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Viewpoints: Hard work remains to keep California’s wolves safe
Published: Saturday, Jun. 14, 2014 - 12:00 am
The remarkable chain of events that set the stage for gray wolves to gain California Endangered Species Act protections last week seemed, at times, more cinematic than real.
From the first California appearance four years ago of the wolf OR7 after his wandering, 1,000-mile trek from eastern Oregon, to the discovery of his pups in southern Oregon just two days before the vote on protecting wolves, it’s tempting to see some invisible hand of fate pushing events along.
But as a scientist and longtime wolf-recovery advocate now helping to craft a California wolf conservation and management plan, I know the toughest part of the journey is yet to come.
The fledgling wolf management plan in Oregon – where wolf attacks on livestock are down this spring despite a population that has tripled – is demonstrating that progress is possible when ranchers use nonlethal control methods such as hanging red flags on fences to scare away wolves, monitoring cattle herds on horseback and quickly removing livestock carcasses.
But the risks faced by wolves dispersing into new areas such as California are immense.
Some ranchers and elected officials in Northern California are on record saying they’ll shoot dead any wolf they see. While that isn’t the majority view, the short history of wolf recovery in the West makes clear that the vocal anti-wolf minority has taken a deadly toll.
At the Center for Biological Diversity, which successfully petitioned California to protect wolves, we verified 65 instances from 1981 to 2014 of individual wolves dispersing outside core recovery areas. And 81 percent of the dispersing wolves were killed, a quarter of them gunned down by people who stated they shot the animal because they thought it was a coyote, or that they knew it was a wolf but fired anyway.
Perhaps even more dangerous to wolves over the long haul is the cadre of livestock lobbyists and politicians who are constantly pushing anti-wolf legislation both at the federal and state levels. Pressure from those groups not only led to Congress voting in 2011 to drop federal protections for wolves in the northern Rockies and Great Lakes regions, but played an important role in the pending federal proposal to drop protections for wolves across most of the lower 48 states.
And those same pressures are sure to be felt in California, where the 6 million or so cattle and sheep sometimes seem to have more political clout than the state’s nearly 38 million people.
Those realities make it all the more commendable that the California Fish and Game Commission showed the wisdom and fortitude to follow the science, not the politics, and extend state protections to wolves. It was a brave and correct decision to ignore a deeply flawed recommendation by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife to deny those protections.
Still, given the politically charged opposition to wolf recovery that clearly empowers some people to take wolf management into their own hands, it’s a remarkable feat when a lone, dispersing wolf is able to buck the odds and establish a new pack.
That’s why just two weeks ago, wildlife managers and wolf advocates were celebrating the news that for the first time since wolves lost federal protections in the northern Rocky Mountain states three years ago, a dispersing wolf from Oregon had somehow made it through the anti-wolf gantlet known as Idaho, where nearly 1,000 wolves have been killed by hunters, trappers and state regulators since 2011.
The celebration of the wolf’s safe arrival in Montana was short-lived. Last week, Montana wildlife officials announced the 2-year-old male wolf had been killed by a poacher.
The lone wolf’s tragic death makes it all the more amazing that OR7 has been cagey enough to buck the odds for four years and counting and throw open the door to wolf recovery in southern Oregon and California.
Viewpoints: State's wolf management plan could set tone for U.S.
Published: Sunday, Apr. 7, 2013 - 12:00 am | Page 5E
Last Modified: Sunday, Apr. 7, 2013 - 2:15 pm
During the 15 months the wolf known as OR7 has crisscrossed the Oregon-California border, the news from his birthplace back in Eastern Oregon has shaken the boots off some of those holding most tightly to deeply rooted misperceptions about the ability of wolves to coexist on the landscape with the rest of us.
In the two years since a lawsuit stopped the state of Oregon from killing wolves, the state's fledgling wolf population has doubled to nearly 50. Yet in Wallowa County, where the majority of Oregon's wolf-livestock conflicts are reported each year, fatal wolf attacks on livestock have fallen by 60 percent as ranchers and agencies were forced to rely on nonlethal conflict-prevention methods.
At the same time in neighboring Idaho, where over the last two years hunters, trappers and state agents have killed more than 700 wolves, the number of sheep and cattle killed by wolves increased by more than 75 percent.
In fact, those trends reflect exactly what biologists and wolf experts have been telling anyone who would listen since wolves became one of the first animals to be protected by theEndangered Species Act when it was passed, 40 years ago: Tried-and-true, centuries-old nonlethal wolf management techniques such as range-riding, livestock-guarding dogs and appropriate fencing greatly reduce predation by wolves on livestock.
And it reinforces the fact that killing wolves and leaving behind orphaned pups and dispersed packs actually increases the chances of livestock being killed, because once the order of the pack is destroyed, so is the natural pack discipline of teaching younger wolves to kill natural prey such as deer and elk, leaving lone wolves with no choice but to take down the easiest prey they can find to survive.
Those lessons come at a valuable time for Californians during the current public comment period, which ends in May, on whether we should protect wolves under the state Endangered Species Act.
It reminds us that as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service moves toward dropping federal protections for wolves in the lower 48 states, we have a great opportunity to build a wolf management plan that sets a national example of how wolves can coexist with human endeavors.
Wolf experts have long said California has hundreds of thousands of acres of excellent wolf habitat. Of course, California is also the nation's most populated state and home to a thriving livestock industry of more than 6 million cattle and sheep.
With 163,000 square miles, California is the nation's third-largest state, behind only Alaska and Texas. And that means we're in a great position to share the land we've inherited with the species we purposefully killed off in California and many other western states.
The return of wolves to California is a promising event for many of us fortunate enough to make our home here in the Bear Republic, where the state flag, featuring an image of the state's last known grizzly, says a lot about how we see ourselves.
Like residents of the other 49 states, we, too, are concerned about jobs, taxes, education, climate change and the length of our commutes.
But the people who make up our state's ever-swelling population continue to represent Western ideals as old as the state, from an ongoing pioneer-style willingness to go where others have not, to a belief in fresh starts.
Even for wolves.
The arrival of OR7 in California in December 2011 shows it's only a matter of time before wolves once again make their homes in our state. And given that animals live in ecosystems rather than states, whether OR7 decides to put down roots here is only a side issue in a much larger ecological evolution, one that wolf experts say will surely result in wolves returning permanently to California.
They're coming – the question is, will we be ready to protect them?
Efforts to make sure those protections are in place were put in motion last fall when state officials recommended that California extend endangered species protections to OR7 and all that follow him. That recommendation will be ruled on in October.
In the meantime, let's be clear: Recovering wolves to their historic range will take discipline and the acceptance that they, like the rest of us, have a right to be here. It won't always be easy. But as the mounting evidence from neighboring Oregon shows, it can be done and done well, if we're willing.
California resident Amaroq Weiss, a biologist and former attorney who has been working to recover wolves in the West for 16 years, is West Coast Wolf Organizer for the Center for Biological Diversity. Reach her at aweiss@biologicaldiversity.org
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