The next time one of these collaboration rollover groups asks for your money, consider giving your funds elsewhere. Look for organizations that challenge the dominance of livestock on public lands! Look for Organizations that dont roll over and have the Goal of Protecting YOUR Public Lands for you, that have put in the research and have come up with a way to stop this terrible decimation of our environment!
They refuse to acknowledge even that Cattle can be taught, or to recognize Peer Reviewed Science!
Article By George Wuerthner
It is a popular notion among some conservationists that the way to win acceptance for predators like wolves is to work with rural communities and ranchers. Gaining their support certainly helps wildlife managers justify killing packs or individual wolves whenever they prey on cattle.
The killing of seven members of the Profanity Peak pack in Washington illustrates how a wolf pack paid the ultimate price for merely trying to eke out a living in a place where unfenced domestic livestock had been released to graze.
Hundreds of cattle were released on the allotment, and salt blocks used by cattle were placed near the den site. That led to wolf depredation on cattle followed by the killing of pack members. (More on the Profanity Peak pack here.)
A growing body of scientific research now shows that killing problem wolves often begets yet more conflicts. Whether the killing is done to protect livestock or for “sport” by hunters, it tends to skew wolf populations towards younger animals less skilled at hunting. Loss of individual pack members can also result in changes in a pack’s ability to hold a territory, pushing the animals into new areas where they are less familiar with native prey. Both outcomes often lead to livestock getting killed by wolves.
Even “predator-friendly” operations harm native wildlife. When ranchers use noisemakers like boat horns or firecrackers, shoot at predators to scare them, or otherwise harass wolves and other predators, this hounding and stressing of our wildlife is considered legitimate. But why should conservation organizations pay for range riders or organize volunteers to harass public animals like wolves to protect someone’s private livestock?
In effect, these groups are saying that wolves, coyotes and other native wildlife do not have a “right” to live on public lands that are being exploited by ranchers. Cows, not native to the West, have preference.
The negative impacts of livestock on our native wildlife go even further than harassment or lethal control — something that none of the “collaborative” groups ever mention to their membership or the press. Just the mere presence of domestic livestock often results in the social displacement and abandonment of the area by native ungulates such as elk.
If one assumes that elk select the best habitat for their needs, then displacement to other lands reduces their overall fitness. And we cannot forget that on many public lands, the vast majority of forage is reserved and allotted to domestic livestock, leaving only the leftovers for native wildlife.
If we assume that one of the limiting factors for native wildlife is high-quality forage, and that less nutritious feed means fewer elk, deer and bighorns, then we are literally taking food out of the mouth of our native predators.
When there is a conflict between private livestock grazing public lands and the public’s native wildlife, such as grizzlies, coyotes and wolves, just which animals should be removed? That is a question that “collaboratives” never ask. It is always assumed that if predators are causing problems for ranchers, the predators, not the livestock, should go.
This assumption adds up to direct and indirect subsidies for the livestock industry. As long as the dominant paradigm is that a rancher’s livestock has priority on public lands, we will never fully restore native predators to our lands. That is why we need to reframe the narrative and recognize that domestic livestock are the “problem” for our native wildlife.
Source: Coexistence between wolves and livestock is a delusion — High Country News
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George Wuerthner originally posts his observation on THe Wildlife News here
http://www.thewildlifenews.com/author/george-wuerthner/
I have listened to him and asked questinons. He sometimes appears at such gathherings as “Speak For Wolves”, who will gathher again in West Yellowstone next July 26-28:
here is their website, and They include all wolf advocates, from tribal to Canadian, from artists to scientists:
http://www.speakforwolves.org/
While I read HCN, its journalism is about all the human interests in the West, from Pacific to Colorado, and it does not always sufficiently challenge the ones who favor humans over all else. I remind readers that while humans complain of inconvenience, wolves do not complain even though they are dying at human hands, cut off from one another by human takeover of all but a few islands of life., and that the wolf is still the most persecuted being on this land, no matter that humans complain about their personal or ingroup lack of “wealth” or status.
If this has not been published here,, Please go to this article by Wuerthner here:
http://www.thewildlifenews.com/2017/07/31/collaboration-leads-to-dead-wolves/
George Weurthner, is Western Watershed Project director for Oregon. this is his bio from there:
[E]cologist, longtime wildlands activist, and wilderness visionary with interests in conservation history and conservation biology.
He has undergraduate degrees in wildlife biology and botany, and a master’s degree in science communications from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
George has worked as a biologist, a wilderness ranger and range conservationist for the federal government, this include time in Idaho working for the Nez Perce National Forest, Challis National Forest, and Bureau of Land Management in Boise, and more recently as a university instructor, photography instructor, consulting biologist, and wildlife policy analyst. His photographs have appeared in hundreds of publications and George has published 36 books dealing with natural history and environmental topics.
Yes, that particular Washington rancher purposely placed the salt blocks near the denning or rendezvous site of that family of wolves.
He has also stated that he does not want wolves in “his” state. Outside of the early Hudson’s Bay Company trappers, his kind has only been in Washington since the 1830s or so. Some christian missionaries came there, bringing domestics and the disease of believing that other animals should be enslaved for their lifetimes corralled, and denied fulfilling natural lives to become exclusive food for the social profit of humans.
The problems i Michigan’s UP also stem almost entirely from te purposeful actions of a “private” lands livestock keeper, who expressly refused to use nonlethal conflict-prevention. The issue is complex (From Apache and Navajo to Coleville and even among the Wolf-brother Ojibwe, there are individuals who group together to exclude wolf from their (the wolf’s) home.).
It is as Twowolves says, necessary to only extend our hands to help the wolf and those who will protect them in this time.
The states especially, and the present federal government, eek to profit from all the land, air, water, and at present fight to take the lives of trees and fish and insects that pollinate and balance life, as well as wolf and bear.
This has led to the difficulty in preserving life connections, and the public lands upon which these connections depend.
There are groups of individuals and of determined scientists and lawyers who fight to restore and recreate the connections and places where native natural life can be safe from the taking by humans.
I notice that one famous scientist, Edward O WIlson, has begun an effort called “Half Earth” because he believes that life and lives will be saved only if humans give away half of the Earth from their use.
Other scientists, ecologists, have understood that we must give back at least 2/3 of earth to successfully protect life, if not the individual lives that many, like those ranchers, will take without thought, because they believe that guns and fences and machines in their possession, entitle them to something called “ownership.’
Even our very bodies are composed of only about 10% of the cells we carry. The 90% that is “other” help us live, and so we should be cognizant that without accepting the validity of all other things, there can be no balance, no life.
I have recently written to an Ojibwe Protector who was part of AIM many decades ago. If you explore the young water Protectors up in the Dakotas now, you will see how they are constantly met with violence from superior armed forces who desire to take and use and poison.
While this way gains publicity, and after all is desperate in attempting to protect the last of life in many places, each of us who desires to help the wolf live, must still choose to encounter those who have forgotten that other lives have the same value as theirs and their co-profitors, whether these are their children or investors or imaginary way of life and values.
Lawyers have consistently told me that their business is to expose truth.
THe wolf cannot speak to those who do not choose to understand, , and very few humans will stand clearly between wolf and those who seek to take their home and lives.
I have seen zoos, and “ambassador packs” of wolves who had the misfortune to be born among, or know humans too early. They proceed in the lives they have been bound to, but if a hole appeared in a fence, they would choose the chance to live lives as they are made to.
This is a cruel fate, to be bound by a creature that has too much power to rule and kill and take vengeance.
And it must not be forced on the wolf.
THere are polls that consistently show that from two-thirds to over four in five humans desire that wolves live and be free to be as they were made to be.
Yet, almost none vote or demand that this be so; other more selfish interests take precedence in the minds of these tens of millions of humans.
Who will speak for the wolf? asks the old tale of the Seneca.
Why do none who seek public service speak for wolf? I ask.
Because even though four of every five people you will ever see, claim to care for these lives, they first seek to enrich themselves over the other humans competing with them.
Yet we know from the hard work of those who put some other lives before their own, that we are most effective when we put the need of another before our own.
It is surprising how much Twowolves has gathered on this site – there are years and years of links not preserved by other wolf advocacy sites, information on wolf-human interactions over the lives of wolves has occurred.
I only know through personal experience and the explorations of scientists, some traditional shared knowledge, and a few others in the Northern world where the wolf lives, something about how the wolf lives and communicates; this is not as well-known as the fighting, the arguing, the incidents, the emotions of humans over their desire to take lands and waters for their own benefit.
It is very very difficult for those who have chosen to be on the wolf side of the gorge, on the wolf side of the raging river between wolf and human.
It is understood that most of the time, each human will choose for a human desire or need. But the wolf has never poisoned our kind, never trapped and held or bred for comfort or curiosity. Never not given way. Each event of wolf and human I have ever looked closely into shows the wolf only acting to survive, or even accepting what happens.
I do not wish to moralize, or to make excuses. Each wolf life is worth saving, protecting. You who work with captives and rescued wolves probably share this understanding.
I have paid for and worked to promote coexistence many, many times, and have tailored my language to situations. THe goals of many who compromise, are the same goals as i mention, except for that recognition of the immeasurable value of each single wolf’s life, as ephemeral as it may be to you.
I spread what money comes to me among the organizations that work for wolves, and try to only materially support those who do the most good (size is not always the measure). I have also worked at length for restoring natural landscapes where all who live can be self-willed, not subject to human taking.
Almost all humans, though, lean toward taking whether little or all. This is a concern. I have known Ojibwa, as I say, who used to work fro USDA Wildlife Services, who learned more and more, and chose to undo the collaring, monitoring, control work they had originally done because they thought they were helping the wolf to survive.
There is so much disagreement, so much that the only answer can be your own. When you encounter this disagreement, you will also need to spend time with yourself, to clear your mind, to find who and what you are.
Compromise may mean that one or more wolves die because humans chose either to kill or to compromise.
This is not a path for those who have been looked into with trust by wolf.
Money does not hurt to lose, if you can still live without compromise. It does not take much money to live. THe wolf does not even ask – I have spoken elsewhere about their natural courtesy, not demanding other than freedom to be themselves.
What does your life look like to you when going alone to look at your relationship with other life? You can do this each day, each night. It takes little time, and what you learn has immense value.
The probably poached wolf family of the north of Shasta possibly has two survivors. At least one is not yet learned to be wise. But in lives such as their, so fractured, broken by the humans, is the hope of balance of this far west. Any one whose life is lost, sets back the balance of life for an unknowable time, possibly years and years.
This is not so certain for the many humans, and is certainly NOT true for the selfish among them.
Thank you for your Words, we had 4 years prior as well, but a server crash lost all… I am Making an Article out of your Comment 😉