By Mary Katherine Ray

From Rio Grande Sierran, March/April 2008

Hundreds of people attended the Mexican wolf scoping meetings in December and thousands wrote a letter advocating for our lobos. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service received over 13,000 comments, and the vast majority of those were in favor of wolf recovery. If you were one of them, thank you! The Service will be reviewing them and will have draft alternatives out in about a year.

Can wolves wait that long?

Photo courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife Service.

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It’s easy to forget that, like wolves, elk were also exterminated from the Southwest. It wasn’t a deliberate persecution with poison and traps, but a consequence of unregulated and relentless hunting. It’s hard to believe, given how common elk are now, that by the early 1900s, there were no more elk in the Southwest. A few decades later, wolves were also cast into the abyss of oblivion with an effective trapping and poisoning program. They and their howls, like elk bugles, echoed no more in our rocky canyons.

In the 1950s elk were brought back to the Gila from Yellowstone National Park. Like wolves, reintroduced elk faced opposition from some ranchers. They compete with livestock for forage and, unlike deer, eat pretty much exactly the same thing cows do. But think how much poorer the landscape would be without elk. Their presence has been a tremendous success story. The sound of bugles in the fall are exhilarating and wonderful. And there is no denying that a huge elk-hunting industry has sprung up, which in some cases offers enough income to allow people to stay on the land who might otherwise have had to get jobs in town. All this would be completely absent if, back then, those few detractors had had their way.

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We hear bad things about wolves from similar detractors today. Just before Mexican wolves were snuffed out forever, the last five in the wild were captured in Mexico and placed into captivity. Only one was female and she was pregnant with a litter by a male who was never captured. She had the litter of the unknown male and later she and one of the other captured males went on to produce offspring. An additional two adults were found in a zoo in Mexico City and two more in captivity at the Ghost Ranch were also determined to be purebred lobos and were added to the breeding program. The entire world population of Mexican wolves is descended from these seven individuals.

These wolves came as close to the brink of extinction as a species can get. But they could be a huge success story, too. Unfortunately, the yearly count has just come in from the Fish and Wildlife Service. Over the entire remote recovery area encompassing 4.4 million acres of Arizona and New Mexico, there are only 52 wolves in the wild today. Only 23 are in New Mexico. All together there are only three breeding pairs. It is not because wolves can’t be successful in their ancestral home. The reason there are so few is that too many are being removed by the very program that is supposed to be recovering them. Twenty-two wolves were either trapped or shot in 2007. Nineteen of those were for depredating on livestock. The other two wandered out of bounds.

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There is an administrative protocol called “standard operating procedure 13” that allows the Fish and Wildlife Service to trap or shoot wolves that have been involved in three livestock deaths in a year. But this protocol is just that – administrative. It isn’t required by the Endangered Species Act, which mandates that wolves be recovered. Clearly, we have to find a better way to mitigate the interaction between wolves and cows so that cows don’t always have the final say. These are animals on land belonging to everyone, and unlike cattle, wolves are a historic part of the biotic community. Cattle should not always be elevated above wolves or any wildlife.

Elk have been a big success, but a prosperous and diverse biotic community needs its predators. Unlike humans, wolves can kill only what they can physically run down: the sick, the old, the injured. Just the presence of wolves causes elk to move around more, resulting in less overgrazing and a positive cascade toward biodiversity all down the food chain. As with elk, we and the landscape would be much impoverished without wolves.

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You can help wolves again by writing to Benjamin Tuggle, Regional Director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, at the New Mexico Ecological Services Field Office, 2105 Osuna NE, Albuquerque, NM 87113; RDTuggle@fws.gov.

Also write Bruce Thompson, Director of NM Game and Fish, at PO Box 25112, Santa Fe, NM 87504; bruce.thompson@state.nm.us.

And write Alfredo Montoya, Chairman of the NM Game Commission, at PO Box 856, San Juan Pueblo, NM 87566; alfredo@nnmc.edu.

Also write Governor Richardson and let him know that enough is enough. This killing of our wolves must stop.

For more information, contact Mary Katherine Ray.

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The Mexican Wolf ("lobo") is the smallest, most rare, and most southern subspecies of Gray Wolf in North America. Its normal range is the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts of Mexico the southwestern United States.

At the beginning of the 20th century, loss of natural prey such as deer and elk caused the wolf to attack livestock. This resulted in intense, successful efforts to eradicate the wolf. It was all but eliminated from the wild by the 1970s and declared endangered in 1976. In 1997, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) began reintroducing Mexican Wolves into the Apache and Gila National Forests of Arizona and New Mexico.

For more information, see the Fish and Wildlife Service Mexican Wolf Recovery Program website.
Also, see the new www.mexicanwolves.org website.

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From Southwest Environmental Center, Feb. 2007

• Wild wolves pose little threat to humans. Here’s a quote from the International Wolf Center:
    "In North America, there have been no verified reports of wolves killing humans. In fact, encounters which have ended in contact between wolves and humans have been rare. With the possible exception of a 1998 incident in Algonquin, incidents seem to have been the result of mistaken identities, defensive reactions, or a person getting between a wolf that was attacking a dog.
    "It is important to keep wolf-human encounters in perspective. Most wolves are not dangerous to humans and there is a greater chance of being struck by lightening or killed by a bee sting than being injured by a wolf. The serious injuries which have occurred were caused by a few wolves that became fearless of humans. Nonetheless, like bears or cougars, wolves are instinctive predators that should be kept wild and respected."
• After several years of modest progress in reintroduction, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) wasted three critical years (2003-2006) by killing and removing Mexican wolves to satisfy special interests. The Mexican wolf estimated wild population of 59 at the end of 2006 was virtually unchanged from the end of 2003 estimate of 55 wolves in the wild, and far below recovery goals.
• The FWS has used a lawsuit which ended in 2005 as an excuse to freeze recovery planning for the lobo since late 2004, and has not announced when it will resume work on a plan to update the existing recovery plan, which was approved in 1982! Twenty-four years of delay is too long.
• Because Mexican wolves are so rare and are descended from such a small number (seven) who were saved from extinction in the 1970’s, scientists have stressed that there is no time to waste in releasing wolves with the right genetic makeup. Every breeding season makes it harder to ensure a maximum diversity and as genetically robust a population as possible.
• The conservation organization Defenders of Wildlife compensates every confirmed killing of cows, horses, or herding dogs at or above full market value, and also pays partial compensation where the depredation was probably caused by a Mexican wolf. The FWS will not even tell Defenders of Wildlife when and where the depredations take place—making it almost impossible to implement preventive measures for a particular allotment.

Printable copy of this fact sheet.

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