The W Word

You know, I’ve been in this business a long time. I’ve seen some amazing things. I’ve met some amazing people. I’ve seen people put aside their own narrow interests and come together to make some pretty great things happen. I’ve also seen them embark on exercises in selfishness and narrow-minded stupidity that make you ashamed to be a human being. As an old friend once said, “Sometimes Wyoming people would rather fight than win.”

I hope that’s not where we’re headed with wolves. It’s sure got all them makings of one of those “let’s all choose up sides and vilify one another until we get tired of fighting” sessions that remind you of junior high squabbles, but with a lot more at stake. In 34 years in this business, I’ve never seen anything like it.

People sometimes ask, “Is WWF pro-wolf or anti-wolf?” The real answer is that we’re neither. Let me quote our official policy on wolves and then talk about what that means. Here’s the official policy, straight from the minutes of our Board Meeting on December 5, 2008:

“The Wyoming Wildlife Federation, Wyoming’s oldest and largest statewide conservation organization, supports delisting for gray wolves in Wyoming. Further, we support wolf management vested under the authority of the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission. As such, it is the position of the Board of Directors of the Wyoming Wildlife Federation that gray wolves in Wyoming should be managed as trophy game animals statewide.”

Here’s my interpretation of that policy statement: I think our members had mixed feelings about wolves when they were reintroduced into the Greater Yellowstone in 1995 and 1996. Some saw it as a historic moment in conservation – the return of a keystone predator to the heart of the West. Some saw it as a colossal mistake, with potentially disastrous consequences. I’m still not completely sure who was right – maybe both, maybe neither. One thing became clear pretty fast – wolves were thriving and expanding. That made one more thing clear: These wolves were here to stay. We could whine about how it was done, we could whine about where they were or how many there were or what they were doing on any given day, but Wyoming was (and is) going to have wolves.

The only real question was that of management. It became clear that Wyoming’s dual status plan, under which wolves were trophy game animals in part of the state (managed like cougars and black bears) and predatory animals (managed, or not managed, like coyotes and red foxes) in the rest of the state was not going to result in their being removed from the list of threatened and endangered species. As long as Wyoming has a dual status plan, the US Fish and Wildlife Service is not going to trust us to manage our own wolves. Whether this is right or fair is a separate question and will be argued in the courts, but everything we know suggests that it is true. So what do we do? Our answer is that we scrap the dual status plan and manage them under the authority of the Game and Fish Commission as trophy game animals (again, just like cougars and black bears) statewide. Set quotas (maybe even yearlong, unlimited quotas in some areas) and hunt them. Let the Game and Fish Department work with livestock operators to control problem wolves, reimburse them for damages when necessary, let hunters kills some wolves, collect good biological information, and make sound management decisions.

Is the Game and Fish Commission capable of managing wolves? If you look at their track record of managing other large predators, the answer is unquestionably yes. They do a good (not perfect) job of managing cougars and black bears – even their most ardent detractors would concede that. They’ve carried the burden of recovering grizzly bears from the brink of extinction for decades. Can they manage wolves? Certainly. So why not give them a shot at it? What we’re doing now – choosing up sides and fighting – doesn’t seem to be doing much.

There’s a lot of folks, it seems, who would like to turn this into black/white, good/bad, pro/anti. It’s time to get beyond that and move forward. I don’t know if that’s pro-wolf or anti-wolf. I do think it’s common sense. What do you think?