I attended the November Durango Wolf Symposium and was disappointed by the orchestrated message that sanitizes the role of the wolf and misconstrues and deliberately omits information regarding the impact of wolves.
Let’s start at the beginning. Why are real wolves nothing like the mythical wolf of European nightmares? Better yet, why were wolves a nightmare for Europeans?
When your survival depended upon your family’s milk cow or sheep, predators were a very real threat to your survival, and still are today. Typically, Europeans did not, and still don’t, have access to firearms, so wolves were emboldened to attack both man and livestock.
Human fatalities in Europe are well documented; less so on the North American continent. The threat of wolves in the history of the U.S. was greatly reduced by the use of firearms, trapping and poisoning. Why?
Because wolves had a severe impact on wildlife, livestock and human safety. Attempting to expunge the nature of wolves is an injustice to people who live with them and it is an injustice to dump wolves out on a settled landscape where lethal removal is only a matter of time.
One of the most repeated, red-herring pro-wolf arguments is juxtaposing livestock losses due to wolves with the total number of livestock in a state. No livestock are going to be killed by wolves if there aren’t wolves in the vicinity. Conversely, a significantly higher percentage of livestock are killed if you look at the number of livestock that were in proximity of wolves.
A Wyoming study concluded that for every confirmed animal killed by wolves, the rancher will be missing another six head . Stress caused by wolves can also impact conception rates and rate of weight gain and make both cattle and sheep difficult to herd. State and federal agencies summarize livestock losses but an under-reported issue is wolves killing pets and working dogs.
“The wolf-less wildlands” claim clearly omits the fact that wolves do not confine themselves to national forests/public lands boundaries, and follow game herds to private property in the winter. In Idaho, about 70 percent of cattle depredations and 51 percent of sheep depredations have occurred on private property.
“Decades of reliable scientific studies demonstrate that if wolves are common enough for long enough and are not persecuted, they can restore the natural balance between predator and prey.” Apparently the author of this statement decided to ignore the precipitous drop in the Yellowstone and Lolo elk herds after wolves were introduced.
Wolves were introduced into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in 1995-1996. In the 1990s the West Yellowstone elk herd was estimated at 19,000 head and has plummeted to 4,900 in 2015. Idaho’s Lolo elk herd was about 13,000 head in 1994, and was reduced to 1,945 by 2016.
The great irony of the wolf debate is the cornerstone argument that wolves bring “balance” to the ecosystem and create a trophic cascade, benefiting other wildlife species. Trophic cascade with wolves is a fleeting moment before wolves, with virtually no nature predators, devastate an ecosystem’s prey base.
Wolves should not be given some contrived, elevated status in nature that ignores and distorts their true nature and effects on other wildlife and the people, pets and livestock that must live in proximity of them.
Wolves are not endangered and do not belong in a settled landscape.
Furthermore, there’s no evidence that wolves would have a positive impact on chronic wasting disease (wolves could, in fact, be a disperser), but ample data that shows wolves can be a disease vector for rabies, hydatidosis, mange and canine distemper, just to name a few.
Let’s make informed decisions based on facts instead of fantastical notions created with inaccurate information.
Bonnie Brown is the Executive Director for the Colorado Wool Growers Association. She lives in Delta.
