From Near Extinction to Common Pest in 50 Years

It is hard to describe the destruction of American wildlife between 1850 and 1900.

By 1850 all the Elk had been shot out in the East, the Forest Bison pushed into complete extinction, the Wolf extirpated from everywhere in the East but the Maine woods.

Between 1850 and 1900 the great herds of Plains Bison were cut down to within a few hundred animals of extinction, White Tail Deer and Wild Turkey were virtually extirpated along most of the Atlantic seaboard, geese and ducks of every type were slaughtered in dizzying numbers by shrapnel fired from cannon used by market hunters, and the beaver had simply vanished from every state East of Ohio. The Carolina Parakeet and Passenger Pigeon were gone, as was the Eskimo Curlew -- birds which once numbered in the millions.

The turn around in American wildlife populations began with passage of the Lacey Act in 1907, which banned market hunting.

A critical turn around in the fortunes of wild geese and duck occurred in 1935 when live decoys -- wild birds that had been trapped and made flightless with pinned or clipped wings -- was made illegal.

It looked like the ban on live decoys had come too late for some species, however. One of those species was the Giant Canada Goose which was thought to be extinct -- or nearly extinct -- in the wild.

The good news is that while there were almost no wild Canada Geese left, captive decoy goose populations still existed. With the 1935 ban on the use of decoy geese, most of these animals were released into marshes and onto ponds. Unable to fly, many of these animals quickly fell prey to fox and dogs, but some managed to grow back their feathers or live long enough to reproduce.

During World War II and into the 1950s, the descendants of once-captive Giant Canada Geese slowly multiplied in remote marshes and isolated ponds. While a natural recovery seemed to be occurring, these descendants of once-captive geese were largely non-migratory since, after three or four generations in captivity prior to 1935, they no longer had any "lead geese" to show them the way North.

In the 1960s the Giant Canada Geese population remained so low across the U.S. that it was considered extirpated in most states and near-extinct in the wild. In order to prevent extinction, a systematic effort was made to captive-raise Giant Canada Geese and introduce small flocks back into areas where they had once existed.

The introduction of Canada Geese was a phenomenal success. Absent hunting and disease, small flocks of Canada Geese grew by 10 to 20 percent percent a year -- a population doubling time of just 3 to 7 years time.

In a relatively short period of time, states saw a phenomenal growth in their Giant Canada Goose populations. Ohio, to cite on example, began with just 20 captive-raised birds in 1956, but by 2002 had a population of over 140,000 birds. Today almost all the geese you see in the Eastern U.S,. and Midwest are Giant Canada Geese.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates the current resident Giant Canada Goose population of the U.S. at 4 million birds and growing rapidly, with a small number of truly migratory Giant Canada Geese still found in the mid-Atlantic flyway.

Giant Canada Geese have also been introduced into other parts of the world, most notably Europe, where they are also thriving.

The "goose problem" today is not extinction but an over-abundance of geese in areas where heavy population densities may inconvenience golfers and cause eutrophication of farm ponds.

A boom in geese populations, however is not too bad a problem as problems go, and it has certainly been a benefit for fox which frequently raid Canada Goose nests in order to feed rapidly growing kits.

The rise of Canada Geese has also created a boom in sport hunting which now pumps hundreds of millions of dollars a year into rural economies. No one has benefited more from the demise of commercial market hunting than the sport hunter.

With the demise of market hunting, and with the assistance of capable wildlife managers, the Giant Canada Goose has returned, as has the wild turkey, the beaver, the bison, the elk, white tail deer, alligator and even the wolf. Truly, these are the good old days.



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Clash of Opinions is Actually a Clash of Knowledge

In Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality and Wildness in America, David Peterson notes that back in 1978 Yale University behavioral scientist Stephen Kellert authored a paper entitled "Attitudes and Characteristics of Hunters and Antihunters" in which he summarized his research into the psychology and world-view of these two opposing groups of people.

Kellert breaks hunters down into three core groups:

Utilitarian-meat hunters;
Domination-sport hunters, and;
Naturalist-nature hunters.

Kellert notes that while the groups blur a little at the edges, these three psycho-demographic groups do exist, and represent striking differences of attitude within America's hunting population.

Utilitarian-meat hunters represent about 44 percent of all American hunters. This group tends to talk of "harvesting" game as a renewable resource and many have a "pioneer spirit" forged in self-sufficiency. As a group utilitarian-meat hunters tend to be older, more rural and less educated, but test pretty well when it came to knowledge about wildlife. Few Americans oppose them.

The second group, the domination-hunter, comprise about 38 percent of all hunters. Most domination-hunters are urban men, have served in the military, and see hunting as a way of expressing their manly prowess. Domination hunters know very little about wildlife, and many actually fear it, having an exaggerated "dangerous game" mindset of the kind we often see in pulp hunting magazines ("Mauled by a Grizzly," "When Sharks Attack", "Stalked by a Killer Moose"). Domination hunters showed little interest in wildlife in their youth, and as adults tend to see wild animals as uncontrolled and therefore as "bad" or nuisance animals. The domination hunter is the group non-hunters dislike, and which antihunters try to use to negatively portray ALL hunters.

The third group of hunters -- naturalist hunters -- represent less than 18 percent of all hunters. This group tends to be younger, more educated, and with higher levels of education and income than the other groups. This category also includes more women hunters. Nature hunters tend to backpack, bird watch and camp, as well as hunt. This group also spends more time actually hunting than either of the other two previous groups. Nature hunters have far and away the highest level of knowledge about wildlife and seek an intense involvement with wildlife and do not fear it.

Kellert also goes on to analyze antihunters as a group and finds, not surprisingly, that about 80 percent are women. Most are urban women living on one coast or another.

Antis had very little actual experience with wildlife and, along with domination hunters, had "among the lowest knowledge-of-animals scores of any group included in the study."
In another ironic parallel with domination hunters, "it appeared that antihunters manifested more fear and lack of interest in wildlife" than average Americans.

What was striking to me about reading Kellert's research was how it explains much of the silliness and stupidity we see in the arena of wildlife management today, where antihunters who have never walked a hedgerow clash all with macho-men domination-hunters who would never consider going into the woods without a Bowie Knife as large as medieval falchion.

Neither group seems to have very much knowledge about wildlife. One group does not hunt at all, and the other does not seem to hunt very much.

Left out of the debate -- and too often ignoring it -- are utilitarian-meat hunters and nature-naturalistic hunters which form a majority of the people who actually spend any time in forest or field.

The good news is that in America, unlike in much of Europe, wildlife management decisions tend to be left to an increasingly well-educated groups of professional wildlife managers with degrees in biology, zoology, resource management, forestry, population dynamics, law enforcement and even economics. The watchword in the U.S. is not knee-jerk emotionalism, but sustainability and habitat protection. As a consequence, we have more deer, elk, moose, bear, wolf, fox, alligator, whales, peregrine falcons, bald eagle, osprey, groundhog, raccoon, possum, coyote, bison, beaver and mountain lion today than we have ever had in the last 100 years, and the numbers for all of these species is going up, up, up.
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Where the Buffalo Roam -- Again

A repost from this blog, circa December 2004.

Thanks to Teddy Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold, Gifford Pinchot, the American environmental movement, the Lacey Act, the Weeks Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Pittman-Roberts Act, the Conservations Reserve Program, the Migratory Bird Conservation Act, and the Duck Stamp Act (to name just a few), America's wildlife is coming back.

All of this legislation has been supported by hunters who understood the value of the land and the wildlife on it. Environmentalists and hunter-anglers have worked hand-in-hand to bring back the wild turkey, to protect bear habitat, to preserve salmon spawning streams, and to shelter riparian areas.

For the terrier enthusiast, the result is plain to see in the hedgerow and forest: a record number of red fox, raccoon, possum and groundhogs spreading out into historically new territory.

Even species once pushed to the edge of extinction are now roaring back from the abyss -- alligators, bald eagles, beaver, Canada geese, wolves, and buffalo.

If the story of 19th Century America was about stripping the land and exterminating every species on it, the story of the 20th Century has been about bringing it all back.

Where the Buffalo Roam -- Again
San Francisco Chronicle, April 22, 2001

________________

Brian Meirs first noticed it a few years ago. The game was coming back.

It was subtle in the beginning - a few more sharp-tailed grouse along the section roads than usual, more deer peering from the margins of the hayfields at night. Then people started noticing there were larger numbers of pronghorn antelope than had ever been seen, and they were hanging around closer to town.

"Even 10 years ago, you never heard of mountain lion or elk around here," said Meirs, a state game warden who works the vast plains and mesa country around Buffalo. "Now they're pretty common. There are even occasional wolf sightings. It's like the wildlife was back there in the shadows, waiting for a change."

The change has been building for decades. The western Great Plains contain the country's greatest demographic anomaly: Its human population is emptying out. The trend, the 2000 census shows, has really gained force over the past decade with the drying up of the ranching economy.

But as people move away, wildlife is starting to fill the vacuum. In an unexpected way, a vision of the Great Plains as a wild commons is taking hold.

"It's funny - Buffalo Commons is really happening," Meirs said, as he sat in his truck on the main drag of Buffalo, a thoroughfare framed by abandoned storefronts. "Not like people thought it would. But it's happening."

The concept of the Buffalo Commons was floated by New Jersey sociologists Frank and Deborah Popper in 1988. The Poppers observed that agriculture had failed miserably on the Great Plains, and noted that the region would probably be almost wholly depopulated save for a few cities by the mid-21st century.

The highest and best use for the area, the Poppers argued, was in its pristine state: A restored prairie cleared of fences and abandoned ranches, reseeded with native bunchgrasses, teeming with wildlife. And foremost among these resurgent animals would be the emblematic beast of the Plains: the buffalo. Back by the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands. Plains residents, both white and Native American, would earn their money through ecotourism and franchise hunting, not punching cows and growing dryland wheat.

Because the Poppers' proposal was predicated in part on federal buyouts of private property, it kicked off a howling storm of protest from the Great Plains agricultural community. Ranchers saw it as the most sinister possible example of a federal land grab. Resistance was so great that the idea died aborning.

But that didn't change the reality of Plains demographics - a reality best apprehended from the air.

Fly in a puddle jumper from Denver to Bismarck, N.D., and look down. There are great tracts of Badlands and rolling prairie, huge expanses of "pothole country" spangled with ponds and marshes, entire square miles of dryland wheat and irrigated alfalfa, serpentine brown rivers lined with cottonwoods, the occasional road. Very few ranches, and fewer towns. No cities. The West and East coasts, the intermountain West, the Southwest, the Gulf Coast and the Deep South - they're exploding with development. Even the industrial Northeast, long a laggard in population growth,
is gaining new people.

But not out here where the buffalo once roamed. Nearly three-quarters of Plains counties - 322 of 443 - have lost population since 1930. According to the 2000 census, 272 of 443 of the Plains counties have experienced population declines since 1990.

Demographers estimate that rural counties of the Dakotas could lose an additional third of their population in the next 20 years. From eastern New Mexico through the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, to large portions of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas and Montana, the story is the same.

The depopulation affecting the region is nothing more than the dying of a dream. Or a scheme, at least. At the turn of the century, the western Plains were considered the globe's most promising emerging breadbasket.

Cattle had thrived on the rich prairie bunchgrasses after the subjugation of the Plains Indians and the elimination of the buffalo.

Now, decided the pols in Washington, D.C., the rich black earth beneath the virgin sod would grow the nation's wheat.

The late 19th century and early 20th century were fairly wet on the prairie, reinforcing a popular idea of the time that "rain followed the plow." But years of drought followed, and homesteaders began washing out. The ruins of their farms are all over the Plains, ranging from abandoned dugout hovels to derelict three-story houses that are home to nothing but bats and owls.

"Agriculture around here is changing so fast you won't even recognize it in 10 years," said game warden Meirs as he sat in his truck listening to the wind whistle down Buffalo's main street. "The cattle and sheep are going by the wayside."

Buffalo Commons, it seems, is destined to occur - no matter what it's called, no matter who loves or hates it. But the forging of the Commons isn't a completely passive process.

True, the great federal investment envisioned by the Poppers didn't happen, nor is that likely. Given general public sentiment against extravagant government spending programs, it's inconceivable that Congress would loosen up the purse strings to fund the purchase of tens of millions of acres of bankrupt rangeland.

Instead, Buffalo Commons is becoming a private enterprise. And leading the movement is media mogul Ted Turner, who appears to have made the North American bison his private totem. Turner owns about 1.7 million acres divided among several ranches scattered across the Plains, and that figure is growing.

"I heard tell that Ted Turner wants to be able to ride all the way from Canada to Mexico on his own land," drawled one Nebraska rancher. "And the way he's going, it isn't going to be too long before he can do that." Turner looks for a certain kind of property: One that's in grass rather than croplands, with natural contours intact. He wants good biodiversity - country that supports substantial populations of wildlife of numerous species. And when he buys properties, he more or less follows the same formula: Tear out all the cross fencing and replant pastures with bunchgrasses and other native vegetation. Bring in the buffalo.

Turner believes that ranching can be profitable on the Plains - but not necessarily by raising cattle. He's promoting the sale of buffalo breeding stock and meat, luxury big game and bird hunts and ecotourism tours as the economic saviors of the region.

Unlike many celebrity landowners, Turner isn't gate-happy, and doesn't seem to mind rubberneckers as long as they don't stop to shoot his buffalo. And there are plenty of buffalo to see. Under a sky crowded with lowering gray cumulus, a couple of hundred of the shaggy beasts grazed near a roadside. About a mile away, on the same vast tract of rolling prairie, a similar number fed.

A Lakota hunter could have witnessed precisely this scene in this same place 150 years ago.

And buffalo aren't the only animals thriving on Turner's property. Big coveys of sharp-tailed grouse fly unhurriedly out of the way at the approach of a truck. White-tailed deer bolt from every coulee. Stop to watch scores of blue-winged teal bank and swoop around a pothole, and you catch the eerie, wild yapping of two coyotes singing in antiphony in the distance. Although he is operating on the most ambitious scale, Turner is by no means the only New Age buffalo rancher on the Plains. Many of Turner's compeers don't necessarily share his wildlife habitat goals. But the wildlife is nevertheless reaping the benefits of their bison husbandry.

Kirk Budd, the proprietor of Freshwater Ranch in Nebraska's Sand Hills, has lived the quintessential hardscrabble Plains life. He raised cattle until "they just about starved me out." He was a bush pilot in Canada for years, and was a crop duster until a pesticide accident almost killed him. Things, in short, were looking pretty grim for Budd. He was in danger of busting out, losing his ranch.

Then a few years ago, he bought some buffalo.

"They were cheap then," recalled Budd, crawling out from under an airplane he was repairing at his ranch. "About $400 for a cow. So I figured what the heck." Budd gradually expanded his herd, keeping the heifer calves, selling the bulls. He now owns several hundred buffalo on three ranches totaling 11,000 acres. Many are verging on coal black, and all are huge - much darker and far larger than Turner's brown-and-russet buffalo. His bred heifers sell for about $4,000.

Although Budd doesn't believe bison will utterly supplant cattle on the Plains, he feels buffalo ranching will continue to grow. "The National Buffalo Association says the country's herds are growing at 12 percent a year, but I know it's more than that. I know a lot of people in this business, and everyone is keeping all their heifers. I figure the real figure is more like 40 percent a year."

And compared with cattle, buffalo have been good to his land, Budd notes. Cattle like to wallow in water, tearing up creeks and ponds and trampling vegetation. But buffalo associate water with predators. They all go down at once to drink, then get out right away to higher ground. The creeks stay vegetated, and the water stays clean.

Indeed, the Freshwater Ranch looks markedly different from neighboring properties where cattle are grazed. The forage is in better condition, and the streams and ponds are far more vegetated. A creek that runs by the ranch house looks like prime trout water, and Budd confirms it is full of
large brown trout.

And the ranch burgeons with wildlife. "A lot of critters like being with buffalo," Budd said. "They evolved with them. Deer, elk, antelope, wild turkeys. We even have bighorn sheep on one of our ranches. You can ranch buffalo, maybe even tame some you raise from a bottle. But they're basically wildlife. And you can see that reflected in the condition of the range on any ranch where they're raised."

As bullish as he is on buffalo, Budd doesn't think much of Buffalo Commons. "That will never, never fly out here," he said. "As soon as you start talking big government involvement, people resist. Also, a lot of this land is still irrigated, particularly to the east of the Sand Hills. It's growing soybeans, wheat, corn and alfalfa. "As a general policy, I don't think you should take all that food land out of production for a wildlife park. That's just not good for the nation."

While Plains farmers resist government intervention, they do understand - and appreciate - government subsidies. Federal payouts have been part of America's ranching and farming culture for decades, and although they have diminished in recent years, they're still relied on to make ends meet. Since the mid-1980s, many of those subsidies have been paid to cattle ranchers to conserve wildlife habitat on their lands. In the Dakotas, almost 500,000 acres of upland and wetland habitat have been preserved under these conservation reserve programs, benefiting a variety of species, but particularly migratory waterfowl.

The coteau region - a vast, hilly stretch of glacially carved potholes and ponds in the Dakotas, eastern Montana, Saskatchewan and Alberta - is a duck factory, explained Scott McCleod, a biologist with the northern Plains regional office of Ducks Unlimited in Bismarck. Ducks Unlimited is a conservation organization composed of primarily hunters that preserve wetlands and grasslands prairie. So far, it has saved 8 million acres of habitat essential to waterfowl in the United States and Canada.

"Sixty to 70 percent of the continent's major duck species breed in the prairie pothole region," McCleod said. "During the winter and spring migrations, the potholes serve as critical resting and staging areas for the birds."

The historic temptation for farmers, McLeod said, has been to drain the potholes to increase tillable acreage and plow the grass for relatively profitable crops like wheat, corn and sunflowers. "That's why we like to work with cattle ranchers rather than farmers," said McCleod. "Ranchers are
interested in the same thing we are - preserving the grasslands."

The restoration under way is not necessarily a process that will proceed smoothly and steadily. Federal funds for conservation reserve programs could dry up; a prolonged recession could make the buying of megaranches by conservation-minded billionaires like Turner a thing of the past. But nothing, it seems, will change the bedrock reality of the western Plains: They are not well-suited for agriculture or year-round human habitation.

Native Americans knew how to live on them - by passing through, by following the buffalo that peregrinated from horizon to horizon. The record of permanent settlement on the Plains, on the other hand, has been dismal. One way or another, the Plains will devolve to their earlier condition: To a sea of grass, where people are the transient visitors, wildlife the enduring residents.

Bison are generally considered the emblematic animal of the Great Plains, and reintroduction efforts for the shaggy beasts are almost universally popular. But there's another keystone Plains species essential to grasslands restoration - and it's not nearly as esteemed as the buffalo. Prairie dogs were once the most common mammal in North America. In the late 19th century, about five billion prairie dogs of five species inhabited the Plains from Canada to Mexico. The vast majority were black-tailed prairie dogs, a stocky, buff-colored rodent that weighs between two to three pounds. Their vast towns comprised complete ecologies in their own right: One in Texas measured 100 miles wide, 250 miles long and contained an estimated 400 million dogs.

Prairie dogs shaped the Plains as much as the buffalo, and a considerable array of wild species depended on the rodents for shelter and food. The prairie dogs' various diggings provide
shelter for a great many animals: badgers, foxes, burrowing owls and a tremendous variety of reptiles, amphibians and insects.

The huge quantity of feces and urine produced by the dog towns was a gigantic fertilizing mechanism for the Plains. Today, prairie dogs only inhabit about 1 percent of their former range; the black-tailed prairie dog is a candidate for protection under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Their decline began shortly after cattlemen moved to the Plains. Seen as competitors with cattle for forage, the dogs were poisoned and shot out.

A coalition of environmentalists is agitating for a return of the dog. "Prairie dogs are decreasing in numbers across their range," said Jonathan Proctor, a program associate with the Predator Coalition Alliance in Bozeman, Mont. Proctor's group was able to secure a temporary ban on poisoning on federal lands through a petition to list black-tailed prairie dogs under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

But the dogs are still shot in large numbers, often for sport. Such activities are widely condoned by ranchers. "There's no shortage of prairie dogs," said South Dakota rancher Pat Clark, who said the animals compete with cattle for grass and endanger livestock with their burrows. "They're all over the place." But scattered families of prairie dogs are no indication of the general health of the five species, Proctor said. Despite the pressures facing prairie dogs, Proctor said he is guardedly optimistic about their future. Colorado recently banned sport hunting for black-tailed prairie dogs, and South Dakota and Montana are considering similar restrictions, said Proctor.

"Basically, they'll come back if we stop actively killing them," he said.

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A Clown Car of Elk -- Only in America

Watch the whole thing, because you really do not get the full story until you see volume of elk at this road crossing. Is America a great country, or what? A special hat tip to Chas C. who had this up over at his great Southern Rockies Nature Blog.
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Home, Home on the Range ...

A young elk is filmed playing in a puddle.

"Home, home on the range
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day."
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The Cull of the Wild

This book set out the tenets of wildlife management still in use today.

This post is reprinted from this blog circa June, 2005

Despite a three-fold increase in U.S. population since 1900, the U.S. now has more bear, cougar, buffalo, turkey, geese, duck, fox, raccoon, possum, alligator, groundhog, bald eagle, pronghorn, wolf, coyote, bobcat, and deer than at any time in the last 100 years. Beaver, turkey and river otter have been reintroduced into areas where they were wiped out, and wolf, elk and cougar are beginning to return to the east.

Though animal rights organizations decry sport hunting, the truth is that organizations such as Ducks Unlimited, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Trout Unlimited, Pheasants Forever, Quail Unlimited, and the National Wild Turkey Federation are the backbone of true wildlife protection in the United States. These organizations, and their state and local affiliates, work to protect and improve habitat across the U.S., as well as fund wildlife reintroduction and research campaigns.

For their part, groups such as the Humane Society of the United States and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) are little more than direct mail mills. Both organizations are entirely absent from all habitat protection efforts in the U.S., and neither organization runs even a single animal shelter in the U.S. despite the scores of millions of dollars they collect from the public. Instead these organizations send out millions of pieces of direct mail every year -- all of it highly emotional and designed to get suburban matrons to part with their "most generous gift of $10, $20 or even $50".

One of the perennial topics of animal rights direct mail campaigns is a push to outlaw trapping. Carefully staged photos and antique traps are used to pluck at the heartstrings, but donor beware! It should serve as a warning that blue-chip environmental organizations such as the National Audubon Society have sued the Humane Society (and won) in order to preserve the use of leghold traps as a wildlife management tool. All of the wolves now in the Yellowstone, for example, are routinely caught in leghold traps in order to inoculate them against rabies and distemper and to switch out the batteries on their radio-tracking collars. Modern leghold traps, properly set, are far more selective and less brutal than those that existed 100 or even 50 years ago -- a fact conveniently omitted from the direct mail literature of animal rights advocates.

Trapping for pelts in the U.S. is now largely independent of wildlife numbers -- when trapping numbers go down it is not because of a dip in the target species population, but because of a dip in pelt prices.

As of this writing, green (untanned) fox or raccoon pelts sell for between $8 and $12 dollars apiece -- not much considering the time and effort it takes to boil, dye and and wax a trap, set it out, check it daily, and skin and flesh the resulting catch.

That said, a surprising number of fox and raccoon are still trapped in the U.S. In the winter of 1999-2000, for example, when pelt prices were quite low, 29,739 fox were trapped in the state of Virginia (15,632 red fox and 14,107 Gray Fox), as well as 83,369 raccoon, 3,304 coyote, and 3,050 bobcat. In Pennsylvania that same year, 63,654 fox were taken (26,794 Gray fox and 36,860 red fox), as well as 107,407 raccoon, 9,508 coyote, and 58 bobcat.

For comparison purposes, the state of Virginia is 42,700 square miles in size, and Pennsylvania is 46,058 square miles in size as compared to England, which is 50,800 square miles and all of the UK which is 94,200 square miles in size.

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Coffee and Provocation

• Blind Dachshunds and AKC Inbreeding:
  Gene-testing of wire-haired dachshunds shows that nearly 10% of the dogs carry the gene mutation that causes day blindness (aka "cone-rod dystrophy”). Why would anyone buy a Kennel Club dog with this kind of genetic load? There is clearly a market here for someone to cross out a small scruffy-looking terrier and a regular dachshund in order to get a wire-haired dachshund that is truly healthy. I hope someone will do it quickly and advertise widely: "Wirehaired dachshunds for sale without the Kennel Club defect!"
  
  
• The American Taliban's Madrasha:
  Virginia's Liberty University -- America's very own madrasha -- has decided to shut down the campus Democratic Party Club because that club supports a woman's right to choose. Never mind that a woman's right to choose is the law of the land, and has been the law of the land for more than 35 years.
  
  
• The Mile-Long Que for a Tennessee Elk Tag:
  Back in October, 12,800 people paid a non-refundable $10 fee just to apply for four elk tags. This was the first Tennessee elk hunt in over 150 years. Kentucky already has a herd big enough to hunt.
  
  
• Armed Men On Powerful Drugs:
  MSNBC reports that: "In deploying an all-volunteer army to fight two ongoing wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has increasingly relied on prescription drugs to keep its warriors on the front lines. In recent years, the number of military prescriptions for antidepressants, sleeping pills, and painkillers has risen as soldiers come home with battered bodies and troubled minds. And many of those service members are then sent back to war theaters in distant lands with bottles of medication to fortify them. According to data from a U. S. Army mental-health survey released last year, about 12 percent of soldiers in Iraq and 15 percent of those in Afghanistan reported taking antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, or sleeping pills. Prescriptions for painkillers have also skyrocketed. Data from the Department of Defense last fall showed that as of September 2007, prescriptions for narcotics for active-duty troops had risen to almost 50,000 a month, compared with about 33,000 a month in October 2003, not long after the Iraq war began. In other words, thousands of American fighters armed with the latest killing technology are taking prescription drugs that the Federal Aviation Administration considers too dangerous for commercial pilots."
  ..

Hunting and Fishing Like Adults

This is a recycled post from August 18, 2006 prompted by a recent discussion, in the comments section to a post about mounted Maryland fox hunting.

I got a couple of emails on my post about stocking 400 pheasants an acre in the UK.

Matt M. in Idaho correctly notes that canned birds hunts are becoming more popular in the U.S., and canned deer hunts as well. Though he lives in one of the wildest states in the U.S., there are at least four commercial bird shoots with an hour or two of where he lives.

Matt writes:

"When I was living in Pennsylvania, a local hunting preserve somehow heard I had traveled to hunt big game, so the owner assumed I was rich and would be interested in his trophy deer operation. Both assumptions are false, but I accepted his invitation to tour the place he called 'Deerassic Park.' During my two hours, I had huge trophy deer parade by me 20 yards away. The guide told me 'Five thousand dollars may seem like a lot for a deer now, but in the second week of deer season, when all your coworkers are asking if you got your deer, it won't seem so much.' He was wrong again. The deer were raised in carefully controlled pens, like cattle, to ensure the best genetics. The bucks were then periodically released. I cringed when I read purple-prose stories by 'famous outdoor writers' who embarked on the challenge of hunting deer at this place. Shooting one of my father-in-law's dairy cows would be just as challenging, and as fun."

On the other side of the coin, and on the other side of the Atlantic, Lyndsey H. writes to note that: driven bird shoots are an important part of the rural economy in the UK; that not all shoots are intensely stocked; that on those shoots that are heavily stocked the land can generally support the bird populations that have been placed on them; that the pheasants are well cared for, and that income from shoots supports the upkeep of large estates (to say nothing of game keepers and the like).

Let me begin by saying that my earlier squib on pen-raised birds and driven shoots was not intended to be the beginning of a book on canned hunts. This is a topic far outside my expertise or knowledge base.

That said, the ethics of "guaranteed hunts" has sparked considerable debate in the hunting community, and so perhaps it is (pun intended) "fair game."

Let's see if I can fence in the debate a bit. Sometimes when we define terms and try to put a fine point on things, we can find common ground.

First, let us dispense with the notion that there is an absolute right and wrong. The issues here are too big for such neat box fitting.

As with so many things, there are degrees of good and bad, and there is also the matter of perspective, which is so often shaped by economics, class, social convention, and geography, to say nothing of human population densities, biology and history.

One man's sacred cow is another man's hamburger.

Hunting is a red-hot topic so let me start by talking about something different -- fishing.

To the best of my knowledge and memory, the first fish I ever caught was a trout pulled from a large blue plastic kiddy pool set up at the Washington Boat show.

The fish were hatchery-fed trout, plainly seen against the bright blue bottom through crystal clear water. The fish had been brought in by truck from a hatchery, and the fish and cane poles were designed to attract people to a nearby boat display.

It worked. For a couple of dollars, kids could toss in a hook with a small bit of canned corn on the end, and pull out a wet and wriggling trout while their parents perused the boats.

Even at age four I knew this was not fishing. I remember feeling a little embarrassed at the artifice of the situation.

And yet, looking back on it now, what harm did it do? Trout are raised to be eaten, and we do not belabor the point when Trout Almandine is served at a restaurant.

This was not "real" fishing, of course, but at age 4 or 5 could I be expected to have memorized "Fishing With Ray Bergman"? It was fun.

And yet I no longer think kiddy pool trout fishing is a good thing.

It is not that I am against fun (I'm always for that!). I am simply against bluring the line between true fishing and slaughterhouse taking.

Yes, we want activities for children to be fast and easy. Perhaps, however, fishing is the wrong activity to satisfy this niche.

Fishing may have other lessons to teach young people – lessons about food and habitat, skill and delayed gratification, for example.

No self-respecting adult would stand in line to yank a trout from a plastic pool at an indoor boat show. Yet (and much to my amazement) adults DO show up for "pay lake" trout and catfish. What are we to make of adults that fish in such a childish manner?

Only one step up from pay-pond fishing are the folks who follow hatchery trucks to the stream in order to "get a jump" on their fellow anglers at the start of trout season. Is this "real" fishing? Not in my book.

But what I think hardly matters. Within 72-hours of opening day, half the trout placed in East Coast streams are gone - stripped from the water by "put and pull" anglers.

I will not belabor the point, nor will I venture further through the cosmology of fishing in America (catfish bait-ballers, top water bass-pluggers, crappie jiggers, surf casters, fly fishermen, tuna trollers). Suffice it to say that there are many fish, many tribes of fishermen, and many methods of fishing. Each to his own.

Let's move up the evolutionary ladder to birds.

Here too we have hunting in a variety of manifestations from "tower shoots," where captive pen-raised birds are tossed into the air from a tower while gunners blast away, to "plant and shoot" releases of birds into a field the night before, to stocked and "naturalized" birds released at the start of a shooting season.

The parallels to "kiddy pool" fishing, over-stocked pay-lakes, and "wild stocked" streams and ponds is obvious.

Again, where do we draw the line?

In my opinion, tower shoots are pathetic, and so too is any form of stocked shooting where a man or woman can plink more birds in a day than he can put in his freezer at night.

At some point, you are not "hunting," you are just killing chickens.

The issue here is not "animal rights." The issue is fakery and debasement of a true set of skills. Shooting brain-addled pen-raised birds under the umbrella of "hunting" debases the art of true hunting. When we snap-trap a few mice in the garage, we do not talk about a "holocaust of mice" -- to do so would be to cheapen the horror of the Holocaust while dramatically inflating the status of rodents and denigrating the lives of millions of once-vital human being.

Language matters.

And so it is with guaranteed bird shoots and pay-pond fishing. Angling is an art, and hunting assumes an element of field craft not evident when birds are purchased as units like Chicken McNuggets.

Hunting is about the experience over the day, not the number of fish boated or birds bagged.

But, as noted earlier, not everything is quite so simple, is it?

What are we to make of the 3,000-acre scrub farm were 1,000 pheasants and quail at a time are released into the wild three times a year?

At this population density, and at this bird-release interval, there is a fair chance that more than a few birds will die of natural causes, and some birds may even die of old age.

On a “natural" farm that is “wild-stocked,” the land may be kept not only free of development, but also free of pesticides and herbicides. Brush rows and mottes may be planted and maintained, enhancing the survivability not only of planted game birds, but also of rabbits, deer, and native songbirds.

Surely, such a bird shoot farm is morally and environmentally superiour to a "Roundup Ready" corn field or cow pasture?

More birds are shot on such a farm than are being naturally replaced, of course, but if the bags are low and a "successful" hunt still requires both a skilled dog and a skilled shot, is it really so bad a thing?

Low-stock shoots of field-acclimated birds is a bit different from a driven bird shoot where 400 to 1,000 pheasants are being stocked per acre-year. It's not entirely natural, no, but it's not entirely awful either.

Of course, some may disagree.

Let us leave bird hunting, for a moment, and now think about "big game".

On one extreme we have lions and tigers and other large and rare exotic animals that are released into 10-acre enclosures to be shot by "sportsmen."

It's easy to be outraged by this kind of activity, and no one I know thinks this is actually hunting.

That said, it's worth noting that canned big game shoots of exotic animals are a natural outgrowth of the public's fascination with "zoo babies".

Zoos routinely over-breed animals because tiger cubs and baby zebras boost attendance and generate profits. Cute baby animals quickly grow up, however, and that's a problem. It turns out that the world has more caged lions, tigers and zebras than it knows what to do with.

What to do? Answer: canned shooting preserves in Texas. It's not an accident that at one point nine board members of the San Antonio Zoo owned hunt preserves.

Not all exotic animals used in canned hunts come from large zoos. Many come from small zoos and private breeders of large exotic animals. If you have a checkbook in this country, you can buy anything from a lion to a bear, and from a bobcat to a gemsbok.

And if you have ever bought a wildife magazine with amazing shots of baby cougars, lynx, red fox, black bear and wolf, you are a small part of the problem. Most of those pictures were taken in private "photography zoos," and at least some of those baby animals were later sold, as adults, to canned hunts.

An example is as current as this morning's headlines:

"Country music star Troy Lee Gentry (one half of popular duo Montgomery Gentry) is facing charges for shooting a tame, captive bear and then trying to mask the killing as a proper hunt.... Indictment documents made public this week showed that Gentry paid $4,650 U.S. to kill a 'trophy-caliber' bear named Cubby. The incident took place two years ago at the Minnesota Wildlife Connection, a company that claims to offer photographers a chance to capture wild animals on film. ... Gentry killed the bear using a bow and arrow while the animal was in its pen."

I think most people would agree that shooting a large, rare, exotic or tame animal in a small enclosure is several time zones removed from true hunting.

But what if the animal is less rare -- such as a Russian Boar -- and the enclosure is quite a bit bigger -- a few hundred acres?

Where do we draw the line?

Is it OK to shoot an exotic animal, such as a Fallow or Axis deer, in a very large fenced parcel of ground provided the countryside is more-or-less natural, and the animal actually runs when stalked? Is it OK to shoot it when it is pressed against the fence?

Does it matter if the animals are not exotics, but are native elk, moose, whitetail or mule deer? Is that better or worse?

What if the animals are not fenced in, but are fed every day from an automatic corn-dispensing bait station set on a timer?

Does it matter if the person shooting the animal over such a feeder is hunting for meat or hunting for trophy or sport?

If you decide it's OK to shoot wild whitetail deer on an open farm over a broadcast corn feeder, why is it not OK (as a matter of law) to do the same thing with birds?

If a mechanical caller is OK for fox and coyote, why is it illegal to use it on ducks and elk?

A lot of people will find some of these questions easy to answer, but will pause at others.

The brain dead Vegan and the knuckle-dragging slob-hunter will find all of these questions easy to answer.

So too will the older, thoughtful, skilled hunter who hunts only wild lands and who only fishes wild waters. He knows what he chooses and why.

This last point needs to be stressed.

The types of questions and dilemmas I have posed here are relatively new. Our grandfathers did not have canned hunts and potted bird shoots. This is not part of the American hunting tradition most of us grew up with.

So what has changed?

To some extent, population growth is part of the problem. Though the percentage of hunters may be less than it was in years past, the absolute number is higher than it was 50 years ago due to rapid U.S. population growth. With increasing population density and suburban sprawl has come greater distance to suitably large farms, forests and fields.

More important than suburban sprawl and hunter density, however, is the fact that America has become a land of rapidly rising expectations and a rapidly declining ability to delay gratification.

The American public wants everything it can imagine, and it wants it NOW, and it wants it “super-sized.” We want fast food, fast cars, and instant communication. We want bigger houses, more money and early retirement.

In short, we have become a nation of spoiled, rich and demanding children. The rise of commercial shooting preserves is simply an outgrowth of that phenomenon. Canned hunt operators are, in effect, telling their client base:

"We know you have zero knowledge of field craft or wildlife and that everything has to be easy for you or you will pout. So, just like your Daddy did when you were 6 years old, we are going to rig every game you play so you will always win. And when you do manage to kill some brain-addled, food dependent, hand-tamed creature, we will slap you on the back and say, 'Look what a BIG boy you are!'"

This type of canned shoot is to real hunting what peroxide-blonde hookers are to marriage: a sad charade that debases the individual and jeopardizes the institution.

Just as we have the Playboy channel and Hustler magazine selling the fantasy that every woman is a lesbian-curious nymphomaniac waiting to be unbound, so we have TV hunting shows and magazines selling the idea that every foray into the field should result in a trophy buck, a monster bear, and a bucket-mouth bass. In this sense, "Rack "Em Up" and "Antler King" feed supplements are to the game farm industry what silicone implants are to porn producers.

Just as "sexual service" ads can be found at the back of girly magazines, so too can ads for canned hunts be found at the back of hunting magazines.

It's not an accident that every episode of ESPN's "Hunting the Country" closes with a nod to the outfitter on whose land the “monster buck” was shot.

An “outfitter? What the hell is an an "outfitter"? And how can these people hunt bull elk while trailing a camera crew and talking?

The answer is that you are watching a canned hunt. In the context of television hunting shows, an "outfitter" is a fellow who trains ranch-raised elk to come to a corn-spewing time-released bait station.

"Start feeding them in the spring, and shoot 'em dead in the fall." That’s the business plan, and it’s one that hunting show producers, who need to film a new trophy kill every week, are loathe to criticize.

There are about 1,000 "canned" or potted hunts in the U.S. catering to about 500,000 hunters a year.

That may sound like a lot to folks at the Humane Society, but in fact this represents less than three percent of the 20,000,000 Americans that hunt in this country every year.

For better or worse, you can find an "idiot three percent" in almost every endeavor.

Of course, hunting is not just any sport.

Unlike skate boarding, mountain biking, or motor boating, hunting is under attack from groups like the Humane Society and PETA.

Ironically, the folks at PETA and the Humane Society are just as childish as the slob hunters.

Raised on Bambi cartoons and "Wind in the Willows" stories, the typical Animal Rights lunatic has not spent a single second considering the fact that everything that lives will also die, and that death in the wild is generally slow, painful, violent and miserable.

When a deer dies in the woods, it does not expire with a morphine drip and a Mozart concerto in the tape deck.

The alternative to hunting is not perpetual life - it is vehicle impact, wasting disease, starvation or predation.

Hunting your meat is certainly more ethical than buying it in a store. Childish Americans seem to think cows are raised pre-sectioned, wrapped in plastic, and frozen.

In fact, most feedlot cows never know one tenth the freedom of a deer. For a steer, the last hour or two of its life is typicaly spent in a crowded and lurching truck on the interstate. The last minute of its life is spent slipping on a blood-wet floor in an alien metal-clanging slaughterhouse.

A mature adult does not shrink from death -- he recognizes that life is short and red in tooth and claw.

This is the way it has always been. God did not make a mistake when He created the cycle of life and gave humans canine teeth and molars.

If you spend enough time in the woods, you will eventually see a predator kill something. A hawk or fox does not always kill quickly. In fact, it may play with its food and then eat it alive and screaming. Compared to that, a cow dies with some grace.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the infantalized slob hunter and the anthropomorphic PETA member are serious adult hunters and anglers.

These folks know where meat comes from, and they respect both the life lived and the life taken.

While the slob hunter and the cringing Animal Rights reactionary are obsessed with the kill, the hunter is focused on the experience of hunting.

It’s almost a universal truth that if you do something for very long, you get good at it, and if you get real good at it, you begin to handicap yourself in order to prolong the experience and keep it interesting.

This not only occurs in golf and chess, it also occurs in hunting and fishing.

If you start fishing at age 5, as I did, you stop using bait by age 12. By age 15, your hooks no longer have barbs, and you are snapping the trebles off the back of your plugs. Your leader line gets thinner, and more and more fish are returned to the water.

There is nothing wrong with killing a few fish, but if you have ever caught so many you had to bury some in the backyard to get rid of them, you try to stay clear of embarrassing abundance. A great deal of dignity can be found in simple moderation.

It is perhaps a little too easy to focus on the idiocies of slob hunters. In truth, they represent a small minority, and their numbers may be in decline, rather than in ascendency. There are some small signs that America may be maturing.

Let me give you one example. When the state of Colorado banned shooting bears over bait a few years back, the number of bear hunters in the state did not decrease, it increased.

It turned out that more people were willing to hunt bear provided that the onerous stain of hunting over bait was lifted.

The trend can be seen outside of Colorado, too. The fastest growth area in hunting today is the rise of bow hunting and the increasing use of black powder. Granted many bow and black powder hunters are also going forth in shotgun and rifle season as well. But not all are.

In a day and age when whitetail deer populations are at record levels, and elk populations are holding steady or increasing over much of their range, more and more hunters are embracing the challenge of bow and blackpowder in order to keep in contact with the elements of skill and chance that are at the core of the true hunting experience.

Of course not everyone is so conscientious.

There’s always Ted Nugent. Ted Nugent, for those who do not know, is the loud adolescent faded rock-star who now holds forth on right-wing radio. He is all blood and guts, tough talk and feisty belligerence. He likes to accuse everyone else of being a weak-knee'd “pastrami-breath" liberal, and a cut-and-run chicken.

What his fans do not know is that Ted himself was a Vietnam draft dodger who got himself cut loose from service by showing up for his physical covered in his own feces and after not showering in weeks. He had a child out of wedlock and only ponied up support when the court forced him to. Real family values. A Great American.

But never mind that. He’s a hunter, right?

Well maybe not.

It turns out that Ted Nugent is not just a sunshine patriot, he is also a canned hunter. In fact, Ted runs his own canned hunt facility in Michigan called Sunrize Acres where, for a hefty fee, you can shoot tame buffalo that have been trucked to his 340-acre spread.

Along with buffalo, Ted's farm is a pay-shoot for whitetail deer ($2,000 for a doe!), wild boar, “exotic ram” (that would be farm goats for you who are wondering), and Sika and Fallow deer.

These are not wild animals -- they are trucked-in farm stock. The bison are no better than glorified farm cows, the Russian boar are no better than glorified farm pigs, the "exotic rams" are just farm goats, and the deer are corn-fed dependents.

Cartoon buffoons like Ted Nugent and his canned hunt farm are, I am sad to say, the loud and ugly public face of hunting in America today.

Last year, in my little state of Virginia, we shot 220,000 deer, and we did it without drama, canned hunts, or a peep from PETA, which is headquartered in this state.

Deer hunting in Virginia reduces crop damage, reduces deer-vehicle impacts, feeds poor hungry families, saves our forests and hedgerows from being over-browsed, stems Lyme Disease, and generates jobs and economic benefits across the state.

But the big "hunting story” told in my state last year was not about the ecological or economic benefits of open-farm natural deer hunting. It was about how Dick Cheney shot his buddy in the face in Texas. Nearly every story also mentioned his canned bird hunting exploits in Pennsylvania.

As for today's newspaper hunting story -- the one about how Troy Gentry was caught shooting a tame black bear in an enclosed pen in Michigan -- my bet is that the hunting TV shows will be silent about the travesty. After all, they engage in canned hunts themselves.

The hunting magazines will be silent because they do not want to lose advertisers from their back pages.

Ted Nugent will be silent, because he sells canned hunts and participates in them too.

Troy Gentry's buddy, Hank Williams Jr., will be silent as he participates in canned hunts himself.

And so, through silence, America’s hunting community will apparently signal acceptance of the ugliest thing going on in the hunting community today.

As noted before, hower, canned and potted hunts are NOT part of America's hunting tradition. This perversion has only risen up in the last 20 or 30 years.

And yet peversion and silence often go hand-in-hand, don't they?

Look at Islam. I grew up in a host of Muslim countries, and I can assure you that radical psychotic violence was not part of that world 30 years ago.

Yet it is today, and in the face of that radical hate-spewing violence, what do we see from the Muslim community?

Silence.

There have been no "Million Muslim Marches" for peace and love in London, Paris, New York or Washington.

Instead, we get terrorists beheading people on TV, suicide bombers trying to kill innocents on airplanes, and car bombs going off everyday.

Muslims sit in silence and wonder why the world does not "understand" them. In fact their silence has become their message to the world.

People that stand silent while others defile and define their culture and community are taking action.

That is how Islam -- once a religion of peace -- has come to be see as a religion of seeminlgy unending violence and irrational extremism.

Are we going in the same direction in the world of hunting?

Time will tell.

All I know for sure is that if you are a hunter willing to stand up and fence off right from wrong, you are sure to get a missive from someone advising you to be quiet.

"We are all in this together," you will be told.

Right. We are. That's why 97 percent of hunters in this country need to stand up and roar against the likes of Troy Gentry -- the three percent morons.

It's time we defined what we are about -- and what we are NOT about as well.

"I ain't gonna spare the rod
Cuz that ain't what my daddy did
And I sure know the difference between wrong and right
You know, to me it's all just common sense
A broken rule, a consequence
You do your thing, I'll do mine"

- Lyrics from the Montomery-Gentry song "You Do your Thing" in which Troy Genry drives through suburbia with a dead deer strapped on the hood of this car.

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National Geographic's Phony "Wolf Man" Stunt

Two re-posts today from more than a year ago, as the "A Man Among Wolves" series is back on TV with a new load of dreck to amaze small children.

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Here's what National Geographic does not tell you about Shaun Ellis and "A Man Among Wolves" premiering on television tonight:

• The whole thing was shot in a less-than two acre cage in a 25-acre theme park in Devon, England. The main attraction of the theme park is animated dinosaurs.
  
  
• Shaun Ellis is not a scientist of any kind. He is not a biologist, nor is he a trained animal behaviorist. He is not even an accredited zoo keeper.
  
  
• The wolves are not wild - they are put on daily viewing for the public, where Shaun's main theme-park job is putting on a "daily howling exhibit."
  
  
• Wolves are raised up by humans all the time. It is a stupid thing to do, but a lot of stupid things are done all the time. Just as you can buy a baby cougar or baby black bear in this country, you can also buy a baby wolf (legal or not). All it takes is a little bit of money and no common sense at all.
  
  
• The wolves are doomed to captivity and will never be released into the wild. The reason? They have been acclimated to humans. A human-acclimated wolf is a dead wolf in every country in the world unless it is kept in a cage. The best these wolves can hope for is to be placed in a larger cage and far from Shaun Ellis.
  
  
• Shaun Ellis has nothing to teach a wolf. He cannot teach them how to hunt, he cannot teach them how to have sex, and he cannot teach them how to seriously fight among themselves. Think about it. Ellis is too slow to chase down a rabbit. More to the point, the wolves do not have near enough room to run down a deer or elk on their own (not that there are any elk in the U.K.). So what does Ellis "teach" the wolves to do instead? He teaches them to ... wait for it ... fish with a few mackeral and trout he steals from the seal exhibit next door. Oh goodie! Talk about Through the Looking Glass.
  
  
• The idea of raising wolves in a cage in not even original. Jim and Jamie Dutcher lived with wolves in a 15-acre cage for three years, and not only filmed the whole thing and put in on the Discovery channel, they produced a companion book as well. After the filming was finished, those wolves were moved to another large cage in Idaho (not to the wild), where they continue to live to this day.
  
  
• Real wolf experts exist, and so too do experts at releasing wolves into the wild. In fact, less than a day's drive from National Geographic's main office in Washington, D.C. can be found the Alligator National Wildlife Refuge where once-captive red wolves were successfully re-introduced into a marshy wilderness. As for howling, it is innate and instinctive with wolves and coyotes, and both wolves and coyotes will readily respond to almost any human howling at dusk, as park rangers routinely demonstrate with truely wild wolves in the Alligator.

In the end of watching "A Man Among Wolves," we are left with only one important question: What moron agreed to put this dreck on TV and make a laughing stock of the valuable National Geographic brand?

Sharing Death and Disease Across Species

A zoonotic disease is a disease that originates in wildlife and which has a reservoir in a wild population of animals, but which leaps the species barriers and can be transferred to humans.

Unlike diseases that reside only in humans, diseases that reside in both humans and wild animal populations are just about impossible to eradicate. The bad news is that there are a tremendous number of such diseases, and the number of them is growing every year.

Malaria -- an old zoonotic disease -- still kills 2 million people a year, while HIV/AIDS is a newer pathogen that has killed 25 million people so far, with another 55 million people (or more) infected worldwide.

The Bubonic plague is an old zoonotic disease, while a newer one is Mad Cow disease, to which can be added SARS, West Nile, and Ebola hemorrhagic fever.

When I was a kid there was no such thing as Lyme Disease in either humans or dogs, but now Lyme disease is one of the most commonly diagnosed diseases here in the Eastern United States.

Meanwhile, it seems a day cannot go by when a rabid fox or raccoon story does not appear in the press somewhere in the United States.

The total number of zoonotic diseases is unknown, but of the 1,415 known human pathogens in 2001, 62% were of zoonotic origin. A quick summary of the vectors for some of the more common zoonotic diseases:

• Bubonic Plague is caused by a bacterium transmitted to humans from black rat fleas. A possible epidemic of bubonic plague is described in the First Book of Samuel, and the so-called Black Death which emerged in the 14th century killed approximately one third of Europe's population. The prairie dog towns of the Western U.S. became infected with the bubonic plague after Chinese immigrants brought the disease to the U.S. after 1900.
  
  
• Rabies was described among hunting dogs in Mesopotamia as early as 2,300 BC, and accounts of the disease can be found in early Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman records. Any mammal can have rabies, but in the U.S. it is most common in feral cats, skunks, bats, fox and raccoons. That said, a groundhog was recently found in Pennsylvania with rabies.
  
  
• West Nile Virus is a kind of encephalitis and may have been what killed Alexander the Great, as crows were reported to have died at his feet. In 1999, West Nile virus was introduced into the US, thanks to the introduction of the tiger mosquito which came to the U.S. in a load of tires from Asia. West Nile now strikes rare birds in zoos (especially perching western hemisphere birds such as parrots, eagles, hawks and cormorants) as well as bird feeder birds, horses and humans. The disease is named after a section of Uganda where it was first found.
  
  
• Tularemia is transmitted by skin contact with an infested, diseased, or dead hare, rabbit or rodent.
  
  
• Hantavirus is spread from rodents to humans by aerosols composed of dust from rodent scat. It is rare, but a concern in the driest parts of the American southwest, especially after wet (or relatively wet) winters and springs.
  
  
• Salmonella is generally transmitted to humans through contaminated water reserves and can come from a wide variety of animals, but especially turtles and other reptiles and amphibians.
  
  
• Leptospirosis ("rat catcher's jaundice") is generally transmitted to humans who drink water into which a rat has urinated. It can also be transmitted to dogs, pigs and other farm stock.
  
  
• Rift Valley Fever is spread by mosquitoes, as is equine encephalitis, and Japanese encephalitis.
  
  
• Leishmania is spread by sand-flies.
  
  
• Typhimurium occurs endemically in wild birds, causing sporadic cases and small outbreaks in humans.
  
  
• Anthrax is primarily a disease of herbivores, but it can be transmitted from wildlife to humans by contaminated meat or water, or by the spread of spores by flies, vultures, and other scavengers.
  
  
• Lyme disease comes from ticks that feed on rodents and deer.
  
  
• Bovine Tuberculosis can be spread from cattle to humans, and frequently finds a refuge in badgers, possums, wild boar, feral pig, and deer.
  
  
• Echinococcosis comes from tapeworms, and moves easily from canids to humans. Fox are particularly susceptible to this parasite as small rodents are the intermediate host.
  
  
• Monkeypox is a disease caused by a pox virus that typically occurs in Africa where the African squirrel is the natural host. The disease now occurs among prairie dogs in the United States, thanks to the importation of African rodents for the pet trade.
  
  
• Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is a viral respiratory illness that is believed to have originated in palm civet cats, raccoon dogs, and rats. It has not yet shown up in wild animal populations in the U.S.
  
  
• Influenza (the flu) has been reported in a variety of animal species, including birds, humans, pigs, horses, and sea mammals, but its main reservoir seems to be wild waterfowl, especially ducks.
  
  
• AIDS is caused by the HIV virus, which appears to be a variety of Simian Immune-Virus (SIV) which may have spread to humans from nonhuman primates in West Africa -- perhaps due to consumption of meat, or infection from monkey blood during slaughter.
  
  
• The common cold is a virus that scientists now believe originated in horses.

Humans are not the only species impacted by emerging diseases leaping the species barrier.

Black-footed ferrets have been decimated by distemper that has crossed over from wild dog populations, as have seals and sea lions.

Frogs and many other amphibians around the globe have been decimated by diseases brought into new habitats -- often by scientists coming to study the creatures.

Lowland gorilla populations are being hammered by Ebola hemorrhagic fever, while elk and deer in the western U.S. are falling to chronic wasting disease very similar to Mad Cow disease.

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Mass Wolf Kills on the Agenda in Idaho

In 1900 there were only 800 bison left in all of the U.S. Today, however, captive bison are so numerous they are sold as supermarket food, and management of wild populations is required to keep herds stable and healthy.


Gray wolves have been listed as endangered since 1974, and a population of 66 animals were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and Central Idaho in 1995 and 1996. These animals have since reproduced to a population of 1,500, and as a consequence the Federal Goverment is now moving to delist wolves in three states -- Montana, Wyoming and Idaho.

In Idaho, a plan is afoot to kill as many as 300 of the 700 wolves believed to be in the state.

The ironic thing (and the thing that reveals the politics behind the delisting initiative) is that Idaho, Wyoming and Montana do not have the largest wolf population in the U.S.; that would be Minnesota.

So what makes Idaho, Montana and Wyoming so special that these states get their very own wolf-killing pass?

The answer: powerful local interests which represent cattle ranchers and big game guides.

These folks want the wolves shot, theorizing that wolves represent a threat to their industries.

Of course the real threat to the cattle industry is something else, as the recent recall of 143 million pounds of meat mixed with "downer" cattle reveals.

As for the elk herd populations, they are still larger than the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service want on the land. Elk over-population remains Topic One when discussing herd management issues in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana.

Taking the wolf off the Endangered Species list does not necessarily mean that it is open season on wolves or that they can be legally hunted. What it does mean is that wolf abatement will be easier for ranchers, and that drunken rednecks who shoot wolves from their trucks will not longer face Federal charges. All three states will now have to develop, and submit, wolf management plans before any wolf killing-culling-hunting initiatives are begun.

Will the wolves manage to thrive anyway? That's the assessment of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service which notes that wolves are both smart and fecund.

The other bit of good news is that wolves exist in states other than Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. Along with a larger wolf population in Minnesota, there is a small population in Michigan, a small but growing population in Wisconsin, a small population of red wolves in North Carolina, and a few wolves in Oregon, etc.

Across the U.S. there might be 4,000 wolves in the wild, out of a national population that was once estimated to top 200,000 animals.
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Build It and They Will Come

From an email received today from a friend:

This is the actual turnoff from Banff National Park, Canada to the # 1 highway to Calgary. Great picture isn't it? They had to build the animals (especially the elk) their own crossing because that was where the natural crossing was and after the highway was built there were far too many accidents. I understand it didn't take the animals long to learn that this was their "road." (click on picture to enlarge)

Elk, Wolves and Grazing

Over at the Black Bear Blog, Tom Remington has a couple of posts on wolves, and also one in which a young man asks a very good question: Why Aren’t Ranchers Upset About Elk Eating Crops?

Reading these posts tonight made me recall an email I got back in January in response to a post I made about Idaho Governor "Butch" Otter's suggestion that 500 wolves be shot in his state.

The not-so-subtle title of my January post was "Why Stupid on Stilts Is Good for the Environment."

A bit harsh, to be sure, and my post generated an email from a reader who is a US Forest Service rangeland management specialist in Montana. He had a couple of objections to my original post. They were:

Ed Abbey was writing a long time ago (the 1960s, 70s and 80s);

There are still some grazing problems out west, but on the whole the land is not as wrecked as it used to be because of better (and integrated) land management plans, and professional science-based rangeland specialists;

People like Butch Otter are saying we need to shoot wolves in order to save elk, the hunting of which is a big business in Idaho.

Everything done in the National Forest system is subsidized, and in this respect cattle grazing is no different than recreation.

Points one and two are readily conceded on this end. Sometimes, when I am writing, it's easier to pull up the old stuff in my head than it is to track down the latest quote, picture and data set. Western lands are still over grazed, but it is true that they are not as bad as they were (or as good as they are going to get, I will venture).

As I noted in the last line of the original piece in question, America does wildlife management pretty well, and it's thanks to a lot of Good Government Guy and Gals, hunters, and environmentalists working together that this is so. I am a pretty enthusiastic supporter of the younger, college-educated and science-based public lands managers coming up. I truly believe the best is yet to come.

That said, I disagreed with points three and four, and I detailed why in a missive back to my Forest Service friend. Because my response is "on point" as to why Elk are given a pass for eating alfalfa while wolves are not given a pass for killing an occasional calf, I append it below:

Dear M -

Thanks for the note. I see you are working in the ___ National Forest in Montana. I know nothing about Montana National Forests, but I do know about land management problems in Idaho.

The good news, is that some of the major problems in the Nolo and Clearwater are getting fixed. In fact, the good news across the board is that we have much better science and much better public lands administrators now than we used to have. It used to be that a USFS guy would mark his career by how many big timber sales he could put together. Now, in part due to litigation and in part due to education and attrition in Forest Service and BLM personnel, different values are in competition with each other. That's a good thing for all sides. Who knew truth to suffer in a free and open debate?

There is, of course, a place for sensible private business use of public lands, but I think you would agree that it's an easier mission to achieve in theory than in reality. The Clearwater, for example, needs more prescribed burns, but the timber folks are not all that enthusiastic about that -- they would rather skid out the big trees and leave the trimmings for beetle bore infestation. Burning up their profits? Are you mad?

The same is true for mining, drilling and grazing. I think you and I would probably agree that there are a lot of places in the West that could benefit from a little less grazing (especially around riparian areas), but try to get the cattle folks to agree to that, much less the cattle. When we talk about free range in this country, it's not just free of fencing -- it's free of human oversight too, which is why wolves are an issue. Not only could the cattle guys not be bothered with owning land, or building fences, they generally cannot be bothered to put someone out there 24-7 to watch the herd.

The good news, as you note, is that a great deal of National Forest rangeland has improved through the 1980s and 1990s thanks to better management practices. A very big problem remains, however: The Western range is vast, the herds of cattle grazing on them are numerous, and the Forest Service has too few personnel to do very much on-the-ground oversight.

That said, I concede that things are better than they used to be, and I have little doubt they are not as good as they are going to get. I am, basically, a huge fan of our public lands professionals.

OK, that said, let's look at the wolf-cow-rangeland-elk-hunter nexus that Governor Otter speaks of for a second.

The first question is this: Are wolves actually having a serious negative impact on elk populations in Idaho or Wyoming?

The short answer is NO.

In Wyoming, where wolves were first introduced in the West (outside of MN where they have always been extent) the state reports that their elk populations are 91,555 -- more than 9,000 head over capacity.

"We would like to get the elk down to our population objective," Game and Fish spokesman Al Langston said. "But overall in the state, the elk population is doing well."

In Idaho, The Idaho Statesman (hardly a liberal rag) notes that : "In 2005, hunters harvested 21,523 elk - the largest number in a decade and the seventh-largest harvest since 1935."

In Montana, nearly 60 percent of Montana's original elk management units exceed their elk-population objective and the folks that write the outdoor columns in your neck of the woods openly laugh at the fear mongers who say wolves are a problem, noting that Montana's elk-harvests are very fine, thank you.

Where elk populations have gone down, it turns out wolves have been less of a factor than the drought -- the same drought that drives beetle bore infestations, and which has always resulted in swings in elk and deer populations in the west.

The bottom line is that, so far, the presence of wolves does not appear to have had a noticeable, significant or unwanted decline in the average Elk population of Idaho, Wyoming or Montana -- despite the rise in wolf populations in all three states.

If there had been a noticeable, significant or unwanted decline in Elk populations, would the proper response be to shoot large numbers of wolves, or would it be to cut back on private ranching on public lands?

My answer: Cut back on cattle and sheep grazing on public lands. Here's why:

As a general rule, wild land can support more wild animals than domestic animals for the simple reason that wild animals (like elk and deer) are native to the land and pretty efficient at converting forbs and grass into flesh.

As you can see from the data (gleaned from GAO), land that can support one cow can support more than 7 mule deer, more than 2 elk, and more than 10 pronghorn.

The Governor of Idaho wants to shoot 500 wolves, each of which can be expected to consume about 20 elk a year (according to Yellowstone biologists who track this kind of thing).

To put it another way, 500 wolves can be expected to eat about 10,000 elk a year across Idaho.

If we want to replace those 10,000 elk in Idaho, we do not need to shoot wolves. All we need to do is dial back on the Animal Unit Months (AUMS) of grazing we are now allowing on public land in Idaho. The AUM data for state land (and federal lands by agency) is available here, but from what I can see, if we want to see an increase of 10,000 elk in Idaho, all we have to do is dial back on public lands grazing in Idaho by 5,000 head.

Now, of course, the subsidized grazers will object to this, but remember they also object to Elk being in our National Forests. As far as some ranchers are concerned, the National Forest system is something they own, and it's there for their use -- not for elk, wolves, back country packers, fly fishermen or even hunters.

The "beef cow vs. bull elk" debate is not a new one, of course, but it is important to note that it predates the rise of wolf in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.

On the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation's web site, for example, there's a pretty good article detailing how livestock grazing in the Elkhorns negatively impacted the elk herds up there until they began putting together an integrated land management plan. Fish, Wildlife and Parks area coordinator Mike Korn is quoted as saying:

"The combination of elk and cattle on public land allotments has always been the point of contention in the Elkhorns. The general feeling from livestock permittees is that there are too many elk using the forage, and their cattle are suffering because of it."

"Too many elk"?

Well sure, you can have too many elk if you put a lot of beef cattle on the land and also have no wolves to keep things in balance.

But let's remember who the foreigner is here. The elk and the wolf are native to the landscape, but the cattle showed up yesterday and are now claiming all the rights. If something has to give, it has to be the last arrival.

Especially since the last arrival is costing America's taxpayers quite a bit of money -- $500 million a year in direct costs according to one study.

Before the wolves showed up, the cattle guys were being painted as the bad guys. Now the cattle guys are only too happy to change the story and point to the wolf as the bad guy, just as the timber guys are only too happy to change the story and point to forest fire as the bad guy.

There's just one problem with that equation, and that problem is what's left unsaid: that what made Montana, Idaho and Wyoming the great states they are today was not subsidized free-range cattle, strip mining, and clear cutting of timber, but God-driven natural forces.

And three of those natural forces are elk, wolves and fire.

For the cattle guys, the wolf is a convenient distraction from what I think is the real story, which is that elk and cattle are in direct competition with each other. The cattlemen want us to forget that every cow stands where two bull elk should be bugling.

The good news in the American West is that we can still field-test our theories against reality. Most of the west is under "new management" of one form or another -- Wall Street Executives, PhD scientists, rangeland experts, farmers, ranchers, Forest Service and BLM officials, etc. Some of these folks are managing their lands better than others, but what's truly interesting is that very few of them seem to be managing their land better than God did.

Former Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation president Bob Munson helped start the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, which gives us some very interesting numbers about roadless forest land in Idaho -- land where there is no timber cutting, no fire suppression, no mining, and (as the name suggests) no roads. There is also not too much grazing of cattle. This is land still under the "old management plan," i.e. God's Original Design (or GOD for short).

As the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Partnership notes:

88% of the land in hunt units that yielded more than 90% branched-antler bull elk is roadless;

94% of the land in hunt units yielding both 70% bucks and 40% 4+ point bucks in the mule deer harvest is roadless;

58% of westslope cutthroat trout habitat is found in roadless areas. And, 83% of the of the westslope cutthroat populations rated as "strong" are found in roadless areas;

74% of chinook salmon habitat is found in roadless areas; and

94% of sediment-impaired (degraded) streams are located outside of roadless areas.

Now, to be clear, I am not against all grazing on public lands any more than I am against all timber harvest on public lands. You are correct that, in theory, we should be able to cut timber and graze cattle on public lands under science-based supervision and with carefully crafted integrated management plans.

That said, I am against allowing folks to exploit public lands for private financial gain while the American people lose money on the deal.

And the American people DO lose money on the deal -- lots of money.

Timber sales alone on public land results in a net LOSS to U.S. taxpayers of over a billion dollars a year. The unreimbursed costs of grazing on public lands appears to generate major losses as well.

You suggest that everything in the National Forest system is subsidized, and ranchers, miners, drillers, and timber companies are no different in this regard than hunters, anglers or back country tourists.

I disagree.

The timber and cattle companies working public lands employ few people, put disproportionately high resource pressures on the land, and require far more management oversight, construction, and reclamation money than do hunters, anglers, bird watchers, or car campers. Extractor industries pocket the cash (hence the name "cash cow") and leave us with the bills.

Hunters, anglers, bird watchers and campers are not a complete free ride, of course, but the cost-per-person-served is very low compared to the cattle and logging companies, and a tremendous number of jobs are generated by recreation -- far more than are generated by cattle and logging.

Lumping these two groups together, I think, is to lump two very different things. One group is a largely benign presence on the land and a huge economic engine, while the other leaves a massive environmental footprint, but creates relatively few jobs.

Ultimately, of course, all public land debates devolve into politics. Sadly, however, the elk, wolves, trees and bears do not vote -- people do.

The good news is that Governor Otter's inane comments about killing off all the wolves are exactly the kind of thing that mobilizes people to take action, donate to groups, join political campaigns, and vote. In the year ahead, I suspect no one will have harmed the cause of public lands grazing -- or done more to help wolves and elk in Idaho, Wyoming and Montana -- than Governor "Butch" Otter.

And for that, we give thanks -- not because we are against ranchers, but because we are for elk and wolves.

Unlike Governor Otter, I think all sides can find room for each other out there in vast stretches of the American west. If push comes to shove, however, Governor Otter has just helped make sure that the wolf (and the elk) will not lose.

My friend working for the U.S. Forest Service objected to a few bits in my missive. As I recall (I am afraid I do not have his original email), he argued that there was a lot more grazing in roadless areas than I thought and that the $500 million grazing figure was too high.

He may be right. Without a doubt there is no ending the debate and discussion on these issues.

The good news is that in the discussion is the solution. At the end of the day, though we may not end up with a perfect policy that makes all sides happy all the time, we get a pretty good policy in which we end up being neck-deep in elk, deer, wolves, alfalfa, and all the rest.

Whatever it is we get wrong, we are (more often than not) getting conservation issues rights. And for that, I remain a proud American.