Protect The Wolves

Could Trump’s Presidency Mean the End of Wolves in the American West 

In Protect The Wolves by TwowolvesLeave a Comment

Republican Senators introduced a bill nicknamed, “The War on Wolves Act.”


wolves,wolf, protect the wolves, native american religious 501c3, wolf protection organizationOn January 17, 2017, Republican Senators introduced a bill nicknamed, “The War on Wolves Act.” If passed S.164 will not only remove ESA protections from wolves in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin and Wyoming, but it will also strip citizens of the right to challenge it in court. 

If killing wolves results in increased wolf conflicts for farmers, if wolves pose virtually no risk to human life, and if they’re essential to economical ecosystem rehabilitation in the West while bringing in tens of millions in tourist dollars, then remind me why we’re going to spend a bunch of taxpayer money killing them?

Why We Need Wolves

As an apex predator, wolves create a trophic cascade of benefits in their ecosystem, restoring balance the whole way down the food chain.

In Yellowstone, for instance, the reintroduction of wolves corrected an imbalance caused by the unchecked expansion of ungulates. Historically, wolves kept the elk population in balance in that area; without them, the elk became too numerous and their movements too static. Grasslands were overgrazed. Willows, cottonwood, and aspen were damaged, destroying the riparian habitats of beavers, songbirds, otters, muskrats, ducks, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. Wolves fixed that. They also checked the population of coyotes, which preyed heavily on small animals. So those populations returned, too, along with the birds of prey that feed on them. The revitalized shrubbery produced more berries, expanding the bear population. The entire ecosystem benefited and was returned to balance by the mere reintroduction of a handful of wolves. It’s that whole circle of life thing that Elton John once sang about in that Disney movie.

Can wolves restore balance to ecosystems elsewhere in their historic range? This study, published in the scientific journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution, suggests they can, and that they may also enable the successful coexistence of invasive species with their native counterparts. The study argues that allowing the return of apex predators like the wolf may be much cheaper than trying to manage these environments through human methods.

Need a dollar amount to define their value? Wolves bring in more than $35 million a year of tourist spending to the Yellowstone area. Local businesses benefit from the mere presence of wolves.

Why Republicans Are Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf

Wolves kill and eat stuff. As described above, that’s their job. Things they like to kill and eat include things people like to kill and eat—primarily deer and elk, but also sometimes sheep and cattle. Which makes us rivals. Between 1995 and 2005, wolves killed 213 cattle and 173 sheep in Wyoming. The elk population has also fallen since the reintroduction of wolves, though drought, disease, and hunting also play a role. There were 17,000 elk in the park when the reintroduction began. Today there are 4,844.

Perhaps due to an exaggerated presence of wolves in nursery rhymes and fairy tales, we humans also find them scary. There have been only six documented fatalities due to wild wolves (two of which were rabid) in North America in the past 100 years. The number of people killed by wolves pales in comparison to the number of people who die each year due to, say, bee stings (in the United States, that’s 100 people every year). Others complain that the loss of livestock hurts ranchers’ livelihood, even though state governments compensate ranchers for any losses. Still others lament the decrease in lucrative guided elk hunts in wolf states, though that has largely been attributed to an increase in out-of-state tag prices.

Politicians from rural areas have been pressured to address those unsubstantiated fears of their constituents, but that doesn’t come close to explaining the scale of the GOP’s war on wolves. The 114th Congress (2015–17) introduced 20 bills targeted at eliminating protections for the gray wolf alone. The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) called it “the most anti-wildlife Congress we’ve ever had.” Until the 115th, that is.

Why exhaust so much time and energy attacking a single species? The real answer is that the protections wolves require in the West can run counter to the interests of industrial agriculture businesses and the oil and gas industry, both of which want to operate on land that is currently subject to protection because it’s wolf habitat.

The anti-wolf policies being paid for in part by industrial agriculture are actually damaging the small, family-owned farms where problems with wolves killing livestock actually take place and which are often cited as the cause for these policies. It’s been scientifically demonstrated that killing problem wolves actually leads to a direct correlation in increased livestock depredation. The killings disrupt pack order and disperse wolves into new areas, and weakened packs are forced to seek easier prey than the wild animals they’d otherwise focus on.

  As campaign donations from the oil and gas industry and industrial agriculture have increased, so too have legislative assaults on the ESA. Because wolves have large ranges, the ESA may prevent energy extraction or industrial farming across larger areas than some other species. That explains the focus on removing the wolf’s protections.

What You Can Do About It

Well, you could start by not voting for politicians who drum up support based on manufactured and exaggerated populist issues, and then work to steal from you once they’re in office. Like the public land heist, the war on wolves is another great example of that. If killing wolves results in increased wolf conflict for farmers, if wolves pose virtually no risk to human life, and if they’re essential to ecosystem rehabilitation in the West while bringing in tens of millions in tourist dollars, then remind me why we’re going to spend a bunch of taxpayer money killing them? Especially when 90 percent of us support the ESA. And you can stop voting for these jerks and enabling this behavior just because you think they’ll lower your taxes. They won’t.

In the meantime, you can call and write your congressional representatives. Tell them you support the ESA, you don’t want them to steal our land, and that you oppose any legislation intended to remove wolf protection. While you’re at it, maybe ask them to start working in your interest, too.

You can also donate to organizations like like Protect The Wolves® A Native American Religious 501c3 That speaks out for their Sacred Animals

Source: Trump’s Presidency Means the End of Wolves in the American West | Outside Online

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.