The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation 

In IUCNCongress, Protect The Grizzly, Protect The Wolves, Protect Wyoming Wolves by Twowolves2 Comments

protect the wolves, wolves, wolf, protect wyoming wolves,

Protect The Wolves™ would like to point out that CWD is a disease brought here by North Americas First Immigrants!

Article by Deidre Bainbridge

My frustration is the same. There is no science that it is better to stop feeding the elk when it is a fact they will die without feed and this winter they would have died by the 1,000’s. That catastrophic loss would have been justified by you and yours to avoid a disease that has questionable impact on elk populations and is in fact not density dependent.

Please see below

The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation

Seven Core Principles of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation

As early settlers made their way West, North America’s wildlife populations dwindled from overhunting and habitat loss. Many species – elk, pronghorn, bison and waterfowl included – went from countless numbers to just a few thousand at the close of the 19th century.

Beginning in the late 1800s, hunters and anglers such as Teddy Roosevelt realized they needed to set limits in order to protect rapidly disappearing wildlife, and assume responsibility for managing wild country. They pushed for hunting regulations and established conservation groups to protect habitat.

Their efforts are the backbone of the North American Wildlife Conservation Model, the only one of its kind in the world. The model’s two basic principles—that our fish and wildlife belong to all North American citizens, and are to be managed in such a way that their populations will be sustained forever—are explained through a set of guidelines, which having been refined and modified over time, may best be remembered as the Seven Sisters for Conservation:

      1. The Public Trust Doctrine. An 1842 U.S. Supreme Court opinion, in Martin v. Waddell, established the legal precedent that it was the government’s responsibility to hold wild nature in trust for all citizens. The next three pillars reflect this fundamental doctrine.
      2. Democratic Rule of Law. Wildlife is allocated for use by citizens through laws. This protects against the rise of elites who would appropriate wildlife to themselves (as occurred in Europe). All citizens can participate, if necessary through the courts, in developing systems of wildlife conservation and use.
      3. Opportunity for All. In Canada and the United States, every man and woman has a fair and equitable opportunity under the law to participate in hunting and fishing. No one group, hunters or nonhunters, can legally exclude others from access to fame within the limitations of private property rights.
      4. Commercial Use. Hunters and anglers led the effort to eliminate markets and commercial traffic in dead animal parts, which was a huge business in the latter half of the 1800s and the early 1900s. The market killing of birds and animals decimated many species and brought some to near extinction or extinction.
      5. Legitimate Use. Although laws could govern access to wildlife and ensure that all citizens had a say in its protection, there had to be guidelines as to appropriate use. This is defined as killing for food or fur, self-defense, and property protection, categories that are broadly interpreted.
      6. Science and Wildlife Policy. Interest in science and natural history was deeply ingrained in North American society, a fact reflected  in the emphasis placed on recording wildlife habits and diversity by almost every major expedition charged with mapping the continent, along with the enormous popularity of amateur natural history collections. Hunters and anglers are, by habit and inclination, naturalists. Science is identified as a crucial requirement of wildlife management. For this Aldo Leopold, in his 1930 American Game Policy, credited Theodore Roosevelt, explicitly stating that science should be the underpinning of wildlife policies.
      7. International Wildlife Migratory Resources. The boundaries of states and nations are of little relevance to migratory wildlife and fish, and policies and laws for wildlife conservation have to address this reality. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 is an excellent example of successful international cooperation.

Source: The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation | Council to Advance Hunting and the Shooting Sports

Comments

  1. Yeminite rhino horn daggers are the only human use of full rhino horns in the world. Uniqueness is NOT a valid criterion for lethal “management.”
    I just spent several hours on the failures and lies involved in the North American “Model”, but since I then discovered that Protect the Wolves is not after publishing the vague and inaccurate supporting document in favor of it, entitled “A Supreme Court decision on a case in 1842 became a foundation for the Public Trust Doctrine”, much of my comment, based upon my own formal education, traditional cultural learning, and decades of exploration and intimacy with the wolf and other wildlife and natural systems along with related travels and sciences, is here moot.

    Yet it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that this pretentious rhetorical “model” partly an artifact of Euroamerican immigrant escape from the time and places where wildlife was for an unfortunate period the province of Feudal overlords, has no place whatsoever in either modern or times and places outside that vestige of medieval human habitat overstauration.

    From Roosevelt to Geist, proponents of NAMWM have almost universally expressed exclusion and personal antipathy for the native wolf.
    My personal association with the wolf suddenly causes resurrection of the futile frustration I’ve experienced when encountering wolf-hatin’ gun-totin’ Euroamericans from Wisconsin to the mountain and far west states and Alaskan hunters who, even when exposed to some of the gaps in their knowledge, continued to blindly and stupidly adhere to killing-on-sight.
    I spent some years traveling with an “ambassador” wolf, one more wild and less restrained than those popular. That wolf helped me to explain the mind and intelligence, the lightning communications and evaluative capacities of wolves freer of human constraints. Often I think of That Wolf’s choice to bond to me, which included purposeful instruction on his part, and elation at his successes, persistence at his failures, and tolerance of the time I seem to have wasted of his attempting to acquaint humans with the reality of the wolf.

    I’ll post an excerpted portion of my diatribe against the so-called “Model.” Because the author of the offensive promotional article described himself within his apologia, I’ll allow my own egotism a similar freedom. From the Salk Institute to Stanford and other institutions, I’ve learned a little about the immensity of information and disciplines required to understand and describe the relationship and knowledge backing travels from Siberian traditional tribes to a considerable part of North America, Atlantic to Pacific, its history and cultures, to touch on a few aspects of humans and nature and wolves. Because the thrust of my life is NOT to favor human populations when they abrade on nature, I have not seemingly been in pursuit of symbolic fame. Only a simple mandate arising from the life and death of a wolf, along with others of his kind and others who, as the ancient Siberian tale, goes, met in council, over what they should do to stop humans from killing beyond need or balance, causes me to speak at all in defense of life. Humans,, as is known there, cannot ever communicate with the Great Sky, but it is possible that you can hold to an equal respect for others, whose lives are as valid as your own.

    In science, a model is tested for accuracy constantly, and abandoned or heavily modified upon any significant failure. The NAM has not been so subjected to the dispatch of which it is so deserving). The NAM is so inaccurate and poor, that it should be mentioned only as a sociopolitical historical note, as slavery was in the various cultures that participated in that model of society.

    The edited comment, expressed in lay language as best I can, follows. I removed entire ecological and genetic discussion; The genetics of small populations and relating to stochastic or targeted removal of evolutionarily fitter individual ungulates by sport, canned, and trophy hunters sanctioned by game-farming state wildlife agencies under the illusion of the NAM requires statistical evaluation.

    Though that exists in great quantity, the extensive literature on it has been repeatedly rejected by agencies from California to the USFWS Mexican Wolf Recovery Program. The excuses made, boil down to human social carrying capacity, meaning that the vast intruding and expanding human populations desires to remove natural systems, replacing them with itself and domestics. The NAM does not address either the genetic information or the ecological necessity to restore genetic connectivity to wolves and other species that will slowly lose local and global variation, ultimately leading to extinction from human cause beyond your lifetime. although not beyond the scope of my concern. This extinction will be traceable in huge part to the “voodoo ecology” to borrow a term descriptive of economics that led and will lead to the continuation of feudalism in your own kind, with attendant suffering, but not to cessation of humans as extinction event.
    I leave in autobiographical insight into my apparent cynicism; you will find that protecting the wolf, and any other life, in the light of anthropocentrism, may require extreme criticism.

    1. ON the failure of the North American Model of Wildlife Management

      1. Hunting is solely concerned with the preservation of “game” species (those species used for what’s called in Africa, Bushmeat, along with those shot for trophy and related hormonal pleasure of arousal). The NAM has consistently been used since the time of T. Roosevelt, an outspoken hater of wolves and other native predators. Present-day apologists for the so-called “management” practice, essentially managing species preferred by gun hunters and trapper, consistently follow the same anti-wild system rhetoric.
      2. Rhetoric is not descriptive, nor is it limited to truth. Understanding the expansion, survival and diminution of wild species is a matter of science. Science is not the same endeavor as engineering or managing, but in the case of wildlife and ecological science, identifies population and diversity of species, creating actual descriptive modeling, predictive of the species and of the ecological effects of changes in species numbers. Wildlife science is then, the only accurate method of measuring the effects and changes of human pressures on an individual animal, local populations of any species, and of broader effects of the species. The science of exclusionary competition and trophic levels is instructive:
      Wolf tends to limit coyote, who limits fox. Fox limits rodents and thus, the spread of ectoparasites, from ticks to fleas, lice, and mites. When wolf is removed in order to enhance ungulates, coyote is freed to reduce, which they do, foxes, a less vagile species occupying local habitats in greater numbers. Foxes are less social than coyotes and wolves. The NAM pretends to replace natural cascades like this through trapping and hunting coyotes and foxes, but tends only to be effective at fox reduction. It thus promotes scabies – a disease devastating all large species (domestic sheep brought Sarcoptes scabei to the once, large populations of Bighorn, now dangerously near extinction . Domestics also brought bacteria innocuous to themselves, which like emergent human crowd diseases you know of, kill nearly 100% of any local bighorn population exposed. Bighorn were a highly important food source for mountain wolves from AK to the Sierra Madre of Mexico. The populations of both were two orders of magnitude larger than presently understood. There are mountain ranges in Great Basin and Desert which once supported both, utterly empty now). Other diseases have emerged due to human intrusion upon wolf: canine Distemper and Parvovirus grew out of excess human and dog populations, hunting dogs are significant factors in spreading these and other diseases. Heartworm once limited to the US southeast, was resisted by certain Red Wolf genes and phenotypes, but spread by humans and doemstic dogs to all warm temperate areas. These are mentioned because of the breeding and proliferation of hunting dogs from that area of North America into the north and west. The cascade of collapse and disease due to excess public hunting in the last 1 ¾ centuries has these prominent, and other, vectors. This is now in the process of lashing back on the human and domestic populations, more of which later.
      3. The NAMWM (or Conservation, as it is variously termed) does not take into account climate, human damage or fragmentation of the environment, major effects on native natural species and systems. The NAM embraces introduced “game” (consumable) species. This flaw has resulted in considerable ecological collapses on the continent and elsewhere, from high lakes and watersheds once supporting important members of the animal community. As illustration explore the introduction of Lake trout into Yellowstone . The larger and alien species has caused a population collapse of native Cutthroat trout, a fish which formerly passed into shallow streams to spawn, a historical food resource for grizzly for tens of thousands of years. Along with the mismanagement by states of wildlife (which I hope to fit into this note), Grizzly have thus been further pressed to seek alternative foods, leading to increased dispersal and conflict with the pressing human population. From the Sierras and Cascades, introduction of alien fish have killed off a number of important amphibians. While most laypersonns are familiar with “Keystone” species, science also developed the concept of highly interactive species, also necessary and sufficient as a group to the resilience and survival of other species in any ecosystem.
      4. The NAM has also been used to promote US state and Canadian Provincial control of wildlife. The major proponent of the flawed and self-serving NAM concept of the past several decades, Valerius Geist, yet another European expatriate attempting to shore up the idea of wildlife existing for human pleasure and consumption, has been instrumental in (the issue on this site being wolf-killing) the blaming and consequent eradication of wolves. Geist has for decades (He’s from western Russia, an area where human culture since about 2 millennia back have long been in conflict with the wolf, as agriculture and bushmeat in that cold country has been a subsistence resource for centuries. The advent of firearms, led to the usual European medireval antiwolf attitudes and to the increased human despoliation and the severe diminution of all animals). Geist et al. Influenced the policies of numerous Canadian Provinces including that resulting from the wildlife crises caused by human exploitation of interior southern BC and central Alberta’s excessive intrusion into caribou forest. Caribou were once rather insulated from the wolf as predator, but when the intense logging and clearing of Canadian forests accelerated in the late 1800s, (this includes central and northwest Ontario and forested Manitoba as well. Space may not allow sufficient coverage of the human damage to environments there and the consequent targeting of the wolf). Caribou were completely eradicated in the NW Great Lakes region by this roading and clearing, combined with motortravel hunting access (Snow machines were invented in the late 1930s, although they were not common until the late 40s and 50s. The easing of woodland access to the wolf, who, mobile in winter, used the human trails to add more caribou to their diet.
      Ontario’s aggressive eradication of wolves outside of small protected parks like Algonquian Provincial Park – a situation where wolves have been baited, killed, everytime they ventured from the popular wolf haven boundaries – even though hundreds of thousands of Canadians visited that Park precisely for the wolves.
      5. The practice of professional “wolfers” those who killed wolves for profit and management purposes extended from the US into Canada as wildland destruction expanded there in the 1880s. The idea of state and Provincial control of wildlife management also runs counter to the nature of north American Wildlife: wildlife inherently migrate and disperse across such fictional human boundaries, and thus partake in, or are a part of “interstate and international] commerce.” the latter word having the meaning of mixing and activity when the US Constitution was written. Its later limitation to human interaction for profit was not the intent of the framers, or they would have clarified such a limitation using other words; the vocabulary and definitions were quite clear in the late 1700s.
      As this note has become lengthy, I’ll have to close.

      My own experience encompasses both traditional native early tutelage on the inherent equality of other species of life with our own. Because I learned this directly from such as an influential elder born in 1850-51, and from the side of my family that first resisted the consumptive ideals of Euroamerican immigrants, then unfortunately accepted that culture as it was perceived to be more effective. Disagreeing with those who turned to anthropocentric isolation through the imposition of false religions claiming that there exists an imaginary deity favoring their superiority. I found that the rationale for scientific exploration, too, was also human-centered utilitarianism.
      So, continually exposed to such ideas that cut off and falsely elevated humans to the hubris that they are in some way charged with or capable of management, I continued with both formal and experiential learning, from Red Wolf country to Across the Pacific.
      The Ainu, a people whose concepts of forces and familiarity I’ve used to help laypersons understand how dissociated organized religions first arose (and they are as you know a massive worldwide problem, for me, if not you, including the relegation of the wolf to inmical inferior), the Ainu creation myth is one of being born of wolf and woman. Their hunters left portions of their kills for Wolf – Hoku Kamui (Kamui in short, being a force of nature, and Hoku, the howling or calling one. Shortened to Japanese it became Okami). Of course in the Japanese embrace of Euro culture in the 1870s onward, reversing their favor of wolf as protector of crops from boars and other omnivores, they poisoned the wolf into extinction before 1918.
      The Mongols and some Turkic peoples spoke of being born of the wolf, and sought for centuries to emulate the wolf’s observed ways. Even though they were the original horse people, they used the Wolf Way as they described, to run down for hours, the horses they used.
      The wolf, then was, as [s]he remained among many North Americans, the teacher. This inclusion is our most ancient – all that lives teaches us the right way to live. The rise and fall of other species affects all others, and the wolf remains a superior manager of such oscillations than do humans.
      Although I can’t treat the failures of the NAM within even a lengthy comment, YOU can explore some of the scientific literature exposing its complete error online, especially if you have access to scientific databases. They are a bit costly unless you have relationship with University.
      WCS a proponent of NAM, lobbies for membership in Wildlife Science departments, corrupting the young who may not have yet been exposed to sufficient tradition, education, or development of the ethical portions of their brains. Since my own areas of expertise include neurobehavioral sciences, I feel that I can make this assertion with considerable support of the science that is presently published.

      But we live and die, sharing mortality, if not intimacy, with the wolf. This should lead you at least to a more accurate humility, possibly only known by those called in traditional cultures as “in-between” who, like myself, were recognized as chosen by nature to seek and find that intimacy. My own formal and personal relationship and work for wolf includes years spent intimately exploring their, and many species, including human, communication and capacities, their acquisition, transmission, and retention of skills – some of which are almost or completely unknown to scientists employed in institutions, whether world-famous biological ones with which I had association for this and related purposes – I do not exist to enable increased human exploitation and growth. We are too many and too empowered by technology to translate science and traditional knowledge into more tools to take. I do not popularize name or identifying material, due to the problems that occur when observing and speaking with individuals and groups using weapons and rhetoric against Wolf and other irrationally hated beings on this, their continent.

      An individual wolf has developmental phases as do humans, and although passing through them at a blazing speed compared to your kind, develop an equivalent understanding of necessity and value. That other senses are used does not diminish the accuracy of a wolf’s cognition, but keeps him or her in touch, rather than dissociated, as are humans by their excess focus on symbol, and other limitations, such as inordinate fear, to which eusocial omnivores are subject when imagining species evolved to manage excess, as are predators like the wolf.

      Again, I call to your attention the Ojibwe conceptualization of the relationship of Original Man and Ma’iingan, the Wolf:
      Although we (almost all of you) no longer walk and discover together with the Wolf, that which is done to the wolf, is also the fate – what is done to the human.
      As you lethally “manage” one, you attempt to impose death upon the other.

      Another elder people, now gone, taught, [I’ll paraphrase, as the oral poetry tales would be too long and confusing for this message if not your own capacities] the Wolf was intelligent,welcoming, even friendly and trusting, until treated cruelly by man. By containing and attempting to crush the Wolf’s spirit, men set in motion their own demise, and and that of all that men revere and value.

      There is neurobiological truth to the holding of such psychological attitudes, as that of those who exclude the wolf. From high Eurasia to North America, these universal ecological recognitions once capacitated human life in motile harmony with the rest of nature.

      The NAMWC, when scientifically and more broadly ecologically, proves to be a dangerously false rationalization, unscientific, immorally narrow-minded and chauvinistic, self-serving of those isolated and destructive of nature and the human culture spawning them.

      Those who seek to preserve the wolf and natural living systems must choose whether they will support any individual or groups claiming your cash or adherence under any pretense of protecting the Wolf. The embracing of public wolf-killing through this erroneous “Model” should lead you to imitate the wise avoidance of the wolf. They have no friends in such persons, and because of the excessive power of humans, would have their lives and their kind extinguished before that occurs to the humans who forgot how small they their own proper part in life, really is.

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