Canis Lupus is in the headlines again, with the Associated Press reporting, “Petition seeks to have predators howl across US.” The petition was filed by the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), whose objective is to restore the gray wolf to all “significant” portions of its range.
At the same time, Michigan DNRE officials are backing Minnesota’s petition asking the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to remove the species from the endangered list.
Wolves are a favorite poster child for large environmental organizations, and why shouldn’t they be? They’re generally gorgeous and they look like dogs. At the same time, they’re one of the more polarizing species, in terms of wildlife management.
Russian tales of children being dragged from sledges echo in the blogs of today. After a hunting dog was apparently killed by a wolf in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula last winter, a spate of wolf-hating bloggers hit the websites.
“What are you going to say when a wolf comes into YOUR yard and rips your little fluffy poodles head off?” one writer asked.
This one takes it a bit further: “Guess what the wolf will do when it runs out of deer to eat? Little Johnny waiting outside for his school bus will look pretty yummy.”
“They are an alpha predator,” another person wrote, “which given the right situation would have no problem eating the same whining people who think that they need to protect them from the big bad hunter.”
“Think of them as hornets,” one writer suggested. “You don’t want them around do you? You don’t want skunks and racoons [sic] in your garbage do you? So, what do you do? Shoot them and get rid of them right?”
On March 17, a schoolteacher in Alaska died from an apparent wolf-mauling. Fatal attacks by wild animals always make good press, but it was reported by msnbc as only the second such fatality in North America. Alaska’s wolves are not protected by the Endangered Species Act, with a healthy population between 7,700 and 11,200.
The gray wolf’s historic range occupied most of North America, but by 1973, when the Endangered Species Act was passed, its presence in the lower 48 states was limited to northern Minnesota, with an estimated 650 wolves.
Currently, most of the country’s wolf population, excepting that of Alaska, resides in the Western Great Lakes States or the Northern Rocky Mountains. USFWS figures from 2009 estimate that about 2,922 wolves live in the wild in Minnesota, 24 on Lake Superior’s Isle Royale, 580 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and at least 626 in Wisconsin, for a total of 4,152.
The Rocky Mountain region, including the states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, as of December 2008, had approximately 1,645, while the Southwest “Recovery Area,” consisting of Arizona and New Mexico, had only 52.
According to the CBD, wolves are still absent from at least 95% of their former range in the U.S. They are calling for a national recovery plan. In the language of the petition:
…the time has come to recover wolves throughout all significant portions of their historic range. To accomplish this, the Center hereby formally petitions the Service to develop a national gray wolf recovery plan, excluding the Southwest, that ensures that wolves are recovered to ecosystems within their former range that still contain suitable habitat or can be restored to sustain them, including existing wolf recovery areas as well as the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, southern Rocky Mountains, California, and Great Plains regions.
The Endangered Species Act allows for the removal of wolves that prey on livestock, and there are programs to compensate for the loss of livestock and pets in most of the recovery areas. In addition, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin will be receiving USFWS grants to help livestock owners develop nonlethal means of dealing with wolf predation.
Hopefully, these provisions will help calm the rhetoric, and keep the humans from howling.
This post was written by
Catherine Parker – who has written 5 posts on Headwaters - Community Journalism for the Great Lakes.
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Good one Kate!
As in so many situations and circumstances on Earth today, money and self-interest make properly exercising “dominion” over our home and its nonhuman residents more difficult by polarizing opinion and creating tunnel vision. I’d like to see someone do a study on how many humans have actually be protected by wolves or wolf-domestic dog crosses. I know of two. I wonder if that would balance out the humans attacked by wolves. Or is there some reason these stories are rarely, if ever, heard or published? Sometimes the attitudes and actions of a sadly growing percentage of (probably/maybe) otherwise rational people make it difficult for me personally to keep the right perspective and correct balance in my preferences for animals to humans. Oh, I know….it’s because more and more humans are acting like ‘animals’ and I do not refer to those four-footed creatures trying to hide from US.