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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 13, 2017)
10 Wednesday, December 13, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon The Bunkhouse Chronicle Craig Rullman Columnist When the wolf comes to town Few subjects in wildlife conservation are as fun- damentally polarizing and explosive as the topic of wolves. And like most sub- jects in our “Breaking News” zeitgeist, the hyperbole shills on all sides of the wolf issue seem to work in fever- ish piques, pandering to our baser emotional responses, and often ignoring outright any evidence contrary to their own cherished narrative. In other words, we hear mostly from the mostly unreasonable. Which makes the con- versation very difficult to have at all. But columnists are frequently meant to pad- dle against the current, and since wolves will eventually reestablish themselves along the eastern Cascades, now seems a good time to offer up a few thoughts on how we might have a more profitable discussion. First: if you are one of those so strident in your love for wolves, or the idea of wolves, that you do not believe they occasionally kill for mere sport, or that they can, overnight, decimate a livestock herd, you are liv- ing in a fantasy world of extraordinary proportions. It might be far more effective, and a convincing overture, for those interested in wolf preservation to finally accept the destruction wolves can cause as an evidence-backed reality. And if the closest you’ve ever been to a wolf pack in the wild is your flat screen television, perhaps let the late Timothy Treadwell, who was eaten alive by a brown bear — one among many he claimed to have befriended in the wild — serve as a cau- tionary tale in the milk-and- cookies approach to apex predators. And maybe, somehow, try to muster some empathy for livestock producers whose livelihoods can be severely impacted by wolf predation. If you truly desire to sponsor reasonable dialogue that may ultimately benefit wolves, save your energy for disput- ing the extent to which those claims are true. Conversely, if you believe the only good wolf is a dead wolf, recognize that to others you may sound intellectu- ally impaired, and possibly incapable of adult conversa- tion — which is a nice way of saying hair-trigger dumb. Joining the Shoot, Shovel, and Shut-up crowd makes one sound more like a honky- tonk nitwit than a visionary problem-solver. Perhaps, if you hate wolves, or the idea of wolves, try to accept that “The absence of top preda- tors appears to lead inexo- rably to ecosystem simpli- fication accompanied by a rush of extinctions.” This is known, scientifically, as The Paine Effect, and it is worth studying because it suggests that having wolves around will eventually prove benefi- cial to a parallel goal, which is a healthier ecosystem from which deer, elk, and humans alike will all benefit. And ranchers, who typi- cally live much closer to wolves than the average urban wolf advocate, prob- ably deserve something more generous than didactic lectures about grazing fees when they ride up on a pas- ture of defenseless heifers or ewes ripped apart in the night by wolves. Finally, maybe everyone can avoid taking easy pot- shots at those people tasked with both the execution and enforcement of wolf man- agement — which is like nurturing a mindless hatred for cops because you don’t like traffic laws. Far better, it would seem, to spend that energy becoming an effective member of one of the numer- ous working groups who hammer out wolf manage- ment policy in the first place. Often left out of the dis- cussion altogether is this notable bit: There is evi- dence, from top-down preda- tor studies around the world, that encouraging controlled hunts of apex predators may ultimately help sustain populations of the animal in FUN EVENTS! 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Wherever one might stand on the topic, one thing seems relatively certain: there remains opportunity for all sides to move off of positions often dominated less by reason and research, and more by emotional embellishment and histori- cal prejudice. Like it or not, we know that wolves are coming this way, and so it might be timely to redouble our efforts at understanding what wolves are, and per- haps more importantly, what they aren’t. And while we are bet- ter informing our opinions, maybe we can also keep in mind, as author David Quammen wrote in his excellent study of apex pred- ators, “Monster of God,” that “The universe is a very big place, but as far as we know it’s mainly empty, boring, and cold. If we exterminate the last magnificently scary beasts on planet Earth, as we seem bent upon doing, then no matter where we go for the rest of our history as a species — for the rest of time — we may never encounter any others.” Come On In For Christmas! 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