Humans and Wolves: Constant Contention

So...what's up with humans and destroying top predators? It sounds like a bad joke, but frankly, it seems like a recurring theme in the relationships humans have with wildlife. Save a deer? Great! Save a wolf? No way!

I started seriously looking into this a few months ago, doing research on wolf reintroduction and Native American tribes. I was amazed at the amount of animosity a single species can generate among the public if its food happens to coincide with our own.

For example, when the Mexican Gray Wolf was proposed for reintroduction into the American southwest (mainly Arizona), ranchers rallied against the proposal vehemently. Keep in mind, this is one of the most endangered mammals in the world. At its most dire moment, it had completely vanished from the United States Plains and existed in very small numbers in Mexico. Even the federal government had taken measures to remove it permanently by issuing "bounties" for dead wolves and setting poison and traps. When conservation efforts began, biologists only were able to capture 4 males and one pregnant female with which to repopulate the species. It's doing well in captivity now, but when introduced back into Arizona, bounties amounting to thousands of dollars were once again issued for pieces of wolves, despite the fact that it's illegal to hunt them now. Many wolves turned up dead.

I'm not saying that ranchers don't have completely valid fears when it comes to wolves eating livestock. It's a serious concern when one makes their livelihood on raising cattle for human consumption and it's taken by wolves. However, calculations regarding how many cattle would potentially be killed by the wolves is only a quarter of a percent of the total livestock on the White Mountain Apache Reservation, which is one of the poorest counties in the nation. On richer ranching farms, I would imagine it's even less than that and that more efforts could be taken to keep wolves out of grazing areas. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the Fort Apache Reservation is much closer to the national park where the wolves would be directly placed.

Furthermore, humans have had to make sacrifices and changing their practices in order to protect imperiled species since the beginning of the Endangered Species Act. What makes wolves any less worthy of rehabilitation than, say, prairie dogs or spotted owls? Wolves don't even get the same protections under the ESA that other species get.

For example, the Defenders of Wildlife Organization has covered accounts from Alaska of their legislature allowing wolves to be shot at from airplanes or chased to exhaustion and then shot in order to boost caribou populations for hunters. And that's just the tip of the wolf-killing iceberg! This seems like a grave injustice to me. Just because they compete with us for our RECREATIONAL hunting doesn't give us a right to wipe them off the face of the earth. Even more disturbing, some people I've long considered to be fellow environmentalists don't see a problem with it. I suppose I'm just still waiting for the punch-line.

Check out www.savewolves.org for more information and ways you can help.