Surprise, Surprise…
Wolves Decimating
Yellowstone Elk
by Angie Many
In the last few years, Resource Roundup
has printed several articles by John Nelson, who warned that wolves planted
in the Yellowstone area were killing too many elk for the herd to sustain
itself. The Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) Commission is now
publicly agreeing with him.
According to a Bozeman Chronicle article
by Scott McMillion, the winter elk hunt in Gardiner, Montana will be reduced
as a direct result of wolf predation. The number of hunters for the January,
2006 hunt will be cut from 1,180 to 148, a 90% decrease, to reflect the
dwindling number of elk.
Kurt
Alt, FWP regional wildlife manager, cited the heavy density of wolves in and
near Yellowstone National Park (YNP), coupled with other predation, as a
reason for the drastic cut. McMillion noted that “The northern Yellowstone
herd hit a peak of about 19,000 animals in 1994. The next year, wolves were
reintroduced and elk have been on a steady decline ever since.” FWP
expects to count less than 8,000 elk this year. “Wolf lovers will have a
hard time accepting that wolves are having such an impact,” said Alt.
Too many calves are being killed
for
the herd to sustain itself.
In 1968, there were about 4,000 elk in YNP,
which stopped culling them that year. By 1975, Park elk numbered about
12,000, and the late hunt started. In those years, noted Alt, there were no
wolves, about half as many grizzly bears as there are today, and a lot fewer
lions. He said that with the abundance of predators in and near the park, he
fears that “one bad winter” could drop the elk herd to the 1968 level
and the smaller herd would then face all those predators.
According to McMillion’s article, recent
studies in Yellowstone have shown that 70% of elk calves now die from
predators by the end of September of their first year. Black bears and
grizzly bears account for about 60% of the calves that are killed by
predators in the first few weeks of their lives. After the calves become
more mobile, wolves begin killing more of them and bears kill fewer, the
studies show.
McMillion added that: “Springtime counts
over the last three years have shown that between 12 and 14 calves per
hundred cows have remained alive through the first year of their life. A
calf/cow ratio of about 20 is needed for a herd to sustain itself, Alt told
the commission.”
Montana is one of several western states
that are working out management plans for gray wolves. Once the state plans
are complete and approved by the federal government, and the wolves are
delisted (taken off the Endangered Species Act list), each state will assume
most management duties now performed by the federal government. The states
can then institute limited hunting and trapping seasons for wolves if the
federal government has approved such actions in the state plans.
Don’t
articles like this make your blood boil? How long are Americans going to sit
back and let government take our tax money to cause the depletion of game
herds we have spent years building up, use our tax money in ways that put
ranchers and loggers and miners out of business, take our tax money to
introduce large predators that kill people, pets, and livestock, use our tax
money to put ‘public’ lands off-limits to the public, and take our tax
money to destroy private property rights -- all in the name of ‘species
protection’ and with the authority of an Endangered Species Act that
actually expired years ago and has a 99% rate of failure?
Our hard-earned tax money is being used
for
all
of these senseless ‘species protection’ programs.
How long are we going to ship our jobs overseas because an
owl or a mouse or a bird is more important to our government than a
hard-working citizen? How long are we going to allow the federal government
to control our lands to the detriment of its human residents -- and often of
its wildlife? How many people must go bankrupt, lose their property, lose
their way of life and their self-respect before people rise up in masse and
say “No more!”? How many small communities must fold up before ‘we the
people’ (remember, ‘we’ are the government!) do something effective
to stop it?
Only when a groundswell of support rises,
when hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of people make their
voices heard, can we make a difference. And that very seldom happens. People
are too tired, too busy, too uninterested to take the time to make a
difference. Until the law/policy/regulation affects them personally,
they’re not going to get involved. And by then, it’s too late.
Our
hard-earned tax money is being used for all of these senseless ‘species
protection’ programs, and it is past time to pull the plugs. It is time for
every American with a lick of common sense to unite against the idiotic
reintroduction of predators. It was bad enough when they put people out of
work for an owl or a woodpecker or a mouse. It was bad enough when they spent
untold millions of our tax dollars to reintroduce quail that were almost
immediately eaten by coyotes. It was bad enough when they started shutting
down grazing allotments for birds. It’s bad enough that reintroduced
predators are decimating game herds, the very outcome which opponents very
vocally predicted years ago. But what should be the real stopper here is that
they’ve used our tax money to bring in animals that endanger our kids, our
lives, our livestock, and our pets.
As for grizzlies, we already know
that
they kill people.
In the case of wolves, the federal government has no business
even in the arena. Wolves are not ‘endangered.’ There are plenty of them
in other parts of the country and the world. Any decision about wolf
introduction and management should be a local decision.
Wolf advocates told us that
wolves would more than compensate for the economic harm they
did by increasing tourism in the areas. But how many of our
rural communities have been enriched by ‘wolf watchers‘?
They told us that wolves would not make serious inroads into
livestock populations, but the ranchers who have lost hundreds
of sheep would no doubt disagree. They told us that ranchers
who lost livestock to wolves would be compensated, but the
burden of proof is so strict that many ranchers have received
little or nothing.
They also told us that
wolves won’t attack people, but that’s not true, either. A
child in Alaska was carried off by a wolf (and thankfully
rescued in time) and children in India, where wolves are
numerous, have been killed by wolves. Wolves in Yellowstone
are evidently so numerous that they’re killing many more elk
that ‘experts’ predicted. How much more numerous do they
have to become here until a bad winter makes them bold enough
to attack humans? As for grizzlies, we already know that they
kill people.
There is absolutely no need
to introduced/reintroduce large predators. Wolves and
grizzlies do no fill any role that cannot be filled by humans,
other predators, and scavengers. The ‘ecosystem’ got along
with very few of these large carnivores for decades, with no
ill effects. In fact, the ‘ecosystem’ always adjusts to
changes -- it is just environists who can’t seem to make
that leap.
Large predators are being
reintroduced due to people with misguided, idealistic
fantasies that maintain that nature is only ‘in
equilibrium’ if people return it to its pre-Columbian
(pre-white man) state and then get out of it. Some of them
don’t care if they never see or hear a wolf; ‘just knowing
it is there is good enough.’ Many of these people have no
idea that, in their naivety, they are being used and
manipulated by those whose goal -- for socialistic and/or for
capitalistic reasons -- is land control. It’s a land-control
project so smart that it can be best enacted by those dumb
enough to believe that ‘the land needs wolves, the land
needs bears.’ ‘The land’ needs predators to keep prey
species in check, but ‘the land’ doesn’t care whether
those predators are bears, wolves, people, or Martians. Only
those people with a warped sense of nature ‘need’ large
wild predators in areas where people, livestock, and pets are
endangered.
There were very good reasons
that our great-grandfathers almost eradicated wolves and
grizzlies from many areas. They are dangerous. And because the
very process of reintroduction means that these carnivores
interact with the people who catch them, feed them,
radio-collar them, give them injections, and release them (and
often repeat this process when troublemaking predators must be
relocated), their perception of humans has been skewed.
Between those experiences and the fact that these reintroduced
species cannot be hunted, they may well lose their fear of
man, which makes them even more dangerous.
They
are not going to
stop
until we stop them.
Again, there is no need to
add grizzlies and wolves to our lands. Man can -- and has, for
decades -- filled their predation role very well. And while it
is impossible to control the number of wildlife killed by wild
predators except by killing the predators themselves, it is
very easy to regulate the numbers of game animals killed by
man simply by controlling the number of licenses issued and
the hunting seasons. (Ironically, the people who press for
wolf reintroduction are often the same people who maintain
that hunting is cruel and barbaric and should be stopped. Yet
their concern is evidently not for the deer or elk, which
would suffer infinitely less pain and trauma if killed by a
bullet instead of being hamstrung and torn to pieces while
still living.)
If large predators exist
naturally and do not cause problems to humans, they should be
allowed to remain, but importing them -- and spending millions
upon millions of dollars to do so -- is stupid, dangerous,
wasteful, and destructive.
Promotion by government
officials and bureaucrats of such an idiotic agenda should be
considered not just wrong, but criminal. Maybe it’s time to
start filing suit against anyone whose role in bringing in
predators contributed to a person suffering a physical or
economic harm caused by reintroduced animals.
It‘s time to say
“ENOUGH!” because ‘they’ are not going to stop until
we stop them. It’s time for us to all stand up and say
“Stop it! We never wanted these predators brought in, we
knew they would cause more harm than good, the figures are
backing us up, and we demand that they are destroyed right
now!” It’s time to say “Stop spending my tax money on
idiotic programs that put plant and animal species ahead of
humans.”
Our states, and especially
our counties, have much more power that even they realize.
It’s time for them to start acting like it. Write your state
delegation and your Fish and Wildlife department today and
demand that they assert the power that the state has to refuse
to administer the Endangered Species Act for the federal
government. Tell them to stop taking federal wildlife
management funds, which come with miles of string attached.
Tell them we’re tired of rights and taxes being taken for a
law that has accomplished almost nothing in over 30 years.
Tell them to start protecting their citizens first. And then
tell your Congressional delegation to get rid of the
Endangered Species Act..
Tell them today.
