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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
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question. It works, in part,
by bringing vital economic
benefits to communities —
so that, turning the usual
dynamic on its head, the ani-
mal is endowed with intrinsic
value, and so communities
that once carried out eradica-
tion campaigns evolve into
stakeholders in preserving
manageable populations of
the species.
In that scenario, every
reasonable voice in the dis-
cussion gets something of
what they want, and a model
that has proven to work for
bears in Romania, and tigers
in Russia, and the people
who live and work amongst
them, might prove workable
for wolves in America.
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.”
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