Mathematical Error or Deliberate Misrepresentation?
By Don Peay
“I knew the answer to the problem was not biological.
It was not legal. I knew the answer was a political answer.”
—Don Peay
Red Flags and Failed Experiments
From the beginning, the Foundation for North American Wild Sheep (FNAWS) strongly opposed the introduction of wolves, one of the few sportsmen-based conservation groups to do so. The rest of the groups drank the proverbial Kool Aid—stating that wolves would only kill the sick and the weak, thereby helping the health of the herds. The FNAWS members, most of whom have hunted in Canada, along with many Canadian outfitter members knew the wolf restoration effort in the Northern Rockies would be a disaster for abundant ungulate populations and the hunting and ranching industries. They should know, as they live with wolves.
I started the fledgling Utah chapter of FNAWS in 1991. That group has raised more than five million dollars to support an amazing wild sheep restoration effort in Utah, going from some five hundred bighorns in just a few isolated herds in the 1990s to about five thousand desert and Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep in over twenty-eight different places in Utah today.
From the beginning, I was personally opposed to the wolf restoration and went on record to that effect with both the Utah chapter of FNAWS and Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife, which I founded in 1994.1 The red flag went up when I saw that the mathematical models and projections being proposed by the “professional biologists” were completely flawed—as this failed experiment has proven.
I wasn’t a professional biologist; I had a degree in chemical engineering, an MBA, and some successful business experience, but I did have another credential. I was a “rocket scientist” and had worked on some very complex mathematical equations while working at an aerospace firm that manufactured nitroglycerin-based propellants for strategic rocket motors. One very critical part of our jobs was to find out when processes went from linear to exponential transitions—from smooth flight to catastrophic explosions. Similarly, in my MBA training, I spent a fair amount of time looking at financial modeling and the growth of investment portfolios. The rate of return, with small variations over a ten- to fifteen-year period of time, had tremendously different outcomes.
Either Wrong or Lying
Many of my college professors told us that math is a universal language and that if you understood math well, you could work in any profession. My experience has proved those thoughts to be true. So, from the very beginning, when some “professional biologists” told us that we didn’t have a biology degree and therefore we had no idea what we were talking about, I was very leery of what the wolf reintroduction experts were telling us. I will give two specific examples, early on, that proved to me that the biologists pushing for wolf introduction and others were either wrong or they had an agenda and were not telling the truth.
Besides the mathematical modeling, engineering, and business training, I had spent my life in the outdoors of the western United States, and I have a pretty good understanding of basic biology. When I looked at the models that were being used to forecast wolf populations back in the 1990s, I could see a similar mathematical process with wolves and elk about to happen—a catastrophic failure in ten to twenty years.
Biggest Myth
The biggest myth perpetrated on the public with wolf reintroduction is that nature perfectly balances itself and that wolves only eat the sick and the weak, thus actually helping the herds become healthier. The federal and state biologists stated in their own documents that wolves would only have a 7 to 13 percent impact on elk and very little, if any impact, on moose. As we now know, there has been an 80 percent reduction in the greater Yellowstone elk herds, moose are for all practical purposes gone from Yellowstone, and now bison, the final prey, are declining as well.
Second Major Myth
The second major myth was that the wolf populations in each state would only grow at a 3 to5 percent growth rate, based upon wolf growth rates in Canada and Alaska where a “steady state” has been reached. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that when you dump a few predators in the middle of the “Garden of Eden” of wildlife, the wolves are going to multiply at very high rates—25 to 35 percent a year.
Mathematical Implications
Let’s take a look at the mathematical implications of these errors. Let’s assume that you have a two-million-dollar portfolio and that your goal is to never touch the principal. You are, on average, getting an 8 percent return, so you develop your plan to spend $160,000 a year, and things are going along fine.
Before the wolf introduction, excess big-game animals were taken by hunters, with hunter harvest very carefully regulated through permits for both the male and female species, and for years, the populations of elk (or your two-million-dollar investment portfolio) remained fairly constant. Your base principal is there, and you can spend $160,000 every year for a long time to come.
Now, let’s assume two things happen. Number one, your interest rate of return drops to 4 percent (the beginning effect of wolves eating calf elk). Your investment manager tells you that you have to cut back spending to eighty thousand dollars a year or you will be eating into your principal. Translating this to the elk situation, state agencies cut back the number of hunting permits, but they knew that wolves were not cutting back but were growing exponentially. The net effect of wolves killing calves and then adults is like doing this to your investment portfolio: in just five short years, your principal is now one million, not two million dollars, as the growing pack of wolves ate half of it, and compounding the problem, with less cows (your principal), your interest rate is now dropped to a 2 percent return. Without dipping into your principal, the most you can spend is twenty thousand dollars a year. In just a short time, say five to seven years, you have gone from being able to spend $160,000 a year and never touching your principal to only being able to spend twenty thousand a year, and even with reduced spending, you know your principal is dropping dramatically. Again translating this to wolves and elk, the wolves are rapidly gobbling up the one-million-dollar portion.
The Yellowstone elk herd dropped from over nineteen thousand head in 1995 to just over four thousand in 2012. During this time period, wolf numbers were growing exponentially. Anyone who understands math at all could see this biological train wreck coming. Your consumption is growing exponentially, your interest rate (calf survival) is dropping exponentially, and your principal (total elk population) is dropping rapidly. Even though hunting permits were ended—we told biologists to end them sooner—elk populations still dropped precipitously.
The second point that concerned me is that these biologists had a political agenda. Ed Bangs, Wolf Recovery Coordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, presented a talk about the wolf recovery effort at the University of Utah three or so years after wolf reintroduction began in 1995–96. In his analysis, he presented some data that painted the fairy tale picture—wolves were eating the old, the sick, and the weak, and hunters were killing the healthy elk. Bangs’s data showed that, at that time, wolves were killing elk that averaged eight years old and that hunters took elk that averaged four years old—i.e., wolves were good, and hunters were bad. I raised my hand and asked one question: “Did you count in your average age of harvest the baby calf elk component into the wolf take?” Bangs replied, “Uh, well, no.”
A similar analogy would be like talking to five hundred people that make fifty thousand dollars a year, then throwing in a few billionaires, and then telling everyone that, on average, they each make a quarter million dollars a year so everyone should be happy! WRONG! If the biologists had included the total number of calf elk—ranging from two days to six months—killed by wolves with the adult elk killed, the average age of elk killed by wolves would have been dramatically younger than the age of elk taken by hunters. This discussion proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that these wolf biologists had an agenda to let wolves run free and destroy game herds and that they were using phony math to buy time.
Out of Hand in a Hurry
Let me put one other issue in mathematical context. Assume you have one hundred wolves in 1995, and you predict that they are going to grow at 5 percent per year. Compounding annually, by 2010 you will have 208 wolves. However, if that same population of wolves grew at 25 percent compounding annually, by 2010, there would be 2,842 wolves—an ERROR almost fourteen times larger than the promised number. And unfortunately, this is exactly what has been happening. We were promised the goal of ten breeding pairs and a total population of one hundred wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. However, in 2012, we had at least three thousand wolves, and some experts believe twice that many in the three states. Don’t you wish your $100,000 investment grew not to $208,000 from 1995 to 2010, but to $2.84 million? This is the magnitude of the error, and with some very quick and easy mathematical modeling, I knew this wolf situation was a complete fiasco that would unfold in a period of ten to fifteen years.
Let me give you one last example of putting numbers in terms of what they really mean. With five hundred wolves in the woods (two hundred more than the agreed-upon minimum population for the three states) and with an average kill per wolf of twenty-three elk per year, the wolves would be killing around 11,500 elk a year. With just 2,500 wolves, they would be killing 57,500 elk a year. Considering that states like Utah only have 65,000 elk in the entire state and hearing that the Animal Rights groups claim they want five to eight thousand wolves, you don’t need a calculator to see that wolves would dramatically reduce game herds and destroy the hunting and ranching industries—and then, after the game herds are gone, the wolves would kill each other and focus on livestock and pets, while considering people. We knew that, even though wolves were years away from Utah, we had better solve this problem before it got to our doorstep. As an engineer and businessman, I clearly knew that an exponential function can get out of hand in a hurry.
Even though the math is pretty straightforward and the models are easy to predict, it still amazed me how many biologists and others told us that wolves would NOT greatly reduce our flourishing game herds or the tens of millions of dollars in economic activity that abundant herds sustain. These biologists had been taught in school that, with good habitat, predators would have minimal impacts on game herds and the rest of the wonder wolf fable.
The Real Fairy Tales
It’s easy to see that a huge mistake has been made by the mismanagement of wolves in the Northern Rockies. The original predictions in the Environmental Impact Statement of wolf population goals and what impact the wolves would have on the wildlife and the economics of the states where wolves take up residence were the real fairy tales about wolves. When wildlife biologists in Wyoming looked at the difference between what the original USFWS Environmental Impact Statement for the wolf recovery program said and what actually happened, my predictions were more than confirmed.
In 2005, ten years after the relocation took place, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department did a review of the predictions made by the USFWS in that Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). This is what they found:
• The wolf population in the Greater Yellowstone Area (GYA) in 2005 was at least 3.3 times the original Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) prediction for a recovered population.
• The number of breeding pairs of wolves in the GYA in 2005 was at least twice as high as the original EIS prediction, and the number of breeding pairs in 2004 was at least 3.1 times the original EIS prediction.
• In 2005, the wolf population in Wyoming outside Yellowstone National Park exceeded the recovery criteria for the entire region and continues to increase rapidly.
• The estimated annual predation rate (twenty-three ungulates per wolf) is 1.8 times the annual predation rate (twelve ungulates per wolf) predicted in the EIS.
• The estimated number of ungulates taken by 325 wolves in a year (7,150 is six times higher than the original EIS prediction).
• The percent of the northern Yellowstone elk harvest during the 1980s currently taken by wolves (50 percent) is 6.3 times the original estimate of 8 percent projected in the EIS.
• The actual decline in the northern Yellowstone elk herd (more than 50 percent) is 1.7 times the maximum decline originally forecast in the EIS.
• The actual decline in cow harvest in the northern Yellowstone elk herd (89 percent) is 3.3 times the decline originally forecast in the EIS.
• The actual decline in bull harvest in the northern Yellowstone elk herd is 75 percent, whereas the 1994 EIS predicted bull harvests would be “unaffected.”
• Since wolf introduction, average ratios of calf elk to cow elk have been greatly depressed in the northern Yellowstone elk herd and in the Wyoming elk herds impacted by wolves. In the northern Yellowstone elk herd and in the Sunlight unit of the Clarks Fork herd, calf-to-cow ratios have been suppressed to unprecedented levels below fifteen calves per one hundred. The impact of wolves on calf recruitment was not addressed by the 1994 EIS.
Conclusion
To me, knowing that hunters and ranchers have invested hundreds of millions of dollars to restore and sustain abundant game herds and then see a group of people act recklessly—willing to make irresponsible representations in management and models, change agreements to have one hundred wolves in each of three states, then allow for state management, and go to court and have judges use ancillary and irrelevant biological arguments to achieve their agenda of no wolf management—was very disturbing. The people pushing for no wolf management have contributed little, if any, money to growing and sustaining the very food sources of “their” wolves. To sportsmen and women, who know that wildlife belong to the people and that we have fought and worked so hard to have abundant herds, it was very offensive.
I grew up in a single-wide trailer with no indoor plumbing, and I worked hard for fifty years. Many of my sportsmen friends are of the same mold. We have worked hard and sacrificed a lot, and we do not intend to let a handful of activists destroy our abundant game herds and all the intrinsic and economic values that come from having abundant game herds.
I knew the answer to the problem was not biological. It was not legal. I knew the answer was political. Working with Ted Lyon and many others, we have set a precedent that will honor the work of sportsmen for many years, and we have made headway on updating the Endangered Species Act to respect the rights of people as well as wildlife.
Endnote:
1. Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife (SFW) has played a major role in the establishment and obtaining of the funding for the 750,000-acre Watershed Restoration Act, and it has helped increase funding for wildlife and land conservation by more than two hundred million dollars. SFW gave a voice to sportsmen in Utah, a state that had been dominated by non-wildlife-friendly interests. SFW also worked to restore world-class trophy bull elk on Utah’s public lands; has led the aggressive effort to transplant new herds of bison, antelope, wild turkey, mountain goats, and bighorn sheep; and has been instrumental in the Mule Deer Recovery Act.
Photo credit: Debbie Steinhausser/Shutterstock.com