Living With Wolves

Abstract

Five subspecies of gray wolf live in North America; the eastern timber, Great Plains, Rocky Mountain, Mexican, and Arctic wolves. Minnesota's Great Plains wolf (canis lupus nubilus) is smaller than its western gray wolf brethern. Adult males average 70 to 110 pounts. Wolf packs may go 10 to 30 miles a day in search of food, traveling at 5 mph, or 25 mph when chasing prey. Dispersing wolves will travel as much as 550 miles to find a mate. In Alaska and Canada, some packs have more than 30 members and territories of up to 1,000 square miles. A wolf exerts jaw pressure of 1,500 pounds per square inch; a German shepherd's is 750 pounds. Minnesota pays farmers up to $750 for a cow killed by wolves. Defenders of Wildlife will pay up to $2,000 for livestock killed by wolves in the Yellowstone ecosystem. Wolf attacks on humans are rare; there are no records in America of a healthy wild wolf ever killing a human. Midwesterners are going to have to learn to live with wolves. Each spring, 2,000 pups are born in Minnesota alone, and the 150 to 225 wolves Wildlife Services takes from the population each year won't even make a sqiggle on the expansion graph. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) believes that the state has never had more wolves. That is because there have never been more deer. In fact, the deer population now provides more meat per acre than the wolves' historical prey base of caribou, moose, elk and bison. Moreover, 30 to 50 percent of the total wolf population would have to be removed annually just to keep it from expanding. That probably couldn't be done without bounties and an all-out, 1950s'-style air and poison war, a political and legal impossibility. While wolves are expanding their range elsewhere--particularly in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Wisconsin, and Michigan--they've become major nuisances only where humans and their livestock ulcerate the big woods of Minnesota. Unless the state comes up with an effective managment plan, the poltical climate in America will be such that wolf restoration, now under consideration in northern New England and New York, will have little chance. Most pet and livestock owners in Minnesota haven't lived with wolves for long, and they're not very good at it. According to a report in the Minnesota Outdoor News, wolves killed 23 dogs last winter and spring along the shore of Lake Superior in the 15 miles between Hovland and Grand Portage. When deer are driven here by tbe brutal northern winter, people provide them with food. That keeps them around houses and attracts wolves. Without prompting, Terri Winger, Bob Lewis and Buzz Lilyquist all proudly informed me that they feed deer in winter. Bill Paul tells ranchers how important it is to bury their dead stock. But carcasses keep getting tossed over fences, setting the table for wolves and giving them a taste for beef and mutton. Many of the people in Minnesota who are losing pets and livestock to wolves blame the Endangered Species Act. For them, at least, it has worked too well. In 1974, just nine years after the state did away with its $35 wolf bounty, Minnesota's wolves--at that time only viable population in the contiguous United States--were listed as enangered. Even Wildlife Services wasn't allowed to kill them. Four years later, Minnesota's wolves were downlisted to threatened. This meant that federal agents could kill depredating animals, a response that was favored by knowledgeable advocates of wolf restoration because pups can learn from their elders the dangerous and somewhat aberrant behavior of killing domestic stock. But until the wolf is delisted, private citizens who encounter wolves attacking their animals have no legal resource other than to shout and clap their hands the way Winger and Lewis did. In due course, a federally appointed team of the nation's foremost wolf biologists set recovery goals: Minnesota would need between 1,251 and 1,400 wolves, and Wisconsin and Michigan a combined population of 100 for five consecutive years. In 1998, the most sophisticated census methods available to the Minnesota DNR revealed a state population of 2,450. A yaer later, Wisconsin's wolf population was estimated to be between 197 and 203, Michigan's between 175 and 200. With wolves thoroughly recovered in these three states, and with roughly twice as many animals as were needed to ensure their viability, the recovery team urged the Interior Department to cancel all Endangerd Species Act protection for western lake-state wolves. In 1998, the Interior Department had said it was going to delist wolves in all three states. Now it is talking only about downlisting Michigan and Wisconsin wolves to threatened status. Spooked by the prospect of endless, grossly expensive litigation, the Department has a long record of not delisting recovered species when it gets pressured by groups committed to permanent protection of all species and all individuals of all species. The worst thing we can do to wolves, Mech submits, is to let them become pests. What he fears most is a backlash--currently in the making--from the politically powerful livestock industry. . . . the Minnesota DNR created a "roundtable" in 1998. It worked about as well as King Arthur's. Thirty-three citizens representing every conceivable interest, notion, and superstition about wolves--from ranchers to trappers to deer hunters to environmentalists to animal-rights zealots--were instructed to hatch a plan for managing the state's wolves, a plan that would placate everyone and at the same time convince the federal government that wolves could be safety delisted. At the 59th minute of the 11th hour, all hands agreed to a plan that would do nothing to slow wolf expansion into farm country but would at least allow people to shoot wolves caught in the act of attacking their pets or livestock. All roundtable members promised to stand by the plan...The cattlemen, on the other hand, quickly reneged, and unsuccessfully pushed their own bill, which would have cut the current wolf popualtion in half.