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?

Fence Removal, June 2010

Join Wyoming Wildlife Federation and Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation to remove fence behind Wild Iris, near Pass Creek and Limestone Mountain in the Shoshone National Forest.

When: June 12 at 9:00 am
Meet: We will leave from Stub’s truck stop just east of Pizza Hut in Lander.
Bring: gloves, fence pliers (if you have them), wear long sleeves & pants

RSVP to Joy Bannon @ 307.287.0129 OR to Bob Joslin @ 335.7290

We need your help—join us for some hands-on fun and to help big game migrate freely.

Click here for the postcard.

The Role of Hunters In Conservation in the 21st Century (Part 2)

An old friend (and one of the great voices of wildlife conservation in America) Chris Madson says:

“Over the last hundred years, hunters and anglers have proven to be exceptionally motivated and reliable supporters of conservation, partly because they have a strong self-interest in maintaining abundant, widely distributed populations of game and partly because their connection with wild places leaves many of them with an unusual appreciation for wildlife, whether it’s game or not. When it comes to the heavy lifting of conservation, the funding of day-to-day wildlife work and the political backing for conservation legislation, hunters and anglers have done far more than their share.”

This wasn’t done by accident. It was done by people – hunters and anglers working hand in hand with the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell (both of whom, by the way, were naturalists first and hunters second) with Albert Nelson and D.C Nowlin. It represents the greatest conservation success story on the face of the earth. And we – you and me – hunters and anglers and people who care about wildlife were then and are now at the center of it. Wyoming enjoys the fish and wildlife we have today because of us, and the dedicated stewards who have served us.

This is a noble history. It’s good to “remember who we are.” But it’s even more important to BE who we are. And that brings us to today. Who are we? Why do we hunt?

Jose Ortega, in his classic Meditations on Hunting (1942) says that hunting is different than most other human pursuits in one important way: That most things that people do are a means to an end – we work in order to get something. “But in hunting…this order of means and end is reversed. To the hunter the death of the prey is not what interests him. That is not his purpose. What interests him is everything that he had to do to achieve that death – that is, the hunt.” In short, we hunt not to kill, but to have hunted.

If that’s true, or if it is even marginally true, what does it mean to have hunted? What factors create this experience we crave? In recent years, conservation has spawned a field of applied social research – the “human dimensions” discipline that has sought to answer this question, and as researchers are prone to do, they have offered a host of sometimes complicated and often conflicting answers. Hunters say they hunt to be close to nature, to share the experience with friends and family, to “get away from it all”, etc. But at the heart of it, there is something deep, something old, something that in the 21st century we may struggle to put words around. It is something that may be as old as we are, something that we sought to express in the cave paintings of Dordogne or Altamira, in the Arizona of Zane Grey and the Africa of Karamojo Bell, in the tight prose of Hemingway or the ponderous paragraphs of William Faulkner.

Speaking only for me, it is about life and death. No more, no less. It is about my life, about my deep and spiritual connection with the life of wild lands and lives of wild things. It is about my birth, my passage through this world, and the legacy I hope to leave behind when my time here is done. This is not romanticizing it. I am not one given much to romanticizing, and I grow even less so with each passing year. But eve3n if we fail to adequately put words around the “Why?” it sees reasonable to make a few observations about the role of hunters and hunting in wildlife conservation.

Walt Gasson
Executive Director