I Rest My Case
By Ted B. Lyon
May it please the court, ladies and gentlemen of the jury of public opinion. I want to first of all thank you for taking the time to read this book. The case this book presents is concerned with addressing the environmental, economic, and political crisis caused by wolf proliferation across North America and the myths that have been perpetuated by those who say that they believe it’s a good thing to dramatically increase the population of wolves back into the lower forty-eight states. We, the authors and contributors, are not anti-wolf, but are seeking a way to manage wolf populations so that there is minimal conflict with people, reasonable contact with game species, and perseveration of the genetic stability of wolves so the species will continue to exist as it has for thousands of years. We hope that by now you agree with us or at least we have given things to think about.
Like many other people, when I started on this journey in 2007, I didn’t understand that wolves are some of the most destructive animals on Earth. But working on this book has shown me that through scientific research which goes back well over one hundred years and continues on today, wolves devastate elk, caribou, deer, and moose wherever they exist together unless wolf populations are dramatically controlled.
From Russia to Canada, from Montana to Idaho, the same story repeats itself. Where wolf populations expand, big-game herds disappear or are severely impacted.
Teddy Roosevelt, perhaps our greatest conservation president, once said that wolves were “beasts of waste and desolation.” The tragedy that has happened in Yellowstone National Park to the elk and moose and to other large ungulate herds in Montana and Idaho is beyond comprehension. It is unbelievable that the elk herd in Yellowstone, which was at nineteen thousand when wolves were introduced in 1995, now numbers fewer than four thousand elk in 2016. The moose count in the same area has gone from at least twelve hundred in 1995 to now almost zero.
What has been shocking to me is that wolves, while causing all of this destruction, have been elevated to an almost exalted status by the Federal Government and some in the environmental movement. I am shocked that no one at the top of the Yellowstone National Park hierarchy has told the truth about what was happening to the elk, the mule deer, and the moose. The only statements that have come out of the park about wolves are from the chief wolf biologist for Yellowstone, who is an admitted wolf proponent. No one with authority has come forward publicly to defend the elk, the mule deer, the wild sheep, or the moose that are disappearing from the Park. Instead, the wolf has become a cash cow for groups that espouse environmental conservation, but actually are using wolves to raise money so they can hinder conservation efforts by state and federal agencies by forcing them to spend precious time and money to defend themselves from wolf advocates.
This book hopefully has proven to the readers that wolves are not an economic boom to the economy as has been represented by many environmental groups when one considers the costs of growing wolf populations to farmers, ranchers, guides, and hunters, as well as increased potential for negative encounters between wolves and people. And, after the newness of wolves has worn off, wildlife watchers say that they actually are more interested in seeing bears than wolves.
When wolves cause huge losses of wild game there is a resultant loss of license revenues and expenditures by hunters that is dramatic, as has been seen in Idaho and Montana, where millions of dollars in revenue have been lost due to fewer hunters coming in to hunt big game. Many years of raising funds to support conservation efforts for game animals have been quickly cancelled by wolf populations that are artificially created and justified by research that is heavily biased toward wolf populations higher than can be sustained for any extended period of time.
The wolf that was introduced into Yellowstone and Idaho is here to stay according to every wolf expert that has been quoted in popular print. We need to learn to live with wolves, and to regulate them so that areas where wolves are found are managed to minimize conflicts between people and wolves and support a healthy wildlife population that is consistent with protecting livestock, pets, and people, as well as respecting wolves.
One of the most significant economic costs of increasing wolf populations is that wolves also cause dramatic damages to ranchers who have no way of recovering from their losses due to programs that require them to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that wolves caused a kill. Studies cited in this book show that for every cow that is identified as a wolf kill, there are at least seven other cattle that are killed. Many are not even found because a wolf pack eats almost everything and leaves little or nothing to prove or disprove what killed the animal, and following a wolf kill, many other predators and scavengers can and do feed on wolf kills to obliterate all proof that wolves are responsible for the kill.
The United States Department of Agriculture reported that wolves killed over eight thousand head of cattle in 2010 alone. At an average cost of one thousand dollars per cow in 2013, that’s a direct economic loss of approximately eight million dollars to the cattle industry in states that harbor wolves.
That loss, however, doesn’t even touch the indirect losses suffered by ranchers whose cattle are continually harassed by wolves. Studies done in Idaho, Oregon, and New Mexico demonstrate much greater costs because of the stress that cattle suffer, which result in loss of weight and the failure to get pregnant.
What has also been shown here is that Congress should require each federal agency that pays attorney fees for the enforcement of the Equal Access to Justice Act to keep an accounting of those payments, what they are for, and to send that to the General Accounting Office, which shall send a report to Congress each year detailing these costs. We also feel that these payments should be made public, so the public at large can appreciate the environmental and economic impacts of wolf advocates.
In addition, each federal district court should be required by statute to send a copy of any judgment awarding attorney fees under the act to the Government Accounting Office as well.
Far beyond the costs of relocating some Canadian wolves into the United States, it’s been estimated that since the 1970s the Federal Government and the States have spent close to two hundred million dollars to reintroduce Mexican wolves in New Mexico and Arizona and Canadian gray wolves into Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. Assuming that the government’s estimated numbers of wolves are correct, there are roughly ninety-seven Mexican wolves in New Mexico and Arizona and a minimum of roughly eighteen hundred wolves in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. Assuming that the numbers in the Northern Rockies are wrong (and many people who live there believe that they are undercounted) and instead using the four thousand total wolves estimated, then the cost to reintroduce wolves is fifty thousand dollars per wolf ($200,000,000 ÷ 4,000 = $50,000).
A reasonable person when thinking about governmental policy and what is good for all wildlife and the economy would have to come up with the conclusion that further federal expenditures to propagate a species that causes such huge economic losses to people living in the areas affected is not rational.
The chapters by Laura Scheberger and Jess Carey, who have been intimately involved with the Mexican Gray Wolf Recovery Program, call into question whether or not Congress should allow for any further expenditures of this program, which has been going on for over thirty-four years at a cost of over twenty million dollars. According to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, there are currently ninety-seven Mexican wolves in the wild. Divide fifty-eight into twenty-six million dollars which is what has been spent on the Mexican Gray Wolf Recovery Program, and the cost of each Mexican wolf is over four hundred thousand dollars per wolf. That’s not rational under any sense of the word when one considers that there are fifty thousand to one hundred thousand wolves in Canada, another eighteen hundred to four thousand and perhaps more in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming and that wolves have expanded into Oregon, Washington, and many other states. There are also several thousand wolves in Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Continued expenditures of federal or state tax dollars to promote wolves is not sound governmental policy. Additionally, all across North America there are at least three hundred thousand and maybe five hundred thousand wolves and wolf-dogs in captivity. The wolf species is here to stay. And I note here that as wolves can and do breed with coyotes and dogs, as well as wolves, that wolves in the wild, especially in the Lower 48, are increasingly hybrids, and not pure wolves at all.
I also think people who are part of the environmental movement need to take a close look at the groups that use the wolf as a rallying cry to raise money and file endless lawsuits over wolf hunts. If you are an environmentalist and believe in the preservation of our wild species, why would you support an organization that continually tries to expand wolves when, in fact, you are destroying other wildlife in order to do so. Isn’t this exploitation of wolves? And just what are these groups doing with the millions of dollars that they bring in by your donation, grants, and litigation fees they collect? To what extent are their continual threats and litigations weakening the state and federal wildlife management agencies that are charged with managing wildlife? Some environmental organizations work out ways that they can work with and support agencies rather than constantly being adversaries.
Hunting, fishing, and sportsmen groups across the United States should also understand that when they work together and can put aside their differences, they are as powerful as any group in the country and can truly impact public policy. When farm and ranch groups combine with organized sportsmen groups, then they are even more powerful.
By the time people in Oregon and Washington fully understand what the wolves have done to their big-game herds and to their ranching industry, it may be too late. Hopefully people from those states will read this book and understand the political template for success in changing the laws in those states to allow for the control of wolves before they destroy their big-game hunting industry and severely affect ranchers and cattlemen.
I did not pick this fight nor this issue to write a book about, but after six years of study I think that I am on the right side of the preservation of our wild game.
Others may disagree, which is their right, but if they look at all the research that’s been done on wolves for over one hundred years, I think they will conclude, as the experts in this book and I have, that it’s clear that wolves need to be stringently controlled if we are to have abundant game herds, as well as allow people to co-exist with wolves on some level.
We also have clearly shown that wolves can and do attack pets and people. Research from all around the world shows that where they are not managed, habituated wolves can and will enter human settlements, where they will eat garbage, roadkill, livestock, pets, and ultimately attack people. Peer-reviewed studies in North America, Europe, and Asia, support the habituation model presented in this book. As we have also pointed out, a primary reason why wolves in North America have not attacked and killed as many people as they have in Eurasia is that we have more firearms to protect ourselves, and wolves quickly learn this and retreat when they are not habituated.
There is also a serious need to recognize that wolves may be vectors for diseases that can harm livestock, wildlife, pets, and people.
I told my wife that I expected this book to be widely praised by some groups and widely condemned by others who may use sophisticated methodology, even misinformation, to attack every facet of the book. As they say in Texas, “Bring it on.”
“No one seriously advocates more than a small sprinkling of wolves. When they reach a certain level they will certainly have to be held down to it . . . . In thickly settled counties, we cannot have wolves, but in parts of the north we can and should.”
—Aldo Leopold