Important reminder to submit a comment to Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks Commissioners

In Protect The Wolves by Lynda7 Comments

IMPORTANT: Only two days left to comment before Montana’s upcoming CWD Management Plan. Montana Fish Wildlife & Parks is taking comments about Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) Please send your comments by Dec. 8th, 5:00 pm MT to FWCOMM@mt.gov There will also be a meeting in Helena Montana open to the public on December 7th, 2017. You can attend this meeting at your FWP regional office if unable to be in Helena. http://fwp.mt.gov/doingBusiness/insideFwp/commission/meetings/agenda.html?meetingId=42312650

Montana is now one of 24 states and provinces with wild cervid populations infected with Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD). Ironically, there were two infected mule deer recently killed by hunters south of Billings, near Wyoming, within days of Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks’ release of its draft CWD management plan. The spread of Chronic Wasting Disease or CWD is spreading rapidly in Montana. Once contracted, it is an always-fatal disease that thrives in the nervous system of cervids (deer, elk, reindeer and moose). It can be passed on through saliva, urine, feces, spinal and brain fluids, etc. Similar diseases affect other animals such as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) which is also referred to as Mad Cow Disease. It’s also found in sheep, known as Scrapie. Interestingly enough, we already know that Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) — a sister disease to BSE and CWD — is capable of infecting humans.

Wolves have a unique ability to sense and exploit an ungulate weakness. They have a 100 times greater smelling ability than humans. They would prefer to kill an unhealthy ungulate then risk injury from a  healthy ungulate. Wolves strengthen elk and deer populations because wolves target mostly weak members of a pack, they reduce the number of inferior and injured elk and deer, allowing only the strongest gene pools to repopulate. With the eradication of wolves and other Apex predators many years ago allowed or at least contributed to giving CWD a foothold and spread.

Montana should take this very seriously. Will they consider the fact that the spreading of CWD will threaten tourism, hunting, outfitting and other outdoor related activities?

It would be financially beneficial to all interested parties to allow wolves and other Apex carnivores to assist in containing and controlling CWD.   Currently, Montana is over elk objectives in many areas.  Wolves are virtually being hunted with no quotas by bloodthirsty sociopaths that enjoy this sort of ‘sport’. What else must happen before this state realizes what a huge mistake is being made by allowing wolves to be slaughtered?

  

It’s time to let wolves and other carnivores be part of the solution. They can remove infected ungulates and the department spends no funding that will help contain and prevent the spread of CWD.  Please be polite and email comment:

FWCOMM@mt.gov

Comments

  1. The killing of Wolves needs to stop and work needs to be done to allow Wolf recovery and better
    work with the public to understand wolves.

    We need better education on working with wolves.

  2. Getting a “Page Not Found” from clicking your link.
    First, here’s MT FWP information on the issue. It’s written to inform the publlic on the CWD issue, and contains links to the proposed management plan.
    http://fwp.mt.gov/fwpDoc.html?id=83455

    Next, here’s the draft plan itself:
    http://fwp.mt.gov/fwpDoc.html?id=83454

    Last, the comment page. Please read the proposed plan, then add your opinion of reducing hunting pressure on the gray wolf in areas where they can establish packs that will keep elk in motion and thus reduce densities and likelihood of ill cervids being able to remain with a herd and subjecting them to increased chance of contracting debilitating transmissible illnesses.

    http://fwp.mt.gov/fishAndWildlife/publicComments/2017/cwdMgmt.html

    The more informed you are about locations and the issue, the more influential YOUR comment will be!

    1. I crafted a comment which included both
      1. the idea of engaging the nonconsumptive wildlife and wildlands-using public and Montana’s Tribal Nations, through developing a citizen-science approach to spotting and perhaps sample-taking along with a method of creating necessary materials for information and distribution that would be paid for by vendors of outdoor apparel and gear and nongovernmental conservation groups.
      and
      2. reducing human hunting pressure on the Gray Wolf, and delineating the population dynamics of the resulting restoration of natural predator -prey dynamics. Since there’s some scientific support for this (not very much science has been done, but I’ll give you just a couple of citations below), any comments supplied by Protect the Wolves members and readers should include these important facts:

      A. ecologically effective wolf populations do more to keep elk and deer MOVING , which makes identification as well as herd shedding of their ill occur at a far greater rate. When there is no human threat to wolves, they can then select the diseased elk at higher rates, and remove them more quickly.
      B. Wolves LIVE in wild places. They thus penetrate the environment FAR more completely than humans can. This results in quicker AND more complete early removal.
      C. Wolf populations will NOT increase beyond what elk can sustain. As a matter of fact, they cannot by themselves reduce prey populations – if they could, no elk or deer would have existed long before humans came; therefore both scientific modeling and actual population research sows that effective wolf numbers will do the disease control job without substantially reducing elk.
      D. Their greatest influence on elk is that they make the ungulates MOVE around, in order to easily select the unfit. The Yellowstone research has shown the importance of this dynamic.
      Ripple, William J.,Robert L. Beschta. “Wolves and the ecology of fear: can predation risk structure ecosystems?.” BioScience 54, no. 8 (2004) 755-766.
      White, Patrick J., and Robert A. Garrott. “Yellowstone’s ungulates after wolves–expectations, realizations, and predictions.” Biological Conservation 125, no. 2 (2005): 141-152.
      Beschta, Robert L., and William J. Ripple. “Large predators and trophic cascades in terrestrial ecosystems of the western United States.” Biological Conservation 142, no. 11 (2009): 2401-2414.

      The citations are for you to read. the Montana Plan is absent all but human circling of areas where a diseased animal is found.
      It does NOT work to pre-empt disease, and cannot without including natural wolf predation dynamics. Worse, it cannot be effective in protecting Montana’s borders with neighboring states and Provinces, OR the two important National Parks and their strong additional value to Montana’s economy.
      Since one of the four primary areas that FWP is focusing on , is the Northern boundary of Yellowstone, reducing and eliminating wolf hunting will have good effects in more than one way. Te Northern Montana area of focus also includes both Glacier NP and Tribal Nation areas, and since Montana’s tribes are respectful of Wolf, better economic and international relationships will result from eliminating wolf hunting and reinstituting natural ecosystem predator-prey relationship dynamics there.

      Except for the three citations, all I have written here is differently worded than the comment made to FWP Commission, so you may even just cut and paste it with very minor changes to effectively add such a viewpoint in nearly your own words to the commission.

      Thanks for doing what you can –
      DON’T put it off! Do it NOW!

      1. Well, today was Montana comment limit, and today is the meeting in Salem OR on the final plan of that state.
        There are some distressing – I think that means hair-pulling, but of course, burning death from a bullet is not the same thing – changes to the proposed management plan. They , the Commission, are tying the management to ungulate numbers, once again erroneously attempting to blame the wolf for excess human hunting pressure.
        Here’s a Bend article on it:
        http://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/5800581-151/wolf-management-plan-draws-criticism-from-conservation-group

        THe revised plan uses this language:
        “ODFW has determined that wolves are a major cause of the [elk or ungulates as a whole] population not meeting established ungulate objectives or herd management goals (e.g.movements, use of key feeding areas, survival rates, nutrition, or other
        biological factors) and that the special permit agent action is expected to improve the situation.
        ii.
        The take will not impair population viability or reduce overall wolf population health factors (i.e., factors related to survival rates, reproduction, dispersal success, territory establishment, immigration and emigration, etc.) within the region”
        a page or so later it introduces the idea of paid trained killers “hunter-trappers” they propose to enlist.

        ODFW uses Marshall 2013 a somewhat disputed bit of research denying wolf behavioral influence on riparian recovery. , but in general, the information you can get by reading the Plan is more comprehensive other than this citation, which was certainly to my mind, promoted by livestock interests, just as they promote other weak and unrepeated materiel whenever they can force its introduction into any agency decisions and plans anywhere. A decade, you see, is a short time, for habitat secies destroyed completely as many riparian systems ave experienced.. THat’s so even up here in the green Pacific NW.

        OR hhas about exactly as many wolves righht now as Washington, and you’ll find the plan’s last maps showing good elk habitat and forest cover illuminating.
        One particular map happens to show human occupation in wolf hhabitat – I can guarantee you that much of the Red zone whichh DFW staff have identified as heavily occupied by humanity, is in fact instead, grazed and roaded for rural occupation.
        Notice how WELL Oregon suits wolves – the west and southhwest are not wolf-poccupied because of te barriers I hhave so often written about – fenced grazing on the forested mts intervening between thhe relatively saturated NE Wallowa mt area, and across thhe Ochocos, etc. the prime way wolves COULD come, if grazing and excessive national Forest roading were removed. Central OR is far more occupied than it was a couple decades ago – it was a shock to me to cross it since the wolf whose companion errant I was died of age .

        So, wheat we have preventing wolves in California and southwest Oregon is a chokehold. Yes, there’s a lot of wheat and oat farming in the open spaces of Oregon, but oit remains the somewhat excluded elk and deer populations who would hhave maintained populations where now there are amber waves of grain.

        Oregon NEEDS to protect all its wolves and all its lost habitat connectivity, for the wolf to return to the wild forests (well, many are clearcut and herbicide-sprayed in huge patches by their industrial “owners”).
        I have been so disgusted by the Euro-white jihadist ranchers, that I have avoided personally appearing in meetings for a couple years now, I seethe a little too much when I hear the ridiculous claims of lying ranchers, or when i drop in some small-town place and experience the tubby military-clad old men discussing what they “got”- shot, in indirect oblique conversation.

        The whole thing makes me lust a little too much for the adolescent feeling of sheathing a knife into an aggressive and disagreeable attacker, and so I just suggest the policy of the Ojibwe grandmother I knew, and her kids – hide evidence of wolf presence, and remove it brush snow tracks or scat away from sight.

        There must be some way that PtW can solicit members in some large pro-wolf group?
        I don’t personally talk to the unfriendly self-important of any stripe (once, wen the wolf and I were attending an eat after a big public meeting, he did try to raid the buffet. I was a bit abrupt at those who protested his presence, and thereafter ceased to “mingle” as, as I explained to everyone – “this is HIS continent. We are ALL just immigrant chimps from Africa, cold and afraid.”)
        . . . I must exude some kind of wolf piss they all find as offensive as I find smelly soap and perfume.

        .

  3. OK, in a Montana meeting of THe Fish Wildlife Parks Commission, Kenneth McDonald, Chief of Wildlife Staff for DFWP claimed that Montana could control the quickly increasing CWD rate in their portion of the Rockies through using human hunting, a statement any wildlife biologist has recognized as in grave error. may have mentioned in the past that the disease seems to have first visibly arisen in South Dakota and Texas “game farms” where ungulates are raised to be placed in small fenced areas for paying shooters.
    I think it was noted in the US in wild populations in COlorado, a state with large whitetail, mule deer, and elk populations almost untouched by predators.
    It struck in Saskatchewan game farms (!) so heavily that this White Paper (a compliation of research ordered by or presented to governing bodies and large institutions outlining an issue) was created by Canadian antiwolf researcher Valerius Geist – I’vementione him before as involved in the same error as McDonald and most states’ wildlife agencies – the discredited North American Model of Wildlife Conservation.
    Geist has now fully understood the need for ecologically effective numbers of predators, because of this emergent threat to wildlife.
    Here: https://mwf.mb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/CWD-Comprehensive-Analysis-LR-14March.single-page-versionpdf.pdf

    Because the anti wolf people have been getting their way (I just wrote a letter against Senate Bill 1415I think, the appropriations to Dept of Interior, which has a wolf delisting rider Section 120 attached, with language preventing court challenge – which language previous courts have UPHELD, so if it passes, wolves and any wildlife targeted by the present evil republicans and trump administration),, and I saw no chance of Wolf ever being able to return, this terrible news about CWD is the only light I see.
    Dave Mech weighed in, recognizing that ecologically effective numbers of wolves must be allowed, as human hunting of ill deer species just won’t stem the deadly disease.

    I am right now reading: http://mountainjournal.org/predators-and-chronic-wasting-disease
    Part 4 of the most comprehensive journalism I’ve ever seen on any wildlife subject in Mountain Journal.
    Please go there – there are links to all parts.
    The writer has covered the subject so well that I can only add that prions are persistent, but do break down over enough time. The informatino should shock you, and should cause states wildlife agencies to allow greater numbers of wolves to live without human hunting pressure, but I do not expect them to do so.

    North America now desperately needs cessation of human limitation of wolf numbers.
    Population biologists and ecologists understand that the wolf will follow the normal growth curve, leveling off when their local habitats “carrying capacity” is neared.
    The artificial construct of human “social carrying capacity” is now what stands in the way, this error will pretty much doom ungulates in North America, unless abandoned. Read the in-depth Mt journal work to understand.

    Humans are primarily interested in if “me & mine ” will catch the always-deadly disease. Should human consumption of ungulates not selected for health by our continent’s natural predators continue, I can tell you from population biology and past looks at communicable disease, that the answer will be Yes.

    Imagine that every hair, every touch, every store and human gathering will carry an evolved/human-adapted damaged prions. A plague possibly more deadly than those carried by European conquistadores that took away 80 to 90 percent or more of native populations of the Americas, will be in store.
    But the real problem is that any such change will first be suffered by the four-leggeds first.
    Predators, you will read, will prevent at very early stages, lowering the incidence of disease. Because wolves unlike dogs eat far less scat, they are less likely to spread it among their own kind.
    It’s more complex, so please read the links, and then get as much science as you can to argue for an end to human killing of wolves!

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