywhere from 2 to ten. This never ceases to amaze me, because I know that Carter, like me, was pulled into the computer age kicking and screaming. I try to read these pieces too, because they typically strike a chord with some issue I'm pondering on: how to curb the excessive killing of carnivores by Wildlife Services (a secretive agency in USDA that kills millions of animals each year that are considered "pests", including wolves), the increasing craziness over the debate on wolves in the Northern Rockies, and some unbelievably bad proposals regarding wildlife management coming out of the Montana and Idaho state legislatures right now. When it comes down to wolves, Carter is sort of a one-man "truth police" too: in an e-mail last week for example, he corrected a mistake (all too common) about a wolf-hybrid dog, NOT a wolf, that was to blame for killing a sheep in eastern Idaho last summer.
Wolves often are unfairly blamed for killing animals that have died for other reasons, Carter explains in his recent memoir Wolfer. That's Carter: a straight talker and a straight shooter, with a curiosity for the truth and an openness to trying new things, including experiments with methods to better exist with wolves in this contentious western landscape. Unlike a lot of veterans of wolf management who have grown over time cynical and bitter, Carter has not—fortunately for those of us who look to him for advice periodically about how to make Wildlife Services more transparent, open and accountable to the broader public, rather than to a special few interests.
Carter's worth talking to, and his book is well worth reading—it even should be required reading for Wildlife Service's employees. That's not just because he tells a thrilling story of the reintroduction of wolves in the Northern Rockies, or because he knows a lot about wildlife, but because he is trying to think through how the complex world around these iconic species actually works, and how it could be better—more fair, open, respectful. This makes his stories much more than they seem at first blush.
Reading Carter's river of e-mails and his book recently made me sit back and think about several themes which I will explore in the next few blogs: how is it that wolf management has come to be largely driven by a privileged few, loud, often brutish special interests? What can we learn from Carter's wealth of experience about wolf/human co-existence? How can we address the increasing polarity in the wolf debate, a dynamic that threatens the very nature of our democratic system? How can basic governance be improved among agencies that have vastly different agendas and that often work at cross-purposes?
I don't always agree with Carter's interpretation of the politics around wolves, but his stories provide a lot to chew on; and many illustrate much bigger social, economic and political dynamics affecting the wolf debate. But, before I get into my own internal ramblings triggered by Carter's writings, I should introduce him to you. The first thing you'll notice about him is that he is tall—6'6"—and at 5'5", I have to crane my neck up to look into his eyes. But before you can get too intimidated, you notice his blue eyes and warmth. He seems like a basically normal guy, but don't be fooled. As he says in Wolfer, "wolves had a way of working their way into my life, like a worm through an apple. They're just animals, of course, but they have a way of making people nuts, and for that matter, attracting nutty people. No normal person could do the job I was doing, and normal people wouldn't want to be involved in something this controversial, at least not on purpose. But here I was".
Watching how Carter responds, typically calm and bemused, to the strange turns and twists of the wolf drama over the last two decades is worth the memoir's sticker price of $18. Even more interesting to me is how he evolved in the years spent at the epicenter of the wolf world, becoming a crime scene investigator, fence mender, enemy #1 (among some), and finally a writer—and a great one at that. Carter kept copious notes, especially of investigations of how livestock die (by wolves or other causes), compiling notebooks that stood taller than a wolf by the end of his career. This made him a real expert on how animals die. He writes: "I didn't consider myself a crime scene investigator until I learned that everyone else did. In their minds, a crime had been committed against livestock by wild animals needed to be answered—preferably with a gunshot. It turns out not to be such a simple job… Without cutting off its hide, I couldn't tell what killed a torn up sheep or a steer sprawled in the mud. My knife—and my diaries—became my closest allies. I wanted to be thorough, and moreover, I wanted to be honest. I cared what the answer was, even when others in my agency didn't. I did a lot of skinning while the rancher standing over me talked trash about wolves. When I reported right there that disease or weather or something besides a predator was responsible, most of them were not happy about it."
Later in the book, when Carter took over as wolf specialist for the state of Idaho, he describes himself as a "fence-mender". He observed in his memoir, "when it wasn't the animals that got people wrapped around their own axels, it was other people—ones that weren't as easily dismissed as a pack of naughty wolves. My principle goal in Idaho was wolf recovery, but I was having the most trouble with people. At least with wolves, I could predict their behavior… Nothing was ever going to work unless everybody tried to get along. The ranchers aren't your worse enemies, I told wolf-lovers, and to ranchers, I broke the news that wolves weren't ever going away, so everybody needed to find a way to live with them. When it came right down to it, everybody in the wolf fight had a lot more in common than they ever would believe".
Carter's point about the common interest rings more true today then ever: in my wolf work, I have met many ranchers, sportsmen and other who accept that wolves will be on the landscape, but they don't know how to resolve the problems wolves can precipitate. And they are frustrated that the government has been largely unresponsive to helping them when conflicts arise. These are people too who typically want to stay out of the limelight. As a result, the rantings of the crazy anti-wolf fringe is what you typically read in the papers.
In his book, Carter describes his efforts to create an arena where common interests could be fostered: they were successful with some individuals, but did not go as far as he had hoped. He had early premonitions of the challenges he faced in this area: "I'd end up slitting my throat by taking the wolf specialist job. I went out and did what I thought was a thorough, honest job and because of it, I was branded a traitor. Every time I said a wolf didn't do it, I got my ass chewed by my supervisor. But I was unflagging in my opinion: wolf might be a nuisance because there were new, but they were not monsters, and I wasn't letting bureaucrats or congressmen or anyone else change my mind about it. I didn't understand why others around me refused to acknowledge this is the truth. The few wolves that wandered into Montana had nearly undetectable effects on ranching and didn't seem to be that interested in livestock. I didn't believe that injecting a sudden, larger population of wolves into America's Northern Rockies could create any sort of burden for most ranchers, except maybe a psychological one. Having wolves around used to be the cost of doing business".
In 1994, when Carter became involved in the effort to reintroduce of wolves from Canada to Yellowstone and central Idaho, those were radical sentiments for someone in the Wildlife Services, a rogue agency that has killed over 114,000 mammalian carnivores just in 2009 (and over 2.2 million animals total a few years before), many unnecessarily. And sadly, those sentiments are still rare, even though Carter has mentored a number of others inside this agency and out. For his mentorship, we are very grateful—but much more is needed to turn this recalcitrant agency around.
Carter talks a lot about the vulnerability of wolves in his book, and how easy it would be to reverse the enormous progress made to date under the auspices of the Endangered Species Act. "Having been a trapper and a hunter, and understanding what I did about wolf behavior, I could kill them without much effort if that kind of order came down. I wondered how many people knew how easy it would be. Just give me wolves wearing radio collars, a helicopter, a shotgun, deep snow and calm winds."
A chilling thought…and one that is especially relevant today as Congress considers a suite of bills that would legislatively removing federal protections for wolves, Montana's Governor Brian Schweitzer encourages wholesale slaughter of wolf packs (even potentially packs that do not have a record of killing livestock), and the state legislatures consider deeply troubling anti-wolf bills, including one that would prevent Idaho from prosecuting illegal wolf kills. In such a climate, it's not surprising that a growing number of people have deep reservations about turning the keys to the car of wolf management over to the states, which have demonstrated fundamental hostility to wolves.
Where does Carter end up in the face of all this wolf madness? With humor of course, one of yesterday's e-mails from Carter was entitled: "It's like a horror movie—they just keep coming out of the woodwork." But for the real answer, you'll just have to read the book.
Carter's worth talking to, and his book is well worth reading—it even should be required reading for Wildlife Service's employees. That's not just because he tells a thrilling story of the reintroduction of wolves in the Northern Rockies, or because he knows a lot about wildlife, but because he is trying to think through how the complex world around these iconic species actually works, and how it could be better—more fair, open, respectful. This makes his stories much more than they seem at first blush.
Reading Carter's river of e-mails and his book recently made me sit back and think about several themes which I will explore in the next few blogs: how is it that wolf management has come to be largely driven by a privileged few, loud, often brutish special interests? What can we learn from Carter's wealth of experience about wolf/human co-existence? How can we address the increasing polarity in the wolf debate, a dynamic that threatens the very nature of our democratic system? How can basic governance be improved among agencies that have vastly different agendas and that often work at cross-purposes?
I don't always agree with Carter's interpretation of the politics around wolves, but his stories provide a lot to chew on; and many illustrate much bigger social, economic and political dynamics affecting the wolf debate. But, before I get into my own internal ramblings triggered by Carter's writings, I should introduce him to you. The first thing you'll notice about him is that he is tall—6'6"—and at 5'5", I have to crane my neck up to look into his eyes. But before you can get too intimidated, you notice his blue eyes and warmth. He seems like a basically normal guy, but don't be fooled. As he says in Wolfer, "wolves had a way of working their way into my life, like a worm through an apple. They're just animals, of course, but they have a way of making people nuts, and for that matter, attracting nutty people. No normal person could do the job I was doing, and normal people wouldn't want to be involved in something this controversial, at least not on purpose. But here I was".
Watching how Carter responds, typically calm and bemused, to the strange turns and twists of the wolf drama over the last two decades is worth the memoir's sticker price of $18. Even more interesting to me is how he evolved in the years spent at the epicenter of the wolf world, becoming a crime scene investigator, fence mender, enemy #1 (among some), and finally a writer—and a great one at that. Carter kept copious notes, especially of investigations of how livestock die (by wolves or other causes), compiling notebooks that stood taller than a wolf by the end of his career. This made him a real expert on how animals die. He writes: "I didn't consider myself a crime scene investigator until I learned that everyone else did. In their minds, a crime had been committed against livestock by wild animals needed to be answered—preferably with a gunshot. It turns out not to be such a simple job… Without cutting off its hide, I couldn't tell what killed a torn up sheep or a steer sprawled in the mud. My knife—and my diaries—became my closest allies. I wanted to be thorough, and moreover, I wanted to be honest. I cared what the answer was, even when others in my agency didn't. I did a lot of skinning while the rancher standing over me talked trash about wolves. When I reported right there that disease or weather or something besides a predator was responsible, most of them were not happy about it."
Later in the book, when Carter took over as wolf specialist for the state of Idaho, he describes himself as a "fence-mender". He observed in his memoir, "when it wasn't the animals that got people wrapped around their own axels, it was other people—ones that weren't as easily dismissed as a pack of naughty wolves. My principle goal in Idaho was wolf recovery, but I was having the most trouble with people. At least with wolves, I could predict their behavior… Nothing was ever going to work unless everybody tried to get along. The ranchers aren't your worse enemies, I told wolf-lovers, and to ranchers, I broke the news that wolves weren't ever going away, so everybody needed to find a way to live with them. When it came right down to it, everybody in the wolf fight had a lot more in common than they ever would believe".
Carter's point about the common interest rings more true today then ever: in my wolf work, I have met many ranchers, sportsmen and other who accept that wolves will be on the landscape, but they don't know how to resolve the problems wolves can precipitate. And they are frustrated that the government has been largely unresponsive to helping them when conflicts arise. These are people too who typically want to stay out of the limelight. As a result, the rantings of the crazy anti-wolf fringe is what you typically read in the papers.
In his book, Carter describes his efforts to create an arena where common interests could be fostered: they were successful with some individuals, but did not go as far as he had hoped. He had early premonitions of the challenges he faced in this area: "I'd end up slitting my throat by taking the wolf specialist job. I went out and did what I thought was a thorough, honest job and because of it, I was branded a traitor. Every time I said a wolf didn't do it, I got my ass chewed by my supervisor. But I was unflagging in my opinion: wolf might be a nuisance because there were new, but they were not monsters, and I wasn't letting bureaucrats or congressmen or anyone else change my mind about it. I didn't understand why others around me refused to acknowledge this is the truth. The few wolves that wandered into Montana had nearly undetectable effects on ranching and didn't seem to be that interested in livestock. I didn't believe that injecting a sudden, larger population of wolves into America's Northern Rockies could create any sort of burden for most ranchers, except maybe a psychological one. Having wolves around used to be the cost of doing business".
In 1994, when Carter became involved in the effort to reintroduce of wolves from Canada to Yellowstone and central Idaho, those were radical sentiments for someone in the Wildlife Services, a rogue agency that has killed over 114,000 mammalian carnivores just in 2009 (and over 2.2 million animals total a few years before), many unnecessarily. And sadly, those sentiments are still rare, even though Carter has mentored a number of others inside this agency and out. For his mentorship, we are very grateful—but much more is needed to turn this recalcitrant agency around.
Carter talks a lot about the vulnerability of wolves in his book, and how easy it would be to reverse the enormous progress made to date under the auspices of the Endangered Species Act. "Having been a trapper and a hunter, and understanding what I did about wolf behavior, I could kill them without much effort if that kind of order came down. I wondered how many people knew how easy it would be. Just give me wolves wearing radio collars, a helicopter, a shotgun, deep snow and calm winds."
A chilling thought…and one that is especially relevant today as Congress considers a suite of bills that would legislatively removing federal protections for wolves, Montana's Governor Brian Schweitzer encourages wholesale slaughter of wolf packs (even potentially packs that do not have a record of killing livestock), and the state legislatures consider deeply troubling anti-wolf bills, including one that would prevent Idaho from prosecuting illegal wolf kills. In such a climate, it's not surprising that a growing number of people have deep reservations about turning the keys to the car of wolf management over to the states, which have demonstrated fundamental hostility to wolves.
Where does Carter end up in the face of all this wolf madness? With humor of course, one of yesterday's e-mails from Carter was entitled: "It's like a horror movie—they just keep coming out of the woodwork." But for the real answer, you'll just have to read the book.
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