S8. E5: Suzanne Asha Stone: Coexistence
"We are fed things like Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs and, you know, we grow up on this stuff, that the wolf is the big, bad character. And what the real wolf is like is so totally different," - Suzanne Asha Stone
A couple of months ago, we did a series on wolves. The episodes focused on the massacre of entire wolf populations in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. At the time, I said that we did enough wolf episodes. But the truth is we didn't do enough because wolves are still not on the endangered species list in those states.
Until they are, I don't think I can shut up about what we're doing to wolves, it’s egregious and it’s devastating.
Suzanne Stone has been on the front lines of wolf restoration in the Western USA for her entire career, since 1988.
In 2008 she founded the Wood River Wolf Project to demonstrate that wolves can coexist with sheep operations on national forests when adequate nonlethal deterrents are consistently applied.
She is a member of the IUCN Canid Specialist Task Force, the world’s chief body of scientific and practical expertise on the status and conservation of all canid species and is also the Executive Director of the International Wildlife Coexistence Network where she is now helping to protect wolves and other imperiled wildlife with communities around the world.
Suzanne has proven many times over many years that proactive non-lethal coexistence methods work. Yet for some insane reason, the slaughter continues.
“If we keep going, if this is allowed to keep going, eventually we will have zero wolves. There's no way that this can be sustained. It's just brutal.” – Suzanne Asha Stone
Please listen and share.
In gratitude,
Elizabeth Novogratz
Learn More About Wood River Wolf Project
Learn More About International Wildlife Coexistence network
Transcript:
Suzanne: [00:00:15] We are fed things like Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs, and we grow up on this stuff that the wolf is the big, bad character and what the real wolf is like is so totally different.
Elizabeth: [00:00:37] Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novogratz. This is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask. If you like today's episode and you have a spare minute, could you please rate and review Species Unite on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts? It really helps people to find the show. A couple of months ago, we did a series on Wolves. They focused on the massacre of entire wolf populations in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. At that time, I said I had done enough wolf episodes. But the truth is, we didn't do enough because they're still not on the endangered species list in those states. Until then, I don't think I can shut up about what we're doing to wolves, because it’s absolutely horrific. So this conversation today is with Suzanne Stone. Suzanne has worked with wolves for her entire career. But since 2008, when the Wood River Wolf Project began, her career really became about solutions. The Wood River Wolf Project is a collaborative of community members, livestock producers, wildlife NGOs and county, state and federal agencies. They're working together to use proactive and non-lethal deterrence to minimize conflicts between livestock and wolves. It's really nice to meet you.
Suzanne: [00:02:18] Nice to meet you too.
Elizabeth: [00:02:20] So I did a lot of episodes on Wolves this spring, and I spent time in Idaho and Montana, Wyoming, and I saw some wolves. Then I said, okay, I'm finished. Like, I've been talking about wolves so much that I'm starting to drive people crazy, I think. But, you know, I can't stop talking about wolves and to talk to you is like a great honor. I'm really happy to have you on, so thank you.
Suzanne: [00:02:49] Oh, no, it's my honor. Thank you for having me and still talking about wolves, because, you know, I didn't think that we would be talking about wolves in this kind of manner 30 some odd years after starting to work on them. I never thought I would live to see bounties back on wolves, people killing pups and dens, just the horrendous way that Idaho is treating its wolf population right now. I didn't think that I would ever see that again in my lifetime that, you know, we'd go back to these barbaric 19th century eradication practices. So I'm really grateful that you're still talking about wolves.
Elizabeth: [00:03:27] I can't believe it either, because I talk about pretty much all animals that we are terrible to, which is pretty much all animals. But the wolf thing I think in particular makes me insane because not that there's logic to what we’re doing to many animals anyway, but with the wolf thing, there's zero. There's so little that they're doing to harm humans, the planet, cattle even. The fear and the hatred are so big and it seems almost metaphorical for so many other political issues happening in this country, which we won't get into. But it is, it's kind of like humanity at its absolute worst. So I've been learning about you. First of all, I learned about the first time you saw a wolf. Will you talk about that?
Suzanne: [00:04:18] The first time I actually saw a wolf was in Texas when I was 17 years old. I didn't know what I was looking at. I knew it wasn't a coyote or a big dog, and I knew it was out in the middle of nowhere and that was incredible. It started my curiosity of wolves at that point.
Elizabeth: [00:04:36] You saw a red wolf right in Texas, and there weren't really any red wolves left when you saw this wolf.
Suzanne: [00:04:42] No, there weren't any known ones, no. They estimated the population had been decimated by that point and that they knew of no ones left in the wild. But the red wolves have an exciting story and that in the last few years they've documented this red wolf canine not far from where I saw them, the one and they found whole packs of them at this point. But it's just fascinating that they could have survived under our noses for this long. Texas is known for its big, wide open deserts and things like that, but it also has vast areas like brush land and Big Thicket areas and, you know, you could hide quite a bit.
Elizabeth: [00:05:27] You seeing this, Wolf, though, this is kind of what spurred your whole life, right?
Suzanne: [00:05:33] Yeah, it was incredible. Just seeing that intelligence in his eyes and then being a big dog person because I've, you know, grew up with dogs and I just wanted to know more. I was frustrated that I couldn't find out anything more. You know, back then there really weren't very many books out about them, very few stories that weren't negative. So, you know, it's really changed a lot since I was a teenager. But then my first time experience of going out, howling for wolves, trying to find them here in Idaho was also just bizarre. I mean, we went out with the US Fish and Wildlife Service Wolf, coordinator for the whole region and it was my first time out with the big boss, right? You know, as an intern he was teaching me how to do howling and we were going up these areas in the back country where people have been reporting seeing wolves. So there was a real chance of having our first wild wolves respond. So my first time to go to Hell Solo, I got out one howl and thought, Well, that's pretty good. Then the second howl about midway through we had rifle bullets, whistles, ding right over the top of our heads. So one of the camps close by, one of the hunting outfitters, just picked up a rifle and shot toward the road and couldn't see us, but was thinking that he was shooting at a wolf. It was just a wild introduction to just how difficult it is for them here in the West.
Elizabeth: [00:07:12] Well, and how difficult it would be for you for the next 30 years in the sense of what you're up against, right?
Suzanne: [00:07:20] Yeah. I went in with eyes wide open at that point.
Elizabeth: [00:07:22] This was before reintroduction.
Suzanne: [00:07:24] Before the reintroductions wolves have been part of the historic native species for Idaho. But they had been eradicated in the 1920s, 1930s. So after years of poisoning campaigns and things like that, they were gone as far as we knew.
Elizabeth: [00:07:41] And back then I was thinking about this because I've talked to a lot of wolf people and a lot of them are wildlife biologists. But you couldn't really study wolves, could you, at that point? Like, we didn't have any.
Suzanne: [00:07:54] We had a few in northwestern Montana that had come in from Canada, so there were a few. But I chose a different path. I was studying biology at that time, but then also my mentor named Jay Gore from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, he was wonderful and he said, you know, we've got wolf biologists out there, biologists out there that are just tripping over each other. There's so many of them. But what we really need is somebody that understands human nature. So please think about really diving deeply into the human nature aspects of it. I thought, Oh, that's the last thing I want to study is people. But, you know, I'm here because I love these wolves, these like, you know, but you could actually help. So I went into wildlife management and then conflict resolution and really did start studying the human aspects of this whole thing. So it's helped me a lot. I still appreciate my biology background, but that was also really good advice.
Elizabeth: [00:08:57] Yeah, well, in terms of what you've accomplished as well, you kind of needed it, I think, right?
Suzanne: [00:09:02] Yeah, definitely did.
Elizabeth: [00:09:04] Up until you started the Wood River Wolf project, what were you doing?
Suzanne: [00:09:08] Right after my internship, I started working on educational outreach and doing so I did school programs for probably 50,000 students and adults throughout the region. Then got tagged into the team that went to Canada to capture the wolves and do the reintroduction for Yellowstone and for central Idaho. So I was actually on the ground up in Canada catching wolves and helping care for them and then helping with the release down on this end and that was thrilling to be part of that whole effort.
Elizabeth: [00:09:42] And was there a ton of resistance then as well with all of this, with the reintroduction?
Suzanne: [00:09:47] Yeah, it was a bit scary. We had science up around we went up through salmon one of the years for when we did the release in Salmon, Idaho, they had signs up that said, kill all the wolves and all the people who brought them here. You know, it was just it was tense. We had law enforcement with us. I remember I was riding in the, we had a long line of vehicles and at the front of that little convoy that was taking the wolves into the backcountry, was a really good law enforcement officer that I knew and trusted well. He was like, you know, we're going in first so if anybody up ahead actually does start shooting, they're going to shoot at us first. I remember looking back behind us and looking at all the vehicles and considering who was in them and thinking, you're the only person that has a gun to shoot back. So I'm staying with you, you know, and we didn't run into the what they thought was going to potentially be an armed resistance, but it was still you know, we knew that there were certain people that were very angry and thought that these were just monsters that we were bringing in, had no idea why we would try to restore a species like this, thought we were part of a big government plot. I mean, it was just the misinformation about it that was so extreme. So it was a challenge.
Elizabeth: [00:11:07] Fake news was going on even way back then.
Suzanne: [00:11:10] Oh, yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:11:12] You bring the wolves back, which is miraculous that this even happened, right? Like so many things had to kind of work and fall into place for this to happen and all of a sudden landscapes start to change. Yellowstone changes a whole lot. When that started happening, was there like an awareness around it? Were people excited about it?
Suzanne: [00:11:33] They were very excited about it. So there were a ton of people that went to Yellowstone. We were just overwhelmed by the amount of interest in the wolves and how many millions of dollars it was bringing into the local economy. You know, it was a new season for a lot of the people in the Yellowstone region, especially because people just didn't visit the park during the wintertime. Now there's a lot of visitors during the wintertime because the wolves are very active then and easier to see. So we now have four seasons of tourism occurring. But you know, beyond that, it was also that even though there were conflicts, you know, where we occasionally have, you know, sheep lost or cows lost. It was not the end of the world scenario that many people had expected and that was good because it gave people a chance to kind of catch their breath, learn from the wolves directly what living with them was like. A lot of people just realized that their fears had been overblown and so things did calm down for quite a while. The ranching community, where they used to come out for hundreds for meetings, we would see meetings where there were two or three, you know, that would show up. And it was a lot more manageable, I think, the conflicts were a lot more manageable than what people had anticipated. There were even Western senators who had predicted children being killed at bus stops and things like that before the release of the wolves and of course, wolves didn't bother any people. They didn't attack anyone, certainly not kids. So I think people are starting to realize that there's a big difference between our perception of wolves because we are fed things like Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs, and we grow up on this stuff that the wolf is the big, bad character. What the real wolf is like is so totally different. So it was good to see people starting to adjust to having them on the landscape again.
Elizabeth: [00:13:44] How long did this harmony last?
Suzanne: [00:13:46] I'm not sure harmony would be how I would describe it. You know, the tolerance was pretty high. I did a lot of research on just talking to ranchers and doing survey work with them and finding out what they were concerned about. It was pretty stable up until about, I guess about ten years ago. About that time it was when wolves lost their protection under the Endangered Species Act. There were these new hunting groups, but they were much more extreme than the older hunting groups. So whereas the older groups really talked about things like ethics and how important it was for biodiversity and that they were part of conservation efforts and things like that. This new group seemed to be more about guns. You know, the bigger the better guns, the more of them, the bigger trucks, you know, ATVs and killing. You know, it wasn't about the hunting experience anymore. It was really about, you know, how many animals were killed. So it just really changed, the narrative within the hunting community changed a lot.
Elizabeth: [00:15:05] When did it get specifically just horrific in terms of like you can shoot wolves in their dens.? The rules all went away, especially Idaho, but Montana and Wyoming?
Suzanne: [00:15:14] A year ago. Yeah, a year ago. It was through the state legislature and they didn't ask for facts, didn't look for information outside of their own imagination and rumor, fairy tales, I mean, all of that. It just like it fed on this hyper fear and propaganda that was being spread within the state legislature here in Idaho and I think Montana to some degree as well. There was just nothing there to stop or to be a counterbalance to that. So there was no information that they would even consider the scientific parts of the issues or how many actual livestock losses had occurred. I mean, the state of Idaho is now spending millions of dollars to protect what amounts to about thousands of dollars worth of cattle and sheep, millions of dollars to kill wolves so that they can protect thousands of dollars of sheep and cattle. And it's like it doesn't make sense economically. It certainly isn't the best method because we know that the non-lethal tools are much more effective at protecting livestock and they're more economical. So if you really wanted to protect livestock, you would do it proactively with these non-lethal measures to avoid having losses to wolves and bears and mountain lions and all the other critters that we live with. But there's just this blatant refusal that it's better to kill wolves than to do anything else to actually protect livestock.
Elizabeth: [00:16:50] Is the ranching community still really anti Wolf, or is it more now extreme hunters or both?
Suzanne: [00:16:56] You know, I'm not sure that the ranching community has gone full swing this way, but the hunting community definitely has. I don't recognize them from the hunters, from my youth that talked about things like fair chase and ethical hunting and giving back to the environment and the experience of being out in nature, being the most valuable part of the reason that they hunted. You know, this is about something totally different. It's about killing. It's just changed so much and, you know, concerns me for the people that are being raised in that kind of environment, the children, especially, because, you know, if you don't have the counterbalance of what is fair chase and what is the animal's right to be out there as well, and respect for the environment, for nature, for those animals, then you stand a really good chance of losing them. It's really different. The hunting community, you know, has gone one way. The ranching community, I think, hasn't budged much from the leadership within the ranching community and has always been pretty anti wolves. They definitely stimulated last year's anti wolf legislation. So they were at the table working with the more extreme hunting groups to get that done.
Elizabeth: [00:18:14] Talk about the Wood River Wolf project, because that's with ranchers pretty much, right? But how did this even start?
Suzanne: [00:18:21] Well, making friends with people on the other side and just really listening to people and trying to find out, you know, is there an opportunity for meeting halfway? So when in Blaine County, we had our first pack of wolves and the locals were treating it like Yellowstone, where they'd go out with their spotting scopes and watch these wolves play at the den with their pups. We're so excited about having a local community of wolves there and then a sheep truck pulled up with another rancher's operation, and a few thousand sheep were unloaded in the same meadow where the wolves were raising their young. Within 48 hours, we had dead sheep, dead livestock guardian dogs, and the wolves were on the chopping block. The official service was going to use Lethal to remove the pack because of the conflict.
Elizabeth: [00:19:18] I mean, that is so unfair, first of all, that you put the sheep right where the wolves are.
Suzanne: [00:19:23] On public land, federal public land. So we're like, okay, what can we do? Let's reach out to the rancher. Let's see if he'd be willing to try these non-lethal tools. So we had a dear friend, Rick Williamson, from the Wildlife Services here in Idaho, and he was a Wildlife Service’s investigator, and he was one that developed a conscience about killing wolves and was just suddenly really appalled by what was going on and became very dedicated to trying to find and use and develop non-lethal measures so that ranchers could peacefully coexist with wolves. I was one of his early supporters and tried to get things like that, turbo flattery. He actually invented the turbo flattery. Flattery’s have been around for generations, but he was the one that electrified it and really helped make it become a non-lethal tool, which is just a type of fencing that works really well in certain situations.
Elizabeth: [00:20:22] And is that with the flags? So it's like fences with colored flags.
Suzanne: [00:20:26] Yeah. It looks like, you know, it should be strung up around a used car parking lot. You know, it just doesn't look like it's scary at all unless you're a wolf and it turns out that, you know, that they don't like the stuff very much at all. But it came originally from the area near Poland and East Germany, where villagers would set up their clothing in strips on big ropes, and they would use it to try to catch or scare wolves into a certain area so hunters could kill them. At the time, the real belief around even in the wolf circles from the scientists, both nationally and internationally, was that you couldn't use these methods on a wide scale. You could do it in a pasture or very small situation on a ranch, but never on this big wide scale across public lands. That was the going thought of the day. I mean, it was in all the scientific literature and stuff. So we did a little review, looked at that literature and just went, okay, they're all saying this won't work, but I don't see a single example where anybody tried it. So why don't we try it? We'll get the flattery up. We'll put out those sheep corrals at night, and see if it works.
Elizabeth: [00:21:34] How did you try it?
Suzanne: [00:21:36] So we put the sheep in these night corrals at night and then the agency said that they would give us time to try it and if we had another problem, then the wolves would die. So we put them in the sheep at night and behind this flattery line, it's a flattering enclosure and we electrified that. Then one of the herders watched as a wolf came chasing out of the woods after a sheep, and the sheep ran into the flattery enclosure and the wolf put his brakes on and just went, Yeah, not going there and turned around and ran the other way. At that point that herder was completely convinced that this stuff works. So we had buyers from the herders and for the rest of the grazing season that summer, we didn't have another sheep loss at all, even though wolves were right there. You could hear from the sheep camp. At the end of this, the community and the producers we all got together for a meeting and we said, look, it works, you know? And they're like, Great, do it again next year. So we set up a three year demonstration project which turned into a seven year demonstration project and now we're going on year 15. Out of 20,000 sheep in our project area every year on rugged national forest terrain, we lose on average about just under five sheep a year, which is the lowest loss rate of anywhere where we have wolves and sheep overlapping because predators do like to prey on sheep, but they're one of the easiest animals in the world to prey on. But this is such a low loss rate that the ranchers are like, you know, this works better than the lethal, because even if you're taking packs of wolves out, you're still going to end up losing a lot more sheep than using these non-lethal measures proactively.
Elizabeth: [00:23:19] Okay. So my first question, and I'm sure this is everybody's first question, why isn't every rancher out there doing this?
Suzanne: [00:23:27] It's a good question. You know, and there are a lot of ranchers who are doing it. I think that there's either a disconnect between people, their understanding of how well this works, distrust of something that they haven't done or tried before, or they simply just want to kill wolves. It doesn't seem like there's really many other answers besides that. You know, the tools are there. There's equipment available for them. There's funding to be able to do it. and yet the buy-in is really low. So at some point, we've got to realize as a nation that it's easier for these ranchers to pick up the phone and demand that the wolves be killed than it is for them to order turbo flattery or ask for help and putting deterrents out around their sheep or clean up carcass pits or all of those things. So we've made it so easy because we subsidize the killing and we rarely subsidize the actual solutions.
Elizabeth: [00:24:32] I mean, it should be a requirement if you're going to have your sheep on public lands, this is how you do it.
Suzanne: [00:24:37] Yeah, it should be.
Elizabeth: [00:24:38] So I don't know if you know the answer to this, but in terms of how many ranchers there are, you know, percentage wise, how many are doing coexistence type work?
Suzanne: [00:24:50] It's growing and there's a national agricultural statistics service that has the survey that it sends out every five years to the ranching community. So both the sheep producers and the cattle producers are and are reporting that they are investing more in the non-lethal, that they're learning more about it, that that trust is growing. But it's slow.
Elizabeth: [00:25:12] Too slow, especially right now. You've literally changed the game for the ranchers that are using it and you're doing work with other animals in other countries and will you talk about that a little bit?
Suzanne: [00:25:23] Yes. So, gosh, a lot of our methods are ones that can work with coyotes, bears, mountain lions. I was talking about this project in different places like Australia, Europe and Africa. People were like, wait a minute, you know, we could take some parts of what you're doing and use it in our project area and maybe it'll work with Dingo or maybe it'll work with wolves in Israel or wherever. So we've started finding each other and coexistence is a movement within wildlife conservation that has really been only active for the last decade or so. So before then you never heard that word. And it is just very rare for people to focus on this part of it. So it's been great to have people not only learning from our project, but teaching us. So we've been able to add new tools to our system as well.
Elizabeth: [00:26:22] I mean, it's awesome and it's funny because I think, like, for centuries or eons, coexistence was the only way we did things, right. Then we went the other way.
Suzanne: [00:26:33] Then we forgot. Now we forgot about our roots. Then there's places in the world where you can still go and see, like, you know, Turkey and in Israel, some of the old farming methods, certainly in Albania and other places. I mean, they're still using livestock guardian dogs in a way that works with wolves.
Elizabeth: [00:26:57] When you talk about the dogs, do the dogs really help?
Suzanne: [00:27:00] The dogs can help. They can actually cause a problem, too. So knowing how and when to use the dogs is super important. The dogs, I mean, to wolves dogs are funny looking wolves. If you look at just the genetics, right? That's what they are. They're funny looking wolves. Right. They share 98% of the same genetic material. So it's like in the springtime, the biggest threat to a wolf, to their litter of pups when they only have one litter per year is strange wolves. So if you introduce dogs into their area, near their den site, their first reaction is to be very aggressive in defending their young, which is what happened that first year. They weren't trying to prey on the dog. They were just freaked out that the dog was going to come in and kill their pups and that does happen with strange wolves. So we try to make sure that the herders and the ranchers understand that any other time of the year the dogs are great because they do resemble strange looking wolves. And strange looking wolves are something that wolves tend to avoid any other time of the year. They just work their best to avoid them and it's rare for us to see dogs being lost outside of that spring denning season and when the pups are really little, when they go to the rendezvous site. So at one time of year, we want to make sure there's other deterrents in place that protect the dogs and that they don't go on top of the dense sites where the wolves are trying to raise their young and then the other times of the year to make sure that that we are using the dogs three or four or five dogs together, which resembles a wolf pack. So, yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:28:39] Before we go, I just want to talk about the Idaho situation a little bit, because I think it's the worst, right? Out of anywhere?
Suzanne: [00:28:47] I think it's the worst place in the world to be a wolf right now.
Elizabeth: [00:28:49] And there's not even that many wolves left considering how big Idaho is.
Suzanne: [00:28:55] We have somewhere between three and 5000 mountain lions in our state. 20,000, 25,000 black bears, 50,000 coyotes, over a quarter million deer and over 100,000 elk and stuff. I mean, we have a lot of wildlife here and we have less than probably less than 1000 wolves left and we don't know how low that number is going. The state is using a monitoring method that is scientifically disproven to be that it's not effective at counting populations. So we don't know and the state doesn't know, as far as we can tell, how many wolves we have left. Like last year alone, they killed 500 wolves. And those are just the ones that we know of. Not illegal kills as well. There's a bounty on wolves now up to $2,500 per wolf and that bounty applies to even pups in the den. So it's horrific.
Elizabeth: [00:29:57] And is it all year round? Is it an open season kind of thing, almost?
Suzanne: [00:30:01] All year round. Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:30:02] So very well. Idaho could have zero wolves at some point.
Suzanne: [00:30:07] If we keep going. Yeah. If this is allowed to keep going, eventually we will have zero wolves. There's no way that this can be sustained. It's. It's just brutal. It's four times the amount of bounty that led to the wolves initial eradication from the West. So we have tools now. Back then, they used poison, but they didn't have high powered weapons. They didn't have these kinds of traps and snares that are so effective. They've got bloody gripping traps now. I mean, the tools they're using are so far advanced from what they had, they're even using drones to search out for wolves. So it's night scopes, you know.
Elizabeth: [00:30:49] So they don't have a chance.
Suzanne: [00:30:51] They don't have a chance. If they keep going this way.
Elizabeth: [00:30:54] And there's a possibility of that, they'll get back on the endangered species list sometime next year. I mean, is that really a possibility?
Suzanne: [00:31:03] The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has agreed that they deserve consideration for listing back under the Endangered Species Act, and they're supposed to come out with their decision in September. At that point, they'll open up a comment period that allows the public to get involved and to comment on this. There will be lawsuits, I'm sure, you know, regardless of which decision and how soon they make it. But it could conceivably be several years before we see wolves back under the safety net of the Endangered Species Act.
Elizabeth: [00:31:34] Which means the wolves could pretty much be gone by the time that happens.
Suzanne: [00:31:38] I hope they're not gone.
Elizabeth: [00:31:40] I hope not.
Suzanne: [00:31:40] You know, we even saw a deep impact of the Yellowstone wolves this year. Like I think close to a third of the wolves from Yellowstone were baited out of the park by hunters and killed. It's never happened before. So it's not just Idaho that's being hyper aggressive. It's Montana following in Idaho's footsteps. It's also Wyoming, nearly 90% of the state where you can shoot a wolf on site any time you want. So it's not a recovery. We were always told that the delisting of wolves in the region that was taken on by the Fish and Wildlife Service was a recovery. At this point, that recovery is completely threatened. So if the service doesn't take action now, Deb Holland, Secretary Holland, could tomorrow sign an emergency listing, which they promise to do as part of the delisting. I mean, they have it in writing as part of the 2009 regulatory rule that they passed, that if a state passed a law allowing unlimited and unregulated killing of wolves, that they would immediately pursue an emergency listing. And that's been a year.
Elizabeth: [00:32:52] That she's not doing it and she's kind of like arms spent behind her back and politically. You know, because I keep saying, like, why don’t you just sign the damn thing? And everyone tells me, well, she can't. She can, though.
Suzanne: [00:33:08] She can, you know, it's 180 days. It buys a little time and especially time that, you know, to get us through to the next political season where the states could decide to back off a little bit and just start re-embrace a responsible management. But there's no reason that I can see that wolves that they've waited this long.
Elizabeth: [00:33:34] When did you start doing this? In the eighties. So how many years is that? 40 years you've been doing this.
Suzanne: [00:33:40] Close to it. Yeah.
Elizabeth: [00:33:41] This is it, right? In terms of how bad things get.
Suzanne: [00:33:45] I've never, never thought I'd live to see this because, I mean, it's it's one thing, you know, having wolves hunted and, you know, all the things we had to accept of having them back on the landscape where they came from, they were being killed as well within Canada, but nobody had ever tried to completely eradicate the species. I think that our state is doing that with this denial. I mean, they keep saying that despite killing 500 or more wolves a year, that the population remains unchanged. And we know that that's not true, that scientifically that's been proven time and again. If people kill up to a third of the population or more, the population will decline. They're reporting no declines now for that kind of aggressive killing for five years. So we don't know what's left of the wolf population. We know that there are some wolves left, but it does not make any sense to wait, especially now.
Elizabeth: [00:34:45] Yeah. And is there anything people outside of Deb Helen can do?
Suzanne: [00:34:52] There is a comment period that's open that the Fish and Wildlife Service is still accepting public comments on their website. If people feel compelled to write to them, if there's any information that they have specific studies that they'd like to share, anything about human psychology, I mean, all kinds of stuff they need to be looking at this from a social science perspective as well as the biological. I think that's my biggest concern, is that they're taking this the state of Idaho's word, that the population is just fine, and we know that that's not true. So the service needs to do a deeper dive and really examine what kind of methods are being used to monitor the population and just how unreliable they are and how much political pressure there is right now to kill wolves in the state.
Elizabeth: [00:35:45] Yeah, I'm sorry.
Suzanne: [00:35:47] I didn't expect it to be this rough at this end, but we're not giving up. We don't give up.
Elizabeth: [00:35:52] Good. We need you not to give up.
Suzanne: [00:35:55] But thanks so much for sticking with this issue, because people need to know. We need to demand that our public lands actually be representative of our own values at this point in time. As an American people, I don't think that we value having pups killed in their dens and this type of slaughter going on. We need to also demand that the ranching industry use good stewardship methods that are common sense. That cost will cost us less in terms of the overall funding that goes into sustaining and supporting the livestock industry on public lands. I mean, we pay for a lot of that and shouldn't our money be going into non-lethal, proactive, sustainable methods as opposed to just killing wildlife, that should be something that we all demand.
Elizabeth: [00:36:41] Absolutely.
Suzanne: [00:36:42] Thank you for raising that awareness.
Elizabeth: [00:36:44] Yeah, thank you very much. To learn more about Suzanne, to learn about the Wood River Wolf Project and to learn about the International Wildlife Coexistence Network, go to our website SpeciesUnite.com. We will have links to everything, including petitions and calls to action on how you can help stop the massacre of wolves. We are on Facebook and Instagram, @SpeciesUnite. If you have a spare moment and could do us a favor, please subscribe, review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps people find the show. If you would like to support Species Unite, we would greatly appreciate it. Go to our website, SpeciesUnite.com and click Donate. I would like to thank everyone at Species Unite, including Gary Knudsen, Caitlin Pierce, Amy Jones, Paul Healey, Santana Polky, Bethany Jones and Anna Connor, who wrote and performed today's music. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful day.
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