A Wolf Saved From Extinction but Snared in Politics
A Wolf Saved From Extinction but Snared in Politics
Ten years ago, almost to the day, Jamie Rappaport Clark walked through the snow in Arizona’s Apache National Forest to release 11 Mexican wolves into the wilderness. At the time, Clark directed the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and was confident she was beginning another successful effort to reintroduce wolves into the wild. Now, as executive vice president of the advocacy group Defenders of Wildlife, she is growing despondent about whether the experiment will succeed.
“I actually released those doggone dogs,” she recalled in a recent interview. “It’s so screwed up, it’s sad. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”
The uncertainty surrounding the Mexican gray wolf, also known as el lobo, highlights the challenge of meshing conservation with politics. While biologists and zookeepers have saved the Mexican wolf, the most genetically distinct subspecies of gray wolf in North America, federal managers are struggling to translate this success into a working recovery program in the field.
Mexican wolves, which once roamed in the Southwestern United States and Mexico, saw their numbers plummet as Americans moved West and Mexicans developed their land. In 1976 the wolves were placed on the endangered species list; four years later researchers estimated that there were fewer than 50 in four separated Mexican states, and these have now disappeared.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Fish and Wildlife Service paid a trapper named Roy McBride to capture several Mexican wolves south of the border. That group of five, which has expanded in captivity to more than 300, is the source of every Mexican wolf that now exists in the United States, posing a genetic challenge for biologists hoping to help the species recover.
“Anytime you have a bottleneck, a certain amount of genes are lost,” said John Oakleaf, Fish and Wildlife’s Mexican wolf field coordinator.
At first glance, there is no reason that Mexican wolves should not make the same sort of robust recovery that gray wolves have made in the northern Rockies. But the northern wolves have more than three times as much quality habitat as the wolves in the Southwest. And a trickier problem government officials face is that the politically influential ranching community in the Southwest has opposed the wolves’ reintroduction, and the officials, in seeking to accommodate those interests, have satisfied no one.
Early in the process, federal officials created what Oakleaf called “artificial boundaries where wolves can be present or not” — if a wolf goes beyond the official Blue Range Recovery Area, which spans 9,290 square miles, it is relocated. In addition, in 2005, Fish and Wildlife put into place “standard operating procedure 13.0,” which calls for the permanent removal of wolves that come into conflict with livestock.
As a result, federal officials have been taking wolves out of the recovery area even as they’ve been putting them in: Fish and Wildlife has released nearly 100 Mexican wolves over the past decade, but as of last year they had counted at least 117 as removed, roughly half of them because of conflicts with cattle. Others were counted as removed because they had died. At the end of 2006, Fish and Wildlife predicted that 102 wolves, including 18 breeding pairs, would live in the wild, but the most recent survey shows that the current group numbers 52, including just four breeding pairs.
“It’s like stocking a trout pond,” said Eva Sargent, who directs the Southwest program for Defenders of Wildlife. “It ain’t the wolves — they’re good at being wolves. It’s overzealous enforcement by the agency.”
Brian Millsap, Fish and Wildlife’s acting assistant director for ecological services in the Southwest, said that he and other officials recognize there are problems with the wolf-removal policy but that the phalanx of groups helping manage the species’ recovery — including the U.S. Forest Service, the White Mountain Apache Tribe, and New Mexico’s and Arizona’s Game and Fish departments — have not reached a consensus on what to do instead….
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April 1st, 2008 at 6:56 pm
Interesting that once again, nobody has asked those affected by the wolves and their problem behaviors what they think the problem is.
We are now subjected to tripple D management in the Mexican wolf program. Dumb Dumb Dumb
Eva, is right, it isn’t always the wolves, it is nearly always idiotic management or lack of management and not enough attention payed to severe problems allowed in this program. Problems that are left far too long, creating more wolf removals. Dumb Dumb Dumb
For goodness sake Defenders and all the other pro wolf groups, moaned and cried about the removal of one habituated problem livestock killing wolf and another similarly behaved pack and the disappearance of yet another similarly behaved pack when all along, the agency had fed these animals, horse meat keeping them in the problem area as long as possible. Dumb Dumb Dumb
Then they have the nerve to believe or should I say promote, the baiting claim made by HCN in it’s idiotic article. This is creating disasterous situations. Why did they feed wolves that are supposed to be wild? To stop the removals even if temproary so the groups might stop complaining for just one minute. Did it help, NO it made things worse, it was disasterous to individuals, landowners, livestock, hunters and yes the wolves. Dumb Dumb Dumb
The problem is bad management and bad political wolf activism influencing management unduely. Yes, Eva you are creating wolf feeding scenairios and problem wolves by your groups constant and chronic complaints about legitimate and absolutely necessary removals of problem animals. Dumb Dumb Dumb
This isn’t about your beliefs and your ideals and your feelings. It is about creating wild wolves out of semi domesticated semi feral animals raised in captivity. It is about letting nature take it’s course not picking up an alpha female wolf with a broken leg giving expensive vet care, keeping it in captivity for 6 weeks then re-releasing it again . Meanwhile their semi natural reasonably behaved pack roams an ever widening territory searching for their alpha female. This gets them into livestock territory and after 4 years of no livestock kills now their territory is expanded into livestock territory. Dumb Dumb Dumb
Some serious management and acknowlegement of necessity of removals is needed. If the extremist pro wolfers don’t like it they should be ignored for the sake of the program. wolf managers should not be allowed to handle the animals like they do, they sure as heck shouldn’t be able to put pups in with non parent wolves that will kill them and if they do they should be subjected to a take of an endangered species. Dumb Dumb Dumb
Not the constant whining and crying occurs every time a that wolf destroys someone’s livlihood and home sanctity is appropriately managed like the rule allows.
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:59 pm
It is management’s fault and your fault, Eva, that wolves will be wolves when continually dumped into an area falsely claimed to be sufficient but so lacking for a full fledged wolf recovery in the first place. Dumb Dumb Dumb.
David Mech recognizes that wolves need to be controlled on ag land, which is exactly what the vast majority of the so called area ‘available’ for recovery is. Why can’t you?
While you and program management refuse to recognize the gross and unscientific errors in judgement that have led to this fiasco, you do nothing to remedy it. Perhaps it is money and career driven and, intentionally, not science driven at all! Perhaps it’s all an intentionally self-generated, self-enriching ‘crises’! Evil management and ‘destructive and intolerant’ inhabitants can be blamed for failure you yourself perpetuate! Thus you obtain power to enforce an promote a ’solution’ which ends up ‘granting’ yourself what you wanted in the first place! this is a feasible scenario - an ancient facist ruse to gain $ and control over …whatever… very much in use worldwide today. Greedy Greedy Greedy.
Perhaps the Parson’s and Paquet’s and Sargent’s don’t really care about reality and the suffering imposed on people and the animals, wild and domestic, as long as the get their way. Do they entertain fantasy visions in their minds complete with animated sparkles of their own private access to this paradise - after they have driven the honest and hard working good stewards, that have maintained the paradise, from the land. The tripple E technique - Evil Evil Evil.
April 5th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
This is a very strange and self-contradictory article. I have read it over 5 times and still can hardly make sense of it.
First, author Juliet Eilperin reports “biologists and zookeepers have saved the Mexican wolf, the most genetically distinct subspecies of gray wolf in North America.” Then everything else she reports contradicts that statement.
The “distinct” genotype is traceable to five animals, which were probably not pure wolves. John Oakleaf says genes have been lost. Jamie Rappaport Clark calls them “doggone dogs.” FWS officials do not release any animal that “lacks a genetic duplicate in captivity,” implying inbreeding if not cloning of the doggone dogs.
Yet there is alleged to be “genetic diversity” in the wild population. What? That statement contradicts all the others. Five original animals, the current population all inbred, with dog genes, is termed “genetic diversity”? Excuse me, but no it’s not.
John Horning claims, “We are really facing the second extinction of the Mexican gray wolf in the wild.” How can that be? Can a species go extinct twice?
Of course not. One time does the trick. And it has already happened. The animals being “preserved” are not wolves but doggone dogs, and inbred to boot. The Mexican Grey wolf is extinct. Bye bye, sayonara, and that’s all she wrote. The fat lady has sung. The MGW is no more. It’s kaput. The animals being released are not MGW’s.
That’s a fact that everybody involved seems to agree with, including all of the above so-called wolf advocates.
What is going on here? Pardon me, but the emperor is stark naked. The entire foofaraw is about doggone dogs. Nobody denies that. The whole MGW program is a hoax, a fraud, a useless imposition, much ado about nothing, a pointless burden, a joke, a con, a chimera, a mirage, sound and fury signifying nothing.
They are dogs, people, not wolves!!!!! Jumping jiminy crickets!!!!!