Reality Bites: Mexican Wolf Impacts on Rural Citizens
By Laura Schneberger
“It’s disturbing to see that there is a consistent trend from government agency personnel working within the program to promote the extremist notion that wolves on the ground are genetically special and cannot be removed or controlled. This is contrary to all scientific and policy documents available.”
—Laura Schneberger
Mexican Wolf Program Background
The Mexican wolf recovery project did not begin with the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973. Nor did it happen in 1976 when the gray wolf was listed as an endangered species. It didn’t take hold until 1979 when the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) approved a recovery team to assist the agency in mapping out a potential recovery strategy for the Mexican wolf, the smallest and rarest subspecies of gray wolf in North America. The USFWS approved the subsequent Mexican Gray Wolf Recovery Plan in 1982. This plan called for captive breeding and establishment through reintroduction of two viable wild populations of Mexican wolf in the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area—a 6,800-square-mile area that encompasses the Apache National Forest in Arizona, the Gila National Forest in New Mexico, and 2,400 square miles managed by the White Mountain Apache tribe.
Unlike other predator recovery plans, this one failed to contain numerical criteria for recovery and delisting of the Mexican wolf, and when the actual reintroduction project was on the ground, that aspect was put on the back burner. The majority of biologists believed that success would not be feasible with the genetic limitations that existed due to the small number of Mexican wolves, none of which were in the wild. A determination was made that this wolf would never be recovered enough for delisting.
Lack of action on the Mexican Wolf Recovery Plan by USFWS provoked litigation by an environmental organization then called the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity, to force immediate implementation of the recovery plan. This suit resulted in a settlement between the plaintiffs and the USFWS, with undisclosed conditions and parameters. Although the USFWS agreed to the settlement in federal court, neither the public nor the state agencies have ever seen the terms of that settlement. As of 2014, USFWS still claimed there was a court order to proceed with the program, though clearly there was not. Somewhere under those hidden terms, “no legal win, no loss,” were the words, “agreed to attempt reintroduction of the Mexican wolf, Canis lupus baileyi.”
The current Mexican wolf program is based on a 1982 agreement and is woefully out of date. It is not scientifically current and lacks even the basic backbone of most recovery plans—delisting criteria that would eventually remove the Mexican wolf from Endangered Species Act protection. By 1996, a proposed experimental rule was written and by 1998, the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) was published directing the program’s beginning. In 1998, designation of a “Nonessential Experimental Population Rule” with the required section 10(j) special rule on managing the reintroduced population of large predators allowing lethal control and authorized take was written. March 29, 1998, the first eleven wolves were released into the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area.
Wolf Lineage
At the time of the 1982 agreement, the captive breeding program consisted of three different lineages—McBride, Aragon, and Ghost Ranch. The only certified animals were the five Mexican wolves captured in Mexico in the late 1970s and early 1980s by Roy T. McBride. McBride, a trapper who often contracted for the federal government, spent years in Mexico hunting out the last of the wild packs of Mexican wolves. He came back with a single female and four males all from the same pack. McBride was in a unique position for this project with both expertise in trapping wolves and a master’s in biology.
During the initial planning for captive breeding of the lineages, it was determined that only the lineage captured by Roy McBride in Mexico was certifiable as pure Mexican wolf.1 In 1997, controversy arose when a captive pack at Carlsbad Caverns National Park designated for release was found by Roy McBride to be largely composed of wolf-dog hybrids.
Zoo employees initially argued that the animals’ odd appearance was due to several generations of captivity and diet, but diet and captivity alone could not account for blue eyes (that wolves do not have) or curly tails. Scientists involved in the captive breeding program and Recovery Team decided to euthanize the line. Unfortunately, there remained a few animals from the Ghost Ranch lineage in private collections around the Southwest.
With only one purebred female, the USFWS began seeing inbreeding depression in the McBride lineage. Some of her male offspring showed signs of cryptorchidism (undescended testicles) and were not fit for breeding, although crossings with her sons and brother did supply more females for further breeding. The program seemed dead in the water, but in the mid-1990s David Parsons, the Mexican Wolf Recovery Coordinator, made the startling decision to include both the Ghost Ranch private collection and the Aragon lineages in the Captive Breeding Program in an attempt to improve the genetic diversity of the animals. McBride, who was livid at the idea of including what were considered by all experts involved to be wolf-dog hybrids, challenged Parsons on this decision. On June 2, 1997, just six months before the first captive wolf release, McBride sent a letter outlining his concerns about the decision.
Dear Mr. Parsons: In reading the recent status report of April 1997, I was shocked to see that the wolves from the Ghost Ranch Lineage were being included in the captive breeding program. In the early days of Mexican Wolf Recovery, the origin and genetics of the Ghost Ranch animals were discussed and investigated ad nauseam. In fact, the conclusion by all members of the early recovery team was that the animals were wolf-dog hybrids. This was the primary factor behind the decision to seek and capture the remaining wild population, because it was the only pure genetic stock available.2
McBride’s letter goes on to discuss the genetic and legal ramifications of the inclusion at length, citing the flawed science behind the decision as “right out of the Twilight Zone.” He questioned whether the ESA would even protect the animals that would be created by USFWS if the Ghost Ranch lineage were included in the breeding program. He was adamant that the Ghost Ranch and Aragon lineages were cosmetically, genetically, and completely different from the original McBride wolves captured in Mexico.
Twilight Zone indeed! When geneticists at the University of California, Davis, confirmed that the so-called “Chupacabra dog” coyotes found in Texas were related to the Mexican wolf everyone laughed. But neither McBride nor Parsons could have known of their existence when the original argument erupted over Ghost Ranch. In 2009, DNA tests on a startlingly ugly blue-eyed coyote cross-dog jokingly known as the Chupacabra in south Texas proved conclusively that this anomaly was genetically related to DNA on file in the Mexican wolf program.3 Several specimens of this hairless blue dog with blue eyes are available and although there is yet no proof, they are likely related to the dog that is one of the unknown founders of the Ghost Ranch lineage. The odd-looking coyote hybrids show marked physical similarities to the Mexican hairless dog, or Xolo, an ancient breed known to have occupied South America for more than three thousand years. Ghost Ranch “wolves” also had some specimens with blue eyes. However, there has been no investigation into the relationship between either the Texas blue hairless (Chupacabra), or the Xolo, or the different lineages of what are now called Canis lupus baileyi (Mexican wolf) as of yet.
McBride’s concerns were ignored and in 1997, he ceased working with USFWS on wolf-related issues. Unfortunately, none of the original specimens of either Ghost Ranch or Aragon exists to use for modern DNA testing and the original records of the recovery team that McBride was a part of have disappeared. Instead, USFWS set up a committee to review the Ghost Ranch and Aragon lineages and verify their approval, although even that team also appeared to have serious misgivings. McBride writes:
As of December 7, 1995, Mr. Parsons had yet to view any living descendant of Ghost Ranch lineage firsthand. Nevertheless, and without examining any of these animals firsthand, Mr. Parsons pronounced them fit, to be purely “Mexican wolf,” and to be appropriate for inclusion with the certified lineage in July of 1995. Mr. Parsons’ determination was based entirely on the results of Hedrick’s and Wayne’s yet unpublished 1995 studies which remain not generally available for public review as of January, 1996.4
One of the first lawsuits against the implementation of the Mexican wolf program was based on the inclusion of hybrid wolf-dogs into the gene pool. This argument was swiftly lost in federal court and the historical samples that may have proved Ghost Ranch and Aragon founders were dogs or wolf-dog crosses were never found again.
The DNA baseline for the Mexican wolf is now from the three combined certifiable lineages. It must be explained that the only way to determine wolf DNA as different from dog DNA is to have family markers. Mexican wolves are purebred because they are all related to wolves in the captive breeding pool, not because they have distinctly different genes than dogs. In other words, it did not matter that they were hybrids, as long as the USFWS claimed they were not and historic records were missing, then the program could go forward as if they were pure wolves.
The unpublished study that Parson used to include non-wolf lineages was eventually published, but the committee still had misgivings about the methodology. The study never used coyotes from Mexico or the Southwest for their comparisons with the questionable lineages but it does admit that:
Wayne et al. (1995, p.6), cannot eliminate the possibility that the Ghost Ranch lineage originated from other North American grey wolves or a dog whose offspring had backcrossed to wild wolves for several generations. Wayne et al. (1995, p.6), cannot eliminate the possibility that the Aragon lineage originated from other North American grey wolves or a dog whose offspring had backcrossed to wild wolves for several generations.5
At the time and probably still today there is no other person alive who knows more about wild Mexican wolves than Roy McBride, yet the Service ignored his plea not to combine these wolves with the McBride lineage because the genetics have been fouled and the likelihood of problems such as a propensity for livestock predation would likely be substantial.
These facts may very well explain why USFWS has documented higher than expected livestock predation, human habituation issues, and the presence of hybrid pups on at least three different occasions in the Mexican wolf reintroduction area.
The entire issue of the existence of the Mexican wolf needs to be reviewed by independent scientists and geneticists. Many of the un-wolflike behaviors that have been exhibited by this population is in part due to the fact that this court-approved population is not pure Mexican wolf and their dog genes have likely impaired their ability to function, as did historic Mexican wolf populations. This leads to the question as to whether these wolves should even be considered an endangered species.
The Modern Mexican Wolf versus the Modern Rancher
The Mexican wolf reintroduction program launch was also the beginning of almost two decades worth of struggle for equality and justice for ranching operations and small rural communities in the recovery area. The goal of one hundred wolves originally listed as the initial goal for the Blue Range Wolf Recovery area is clearly an over-estimate. In over a decade, there are fifty-eight in the wild in spring 2012 according to USFWS.6
Regardless of the number of the Mexican wolves, a substantial number now on the ground have left the wilderness recovery area, preferring to eat livestock, pets, and garbage, and frequent homes and campgrounds. This may seem to lead anyone not connected to the relocation program hierarchy to believe that wild prey populations are not sustaining the food needs of the current population, particularly in the wilderness areas.
Logically, this leads to the belief that at any one time prior to the turn of the century, there were never one hundred Mexican gray wolves in southwest New Mexico and Arizona combined. Historical accounts by early explorers such as Emory, Carson, and various Spanish expeditions rarely mention encounters or even sightings of wolves. Further, the same early expeditions by Europeans found the area so lacking in game species, that the threat of starvation loomed almost constantly. Kit Carson, who led several expeditions through the area, survived by eating horses he traded out of the local Native American populations. The lack of game and the few documented sightings of wolves by these folks clearly show that the Mexican wolf was, at best, rare in the area and probably rare throughout its entire range.
Where did the USFWS get their population goal estimates? By the turn of the twentieth century Mexican wolves were relatively common, likely because a new prey animal had been introduced to the area—livestock in the form of both sheep and cattle had been steadily increasing throughout country set aside for ranching that is now considered the Blue Range Wolf Recovery area. The ranching businesses contributed meat needed by the mining towns springing up all over the region but that same meat led to an increase in breeding capability and larger litters from the few wolves that were historically documented on that area. The same situation occurred in California at the turn of the century when livestock became prevalent in the territory and the grizzly population exploded with the expanded food supply.
With increased nourishment, the Mexican wolf populations did increase significantly as did increased wolf/livestock conflict. Early governments authorized the PARC service (early USFWS) to begin the removal of the Mexican wolf. Although several dozen wolves were indeed killed from 1900 to the 1970s, this number was the culmination of seventy years and should not have been used as a population goal, as it in no way represented a natural ecological number to estimate historic population levels.
Note: the gray wolf recovery goal that was set for Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho was one hundred wolves and ten breeding pairs in each state. Wolves prey on large ungulates, hoofed mammals, and snowshoe hares. When they are available, elk are the preferred food for wolves. According to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, New Mexico has a total elk population of eighty thousand (over half of which are found several hundred miles of desert north from the recovery area) and Arizona had 17,500 elk in 2009. Wild elk populations in western New Mexico and Arizona are not large enough to sustain one hundred wolves, if the wolves would only prey on elk.7
Ranches and Rural Home Impacts
Excerpt from the case study “Wolf Habituation as a Conservation Conundrum” by Diane K. Boyd:
The expanding wolf distribution has caused an increase in wolf-human encounters and generated concerns among wolf managers and conservationists . . . . This may sound like a tabloid headline, but the attacks were well documented by wolf authorities. Several factors may have led to the attacks including a lack of available wild prey, domestic livestock that were well protected, and many small children playing in the vicinity of the wolves. The common factor among nearly all reported wolf attacks was that wolves had become increasingly bold around humans (perhaps because of food scarcity, or possibly as a new strategy to exploit resources brought by humans into wilderness areas). North American wolves involved in recent attacks were repeatedly seen stealing articles of clothing, gear, exploring campsites, and sometimes obtaining food items—behaviors nearly identical to those reported by early frontiersmen.8
The current DNA mix of what are now known as “Mexican wolves” supports all of the above, so much so that many adults and children residing in the BRWRA have been seriously impacted by wolf encounters.
Often the general public, particularly those that do not live in the Southwest, are unaware that while the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area (BRWRA) is a large area, there are hundreds of private land in-holdings in it where people live, work, and recreate in what the FWS shows as a vacant, empty green spot on a map. Sixty-six percent of the BRWRA is open to raising cattle, mining, and forestry. All of these private in-holdings are over a hundred years old and a large percentage of them are working family livestock operations, hardly good habitat to be releasing and building up a large population of predators. I now share some stories of what it has been like to live with Mexican wolves to illustrate the realities non-residents seldom ever experience.
• In 2007 Mary Miller and her husband Mark were forced to witness their eight-year-old running from a wolf attack on a family dog, an attack that occurred next to the child and likely was an attempt by the dog to protect the child. The dog recovered with extensive veterinary treatment. Two months later the same wolf killed eight-year-old Stacy’s pretty black horse, named Six, in his corral while the family was out on a grocery trip. Six’s remains were almost all gone after four days and five wolves.
• In 2005, Carlie Gatlin suffered a concussion in an auto wreck and was forced to walk home from a wrecked vehicle with two small children. Her son was bleeding from a head injury and her daughter was small enough that she had to be carried. When Carlie went to the hospital for treatment the next morning, the tracks of the Luna pack overlapped hers and her son’s in the snow beside the road. The Gatlin children have since suffered through several maimings and killings of their family dogs by wolves.
• Ivy Schneberger, thirteen, was riding her mare a half mile from home when the Sycamore Pack of two animals attempted to corner her. She fired off a round from her single-shot .22 and they finally meandered away, choosing instead to kill the family’s calves for several weeks before the first legally killed Mexican wolf, AF 1155, was shot on that ranch. This is one incident where the wolf was considered a threat to human safety. One story circulated that a few days prior to the Schneberger incident wolves had threatened one of the program volunteers near their wilderness release site some forty-five miles to the southwest. But when the annual report came out both incidents were downplayed and the wolf was categorized as having been shot for livestock kills, not human safety and removal problems.
• AF 1155 was the same wolf that the Schneberger family had dealt with three years previously during the winter of 2000 when her mate left her to starve at their home and agency personnel chose to allow her to stay there from December until April. While living on the Schneberger ranch, the wolf subsisted on dog feces from their kennels and occasionally scavenged off coyote kills in the area. After she had been at the ranch headquarters off and on for three months, the family’s milk cow died on a tributary leading into the home, which provided an excuse for the agency to justify to the public about the behavior of the obviously habituated wolf that fed on the dead cow.
• J. C. Nelson was fourteen years old when the Luna pack of five wolves crowded him against a tree and circled him for fifteen minutes. J. C. made no move to run, instead choosing to find as much cover as possible in an area damaged by a wildfire. He was only able to back against a charred ponderosa pine. The pack apparently smelled his rifle and, having better things to do, it eventually meandered away. This incident was reported to USFWS by Catron county law enforcement. USFWS investigated by sending volunteers to try and entice the pack to copy the behavior. This did not occur and the USFWS chose to deem the incident unimportant. J. C. said he was afraid to shoot the wolves because he thought his father would lose his grazing allotment if he did.
Proximity
Proximity is a problem when dealing with Mexican wolf presence and your family. The onset of the 2012 breeding season and the rise in the wolves’ population numbers, sightings, close encounters, and home encounters have once again created a difficult situation for managers of the Mexican wolf program and they are not getting much slack from local governments and citizens.
In December 2011, the program issued its first lethal control order after a female wolf with a long track record of livestock depredations and human habitation was found circling a private home at regular intervals where small children were exposed to her close presence. The same wolf had birthed a litter of hybrid Labrador pups the prior spring and USFWS was still on the lookout for the one Mexican wolf-dog hybrid that got away. They have not found it. Presumably, it will add to the genetic mix that is the “rare Mexican wolf.” The remarkable thing about this control action is the fact that despite dozens of human safety encounters since the beginning of the program, many of which involved Mexican wolves’ attraction to children, this was the first time the agency admitted lethal control was warranted for human safety reasons.
The encounters with wolves did not end after AF 1105 was removed from the picture, nor did the controversy of the necessity to remove her. Despite the claims from radical environmental organizations that the wolf was merely lonely and only needed to find a male, that there just were not enough male wolves in the wild for her to mate with, the next three encounters at homes and highways in the same area were with male wolves looking for a mate.
Numerous photos show that these animals are clearly very close to people. Also, they are in the area where pairing with AF 1105 was possible. Instead, the wolves appear more interested in easy prey or a handout at a home than pairing with a female that was making itself readily available. It makes a reasonable person wonder what these big males are breeding with since they showed little interest in AF 1105. Perhaps coyotes? It is possible, as the canine DNA is nearly identical for all species with the exception of family marker identification.
The photos taken on the highway of the large male wolf occurred when a young mother stopped alongside the road to allow her four-year-old daughter some fresh air after she was carsick. The other child, a two-year-old still strapped in the car seat, became impatient and began crying. At that moment, this wolf stepped out of the woods and approached the woman and her children. She was able to put the sick child back in the car and get herself in the car with about twenty feet between herself and this enormous animal. However, this wolf was intent on stalking her, and her children were only goading it more with their distressed behavior.
Since that time, the wolf was killed, and the mother has suffered an unbelievable amount of slander in the local news media. This is simply because she lives in proximity of the expanding Mexican wolf population. The activists who have repeatedly attempted to destroy her credibility and reputation have avoided the factual reports of the situation, of was which was made available to them. Instead, they chose to blame and attack a mom over the death of a habituated aggressive wolf, even though she certainly was not responsible for the decision. The message these people promote is that this wolf was special, presumably more special than the woman’s small children and their safety and more important than their freedom to exercise their rights on their own land at their own home.
This wolf is not unique. Hybrid controversy aside, genetically this wolf was redundant to the population of Mexican wolves, which include over four hundred in captivity. Only genetically redundant wolves are legally allowed to be used in the releases on federal lands in Arizona and New Mexico. Dozens exactly like her exist in captivity, ready to enhance the wild breeding pool.
It’s disturbing to see that there is a consistent trend from government agency personnel working within the program to promote the extremist notion that wolves on the ground are genetically unique, and so cannot be removed or controlled. This is contrary to many scientific and policy documents available. This biased advocacy indicates that not only are there close ties between the program and the most extreme environmental advocates for wolves in the Southwest, but also that members of the USFWS appear to be coordinating media and press release strategies with those same organizations.
The behavior of the wolf population that the federal agencies are in charge of (as well as the radical wolf advocates) is such that local governments in New Mexico and Arizona counties that contain wolves are examining their options to protect human safety. Human health and safety is an area that the agencies themselves are supposed to maintain over any policy that they have in place, including promoting increases in the wolf population. With the large number of incidents involving children in the BRWRA, the counties feel they must be ready to step in and do the job the federal government is somewhat lackadaisical about doing. We do not know what will happen if Catron County, New Mexico, kills a wolf in a constituent’s yard, but the majority of the small human population in the county are supportive of the idea.
Megan Richardson witnessed the habituated-livestock-killing Middle Fork pack coming to her home at regular intervals, and began to wonder if the noises her small baby son made drew the wolves even closer. The wolves can be seen coming into her driveway in photos from game cameras she has installed. She put it bluntly: “Is it going to take someone getting seriously hurt or killed before something is done?” Megan deals with the situation by keeping game cameras out in the yard to document the animals’ frequent presence on her land.
The Middle Fork wolf pack, implicated in dozens of unconfirmed livestock deaths, has frustrated ranchers with uncontrolled killing. The Middle Fork pack was the first, and perhaps only, group of wild-born Mexican wolves to pair and raise successful litters on their own. For the first four years of their existence, there is no record of them killing cattle and they stayed in the wilderness.
In 2007, USFWS discovered the female had a broken leg that had healed poorly and was cosmetically unattractive, although not a deterrent to her hunting ability. They trapped her, took her into captivity, and amputated the leg. She was in captivity for over a month. Her pack, sensing that she was alive, made wider and wider circles out of their normal territory looking for her. By the time the female was placed back into the wild, the wolves had discovered a livestock operation miles to the north. Later that year they began killing calves. Sometime later, the agency also chose to amputate the leg of the alpha male that had been damaged in a trap likely belonging to the same personnel that had trapped the female. The Middle Fork pack was never well-behaved after that, and the USFWS once again contributed habituation behavior of wild-born Mexican wolves that had previously displayed normal behavior patterns.
In spite of a massive hazing effort that took place on the Adobe and Slash Ranches in 2009, in southwest New Mexico, the Middle Fork pack was allowed to kill and maim livestock undeterred. Early that spring the pack was suspected to have killed several yearlings, but none were found early enough to get a confirmation on the kills. Ranch manager Gene Whetten grew more frustrated by the day. He says:
We work our tails off managing this place for elk and livestock and we do a good job here. However, when you read the papers you see the implication that something is managed badly on the ranch and that is why there are wolves here killing our stock. We have even read where someone makes the claim that there were sixteen livestock carcasses that we supposedly left lying around the den. I guess they meant deliberately. We did not even know where the den was until the first confirmed kill happened. If there were yearling kills at the den it was wolves that dragged them there after they ran the elk out of the country.
Here, Whetten is referring to the tendency of the USFWS to release information to environmental organizations on wolf incidents first, thereby allowing these organizations to filter news releases regarding the program, particularly livestock conflicts. The agencies hang back on releasing their own press statements. When caught between the environmental extremists’ false accusations against the rancher and the facts, program spokespeople tend to refuse to correct deliberate misinformation that they know is false.
Adobe Ranch Case Study—Performance-Related Losses
From 2000 to 2003, the Adobe Ranch knew of only two wolves on the ranch. In 2004, the number of wolves increased to nine, until 2006 when the total dropped to six. By the fall of 2007, fourteen wolves (three packs) were known to be on the ranch (as per the Adobe Ranch management, personal communication, 2008). Wolves were also in close proximity to the ranch headquarters and branding pasture beginning in February.
This level of wolf activity led to eight confirmed and one probable depredation of livestock. Total depredations for 2007 included confirmed (thirteen animals), probable (one animal), and possible (four animals) on the Adobe Ranch. The Adobe Ranch alone accounted for 46 percent of the total confirmed depredations reported to the Bailey Wildlife Foundation Wolf Compensation Trust in New Mexico for 2007. In addition, 50 percent of the possible depredations and 100 percent of the probable depredations for 2007 occurred on this ranch. Although depredations were confirmed, no compensations were paid by the BWFWC in 2007 and 2008.9
The effect of wolves on livestock, however, goes much further than kills. Stress placed on cattle and sheep by the presence of wolves results in weight loss, which translates into income lost. Weaning weights, shipping weights, and site-specific precipitation were available for the Adobe Ranch from 2002 to 2007. Growing-season precipitation was correlated to steer performance, as forage production is closely related to growing-season precipitation. Cumulative precipitation from April through October is considered growing-season precipitation. There was little variation in steer ADG from 2002 through 2006, with an average of 0.08 pounds per day, which is considered normal performance in the region when fall-weaned calves are retained (as per C. Mathis, personal communication, 2008). However, ADG in 2007 was much lower than in previous years although calves were managed similarly between weaning and shipping; ADG fell well below the lower limit of a 99 percent confidence interval of -0.75 pounds per day. Using actual market values from the Clovis Livestock Auction in Clovis, New Mexico, the cost of the estimated impact of weight loss in 2007 was -$108.83 per steer weaned.10
Overall, impacts of wolves on ranches is not only significant, it is destroying ranch viability (see chapter 11, “Collateral Damage” by Jess Carey). Actual data on current losses is virtually ignored by USFWS.
Prey Preference
A 2006 study using GPS collars to analyze the prey preference of Mexican wolves showed the agencies’ bias and flawed scientific techniques. In the study, the Nantac pack male was implicated in thirteen livestock kills in 2006 over several weeks. The data gathered during the livestock kills was not used in the study. Instead, the study concluded a majority of Mexican wolves killed elk. This occurred simply because the Nantac male with a GPS collar was shot for livestock depredation because the agency could not stop him any other way. The pack’s kills were not included in the study simply because the agency did not want it to reflect a livestock surplus killing spree, which they consider abnormal wolf behavior. In one twenty-four-hour period, the two Nantac wolves killed two cows and their calves, while eating nothing.
More importantly, the USFWS needed the study to reflect elk as the major food source in order to ask for continued funding for the program, and to continue federal planning efforts in the scoping process for an eventual rule change. Proving that the wolf surplus killed privately owned livestock was simply not on their agenda. Had the Nantac pack’s livestock kills been left in the study, USFWS would have had science that is more accurate.
Carcass Removal
The Mexican wolf management program, from the beginning, has been complicated by environmentalists. The Center for Biological Diversity, who originally sued to push recovery forward after biologists had voted against it, demanded that ranchers remove dead livestock or have no wolf damage control occur on their allotments or land. Ranchers balked at this demand in part due to costs, logistics, and the fact that most allotments have areas that are completely inaccessible for such maneuverings. The ground is always frozen in the winter leaving them with no access to pastures or no way to bury carcasses. This demand is simply unattainable.
Ranchers also own the waters and rights to access that land through beneficial use of the water. Removal or manipulation of livestock access to those rights is a federal take of their property and often leads to serious management interference with their grazing rotation plans. Neither the experts nor the science agrees with the CBD. For example, The University of Minnesota conducted a study in early 1999 to determine if any livestock management practices could prevent wolf depredation. The study could find no management practices certain to prevent wolf depredation. The only method proven to prevent wolf depredation was removing the depredating wolves from the farm.11
Wildlife biologist Ed Bangs, who until 2012 was the Wolf Recovery Coordinator for USFWS, and the principle author of the 1993 Environmental Impact Statement for the wolf recovery program in the North Rockies, wrote in a 2006 email that he did not believe that removal of carcasses would make a difference in wolf behavior:
I thought the idea that wolves eat a dead cow, think beef tastes great, and then start attacking cattle is mythology—as eating carrion and killing prey are two totally different wolf behaviors. Wolves often scavenge all they can. However, I do think that having bone pile next to calving pasture can increase potential for conflict by attracting wolf activity in the vicinity of livestock [research shows cattle near wolf dens are more likely to be the ones attacked simply because level of wolf activity and interacting with livestock is highest there] and that anything that helps wolves become more familiar with livestock can increase the chance they might test them as prey. But normal range practice out here makes it nearly impossible to find and bury [or blow up for human safety concerns as they do for G. bears issues and livestock carcasses along trails] every carcass so if livestock carcass disposal is within ‘normal’ and traditional livestock husbandry practices we don’t consider them an attractant that we would withhold wolf removal. We do advise ranchers not to have a bone yard next to livestock and we have removed carcasses in pastures to prevent wolves from coming back into concentrated livestock to feed on their kills. But feeding on livestock carcasses is a very different thing than attacking livestock—one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other.12
In spite of the lack of scientific evidence or publications that confirm livestock carcass removal will benefit the program, it is still being pursued by Region 2 USFWS as an option. In addition, there is the notion that the mere presence of livestock on ranches more than a century old is impacting the success of the wolf recovery program.
Recent changes in the program seem to have all been aimed at the cessation of mitigation for problem animals. The only exception in the past five years has been the removal of AF 1105 for human safety reasons. Defenders of Wildlife has stopped reimbursing the immediate cost of ranchers confirmed livestock kills as they did in Wyoming when bears became established and the organization felt ranching should become a thing of the past in those areas. New Mexico is far too poor to appropriate state funds to reimburse ranchers for the take of their livestock by wolves. It is hard not to conclude that the promises outlined in the 1996 EIS and final rule have simply been discarded when it became apparent that wolves or wolf hybrids will wipe out ranchers and ranches if left unmanaged long enough. Let us look at some specifics.
Conflict of Interest, Collusion, and Corruption
Wolf team full cooperators do not include local organizations or local people and do not efficiently mitigate problems arising from the program. Instead, non-government organizations such as the Turner Endangered Species Fund (TESF) and Defenders of Wildlife (DOW) enjoy full cooperator status. This status is unofficial, but the results of their activities in the program speak for themselves. It has also become apparent that other environmental groups funded by TESF have internal knowledge of the day-to-day operations and internal planning of the reintroduction and recovery. The draft of the program’s five-year review was released to environmental groups before being made available to the public or local government.
Dave Parsons, former program coordinator and author of the original EIS, and the person behind the introduction of the Ghost Ranch hybrid genetics, is the coordinator of the Southern Rockies Wolf Restoration Project, another TESF grantee. Involvement and support of the ideology of these organizations is in part why the original EIS projections have never been met. It was apparent from the beginning of the program that Parsons had exerted entirely too much influence and was promoting a plan that would eventually be detrimental to the livestock industry as whole. It was also apparent that his team was determined to ignore socio-economic comments, barely referring to those issues or arbitrarily discarding the notion that the program would harm people. In fact, USFWS claimed in the EIS that there was not going to be significant harm done to the region although they had the data from historical Mexican wolf damage records, such as the following:
The estimate of economic damage in New Mexico caused by forty to fifty wolves in 1918 was $60,000—equivalent to about $960,000 in 2007 dollars. From 1915 to 1920, wolf-induced economic losses were estimated at half a million dollars—comparable to $9.4 million in 2007 dollars. In a 1921 US Department of Agriculture news release, the Bureau of Biological Survey estimated annual economic losses in livestock of $20 to $30 million ($205 to $308 million in 2007 dollars) to all predators throughout the West. According to Brown (1992), average destruction by predatory animals during this same period was estimated to be $1,000 worth of livestock annually ($10,000 in 2007 dollars) for each wolf and mountain lion, $500 ($5,000 in 2007 dollars) for each stock-killing bear, and $50 ($500 in 2007 dollars) for each coyote and bobcat. He also illustrated cases where substantial damage was caused by just a few predators. For example, one wolf in Colorado killed nearly $3,000 worth of cattle ($30,000 in 2007 dollars) in one year, two wolves in Texas killed seventy-two sheep in two weeks, one wolf in New Mexico killed twenty-five head of cattle in two months, and another wolf killed one hundred fifty cattle valued at $5,000 ($51,000 in 2007 dollars) during a six month period.13
The 2010 Mexican Wolf Recovery Team has room for only three to four members that represent economic, livestock, or hunting interests. Those members are the only members of the recovery team that are true volunteers and not reimbursed or paid for attendance. USFWS, TESF, DOW, and other NGOs, as well as the state wildlife departments, pay other team members. The 2010 Recovery Team is not much different from the 2003 team. There are so many divisions to the team that only the top tier will have significant input into the program. The following is from the official recovery team page in the USFWS website for the program:
The Southwest Region has initiated the revision of the 1982 Mexican Wolf Recovery Plan. In December 2010, we charged a new recovery team with the development of a revised recovery plan for the Mexican wolf. The team includes a Tribal Liaisons Subgroup, Stakeholder Liaisons Subgroup, Agency Liaisons Subgroup, and a Science and Planning Subgroup. When completed and approved by the Service, the plan will include objective and measurable recovery criteria for delisting the Mexican wolf from the List of Threatened and Endangered Wildlife and Plants, management actions that will achieve the criteria, and time and cost estimates for these actions.14
Is this collusion, corruption, or simply cooperation?
Currently there are no actual stakeholders involved in the recovery planning, only the Stakeholder Liaisons Subgroup; this is a transparent method of keeping impacted parties from putting information into the recovery plan that will protect and assist actual stakeholders.
It appears that far less influence by non-affected wolf advocacy parties is necessary to further the goals of the ESA in reference to that specific and emphatic statement in the law that the ESA “will not be used to engineer social change.” This is recognized in various federal documents, for example the 2011 USFWS publication, “ESA Basics: More Than 30 Years of Conserving Endangered Species” states:
Two-thirds of federally listed species have at least some habitat on private land, and some species have most of their remaining habitat on private land. The FWS has developed an array of tools and incentives to protect the interests of private landowners while encouraging management activities that benefit listed and other at-risk species.15
Wolf activists, however, seem to believe that it is necessary to specifically foster changes in the economic and social structure of the region and to keep required and necessary wolf control and management at a dangerous minimum. The NGO involvement promotes keeping problem wolves on the ground, and further harms the local communities that are relatively defenseless. This is a clear violation of the ESA. USFWS should be developing protocol to enhance affected party participation in decision-making and management and to limit non-affected NGO interests whose goals are contrary to the ESA’s requirements for avoiding social change.
Collusion with Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) Over Future Planning and Implementation of Current Procedures
The technical team of Paul Paquet and Mike Phillips, both advisors to the NGO Southern Rockies Wolf Restoration Project, made three-year review recommendations. There was no data collected the first three years for the tech team to go on. The scientists admitted as much and stated as much publicly. They made socio/political recommendations instead: 1. Force ranchers to remove livestock carcasses, holding US Forest Service permit removal over their heads; 2. Boundary removal allowing wolves to spread beyond the original Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area (BRWRA); and 3. Manipulation of problem wolves and control of depredating wolves was claimed in their report to be counterproductive to reintroduction efforts.
These recommendations were admittedly socio/political with no scientific basis.
Due to the non-scientific nature of the technical recommendations, then–wolf reintroduction coordinator Brian Kelly put together a rather large team of stakeholders to make recommendations for changes to the program in a way that would enhance the program, yet eliminate or mitigate the problems and make things work for the majority of the stakeholders. It was a good idea but the NGO participants were not happy about it. The individuals invited to this large working group comprised many different facets of the local communities—economic, human dimension, environmental, and scientific—as well as many wolf experts and biologists. The document developed from that group represents the last time a concrete attempt was made to cooperate with local communities and governments. However, it never went into effect.
The conclusion to be drawn here is simply that those recommendations were not politically expedient to meet the unstated goals of the agencies, and more importantly the cooperating NGOs, because it cooperated with both sides of the wolf issue. Because of this, those recommendations were shunted aside when lead agency status changed in the spring of 2003. Brian Kelly, former USFWS Mexican wolf team leader, left the program and with him went the strategic removal of public input into the program.
This removal of public input allowed the agencies and NGOs to ignore their obligations to stakeholders as set forth in the final Environmental Impact Statement and Final Rule. There was no one involved at upper levels to hold their feet to the fire and be fair to the local stakeholders.
What happened next was entirely predictable. Suddenly, those three-year review recommendations by Paquet and Phillips were massaged into the basis for the new five-year review by new wolf managers. Ranching and community sustainability swiftly took a back seat to wolf recovery.
For the past several years, there has been very little effort to follow the final rule as it relates to complying with wolf management habituation control or livestock protection. Instead funding is focused on planning total recovery in the whole recovery area, planning more releases, and on promotional programs marketing wolf reintroduction to the un-informed and unaffected public.
Allowing the NGOs to serve as experts in the wolf reintroduction and recovery has given them unique power over the landowners in the areas affected by the Endangered Species Act. The NGO scientists have the full force of the federal government behind their plans. When rural people are forced to sue the USFWS, judges always defer to the expertise of the USFWS, however, in reality they are deferring to the expertise of the NGOs who are so heavily involved in structuring the day-to-day management and planning of the program. There is no input or redress for affected people either at the agency level or in the courtroom.
Management and Personnel Bias against Ranching
H. Dale Hall, USFWS regional director until 2006, admitted that when he was first placed in position, members of his wolf staff brought him an anti-grazing NGO published book and told him that grazing should be removed to make way for the wolf recovery. There has been no exposure of this action, nor were there any personnel changes. These persons were not removed from the team and placed elsewhere in the agency. Clearly, there are still many wolf program employees that are openly promoting an anti-grazing agenda.
Reintroduction of Mexican wolves into their historic habitat or historic DPS area would have required reintroduction into northern Mexico, extreme southern Arizona and New Mexico, and southwest Texas. Currently, Mexican wolves have been released into Arizona and New Mexico. Recently, five wolves were released in Mexico in the state of Chihuahua and four of them were either killed by poison or died within the first six months. Suspicious death and disappearance is also a factor in the US side of the program. Cornered people simply do not respond well to threat.
Damage Control: Habituation Management or Management for Maximum Habituation?
Mexican wolves have been shown through DNA analysis to include DNA from three different wolf species from North America as well as coyote and domestic dog genes, again showing that Ghost Ranch and Aragon were completely inappropriate additions. Hybrid wolves are known to be far more aggressive and to kill more livestock and domestic animals than non-hybrid wolves, yet the Mexican wolves we now know were created in a kennel and deemed a pure subspecies in a courtroom.
USFWS numbers indicate there are more than three hundred Mexican wolves with the same DNA in the captive breeding program available for release. Naïve animals without a history of livestock kills exist; still any discussion of removing depredating packs has hit a brick wall within the program, mainly due to the Center for Biological Diversity’s insistence through lawsuit threats that each individual wolf is important to the gene pool. This is not a scientifically valid position, as the rule states clearly that only genetically redundant wolves are used in the release program. Yet that false premise has recently been taken up by the USFWS as if that claim had legitimacy, when in truth it is merely another politically motivated decision to kowtow to extremists in order to keep to their own agenda.
The seriousness of the habituation of Mexican wolves can be seen in the documented incidents involving children, many backed up with photographs, including:
Wolf-proof school bus shelter.
Young boy in Catron County waiting for the school bus in a wolf-proof shelter.
• Child encounters wolves while on horseback.
• Child finds pet dog slaughtered by wolves on private land.
• Child surrounded by wolf pack on hunting trip.
• Children followed by wolves from bus stop.
• Dog defends child in yard from wolf.
• Child’s horse slaughtered by Aspen pack in corral.
• Child watched wolf kill kitten in yard.
• Children kept captive in rural communities due to wolf presence.
• Children subjected to wolves coming in their yard while mother unloads groceries from her truck.
• Children calling in a wolf by crying when stopped on the side of a rural highway due to motion sickness.
• Wolves laying in yards and defecating in places where children play, possibly as a method of marking territory where there are dogs present. (Also introducing possible exposure to hydatid disease found in wolf feces.)
USFWS wolf managers still insist that nothing is amiss in this program. Some of them have even called these accounts hyperbole and blame parents for instilling fear into their children. Fear is not always a bad thing. J. C. Nelson responded to that fear instilled in him and reacted calmly. Had he reacted to his natural fear and run from the Luna pack, he likely would have been killed.
Little to nothing is done to mitigate these types of behaviors. Does the name-calling of a family matter if their children are deliberately being placed in harm’s way by a mismanaged, government-sponsored program if the community was adamantly against it to begin with? Not really, not on a local level, since the majority of rural residents impacted understand the circumstances that led to the incident. However, marginalizing the family is a common method of downplaying the incident that actually occurred. The Mexican wolf reintroduction area residents share an attitude that is not all that unusual in other cultures where wolves are actually present. Proximity to wolves affects your mindset. As chapters in the book on Wolf Attacks and Wolves in Russia clearly show, in Norway, Finland, Sweden, France, Spain, Russian, Karelia, and throughout Asia, historically documented wolf attacks on people were common enough that on occasion they became epidemic. In fact, in a 2003 study in Scandinavia, 85 percent of the wolf-related deaths that were verified were children with no adult present.16
These incidents lead researchers to another question: Why did wolves become child snatchers? The researchers came to believe that wolves understood that children were vulnerable prey and made efforts to avoid adults who would hunt them. In fact, most of those killed were doing some very familiar things such as herding livestock—near a house or farmyard, in a forested area, or by outlying barns or fields.
This sounds a lot like the community and culture of the Mexican Wolf Blue Range Reintroduction area. It really doesn’t matter that for generations there has not been a wolf attack in the lower forty-eight states. None of the talking points about wolf behavior or the demonization of parenting abilities fazes rural people actually living among and dealing with Mexican wolves. Rural people instinctively know there is danger, and distrust those who downplay their experiences. Parents keep their kids confined due to danger from wolves, so we are actually seeing rural residents changing their behavior due to this program.
Perhaps the question shown by the Scandinavian study should not be why people are afraid of wolves, but rather in the face of such overwhelming evidence, why so many people appear to be unafraid of wolves.
What the Future Holds
The current situation in the United States in regards to the recovery of wolf populations in historic habitat is very bleak for rural Americans. States such as Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, and Washington are being overrun with an unmanaged and possibly overprotected population of gray wolves. Wolves are spreading into Utah, Illinois, Indiana, and Colorado. While the Southwest program has been floundering along for many years without significant successes, such as those seen in the Northern Rocky mountains, the very fact that the Mexican wolves are not listed as a subspecies indicates that Congress never intended to allow them significant status for full recovery instead preferring to allow them a footnote in history as a small population of gray wolves with distinct features adapted to the arid regions of the Southwest and Mexico.
The agenda of the environmental movement and federal bureaucrats however is significantly different. The delisting of the gray wolf by Congress was the beginning of the end of federal funding for wolves and these entities are losing their cash cow. It makes the Mexican wolf that much more important as a tool for federal programs, as well as manipulating landowners and federal lands ranchers, and a replacement poster animal for the previously lucrative gray wolf of the Northern Rockies and the Midwest.
Editor’s Note
As this book goes to its second printing, the office of inspector general for the US Department of Interior has released a scathing report on the Mexican wolf program. All of the information regarding Mexican wolves in the first edition of The Real Wolf and in Laura Schneberger’s chapter is supported by the report titled, “Investigative Report of the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s Mexican Wolf Program, July 11, 2016.”
The investigation began in July 2013 when the Catron County Board of Commissioners submitted a complaint to then-Congressman Doc Hastings requesting the US Department of Interior’s Office of Inspector General investigate alleged misconduct by US Fish and Wildlife Service staff overseeing the Mexican Wolf Recovery Program (MGWRP). Congressman Hastings was replaced by Steven Pearce upon the former’s retirement in 2015. Pearce submitted the complaint to the Department of Interior in February 2014.
The Board of Commissioners complaint requested the Office of Inspector General investigate violations of the Federal Misconduct Policy, which included that the coordinator of the Interagency Field Team (IFT) for the MGWRP had failed to properly document nuisance complaints about wolves, had not communicated effectively with county residents to address public safety concerns involving wolves, had mismanaged livestock depredation investigations and compensation, had destroyed a wolf DNA sample, had mishandled a wolf bite incident with a MGWRP volunteer, and had refused to assess ranchers’ property losses associated with wolf kills. The board also asserted that the Mexican gray wolf is actually extinct, its DNA contaminated with that of coyotes and/or domestic dogs.
The Office of Inspector General narrowed their investigations to: “mismanagement of nuisance wolves; failure to communicate effectively with the public and Catron County; depredation-related impacts; and administrative management issues.”
Excerpt from the OIG Report:
In February 2014, the US Department of the Interior’s Office of Inspector General received a request from US Congressman Steven Pearce (R-NM) to investigate alleged misconduct by US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) staff overseeing the Mexican Gray Wolf Recovery Program (MGWRP). The Congressman referred us to the Catron County, NM, Board of Commissioners, which had submitted a complaint in July 2013 to then-Congressman Doc Hastings. The county’s complaint made numerous allegations against MGWRP, particularly involving a former coordinator of the Interagency Field Team (IFT) charged with implementing the program. The county alleged that the former IFT coordinator and MGWRP had failed to properly document nuisance complaints about wolves, had not communicated effectively with county residents to address public safety concerns involving the wolves, had mismanaged livestock depredation investigations and compensation, and had destroyed a wolf DNA sample. The county also alleged that FWS mishandled a wolf bite incident involving a MGWRP volunteer and refused to assess ranchers’ property losses associated with wolf kills. In addition, the complaint asserted that the Mexican gray wolf is actually extinct; its DNA is contaminated with that of coyotes or domestic dogs.
The investigation substantiated many of the allegations against the former IFT coordinator, but learned that USFWS had been aware of these issues and had already reassigned her to another position by the time they received the complaint. Since then, MGWRP employees informed OIG that USFWS has been documenting nuisance complaints and has attempted to improve communication with county residents; however, many of the county residents we spoke to said they were still concerned about poor communication with MGWRP and a perceived lack of concern for public safety. The OIG also found that local ranchers have not consistently received full compensation for their livestock losses, but we did not substantiate the remaining allegations.
There were several allegations that were substantiated by the IG report, including a finding that ranchers have not been adequately reimbursed for livestock losses. Among the more serious allegations, the IG’s report confirmed an agency employee falsified the location of multiple wolf kills, allowing wolves to kill further livestock and remain in close proximity to humans.
The former IFT coordinator, a wildlife biologist for the program, “Acknowledged that she gave genetically valuable wolves more care, allowed their nuisance behavior to continue, and provided them more opportunities to breed,” reads the report. This happened in violation of the agency rule, which required removal of repeat-offending wolves that kill livestock.
The former coordinator was simply transferred to work with rule changes and recovery planning for Mexican wolves. Dr. Benjamin Toggle considers this transfer a full repair for the damage done by the program, although the former coordinator’s actions are certainly not the only problems the program has burdened the public with over the nearly two decades it has been in operation.
The OIG report also found that in general there is mismanagement of nuisance wolves, which continues to be a public safety issue of concern; failure to communicate effectively with the public and county government; depredation-related impacts and uncompensated losses; and administrative management issues, including that the Fish and Wildlife Service in general protected “genetically valuable” wolves in the wild.
According to Fish and Wildlife spokesman John Bradley, “We have been working to improve all aspects of our work with the county and the people who live there” and added that the current field office coordinator “considers this matter closed and resolved.”
Congressman Pearce called the OIG findings “incendiary” and said it pointed to problems at the highest management levels. “They claim they have fixed the problem by reassigning one person,” said Pearce. “Their problems are much bigger than one employee and extend to the highest levels of the agency. Those at the top levels at FWS tolerated a culture of lies, falsification, mismanagement, and manipulation of scientific data, ultimately at the cost of livelihoods and the public trust. This mismanagement has caused economic harm to the state, county, and individuals.”
Examples of failure to document problem or nuisance wolves were cited throughout the complaint document and have been verified by the OIG report. In one instance during an interview with the former Interagency Field Team coordinator, the former IFT coordinator acknowledged that under her supervision data occasionally went uncollected, either because staff was “busy” or because the information “slipped through the cracks.” Although she knew that MGWRP used the data to make program decisions, she still did not fill out a form for every call about a wolf, even if the call resulted in relevant scientific information. She blamed this on “workload demands” and “human error.” She also explained that if the IFT member collecting the data for the report decided that the animal being described was actually a coyote or a dog, not a wolf, the information did not have to be entered. In later interviews this coordinator was said to have not believed that nuisance reports were necessary and did not require her staff to fill them out because the incidents were inherently ambiguous and based on perceptions of the witness, that one person’s “attack” may be another person’s “spiritual experience.”
This type of obfuscation is apparent throughout the report and while many of the allegations remain unproven, those that were indicate the continuing trend that the IFT is willing to spin each situation in a manner that benefits the program and themselves has not ended.
On September 15, 2016, downtown Eagar, Arizona, had such a “spiritual experience” with what, biologically, can only be a pack of wolves. Downtown Eagar consists of a main street and about two miles of small-town stores including fast food restaurants, schools, and grocery stores all bordered within a block by open fields and farms. Incredibly, even after the agency fix of the OIG verified reports, Fish and Wildlife Service claimed a dead cow also found in the same area that day, one block from the main street, was a coyote kill. The cow had 40 mm bite marks; the average coyote bite is 33 mm. Mexican wolf bite spread averages 39 to 44 mm.
This author received the following email from a person who lived in the Eagar area:
Wolf incident and a dead cow, along with a very scared young lady who was feeding the calves, right in the middle of our town. The details—4 wolves behaving aggressively towards a young woman feeding livestock early in the morning. The horned young bred cow was found dead near the Safeway, although the bite marks were 40 mm wide, FWS claimed the grown cow was killed by coyotes. Something that no rancher in the Arizona-New Mexico region has ever seen occur with coyotes.
Doyel Shamley, Apache County, Arizona, coordinator says,
Here is the long and short of the whole incident, whether it was a wolf (nobody in any “team” or “agency” will provide a report yet) or a coyote, the agencies are mishandling all aspects of public health and safety, a constitutionally delegated power of the 10th Amendment to the states and their political subdivisions. The county’s “wolf team” didn’t even notify their own agency regional chief and former IFT-L, Chris Bagnoli. I had to tell him there was a depredation to begin with, and the location, etc. The “wolf team” never notified the local city government (remember, it all occurred in downtown Eagar), or Apache County, or the Apache County Sheriff, all requirements of their system and business as usual for the program. I had to do that function. The “wolf team” never notified our AZ Department of Agriculture or our AZ Department of Agriculture Livestock Inspector, a requirement of their system and business as usual for their program. I had to do that function as well. The “wolf team” never notified any of us of the outcome of the Wildlife Services investigation with reports, data, etc.—instead it was a one-sentence phone-to-email message from Bagnoli, stating the WS determined it was a coyote with a canine spread the size of a wolf. No reports have since been delivered despite requests. THAT, is exactly how they are running this fraudulent system.
The report claims all problems were resolved with the transfer of the former IFT coordinator; however in one single incident, two, possibly three, separate issues are shown to still be standard operating procedure: blaming coyotes for wolf kills; allowing wolves in areas where the public can be harmed and threatened without thorough notification investigation or mitigation; and possibly allowing coyote/wolf hybrids to exist and breed in the Mexican Gray Wolf Recovery Area, which is a violation of the Endangered Species Act and all applicable regulations associated with the program.
Taking Action
The new IFT coordinator says that he now requires every MGWRP staff member to complete a form when a complaint is received. According to Office of Inspector General report, on July 11, 2016, the Office of Inspector General reported that it had “substantiated many of the allegations against the former IFT Coordinator.” By that time, the USFWS had reassigned the former IFT Coordinator to another position. Since that occurred USFWS has been documenting nuisance complaints and attempted to improve communications with county residents. “However, many of the county residents we spoke to said they were still concerned about poor communication with the MGWRP and a perceived lack of concern for public safety. We also found that local ranchers have not consistently received full compensation for their livestock losses . . . we could not substantiate the remaining allegations.”
One of those allegations was in regards to the genetic purity of the Mexican wolf. The USFWS senior wolf biologists said that extensive research has been done on the Mexican gray wolf, and the Mexican wolf is the most genetically distinct gray wolf subspecies. The wolf biologist said that on rare occasions when a Mexican wolf had bred with a dog, the pups were euthanized at the den. The genetics of the Mexican wolves will, however, continue to be monitored.
The Investigative Report concludes with this summary of changes that have taken place since the July 2013 letter from the Catron County Commissioners:
The MGWRP coordinator gave us a list of changes made by the MGWRP since Catron’s County’s original complaint. Perhaps most significantly, she noted that the former IFT Coordinator had been reassigned in August 2013 to another position in the USFWS. She was still involved with MGWRP, but at an administrative level. Also in August of 2013, the current IFT Coordinator assumed that role, which he fulfills from Albuquerque, NM. MGWRP also added new biology staff and an outreach specialist to work with partner agencies and the media. The reorganization, according to the MGWRP Coordinator, resulted in improvements to the MGWRP, included shorter response times to nuisances, better interactions with livestock owners, improved documentation of nuisances and depredations, and improved communication and working relationships with owners and partner agencies.
The Investigative Report goes on to say that concerning IFT’s communication with the public:
• More than fifty signs listing IFT’s toll-free number have been posted in and around the Gila and Apache National Forests for years, predating the current coordinator’s own employment at FWS. He noted that the number connects directly to the IFT office.
• Two public websites, the MGWRP site and the Arizona Game and Fish Department site, provide contact information.
• MGWRP holds approximately six public meetings annually to discuss wolf recovery issues. Meetings are advertised, held in local communities, and open to the public.
• The current IFT coordinator regularly meets with constituents at their homes to discuss wolf issues.
• Every week, IFT notifies ranchers if they are near current wolf locations.
• IFT’s contact information is included in pamphlets provided to hunters.
• IFT members regularly provide wolf education at schools, zoos, and other venues.
In short, the July 2013 complaint has proven to be largely substantiated by the Investigative Report of the USFWS Mexican Gray Wolf Program. But, there is much more at stake for the people of Catron County.
The negative effects to livestock producers caused by Mexican wolves are a wide spectrum not addressed and/or ignored by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Prior negative data and documentation of wolf recovery from other states were not utilized to mitigate the same negative effects of Mexican wolf recovery in New Mexico and Arizona.
Wolves are continually killing, and prey testing in a herd produces chronic wolf stress in cattle. Chronic wolf-caused stress in cattle leads to loss of body condition, cows birthing weak calves, pre-mature birth of calves, abortion of calves, immune suppression, decreased pregnancy rates, increased susceptibility to disease, weight loss, and altered demeanor from docile to aggressive.
1. True livestock losses are not reflected in confirmed and probable investigative findings;
2. Few livestock depredations are actually compensated;
3. Cumulative effects of wolf predation makes livestock production untenable;
4. Impact on individual family ranchers is devastating, even though the impact of the entire livestock industry of the state may be small;
5. Wolf depredation disrupts grazing management plans;
6. Increased uncompensated hours tending injured cow/calves;
7. Increased uncompensated hours checking livestock;
8. Increased uncompensated hours mending fences when wolves attack/run livestock through them;
9. Increased uncompensated hours gathering livestock and returning to proper pasture;
10. Loss of market value for maimed and disfigured calves;
11. Loss of replacement heifers/production;
12. Loss of revenue while new herd takes several years to acclimate;
13. Loss of revenue while replacement heifers take three years to acclimate into an existing herd.
Several ranches have been closed as a result of the effects of the wolves on Catron County and elk and deer hunting in that area have suffered. The New Mexico Game and Fish Department has opposed the Mexican Wolf Program and supported Catron County.
The full Investigative Report can be found online at: https://www.doioig.gov/sites/doioig.gov/files/MexicanGrayWolfProgram_Public.pdf.
Endnotes:
1. Hedrick, Philip W, Philip S. Miller, Eli Geffen, and Robert Wayne. “Genetic Evaluation of the Three Captive Mexican Wolf Lineages.” Zoo Biology 16 (1997), 47–69.
2. http://graywolfnews.com/pdf/the-courts-were-wrong-these-wolves-are-hybrids.pdf
3. http://www.cuerochupacabra.com/id25.html
4. http://graywolfnews.com/pdf/the-courts-were-wrong-these-wolves-are-hybrids.pdf
5. http://graywolfnews.com/pdf/the-courts-were-wrong-these-wolves-are-hybrids.pdf
6. http://www.fws.gov/southwest/es/mexicanwolf/BRWRP_notes.cfm
7. http://www.rmef.org/NewsandMedia/NewsReleases/2009/ElkPopulations.htm
8. Diane K. Boyd, (Case Study) “Wolf Habituation as a Conservation Conundrum” http://www.sinauer.com/groom/article.php?id=24
9. http://www.defenders.org/resources/publications/programs_and_policy/wildlife_conservation/solutions/full_list_of_payments_in_the_northern_rockies_and_southwest.pdf
10. http://aces.nmsu.edu/pubs/_ritf/RITF80.pdf
11. Mech, L. David, Elizabeth K. Harper, Thomas J. Meier, William J. Paul. “Wolf Depredations on Cattle.” Wildlife Society Bulletin 28:3 (Autumn, 2000), 623–629.
12. Ed Bangs 09/01/2006 (email excerpt from correspondence with other wolf managers in Mexican Wolf Program referring to call from reporter concerned about livestock carcasses attracting wolves).
13. http://aces.nmsu.edu/pubs/_ritf/RITF80.pdf
14. http://www.fws.gov/southwest/es/mexicanwolf/
15. http://www.fws.gov/endangered/esa-library/pdf/ESA_basics.pdf
16. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228805074_Is_the_Fear_of_Wolves_Justified_A_Fennoscandian_Perspective
Photo credit: FloridaStock/Shutterstock.com
