The Real Wolf: The Science, Politics, and Economics of Coexisting with Wolves in Modern Times
388
The Real Wolf: The Science, Politics, and Economics of Coexisting with Wolves in Modern Times
388Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
The Real Wolf is an in-depth study of the impact that wolves have had on big game and livestock populations as a federally protected species. Expert authors Ted B. Lyon and Will N. Graves, sift through the myths and misinformation surrounding wolves and present the facts about wolves in modern times. Each chapter in the book is meticulously researched and written by authors, biologists, geneticists, outdoor enthusiasts, and wildlife experts who have spent years studying wolves and wolf behavior. Every section describes a unique aspect of the wolf in the United States. The Real Wolf does not call for the eradication of wolves from the United States but rather advocates a new system of species management that would allow wolves, game animals, and farmers to coexist with one another in a way that is environmentally sustainable.
Contributors to this groundbreaking environmental book include:
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781510719613 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 04/03/2018 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 388 |
| Sales rank: | 1,153,640 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Will N. Graves volunteered for the US Air Force and was trained as a Russian linguist. In order to accelerate and develop his skills in Russian, he started reading Russian wildlife magazines and books. Wolves were often discussed and soon his interest focused on wolves in Russia. Graves's interest in wolves grew into a serious hobby that continued after the war. Graves lives in Millerville, Maryland.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Real Wolf Story
By Ted B. Lyon
It became clear to me that the issue of how the wolves could be controlled was not science at all; it was pure, unadulterated politics.
— Ted B. Lyon
My first introduction to the wolf issue came in 1999 while my wife and I were staying at a small resort called Chico Hot Springs, located just north of Yellowstone National Park. I was soaking in the hot spring pool when a big guy with a beard slipped into the pool. Since he and I were the only two people in the pool, we started talking. I asked him what he did and he told me that he used to be a big-game outfitter and had worked and lived in the area his entire life. He'd been a licensed outfitter for over fifteen years and had employed over fifteen people for his operation during the hunting season. He also told me that his business had been booming before the wolves were introduced in 1995 into Yellowstone National Park. However, after the wolves were introduced, the elk herd became smaller and smaller each year until eventually he had to shut his business down.
I listened to his story with a good bit of skepticism because I could not believe that just a few wolves could cause that much destruction to an incredibly large elk herd — over nineteen thousand in 1995.
Montana Real Estate
In 2001, my wife and I bought a beautiful piece of property just north of Bozeman, Montana. As we drove onto the property that crisp October morning, a whitetail buck ran across the road and shortly thereafter, as we continued to drive down the road, two ruffed grouse flew off to the side. We stopped the truck and just as we got out of the vehicle an elk bugled off to the south. I told my wife that the place was speaking to us. We eventually bought the property and built a home there. At the time, the area, which is about fifty miles north of Yellowstone, was full of elk, deer, and moose. Just to the west of us between Bozeman and Big Sky Mountain there was the Gallatin Canyon elk herd with between a thousand and fifteen hundred elk.
Horror Stories or Isolated Cases
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent several weeks in the Salmon River Wilderness riding horses, camping out, and hunting elk and mule deer. It was a wild game paradise. There were a number of huge bull elk and mule deer bucks in the area. There were also moose and bighorn sheep. I hunted there with Brent Hill, a long time outfitter in the area. Each year before 1995 he would take around sixty hunters into the area by horseback. It is one of the wildest places in the Lower 48. Brent and some of his wranglers were there in the wilderness in 1995 when Tom Brokaw, Ted Turner, and Bruce Babbitt, then the Secretary of Interior, watched as US Fish and Wildlife officers released the wolves onto an airfield.
Each year about fifty to fifty-five elk were taken by hunters guided by Brent or his guides in the Salmon River Wilderness; this was before Canadian wolves were released into that area in 1995–96. Brent told me that the wolves began killing sheep, mule deer, and elk that winter by the river. The next year, only twelve bull elk were taken by hunters, and the success rate went down each year. Eventually, his outfitting business was closed.
Even though I knew about those stories, I believed that they were isolated cases because the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Idaho Fish and Game, and Montana's Fish, Wildlife and Parks were putting out the same basic story that wolves would not and did not affect the wild game populations to any great extent.
I simply couldn't believe that trained biologists could be so wrong about the wolf and its destructive effect upon wild game. I trusted them because as a State Senator and House member in Texas, I spent fourteen years on committees that dealt with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. That agency would continually appear before my committees and would always advocate for the preservation of our wild game and fish resources. I always used the biologists and their staff to support the bills that I pushed, and I developed a tremendous amount of respect for their scientific knowledge and their desire to manage our wild game and fish so that it was abundant, and to better utilize the resource for the public.
In 2007, I was on an annual pheasant-hunting trip with a number of good friends in Choteau, Montana, on the farm owned by my good friend Skip Tubbs. Skip is an avid sportsman and conservationist who owns an art gallery in Bozeman, Montana. He also raises English setters and is a falconer. All of the people invited to Skip's for opening day had one thing in common: we were, as Southerners say, "dog men." Everyone had hunting dogs, from Labradors to setters to Brittany Spaniels, and even one Cocker Spaniel. We all love to hunt with our dogs and live to see dogs that we have trained perform.
On Saturday night, after bagging our limits of pheasants, we started cooking steaks and drinking a little wine. It was at this event when I was first exposed to the strong reaction that Montana hunters as a group had toward wolves and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. That night I defended the decisions of those who put the sixty-six wolves into Yellowstone National Park and the Salmon River Wilderness area in Idaho in 1995 and 1996; ignorantly, I must say. I also defended the statements made by Idaho and Montana state wildlife biologists who parroted the same statements made by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
The men crowded around the fire that night were adamant that under no circumstances had the introduction of Canadian wolves been a good thing for Montana, Idaho, or anywhere else. Statements such as "wolves are not impacting the elk herds" and "hunters only need to work harder to find the elk," were considered "pure BS."
I just could not bring myself to believe that a US Fish and Wildlife Service official, or an Idaho or Montana state agency wildlife biologist, knowing the economic impact that elk and deer hunting have on Montana or Idaho, would knowingly make misrepresentations about the effects that wolves could have on Montana and Idaho's elk herds or could be that wrong.
That night, as I drove back to where I was staying, I thought that my hunting friends were surely over-reacting. The next thing I expected to hear from them was about black helicopters. But, that evening stayed with me, so I decided to look into what they were saying.
Research and Enlightenment
In 1995 and 1996 the US Fish and Wildlife Service introduced thirty-two Northern gray wolves from Alberta, Canada, into Yellowstone National Park. As you will learn in later chapters, the cost of introducing each wolf has been between two hundred thousand and one million dollars per wolf.
An additional thirty-four Canadian wolves were introduced into the Salmon River Wilderness area in Idaho at the same time. The Salmon River Wilderness area is located some five hundred miles to the north of Yellowstone. To get there from Yellowstone, which is located at the southern end of Montana and the northern end of Wyoming, follow Interstate Highway 90 up the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains to Missoula, Montana. From there you can travel the Lolo pass, made famous by Lewis and Clark in their exploration of the Missouri River, all the way to Idaho. It is a beautiful trip through a place where you expect to see a lot of wildlife.
Fast Forward Two Years
At the time these foreign wolves were introduced, Yellowstone National Park was home to some of the healthiest elk, mule deer, and Shiras moose populations in the world. The slopes of the Rockies on the western side of Montana and the Lolo National Forest were also home to thousands of these ungulates. These vibrant populations were the result of decades of conservation work by sportsmen.
When the scenario repeated itself at Skip's annual hunt two years later in 2009, I was better armed, having read a number of articles that said the wolves were not impacting the moose or elk herds. There was even an "official" scientific study funded by some groups I had never heard of that said this was true.
There was also an economic study that showed that wolves were a positive thirty-five-million-dollar benefit to the Yellowstone area that you will learn more about in a later chapter.
That opening night of the 2009 pheasant season, when we all gathered at Skip's house, a new guy was there, Ray Anderson, who had retired to Montana after a successful career as a businessman. Ray and Dale Simmons, a website designer, were vocal and articulate in their feelings about the wolves. The clincher came when Dr. Shannon Taylor, a professor at Montana State University, and Terry Thomas, a heating contractor, both insisted that the moose had all but disappeared from Yellowstone National Park. Each fall, Terry spends the entire elk season camped out next to Yellowstone, and has done so for years. He said the elk herds were severely depleted and that the moose were gone. These guys were adamant, adding their voices to the chorus.
That night I resolved to thoroughly research the issue. I had to look widely, as very little of what these men were saying was available in popular print. Frankly, as I got into it, I was shocked. The tangible result of that shock is this book. It is about the true story of the greatest destruction of wild game in the United States since the decimation of the bison herds and the elimination of the passenger pigeon in late 1800s, and how people are trying to reverse it.
When my wife and I first bought land in the mountains of Montana in 2001, I thought wolves were harmless. The wildlife biologists from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the states of Idaho and Montana said that wolves brought a natural balance to nature; that wolves are not now and have never been a threat to man; that wolves can be trained and educated so that they do not attack livestock; that wolves are not sport killers and only eat what they kill; that wolves do not carry deadly diseases; that wolves were the sanitarians of nature; and that wolves were good for the economy.
The more I looked into this situation, the more I realized that much of the flood of positive information about wolves was just plain wrong. I believed these statements because they were put out by officials at every level of government. The people that told these myths are not evil, but they were wrong. They either failed to research the issue adequately or simply believed the misstatements that had been perpetrated by many people who had either fabricated the scientific data about wolves or ignored data that had been accumulated since the turn of the century.
Then I learned that environmental and animal rights advocacy groups that supported the wolf reintroduction program were making millions from contributions to save the wolves, which meant that they were not interested in telling any other story, even if it was true.
Finally, in January of 2010, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks released a report called "Monitoring and Assessment of Wolf-Ungulate Interactions and Population Trends within the Greater Yellowstone Area, Southwestern Montana, and Montana Statewide Final Report 2009" written by Kenneth L. Hamlin, a senior wildlife researcher, and Julie A. Cunningham, a wildlife biologist. This eighty-three-page report detailed the amazing decline of the Northern Yellowstone herd. It showed that in 1995, when wolves were first introduced into Yellowstone National Park, the elk herd numbered over nineteen thousand animals. The count in 2009 was just a little over six thousand elk. It also showed that there had been a precipitous decline in moose. They were almost gone from the same area.
At first, I simply could not understand how an initial population of thirty-two wolves could take an elk herd of over nineteen thousand down to a little over 6,200 in the space of fourteen years. The harsh reality is that the elk herd today in Yellowstone was down to three thousand in 2015, and the Yellowstone moose population has dropped from one thousand to less than two hundred.
This was not an isolated case. Similar devastation has happened to other elk populations throughout the northern Rocky Mountains since the new wolves arrived. In the Lolo National Forest where wolves migrated from Idaho in 1995 the elk herd has dropped from twelve thousand in 1995 to around two thousand in 2011.
More Irrefutable Data
The early "studies" had totally misjudged the rapid rate that the wolf population would grow and spread, from sixty-six in 1996 to conservatively seventeen hundred in 2012, and many scientists believe there are at least five times that many. Unlike other predators like mountain lions or bears, wolves have large litters and they can begin breeding by age two.
On top of that, the introduced wolves were a larger subspecies than the native subspecies, which had voracious appetites. Gray wolves can survive on about two-and-a-half pounds of food per wolf per day, but they require about seven pounds per wolf per day to reproduce successfully. A large gray wolf can eat between twenty-two and twenty-three pounds at one time, and these introduced Canadian wolves are much bigger than the ones that used to live in the Northern Rockies. Put larger wolves together with an abundance of prey, and you get a lot of wolves quickly.
Despite what some people were saying about wolves being nature's sanitarians, they do not seem to care what they eat, healthy or not. On occasion, wolves simply go on killing sprees, killing and wounding many times the number of animals that they could ever eat, leaving without feeding on their victims.
Side Effects
Predation by wolves is significant, but their impact on herds goes far beyond that. Research by Professor Scott Creel at Montana State University (funded by the National Institute of Science) determined that the cow elk in and around Yellowstone were not getting pregnant as a result of the stress caused by wolves. Think about being the fattest animal in the herd. They run the slowest and therefore become the easiest victim of the predators. Creel's later research showed that the elk that were hunted by wolves were actually starving to death in the winter, as well as not calving, or having many fewer calves.
More Damning Evidence
The damning evidence does not stop there. Before the introduction of the wolves into Montana and Idaho, there was no known incidence of hydatid disease in either of those states or in Wyoming. Hydatid disease, also known as hydatidosis or echinococcosis, is a parasitic infection of various animals, and can infect humans. The disease is caused by a small tapeworm that lives in canids, especially wolves. Tapeworm eggs pass out in the feces of infected wolves. If eaten by a suitable host — ungulates, livestock, and man — these eggs may develop into hydatid cysts in the internal organs of the host, especially the liver, heart, and lung. The disease didn't exist in the moose, elk, mule deer, whitetail deer, mountain goats, or sheep herds before the wolf introduction. It's there now though, and is a serious threat to animals and man, as you will see in a later chapter.
Like most people, I was not aware of this disease before I began my research. It was while I was researching wildlife diseases that I found my coauthor, former National Security Agency Security Officer Will Graves, an incredibly interesting man who has spent a good deal of his life researching wolves. Will had written a letter in 1993 to Ed Bangs, the US Fish and Wildlife biologist in charge of transporting the wolves to Yellowstone, about his concerns about hydatid disease in the wolves from Canada. (See Appendix.)
I interviewed Ed Bangs in Helena Montana in June of 2012 and he confirmed that the wolves were wormed twice before they were released. The circumstantial evidence is strong, almost overwhelming, that either the wrong type of wormer was used or that the parasite existed in Montana and Idaho and was simply unknown. Since the wolves were introduced, the parasite that carries hydatidosis has been transported by wolves all across the western states. Humans can become infected with this disease simply by petting a dog that has rolled in an area where a wolf has defecated.
Contrary to what some spokesman for wildlife agencies in the United States have reported, hydatidosis is a deadly disease to humans with reported deaths all around the world where the tapeworm exists. Over 68 percent of the wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming that have been tested are infected with Echinococcus granulosus tape worms. In some areas the infection rate is as high as 84 percent. There's also strong evidence that the tapeworm weakens the ungulate, which is an intermediate host, making it more susceptible to being preyed upon by predators.
Spin Doctors
After realizing that my friends' anecdotal stories about what havoc the wolves had done to the elk were right, I resolved to find out why. One reason that quickly became apparent was that although the US Fish and Wildlife Service had declared that wolves were recovered in 2000 — easily passing the goal of ten breeding pairs and a hundred wolves in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho — neither states, hunters, livestock producers, nor the US Fish and Wildlife Service, was allowed to manage the wolves.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Real Wolf"
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Copyright © 2018 Ted B. Lyon and Will N. Graves.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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Table of Contents
Foreword Idaho Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter vii
Author's Preface Ted B. Lyon xi
Author's Preface Will N. Graves xiii
Minimum Estimated Wild Gray Wolf Populations Opening Statement Ted B. Lyon xvii
Chapter 1 The Real Wolf Story Ted B. Lyon 1
Chapter 2 Selling the Wolf: The Massive Sales Campaign and Its Fallacies Ted B. Lyon 14
Chapter 3 The Myth of the Harmless Wolf Ted B. Lyon 42
Chapter 4 Russian Wolves and American Wolves: No Real Difference Will N. Graves 67
Chapter 5 Seven Steps of Wolf Habituation Valerius Geist, PhS 78
Chapter 6 Mathematical Error or Deliberate Misrepresentation? Don Peay 90
Chapter 7 The Caribou Conservation Conundrum Arthur T. Bergerud, PhD 97
Chapter 8 Wolves, a Serious Threat to Livestock Producers Heather Smith-Thomas 112
Chapter 9 The Unspoken Costs of a Growing Wolf Population Rob Arnaud Ted B. Lyon 142
Chapter 10 Reality Bits: Mexican Wolf Impacts on Rural Citizens Laura Schneberger 162
Chapter 11 Collateral Damage Identification: Mexican Wolves in Catron County, New Mexico Jess Carey 192
Chapter 11 The Wolf in the Great Lakes Region Ted B. Lyon 207
Chapter 12 The Wolf as a Disease Carrier Will N. Graves 223
Chapter 14 The Wolf as a Cash Cow Karen Budd-Falen Joshua Tolin 235
Chapter 15 How the First Political Wolf War Was Won Ted B. Lyon 243
Chapter 16 How the Second Political Wolf War Can Be Won Ted B. Lyon 255
Chapter 17 Canis Stew: The Inevitable Disappearance of the Pure Wolf Ted B. Lyon 265
Chapter 18 What Is a Wolf?: Classification of North American Wolf Species, Subspecies, and Populations Matthew A. Cronin, PhD 280
Chapter 19 Of What Value Are Imported Canadian Wolves? Rob Arnaud Ted B. Lyon 306
Chapter 20 I Rest My Case Ted B. Lyon 317
Appendix A Letters 322
Letter: Will Graves to Ed Bangs, 1993 322
Letter: Harris to Jewell & Ashe, 2013 326
Appendix B Report: "Global Socioeconomic Impact of Cystic Echinococcosis," 2006 329
Appedix C Report: "European Echinococcosis Registry: Human Alveolar Echinococcosis, Europe, 1982-2000," 2003 342
Chapter Authors 355
Index 361