S6: E22: Erik Molvar: America’s War on Wolves
“Let me tell you, there were no bounties when wildlife management became a discipline and it's never been a part of wildlife management, but, but these are the crazy kooks at the absolute extreme of the hunting spectrum. And they got together and held fundraisers and started giving out thousand-dollar bounties on wolves.”
- Erik Molvar
Erik Molvar is the executive director of the Western Watersheds Project. He was on the podcast recently to talk about the wild horse crisis in the American West. Today, he is back to talk about wolves and the wolf wars that are happening in the West, especially in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.
Erik and the Western Watersheds Project recently authored a petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service that was jointly submitted by 70 conservation and wildlife groups, to relist wolves back on the endangered species list.
And, it made it through the first pass – meaning Fish and Wildlife will initiate a comprehensive status review, but it could last a year or more.
Let’s hope it passes because in the meanwhile it’s open season on wolves.
Learn More About the Western Watersheds Project
Learn More About Erik Molvar
Transcript:
Erik: [00:00:15] Let me tell you, there were no bounties when wildlife management became a discipline, and it's never been a part of wildlife management. But these are the crazy kooks at the absolute extreme of the hunting spectrum, and they got together and held fundraisers and started giving out thousand bounties on wolves.
Elizabeth: [00:00:45] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz, this is Species Unite. On October 1st, Species Unite is starting our 30 day vegan challenge. So if you haven't signed up for it, sign up, go to our website Species Unite and click the 30 day vegan challenge. It's really good. It's 30 days of recipes, tips, information on all things plant based. If you're already vegan, sign up anyway, because it's really good information. If you have no interest in ever being vegan, just do it for 10 days. See what it's like? Go to our website SpeciesUnite.com/challenge. This conversation is with Erik Molvar. Erik is the executive director of the Western Watersheds Project. He was on the podcast pretty recently to talk about the wild horse crisis in the American West. Today, he's back to talk about wolves and the wolf wars that are happening in the West, especially Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Erik and the Western Watersheds Project recently authored a petition to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It was jointly submitted by 70 conservation and wildlife groups to release wolves back on the endangered species list. Since he and I spoke a couple of weeks ago, it made it through the first pass, meaning fish and wildlife will initiate a comprehensive review, which could last more than a year. Let's hope it passes because in the meanwhile, it's open season on Wolves.
Elizabeth: [00:02:39] How are you?
Erik: [00:02:40] Very good, how are you?
Elizabeth: [00:02:41] Really good. Thank you so much for doing this.
Erik: [00:02:43] You bet.
Elizabeth: [00:02:44] You know as much about wolves as you do about wild horses.
Erik: [00:02:48] I know far more about wolves than I know about wild horses.
Elizabeth: [00:02:50] That's right. I mean, wolves
Erik: [00:02:52] I mean, wolves are part of my professional business. I just wrote an Endangered Species Act petition for Wolves.
Elizabeth: [00:02:59] I saw it. It's awesome, too. Let's just start with talking about what was in this country because we had wolves. Then we didn't. Then they got brought back. Will you just kind of give some history so people have an understanding of where we are today.
Erik: [00:03:17] Wolves were originally found throughout the North American continent, and there were hundreds of thousands of them when the first Americans showed up on this continent. As the United States became its own nation and started to expand westward, it functioned under a sort of a theory of manifest destiny in which the westward pioneers would tame the wilderness and subdue the wild creatures. Part of that was eliminating wolves and eliminating grizzly bears and mountain lions and all of the other large carnivores that competed with humans for space and which were found threatening to domestic livestock like sheep and cattle that the settlers brought with them. So during the 1800s, there was a very aggressive campaign on part of primarily the livestock industry to stamp out all the wolves in the United States. Over time, by the early 1900s, they had, you know, more or less succeeded. The last wolf was gotten rid of in Colorado in the 1940s, but basically it was. It was a campaign of extinction by the livestock industry to kind of make the land safe for livestock and domesticate it and kind of dominate nature. So that's a big part of our American kind of colonialist culture. And we cleared away the indigenous people and we cleared away the indigenous wildlife just the same. In order to kind of elbow our way into dominating the landscape.
Elizabeth: [00:04:53] So we had no wolves from like the 40s to the 90s. Is that true?
Erik: [00:04:57] They were pretty well gone. There were a few wolves hanging on in the northern reaches of the far northern reaches of Minnesota, but they were largely extinct in the lower 48 for a large span of years. That was completely intentional. The federal government played a very deliberate role in that. They hired government trappers to go out and trap and kill wolves. One of the really interesting stories in my field, wildlife management, is that Aldo Leopold, who is widely credited as being the father of wildlife management, actually worked down on what was to become the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. He was out there at the same time that the wolves were being shot out by the ranchers and by the fish and game agencies and by the federal agencies. He himself was engaged in that kind of wolf killing and then later came to write a very famous essay in which he opined that, you know, because the wolves were driven extinct, deer become overpopulated. They damaged the ecosystem. Nature got out of balance, and he looks back on his killing of a lone wolf at the end of that extinction event and thinks, you know, maybe nature disagrees with my decision to shoot this animal and the green fire dying in its eyes is maybe the death of nature. He very acutely captured that tragic moment in American history in which we were at war with with nature and really was ahead of his time because, you know, here in the in the American West, in the 21st century, there are plenty of ranchers who still don't get it, who still are trying to drive all the wolves extinct, all the beavers extinct, all of the prairie dogs and every other species that's incompatible with maximizing their profit from cattle and sheep is targeted for elimination.
Elizabeth: [00:06:54] I feel like the majority of the issues you work on at Western watersheds kind of always goes back to the cattle industry.
Erik: [00:07:01] The livestock industry is the most widespread industrial footprint on Western public lands in the United States. Conservationists and environmentalists get really excited about logging because it heavily affects a lot of national forest areas. There are oil and gas fields that get built and strip mines. So imagine that you know that these industrial farms of land use for native wildlife species are getting run over by a Mack truck. But having livestock out there is like having cancer, a chronic disease that's killing you slowly, constantly, everywhere and with which there's no escape. And there are places that are left that aren't developed for oil and gas or for strip mining or for logging out there in the American West. Maybe more than half of our public lands fall in that category. But all of those lands have major ecological problems, and none of those lands, with the exception of maybe Yellowstone, have that original full complement of native wildlife and that kind of abundant diversity. The reason we have that in Yellowstone is that we don't allow industrial uses and we don't allow cattle.
Elizabeth: [00:08:14] You know, I lived in Montana, I went to school in Montana, and I lived in Missoula in the 90s when Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone. That's the one thing I do know about Wolves is when they came back. Will you just talk about how that even happened and all the positives that happened within Yellowstone because of it?
Erik: [00:08:36] I was also in Missoula in the late nineteen eighties, and I remember during that time Les Pengelly was my intro to wildlife management professor. Every spring he took all of the freshmen wildlife biology students out on a tour of Yellowstone because in the eighties, elk were incredibly overpopulated in the northern range of Yellowstone, so much so that the park service was was talking about going out there to shoot them, to cull their numbers down because they were damaging the range and they were lowering the carrying capacity of the park to sustain elk. We went out there in March, which in Montana is still winter. We cross-country ski around from dead elk to dead elk and these majestic seven and six point bull elk. These huge hair masters just died in the middle of winter because they didn't have enough forage to sustain them. Because the elk were overpopulated, the place was clearly out of balance. So ultimately, the park service decided that it was going to reintroduce wolves to bring them back. Of course, back then, as everywhere, the livestock industry and their allies fought tooth and nail to fight that reintroduction and to say that's never going to be successful and it's going to be the end of the world and it's going to be the end of the economy and we're all going to be suffering from all manner of possible bodily injuries and even deaths of humans from these wolves. And of course, that never happened, even though there are three million visitors in Yellowstone every year. But there was a full throated campaign to oppose this, and yet the park service ignored the anti conservationists and moved ahead anyway. What ended up happening was an ecological renaissance. So once the wolves really got established in Yellowstone, they created what became known in science as a landscape of fear in which the elk and other large herbivores were no longer just out there grazing in the middle of the valley floor, wiping out the willows along the streams and having a heavy impact on on the Aspens. They were pushed around. They were pushed into steeper countries. They had to hide from predators. They had to keep moving. So what ended up happening is that it released the vegetation from the heavy pressure that had previously faced that vegetation. So the willows along the stream sides came back. You started seeing Aspen reproduction, you started seeing songbirds coming back to the stream sides. You started to see healthier stream ecosystems. I mean, it had cascading effects throughout the entire ecosystem. Nowadays there have been dozens of scientific studies that have looked at this effect of wolves returning to Yellowstone, having this impact on the native herbivores and pushing them around and creating this ecological rebirth for an ecosystem that was always thought to be pretty natural. But we really didn't understand how badly out of balance it was until the wolves came back.
Elizabeth: [00:11:31] We started with very few wolves right, in Yellowstone at that time.
Erik: [00:11:35] Yes, there were only a few dozen at the outset and of course, the wolves found abundant prey and lots of undeveloped land and set up territories. And now we have, you know, perhaps hundreds of wolves in Yellowstone and they have expanded beyond the borders of Yellowstone. They are there in national forest lands and other undeveloped areas all around the Yellowstone ecosystem. Simultaneously, there was a wolf reintroduction that happened over in Idaho, and that wolf population has increased in those wild mountain fastness’ in central Idaho. You have more than a thousand wolves there as well. Yet at the same time, there has been plenty of conflict between wolves and the livestock industry, particularly whenever the wolves have expanded out into private ranch lands. The ranchers, of course, want to finish the job that their great grandparents started back in the 1800s and drive wolves extinct again.
Elizabeth: [00:12:32] I listened to a podcast, kind of a pro rata podcast, so I can try and understand this whole let's kill all the wolves mentality. They do make it sound very much like all the cattle in the West are being threatened and all the elk. So will you explain exactly what's going on and what spurred this petition that you spearheaded?
Erik: [00:12:58] In Idaho and Montana and Wyomin these are the areas in the West that have the biggest wolf populations. Yet in these areas, the populations of elk today are bigger than they were before the wolves were introduced into Idaho in the Yellowstone. So the idea that the wolves are eating all the elk is an absolute fabrication, a complete myth, a lie that's told to advance a political agenda to get rid of wolves for no other reason than the hate of Wolves. It's not for any kind of scientific reason or any kind of actual real management concern. It's really just people that hate these animals and bought into the European fairy tales about the big bad wolf and feel like it's their duty as an organism to get rid of other organisms that they see as threatening or getting in their way.
Elizabeth: [00:13:54] Was it during the Trump administration that all the bans on how you hunt them got removed, especially in Idaho?
Erik: [00:14:00] Well really, part of it was in Idaho and Montana the laws really got rolling in the legislatures and started to get underway during the Trump administration. But a lot of them were brought into effect under the Biden administration by these states. Certainly, the Biden administration has no control over what state legislatures passed, especially in heavily Republican states. But basically, what happened was that the legislatures in Idaho and in Montana followed the lead of the state of Wyoming and said, we're going to enact the kind of legislation that says we're going to knock Wolves back to the very bare minimum, to one hundred and fifty wolves, that's the very bare minimum that's allowed under the recovery plan. We're going to authorize all kinds of killing methods, not just trapping and snaring, but we're going to authorize things like hunting at night with night vision scopes and hunting from helicopters, things that these agencies wouldn't approve of for any other species of hunted animal. Yet, the wolves get this special treatment, and it all is patterned after the state of Wyoming's approach, in which they designated eighty five percent of Wyoming as an area where wolves would be classified as a predatory animal and that sounds perfectly legitimate, right? Because they are predators. But what that means in the legal sense is that you can kill any wolf at any time without a bag limit, without any seasons. You don't even have to have a hunting license. So it's completely unregulated, wolf killing. It's the opposite of wildlife management because there's no management at all. How many wolves get taken, where they are taken, how their populations are going to survive. The state of Wyoming's idea was we are going to create an extinction zone that spreads across the vast majority of Wyoming, and the only place that wolves will be left are in Yellowstone and Grand Teton and a few wilderness area surrounding those parks and the state of Idaho and the state of Montana, when their legislatures swung to the hard right. They looked at that and said, Hey, we want some of that action too, and we want to create extinction zones for Wolves because many of our conservative ranchers and NASCAR sportsmen want to get rid of wolves and don't want to see them at all. So that's what they did is they created that extinction agenda and they pushed it across the finish line as law and now you have these three states that have the the only really viable wolf populations by population size in the entire West, now have wolf management plans that are completely inadequate regulatory mechanisms under the Endangered Species Act that will not allow the states to manage and control how many wolves get killed. It's completely unlimited.
Elizabeth: [00:16:52] People are getting paid to shoot wolves, right? Here's a thousand bucks.
Erik: [00:16:55] That's right in the state of Idaho, the Legislature approved the money from the taxpayers to pay bounties on on wolves, and this was all started by a very cynically misleading anti-war group called the Foundation for Wildlife Management, and they have nothing to do with wildlife management. Let me tell you, there were no bounties when wildlife management became a discipline, and it's never been a part of wildlife management. But these are the crazy kooks at the absolute extreme of the hunting spectrum, and they got together and held fundraisers and started giving out thousand bounties on wolves in Idaho. Then they announced they were going to expand that into Montana as well, and it's all part of trying to turn the clock back to the eighteen hundreds to reinstitute that extinction agenda.
Elizabeth: [00:17:43] There's not that many cattle or sheep getting killed by wolves, right? The numbers aren't huge.
Erik: [00:17:50] Oh, it's only a few dozen per year in each of these states. There are millions of cattle and sheep in each of these states. So when you say what's the percentage of cattle and sheep getting lost to wolves each year? I mean, the answer is zero point zero zero zero zero zero something. I mean, it's not even measurable. It's a rounding error. Let's also remember that that the ranchers cry bloody murder when a wolf takes one of their livestock. But what are the ranchers going to do with these animals? They're sending them to a slaughterhouse. They're claiming they care about these animals that they're going to send to kill anyway. I mean, to me, there's a certain amount of hypocrisy here.
Elizabeth: [00:18:33] How many people are killed by wolves a year?
Erik: [00:18:39] None.
Elizabeth: [00:18:40] No, I didn't think so.
Erik: [00:18:40] There are a few dozen people that get killed by cattle every year. You know, if you want to go by human deaths, if you want to eliminate a species from the North American continent to make life safer for humans, it's the cows you eliminate. You leave the wolves there because the wolves don't kill anyone. I mean, the number of people who have been killed by wolves over the past century has been, you know, a handful and often rabid animals. So, you know, this is how safe wolves are. To give you an example, I remember one fall afternoon I was hunting in the Alaska range across the Nnanna River from Denali National Park, and I was working my way through an open white spruce woodland and a couple of foxes jumped up. So I looked at them through my scope and of course, I'm not going to shoot a fox because, you know, you can't eat foxes. They ran off down the hill and I continued on, and pretty soon these small animals started setting up this pitiful howling and it wasn't foxes. It was young of the year wolves. Then from uphill, about 30 yards come the howls of the pack howling deep throated, howling within 30 yards of me. So I had wolves in stereo and anyone that spends a lot of time in wild country, especially with grizzly bears, knows you don't want to get in between a grizzly bear and her cub. But here I was between an entire pack of wolves each one, maybe one hundred pounds with bite strengths that could easily do me a lot of damage and their young were on the other side and I was right in the middle and between them I was at no risk at all. In fact, I wasn't even nervous. I looked and I turned in 360 degrees so that I could record that moment for the rest of my life, and I could call it up in memory in exact detail and I've always been able to do that because it was one of the most spectacular moments of natural law that I have ever experienced. But never was I in danger because wolves don't mess with people they are afraid of us. If anything, they'll run the other way.
Elizabeth: [00:20:48] So if they're not killing anybody and they're killing very few cattle and sheep. I don't understand the hatred. Like it just seems so absurd to me that, I mean, this is deep, multigenerational like vicious hatred.
Erik: [00:21:05] Well, you know, I think the wolves have become a symbol of wild, untamed nature. You know, nature that is self-willed and not controlled and managed by humans. I think this is really offensive to the agriculture industry because they don't want anything on the landscape that they don't control, that they don't manage, that's not there by their leave. You know, it's a tremendously privileged type of viewpoint and a tremendously entitled viewpoint in which they feel like they and they alone should determine which species are on the landscape. The answer is only those species that advance the profits of the livestock industry. And I mean, we talked about earlier on your podcast how the livestock industry has it in for wild horses, too. Mean they also have it in for beavers because the beavers build dams that sometimes clog up their culverts on their roads and wash out their roads and they have it in for the prairie dogs, too, because the prairie dogs eat the grass that their cattle eat. So they want to poison all the prairie dogs and it goes on and on and on and on. And you have all these different species that the livestock industry has decided in its own mind that are, you know, unwelcome in their very own habitats that have been invaded by these Euro-American colonizers who I mean, animal agriculture didn't evolve with these landscapes. We're imposing that on these landscapes and with disastrous ecological results.
Elizabeth: [00:22:32] It's just baffling to me, though, because it's not just like they're frustrated or annoyed, it's hatred and it's so political. In the past few years, it's become way more political.
Erik: [00:22:45] Well, it certainly has been and one of the really interesting political outcomes with Wolves has been the ballot initiative to return Wolves to Colorado. During the last election, a ballot initiative was run by the Rocky Mountain Wolf Project. They had to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures just to get it on the ballot and the livestock industry and these far right fringe sportsman's groups started this Stop the Wolf Coalition, and they were putting all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories out in the public press. One of their talking points was, well, wolves carry hydatid disease, and that's going to be harmful to humans. Hydatid disease is, I guess, some kind of a parasite that's transmitted by wolves through their feces, right? So the answer is, well, don't eat wolf species and don't kiss wolves with your tongue and that's how you avoid getting hydatid disease because there are no instances where hydatid disease has ever been documented to be transmitted between a wolf and a person, even from wolves that are in captivity and in close contact with people all the time.
Elizabeth: [00:23:53] It seems like it's about more than just the wolves, the hatred and the politics with this issue.
Erik: [00:23:59] I think in some measure, the wolf hatred is part of a broader kind of hate culture that permeates American politics. I think, you know, whether you like Donald Trump or don't like Donald Trump, I think it's undebatable that when Donald Trump became president, it changed American political norms. There was a certain level of civility that existed in the American political discourse between the Republicans and the Democrats, between the, you know, kind of the neo liberals and the progressives in between all the different ends of the political spectrum. There was a certain amount of, you know, OK, we're going to disagree on policies. We'll try and agree on the facts. We'll try and have our disagreements based on what we think we should do based on these common facts that we all agree on. The rise of Trumpism what it fundamentally did to our culture was it said, number one well you don't have that, we can have our own facts. We don't have to accept the facts that are established by science and things that have become known through long study. We can just throw things out there that are made up and you see this and the wolf issue where the ranchers talk about what an economic disaster wolves are for the cattle industry and how they're going to wipe out all the elk. These are fake news narratives, and that's part and parcel of this broader political move, and it's been facilitated also by social media on both sides of the spectrum. I mean, people get amped up. You don't always know what information you're getting from these sources, and it's not always sourced to a credible, you know, kind of scientific source or a credible historical source. You don't necessarily know if that's a valid fact or not a valid fact, but it gets repeated often enough and people believe it. The wolves are part and parcel and victims of this whole idea that we're no longer going to have a kind of a civil discourse and kind of try and suss out, you know, these are the problems. These are the solutions here. Here's how we can handle these disagreements and these difficulties and come together with things that work for everybody. That's not something that is even being attempted anymore. It's just kind of like lobbing grenades from the fringes often happens.
Elizabeth: [00:26:13] You spared this petition to release wolves on the Endangered Species Act. Will you talk about that a little bit? If that even is that possible to get them listed?
Erik: [00:26:25] Well, certainly it is fully within the discretion of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to issue a new rule, saying wolves are listed not just in the areas where the Trump administration delisted them because there were three states Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, where those wolves were already unprotected previously under the Obama administration, they should be listed throughout their entire Western range and indeed across the entirety of North America. They deserve to be listed, in my view and Western Watersheds project, really, we are focused on the West. We perceived that the wolves in the western states were geographically separated and divided from the Midwestern wolves, so we wanted to focus on that wolf population as a distinct population segment, and we petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under the Endangered Species Act, which the law allows using the best available science that the wolves deserve protection and this was based on a number of different factors. First of all, they're facing a large number of threats and certainly the new extinction agenda from the states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming for the three states that have the largest populations is a major threat to those wolf populations. Then you look at other states and you look at the states of Washington and Oregon, where they're delisted on one side of the state and used to be protected on the other side of the state before the Trump administration delisted them nationwide. Neither of those states have populations that are large enough to be considered viable populations based on the best available science and when you say viable populations, that means they're big enough to have safety from inbreeding, and they're big enough to be robust against the possibility of some kind of stochastic disaster event like a disease outbreak or some major threat of that nature that could wipe out the population and drop it down to the point where wolves would be going extinct through inbreeding and genetic problem. Then when you look at states like California, which now currently has, I believe, three breeding pairs states like Colorado, where there's one breeding pair of wolves states like Utah and Nevada and northern Arizona, where you have an occasional wolf dispersing through but can't even find a mate. To say that wolves are recovered in those states is absolutely absurd. I mean, there's no way you can make an argument based on science. So basically, we're sticking this science in front of the Fish and Wildlife Service and say, Look, this is obvious. The wolves meet the criteria for Endangered Species Act protection, and we in fact do have a number of threats. Most of them are human. We're the biggest threat to wolves, but also we have diseases, there's canine distemper, there's canine parvovirus. There's other kinds of diseases that can have major negative effects on these wolf populations. So even in Yellowstone, where the wolf population is perhaps most secure, you know, with Idaho, Utah and Wyoming hammering away at these wolf populations all along the boundaries of these national parks, you can't count on having enough wolves in the sanctuary of these parklands to survive a disease outbreak, because these different factors that can potentially affect the population size and viability happen, not in isolation, they happen synergistically. That's what drives species extinct. It's usually never one factor, but because you have driven the population down so close to the brink of extinction, it only takes one wrong event to knock them over the edge.
Erik: [00:30:03] That's why we have the Endangered Species Act and that's the real beauty of it. The fact that wolves were delisted in Idaho and Montana and basically in Wyoming the same way by Congress under a congressional rider is an absolute abrogation of the Endangered Species Act, because that's a law that, in its wisdom, Congress passed to say it's going to be science and never politics that is going to determine our Endangered Species Act decisions. By taking that decision away from the scientists and putting it in the hands of Congress people, senators, we don't have any wildlife biologists in Congress. They don't know what the heck they're doing and these are the people who are going to make these wildlife management decisions for a species that's on the brink of extinction. That's absurd. Yet that's what Congress did, back in the late 2000s. It was Senator Tester and it was Senator Simpson from Wyoming. It was Idaho and a Montana senator who, you know, if they had any integrity at all would have said, Well, maybe we ought to choose ourselves because we have a vested interest with all these livestock, you know, lobbies breathing down our necks. Maybe we should just let science determine how we manage wolves. But no, they decided to have the hubris to step in and say, we're going to delist these wolves. And not only that, but the courts aren't going to have any ability to review it and see if it's legal or not.
Elizabeth: [00:31:31] So right now, while this is happening, I mean, wolves are being killed left and right, right?
Erik: [00:31:36] In Montana, the hunting season starts basically this weekend. You know, we're going to see hunters lining up on the boundary of Yellowstone National Park, waiting for Yellowstone wolves to step one foot across that line so they can shoot them. I mean, this is the absurdity of these random and artificial boundaries that we've created on the landscape that now have very legal and life-changing consequences for the wildlife that inhabit these lands. Because, you know, if you're a wolf, the boundary of Yellowstone National Park, you can't see it. You don't know when you're on National Park Lands and then moving out on National Forest, you can't see that difference.
Elizabeth: [00:32:15] And literally, they set five feet outside and they're free game.
Erik: [00:32:20] On one set of lands you're protected, on one set of lands you're not. You've lived your entire life in an area that is close to hunting and in which humans are not a threat. You've grown up, you know, with humans watching you across the sagebrush, not as a threat and you're not you're not ready for this kind of change to now this animal, which before was just part of the landscape and was an innocuous thing, now becomes a deadly threat to your survival. As an animal, you're not ready for that. So it's kind of a sneak attack.
Elizabeth: [00:32:55] What's been the reaction so far to this petition because you get a ton of people behind you on this?
Erik: [00:33:01] Well, certainly we had 70 conservation and animal welfare groups sign on behind us. There was another petition that was also put forward by a handful of conservation groups calling for emergency listing even before our petition. The tribes have come out in a very public way and said, Hey, this is a sacred part of our indigenous cultural ways and needs to be respected and they should be back on the list. The vast majority of Americans support wolves. This is a tiny minority. This number of livestock producers and fringe elements of the sportsman's community. I'm not even going to say hunters because it's not all hunters. There are a lot of hunters that respect wolves and would never shoot a wolf. So with this large and growing American consensus that we need to leave these species alone and let the wild things be and give them the space to be native wildlife and give them the freedom to roam. Then you have these tiny little vested interests. They have an outsized influence on American politics and it's because they're very well organized and in some cases, they're very well moneyed. They've been fielding lobbyists for years on Capitol Hill to try and get their way. So they've been very crafty at being able to dominate the kind of the public, the public conversation in ways that really don't represent any kind of majority of Americans. We found that out in Colorado because when the wolves were on the ballot and the voters in Colorado went to the ballot box, they voted and said, Let's bring Wolves back over the objections of the livestock industry, over the objections of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. It was because those groups do not represent the majority of the population, even in the rural West. That's something that I think the politicians need to start paying attention to because basically they've been fed a fiction all these years that really ranchers speak for the West. They don't.
Elizabeth: [00:35:04] The wolves need to get back on the list, but what needs to happen to make that happen?
Erik: [00:35:08] Well, Western watershed projects and other groups have petitioned them for listing. So what that does is it initiates a mandatory process where the Fish and Wildlife Service first takes a look at all of the science that we brought forward in these petitions and makes a determination of whether there is sufficient science that that listing may be warranted. Not that it is warranted or isn't warranted, but it may be warranted. I think that, you know, it's pretty obvious that these petitions are going to easily cross that threshold. Then once they've made this what's called a positive 90 day finding, which sometimes takes 90 days but usually takes longer, they then must go on to a 12 month finding, which is a final determination. Are we going to list them or are we not? Are they warranted for endangered species protection or are they not warranted, based on the science and the law? Now, interestingly, some of the same people are in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who delisted wolves, and they want to justify that decision. I mean, we had Dan Ashe, the former head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under Obama, came out in a Washington Post op ed piece and said, We need to relist wolves in places like Idaho and Montana. We don't want Wyoming to become like those states, even though Wyoming was where those states got the idea and Dan Ashe was the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director when wolves were delisted in Wyoming. So he doesn't want to admit that he screwed up, but he really did. He made a huge mistake, and it wasn't based on science at all. It was based on appeasing Western governors. It was based on caving in to political pressure from county commissioners and legislators and more often than not, these are extreme right wing figures. They don't represent even the general populace in these states.
Elizabeth: [00:37:00] Is there anything people can do in the meanwhile like at all to push this? Get behind it, support it?
Erik: [00:37:07] Well, you know, I think that what people really need to do is come out in support of wolves in a very public way and direct their decision makers, their representatives in Congress and say, Look, we want these these natural large carnivores to return to Western public lands to those large areas of their habitat that are currently vacant. Where wolves belong, but they're not currently present and by doing this, I think gradually and slowly the entire political conversation in the West is being changed. I think that the fringe elements that hate wolves are gradually becoming outnumbered and marginalized and eventually, it's not going to be a political issue anymore because the Endangered Species Act process and the federal protection of wolves must by law, be the only done solely on the basis of science. So it's not going to be that the public can pressure the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service into listing wolves. But what they can do is they can pressure decision-makers into piping down and stopping the anti wolf histrionics and propaganda that are putting political pressure on the agency not to list the wolves.
Elizabeth: [00:38:28] So to stop the histrionics and the propaganda, wolves need better PR, they need a better story.
Erik: [00:38:34] Well, you know, it's not just that wolves are ecologically important and that they're a key piece of the native ecosystem that helps keep everything in balance. That's only a part of the story. Wolves are really a hot button issue for so many Americans, for a lot of different reasons. I mean, if you look at the indigenous tribes, I mean their cultural heritage and their creation stories and their religious beliefs are closely entwined with the wolf. The wolf plays a prominent role and is an important figure and that's why you see Native American tribes stepping into leadership roles and stepping out and being very eloquent spokespeople on behalf of Wolves. If you think about how many Americans have dogs. Did you know that the subspecies name of the dog is Canis Lupus Domestiques? It's a subspecies of wolf, of course, according to science. We have brought wolves into our homes and they are part of our families in some way. So Americans have a lot of different connections to wolves and it's not just the backpackers and adventurers who want to go out in the mountains and here that kind of spine tingling thrill of wolves howling at sunset. I mean, that's an amazing experience. But wolves are part of America's natural heritage. They're just as important to America as the bald eagle.
Elizabeth: [00:40:03] On top of that, they're incredibly smart animals with really complex social systems. Every time a wolf gets shot by somebody for a thousand bucks, you're like ripping apart a family. Wolves are absolutely incredible.
Erik: [00:40:18] Even as scientific research. When we look at wolves, we see some of the same mammalian behaviors that we as humans have. I mean, they live in family groups just like humans do. They have long lasting relationships. These are not the kind of animals that don't recognize each other and are just randomly bumping into each other on the landscape. They hunt cooperatively. They have teamwork. I remember a story that was once told to me by an Alaska Department of Fish and game biologist who, you know, they had a project that they were actually flying fixed wing aircraft and gunning down wolves to try and increase the number of caribou because they thought back then in the 1980s and early 90s that you could actually increase the number of caribou by shooting the wolves that were out there in the landscape. That turned out not to be true. That was debunked by science. But while they were out hunting these wolves and taking them out by air, they had one particular wolf pack that was focusing its predation on moose. Moose are very difficult prey items. They're dangerous prey. That's why wolves are very cautious about tackling them, much the same as bison. These are animals that stand their ground and fight when confronted by a predator, as opposed to an elk or deer, which would flee. So this particular pack of wolves had created a system in which each individual wolf had a role. One of the Wolves' roles here was the nose wolf, and he would run in and latch onto the nose of the moose and so the moose couldn't rear up on its hind legs and strike out with its hooves. Then another wolf would come in and grab the rear haunches of the moose and weigh those down. Then once the moose was thus encumbered, then the other wolves could come in at the flanks and eventually take out the neck and its fish and extricate the moose and take down this 12 hundred pound animal. What had happened in this aerial gunning is that ADF and G took out the nose wolf and once the nose wolf was gone, that pack could no longer hunt moose because none of the other wolves could step in and be like, the backup nose wolf. None of them knew how to do it. So that pack of wolves switched to caribou and started targeting caribou instead, because caribou are an easier prey item to take down. With all the science and wisdom the ATF and G thought that it was going to increase the caribou population, but in this particular case, they increased caribou predation because they took a wolf pack that was focusing its predation on moose and switched it over to caribou. We think as humans that we're so smart, that we can tinker with the very fine machinery of the natural world. These very complicated interrelationships between organisms. We think we can get in there and kind of monkey with the way that the machine runs. But it's kind of like hiring a dentist to work on your Ferrari. As a professional wildlife biologist who was trained in wildlife management programs, I'm here to tell you, we know a certain amount based on the science on how these ecosystems work, but there is so much more that we have no idea about. That we have yet to learn that we're not ready to come in there and play god.
Elizabeth: [00:43:43] Well, and we're seeing it all over the world like we've every ecosystem we mess with, which is pretty much all of them, we're destroying.
Erik: [00:43:51] And you know, it is true that we have become out of balance with the natural world by thinking that humans ought to be the dominant factor in all natural interactions. So instead of being mutualistic with nature, which was how we evolved to be, we evolved to be muralists. You know, we participate in nature. Nature gives to us. We contribute to nature. We're just part one of many hundreds and thousands of species that is part of a broad natural balance. All of a sudden, we became out of balance because it became all about us as humans, our goals, our profits, our industries, like the livestock industry. Instead of coexisting with the natural world, now we are dominating the natural world. That's why we have a biodiversity crisis that is coming back around to bite us in the rear, and it threatens the survival of our species now. We have to figure out a way to return to that very much earlier time, when we had indigenous people who knew the land, who knew how the interactions worked, were very well connected with the land and knew how to behave with restraint and let nature be nature and not try and control it, but instead learn how to coexist with it in a mutualistic way. That's where humanity needs to go in the next bunch of generations, if we're going to survive as a species and the cost of not learning, that lesson is going to be our own extinction.
Elizabeth: [00:45:25] Erik, it's such an uphill battle and you fight it with such grace and dignity. We're lucky to have you in the world fighting these battles. Thank you.
Erik: [00:45:36] Well, it is my pleasure to be on this program and it's my pleasure to be able to speak on behalf of those who cannot voice their interest in human terms. Nature needs advocates. Nature needs fans. Nature needs people to speak on its behalf because otherwise, in a vacuum, it's all going to come down to the almighty dollar and that's going to be a pretty ugly, sterile and unhappy world for us to live in.
Elizabeth: [00:46:12] To learn more about Erik, to learn about the Western Watersheds Project and to learn more about wolves in this country, go to our website Species' Unite. We will have links to everything we are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare moment and you could do us a favor, we would greatly appreciate it if you rate, review, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you would like to support the podcast, we would greatly appreciate it. Become a member go to Species Unite and click become a member. I'd like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pearce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santina Polky and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening and have a great day.
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