Losses to Wolf Predation Move South

How many wolves is enough?

As many as people are willing to live with.  I expect we are approaching that number and the forces
that seek to keep the wolf on the endangered species list are the one's putting the wolf's long-term prospects into the most danger.

When the wolf is less a sound heard up north and more a threat to the family pet or next year's heifers, people will begin to turn against wolves.  When people turn against wolves, they won't wait for government approval to act.  That is why compensating farmers and animal owners for wolf losses are so important.

But those are country kid problems.  It is hard to get city kids to hear, let alone understand or acknowledge the perspective of those who actually have to live with wolves.  I've talked about that before.

But if it reaches a point where the government pay out is insufficient, the advice is age old.  I've heard it since I was lad.  If wildlife threatens your livelihood, if it threatens your child, if it is just too big a pain in the ass: there are always the three S's.

Shoot.
Shovel.
Shut up.

By the time you drive a person to commit a felony, I doubt you'll be able to turn them back into supporters for conserving the species.

According to the Minnesota Department of Agriculture losses to wolves are moving south.  We have no winter snow to slow down deer, making them easier prey.  There are fewer deer the last few years.  It is no wonder lone wolves and packs are spreading out seeking prey.

The Minnesota Department of Agriculture has received wolf attack claims from farmers who have lost livestock in new southern locations in the state. 

"The most unique one recently was in Wabasha County—that's south of the cities of course. That is very usual to see a claim that far south," Geir Friisoe, director at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture said. 

The Minnesota Legislature authorized the Department of Agriculture to reimburse livestock owners for loses caused by wolf attacks. 

"Historically it’s the north-central part of the state we have more of our claims," Friisoe said. 

In fiscal year 2016 (since July), there have been 72 claims to the state, totaling $142,074 by property owners who lost livestock during that time according to Department of Agriculture data provided to 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS. 

The department said 16 wolf claims, $42,487 from fiscal year 2015, were recently paid.State data shows, since 1993, the total number of wolf claims in Minnesota has averaged $78,398.35 per year.

I will probably never hunt a wolf.  I lack the patience and the drive.  I do enjoy hearing them on a clear winter night.  I hope to hear that sound from my front deck for the rest of my life.

To get there we need to bring back a limited number of tags to keep the numbers low.  It might even be worthwhile to consider a southern limit for wolf expansion, a line below which there is a year-round open season on wolves.

Settled Science

A year ago a coastal judge unilaterally returned the Wisconsin wolf to endangered species list.  The logic being that because the wolf had not returned to the whole of its historic range, it was still, in need of protection.

The rejection of the ruling was not limited to predator hunters or those living "up north."  Everyone with knowledge rooted in place found the ruling nonsensical.

The historical ship has sailed.  Living in the present, the wolf is best protected if we discourage it from becoming established in all of its previous range.  We best protect the wolf by managing its numbers where it does maintain breeding populations so that the people who live there continue to believe the wolf is worth protecting under the law instead of dispatching under the three S's: shoot, shovel, shut up.

From 2014:

By now we expect absurdity and fantasy in our wolf-management programs, but last week’s federal court ruling that returned Great Lakes wolves to the Endangered Species List is likely the silliest decision yet. 

In effect, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in Washington, D.C., declared that although gray wolves aren’t biologically endangered in the Western Great Lakes, they remain legally endangered. In other words, she found reality illegal. 

Is nothing easy with wolves? The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service first removed the Western Great Lakes’ wolf population from the ESL in 2007, but court rulings have since forced the F&WS to restore federal protection four times. 

In this most recent dismissal of science, Judge Howell held the F&WS to its original 1978 decision to protect the gray wolf “species” in the entire Lower 48. Therefore, she found that most of the area specified as Western Great Lakes wolf range didn’t offer wolves enough protection. 

Specifically, Howell cited Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, North and South Dakota, and two-thirds of Minnesota as unsafe for wolves. No matter that those states and most of Minnesota lie outside the region’s best wolf habitat – northeastern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula – which wolves recolonized the past 30 years. 

Basically, Judge Howell said it’s not enough that Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan have healthy wolf populations in their Northern forests. By her interpretation, the states still haven’t done enough to meet the Endangered Species Act’s legal requirements. She noted that wolves sometimes wander far from their birth range, and state laws do little to protect them. 

She also said Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan are “deficient” in addressing the possibility that disease and illegal kills could interact with each other and threaten the species.Are we really supposed to write laws to protect individual animals or entire species from every eventuality? We can’t even do that for ourselves, judging by recent protests from Ferguson to Milwaukee to New York.

There are people and organizations whose moral universe is informed by a Manichean view of the human interaction with the natural order.  Humanity, outside its original role of subsistence hunter/gatherer, is unnatural and evil.  The rest of nature is pure and good.  We have met Mordor, and he is us.

This is the same kind of thinking that brings you anti-GMO nonsense, when it is not their children who will starve.  This is the same kind of thinking that brings you the anti-vaccine message, they do not believe it is their children who will suffer and die.

They want the wolf to range the same space it did prior to the Columbian contact, and they do not feel bound to make arguments to their fellow citizens.  They will use law-fare believing they can force their moral order on the rest of us.

They confuse law and culture.  From speed limits to bedroom games, people do what they think is right, and do not obey the guidelines of some far away lawgiver.  Using one ideologically driven view of the law to restrain culture without making an argument to the culture just cheapens the law.

The quickest way to undo the gains the wolf has made is to turn the residents of the northern states against the policies designed to protect the wolf.  A few will go to Madison to plead their case.  Those who stay home will be much more effective.

The Manicheans do not make an argument to convince the rest of us because they only have ideological arguments and we are not ready to be converted to their religion.  Reality, science, and any view of the Anthropocene as anything other than an aboriginal utopia, are united embracing the reality that today the wolf has recovered. 

A group of leading wolf scientists are urging the western Great Lakes population of gray wolves be removed from protections of the Endangered Species Act. 

The 26 scientists, including Dave Mech of the University of Minnesota and Adrian Wydeven of the Timber Wolf Alliance, argue the species has successfully recovered in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin and should be delisted. 

"It is in the best interests of gray wolf conservation and for the integrity of the Endangered Species Act for wolves to be delisted in the western Great Lakes states where biological recovery has occurred and where adequate regulatory mechanisms are in place to manage the species," wrote the scientists in a letter delivered Wednesday to Sally Jewell, Secretary of the Department of Interior, and Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

The scientists' position supports past decisions by government agencies, which has moved three times to delist the wolf in the region, only to be overturned by lawsuits or legal challenges.

The men and women who live with wolves have abidded by the good sense legislation that has protected the wolf and allowed its return.  If that regulation becomes foolishnes, however, people will protect themselves, their livestock, and their pets with the resources they have on hand.

When we do not feel protected by the law, we begin to protect ourselves, and the wolf will lose when women and men who live with the wolf learn to disregard the protections we have extended to the wolf.

City Kids, Country Kids, and the Wisconsin Wolf

It is a common city kid fantasy: that a problem can be solved by the passing of a law or the writing of a regulation.  Human problems can only be solved by changing human behavior.

In the end, people do what they think is right or, more cynically, "they do what is most convenient and then they repent."  Either way, laws only work when they operate with the consent of the governed.  There are plenty of laws in every nation which are ignored for this very reason.

If wolves are to find a permanent place in our wild areas it will come through a variety of regulations and laws which through a variety of sticks and carrots, convince the humans who must live beside the wolf to do so grudgingly if not happily.

• There are plenty of laws protecting African lions, but when the people who bear the cost of living next to lions do not share the benefit of having them around, lions are poisoned.
• Preserving the den sites of Illinois rattlesnakes, a necessary part of their preservation, looks very differently if you live nearby, have children, and want to feel safe allowing them to play in the yard.
• The allure of a resident wolf pack is experienced very differently by the downstate resident who travels north to hear them howl once every summer or two and the sportsmen who looses a dog, the livestockman who fears for his animals, or a father and son forced to fire off a warning shot when stalked. 

When it comes to wildlife policy and the health of our wild areas the urban/rural divide shows itself clearly.  It is the difference between those who want to project their vision of what rural areas ought to be onto people who have to live with the consequences.

When passing laws aimed at rural areas, city kids need to gain the consent of the governed.

Take for example a study recently published concerning the attitude of rural Wisconsinites to wolves, the Wisconsin DNR, and their state government.

Christine Browne-Nunez, a post-doctoral research associate working for the University of Wisconsin-Madison during the study, said that the focus groups revealed that the participants’ dislike for wolves is complex. Most of the participants were angry because of their perception that the state Department of Natural Resources failed to manage high wolf populations and the dangers they caused.Among the responses recorded by the study:

• A northeastern bear hunter: “They talk wolf policy and deer policy and everything and managing our predators up north here and they have all these meetings down in Madison where all these anti-hunters don’t know jack about what’s going on up here, and they’re controlling what happens up here. We know what’s going on because we live here, and yet they’re telling us down there what we have to do up here.”

• Another: “I’m going to tell you straight out, plain and simple, the DNR is not honest in what they say. They lie, they lie, they lie.”

Residents who share their world with wolves do not have so much a problem with the presence of wolves as they do with the perception that their ideas and concerns are not heard in state government.  They need to be given the power to live successfully with wolves and that power will only come when their concerns are heard and addressed.

There is the experience that hearings held in Madison, are mostly attended by activists who live in Madison.

Even in the internet age it is hard enough to figure out when a hearing is going to be held but even if you do know when and where a hearing is to be held, you still need to be able to take time off of work to drive down, find parking, and participate in the hearing.
A coyote eats a cat and city kids act like it is the end of the world, but that does not keep them from thinking that they are expert enough to prescribe how northern citizens should live with wolves.  
Twenty-one hunting dogs have been confirmed as killed by Wisconsin wolves so far this year.  In that set of circumstances, people who hunt with hounds have been treated as stakeholders and are compensated for their loss.  While the program is controversial, it is responsible for much of the success we've seen with wolf re-introduction into Wisconsin.

Within my personal circle, I know people who hunt the northwoods with dogs and when they see a wolf they pray for its death.  I do not know anyone who is actually going out to do them harm.  Their hate of the wolf is a result of their love for their dogs.  The knowledge of generous compensation will be forthcoming if they do loose a hound to wolf predation, however, keeps them in the fold. When we had a season, it gave northwoods hunters an outlet for that animosity.

Wolves were hunted to the edge of extinction for a reason, we must eliminate, or at least mitigate, that reason if we would have them return to those places where wild and domestic exist side by side.

Over a couple of springs a resident pack raised litters a few miles away from my house.  That resident pack disappeared.  Maybe it moved.  Probably someone made use of the three S's: shoot, shovel, shut up.  The closer wolf packs expand into more densely populated wooded areas, the more effort will be necessary to win the cooperation of citizens who live in the area.It means winning people over.  It means listening to and accounting for their concerns.  It requires education but an education that exists in the form of two-way communication.  City kids need to be educated about rural realities.  City kids need to account for rather than discount the rural experience.  Country kids need to educated about how to avoid wolf conflicts.  We're going to need to make compromises about where wolves will and will not be tolerated.

Some people live or travel up north to be amongst the wild.  Lots of people moved to West Wisconsin to be a dairyman, hunt whitetail, or to have the benefits living near the Twin Cities without urban or suburban problems.  They're going to need to be convinced to share their space with wolves.  If they can't be convinced, then there will not be wolves in the area, no matter how many laws are passed in Madison.

Mutual respect is the root of the commonwealth.

Wolf Management Requires Hunting

Wolves are an important part of our ecosystem.  

Wolves exist in the ecosystem due to goodwill of the people who live in the same area.

Therefore, maintaining human goodwill toward wolves is good for the ecosystem.

This simple syllogism demonstrates what the "no hunting wolves anywhere" fail to understand.  I doubt even the most extreme police state technologically possible can protect the wolves from human depredation if the humans who live near them resent their presence.

"Dual use technology" is not just about outlaw states seeking chemical or nuclear weapons.

The wolf/human relationship needs to be managed.  We've seen what happens when that relationship is allowed to follow their natural course: wolves go extinct.

With that I am hopeful that granting Adrian Wydeven a podium at the debate will lead to the rationalization of the debate about Wisconsin's wolves that will allow long term management that is good for the wolves, good for people, and good for the ecosystem.