What we are up against.

[Yummy and Tasty Animal]

This is an older article (from 2009), so I don't know if it has been posted before.  It is a good example of the kind of mentality many people have that may lead to the gradual fazing out of hunting.

http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/are_hunters_stupid_the_unintended_consequences_of_wolf_hunting/C4/L4/#comments

In my younger days I worked for the BLM in Boise, Idaho. A new range con, named Daryl, came to the district.  On Friday after work, we invited Daryl to a party so he could meet some of the local folks. I was talking to a couple of women when Daryl ambled up to us with a beer in his hand and big smile on his face. I introduced him and he started talking to the ladies.
 
I think on the whole he was making a good impression. Dressed in his cowboy boots and jeans, Daryl made a striking figure. After making some small talk for a while, Daryl made his move. He asked them if they wanted to go gopher shooting on Saturday.  “Gopher shooting” they asked incredulously?  “Yeah, he said, “gopher hunting—you know blowing away gophers.” They looked stunned and remained silent. So Daryl tried to recover and said, “The fun part is seeing the red mist rise in the air when you hit one. It’s an incredible rush,” he said with obvious enthusiasm.
 
Those women just looked at each other like they couldn’t believe what they were hearing.  He might as well ask them if they wanted to go the park and molest children. The women fled. Daryl was left baffled and standing alone. He just couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to go blow away gophers, especially when he offered to bring a spare rifle so they could join in the fun.
 Poor Daryl had grown up on a farm in North Dakota, and more recently had worked in Burns Oregon. In his world, shooting gophers was considered a legitimate recreational pastime. But what passes for fun in rural America seems like senseless killing to most urban dwellers.
 
Sometimes I think most hunters in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming are as clueless as Daryl. They can’t seem to comprehend how killing wolves baffles, if not outright infuriates, a lot of people. Wolf killing gives fodder to those who want to stop all hunting.  Sometimes when I see these rural rubes, strutting around celebrating the initiation of a wolf hunting season and talking about how it’s an “adrenaline rush” to shoot one, I have to wonder if they are brain dead or just incredibly naïve and ignorant about the rest of mainstream society’s values?  They apparently cannot imagine how much some forms of hunting, including the shooting of an icon like the wolf, turns off the rest of society to hunting.
 
Most people don’t hunt, so the perception of hunting and hunters is key to how society will tolerate and support hunting as a legitimate activity. Yet most hunters seem to take the knee jerk attitude that anyone who objects to any form of hunting or kind of hunting, no matter how barbaric, is either a member of PETA, or just doesn’t “understand” Nature. The truth is that many of those objecting to wolf hunting are neither ignorant of ecology nor members of PETA or any other animal rights organization.
 
Americans are willing to accept some forms of hunting, typically if the animal is used for food and/or if there is a legitimate safety issue—say animals carry rabies. But they don’t support outright slaughter of animals for no reason other than someone thinks killing is fun or a challenge. I and many of my friends hunt—but we all eat the animals we kill, and we don’t kill animals unnecessarily or with malice against them.
 
Furthermore, many Americans, including myself, consider spotting a wolf in the wild as a cherished event. Despite the claims by some hunters that there are “too many” wolves in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, the chance of seeing one of these animals in the wild is extremely rare. There are less than 2000 wolves spread over three of the largest western states. Imagine if there were only 2000 deer spread over all three states—would hunters think there were “too many?”
 
Plus, for many Americans, wolves are symbolic of a largely lost heritage of the wild, unfettered nature. And for some, such as myself, wolf restoration represents the best of American values—acknowledging the great ecological wrong we imposed upon the land when we extirpated wolves, and an attempt to heal the ecological wounds we created.  So the idea that any state would implement a policy to restrict or reduce wolves is something to strongly oppose.
 
As the ecologist Aldo Leopold noted years ago, wolves also play an important biological role as a top down predator that has many ecological ramifications across the landscape. Unfortunately most hunters have not yet developed the ability to “think like a mountain” as Leopold admonished.
 
We do know that wolves select different animals in the herd from hunters. Wolves, while opportunistic, still tend to kill the young, old, and injured. They can keep herd animals free from disease and can sometimes have significant influence upon other animals and plants. For example, it’s theorized that hey alter habitat use by ungulates, for instance, moving elk out of riparian areas. Even when wolves severely reduce prey numbers, they are performing an important ecological function by providing plant communities respite from heavy browsing pressure.
 
Hunters by contrast, tend to kill the productive age healthy animals, and have less ecological influence upon prey species and habitat use than native predators.
 
Of course, some hunters rationalize killing wolves because they suggest the animals “need” to be managed. I hear that all the time, as if somehow the natural world had gone to hell in a hand-basket before Euro Americans arrived just in the nick of time to rescue Nature from imminent collapse.  Of course, the “need” to manage wolves is both a self-created and self-justifying excuse to kill animals that most hunters wish would just go away or at least believe should be kept at much lower numbers.
 
All this talk about the so called “need” to manage wolves is disingenuous at best.  Any good ecologist will tell you that wolves and other predators do not need to be “managed” since they are more or less self-regulating by prey availability and social interactions. The only reason one has to “manage” wolves is because state wildlife agencies want to sell more hunting licenses.  (There may be rare instances where lethal action is necessary where an animal may have become habituated to people and poses a safety concern, but that is entirely different than “sport hunting”.)
 
I doubt most agencies care about predator social interactions. They treat wolves and other predators like cogs in a wheel—interchangeable parts. Shoot some wolves. Not to worry, more will be born. But the interactions between wolves, prey, and humans are not so simple. Animals have real social lives that influence many aspects of their behavior.
 
Indiscriminate hunting, by disrupting these social relationships, can exacerbate the conflicts between wolves and humans.  Killing a large percentage of wolves in any area creates many of the so called “problems” that hunting is supposed to reduce. Indiscriminate hunting and reduction of wolves (as opposed to the surgical elimination of a particular animal or group) skews the local population towards younger animals which are less skilled hunters, thus more likely to attack easy prey like livestock.
 
Also with more young animals breeding, that produce more pups, you actually increase the total biomass requirements of packs so that even if they don’t prey on livestock, wolves are likely to need more prey—i.e. those elk, deer, and moose that hunters covet. Nothing will do more to create animosity and conflict towards predators than hunting. But you won’t hear this from any state wildlife agency since it’s not in their interest to worry about social interactions of animals.
 
Yet if you read hunting magazines and/or listen to hunters discussing the future of their favorite activity, you find a common theme is that predators are destroying game herds, and the “antis” are out to take away their guns. The “antis” are, of course, anyone else who doesn’t hunt.  Most hunters spend more time complaining about the “antis” than doing anything meaningful to protect the habitat that is central to all hunting.
 
The real threat to hunting doesn’t come from PETA or any other animal rights group, but from the habitat loss resulting from oil drilling, logging, livestock grazing, ATVs, sprawl, and all the rest of the development and degradation of natural landscapes that continues unabated daily.  Some hunters and some pro hunting organizations like the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, among others recognize this, and certainly most agency biologists are well aware of this threat, but the average hunter seems less interested in protesting against oil wells, expanding ATV use, and/or sprawl than complaining about the antis.
 
If hunters want to help realize their worst fears—that is fuel opposition to hunting by society--they could find no better way to do this than continue blowing away wolves. But if Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho want to signal to the world that they have entered the 21st Century and no longer hold archaic and outdated ideas about predators, they can begin to value wolves as essential for ecological diversity, as well as their role in the American imagination as symbols of what we are doing right to heal the ecological wounds we created. The way to do this is to stop the hunting of all predators starting with wolves.
 
George Wuerthner is a wildlife biologist and a former Montana hunting guide.

P.S. I did a quick search for who George Wuerthner is.  He really is a former Montana hunting guide (from what I found), a founding member of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, an ecologist who "worked on wolf recovery in Montana and Wyoming", a nature photographer, and I guess you could say some kind of environmental warriror strongly opposed to things like ATV trails on public lands (his blog is here: http://wuerthner.blogspot.com/).  He also claims he is an avid elk hunter.  I found that he also wrote an article criticizing wolf hunting titled, "Killing Wolves Violates Public Trust".  If anyone can find out which guiding service he worked for just to clarify that he actually was a guide that would be great because I find it hard to believe he ever was a hunting guide.

A really good read concerning his pro-wolf article is located below:
http://newmexicohuntingtoday.com/blog/index.php/2007/12/27/bringing-wolves-back-violated-the-public-trust/

And here is another one of George's gems from August 2011:
http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/wolf_hunts_morally_corrupt/C564/L564/

[bearpaw]

The Wolf lovers will also pose as hunters to try and discourage responsible wolf management, hunters have to watch for this.

[ArrowH]

Makes me wonder about him, because in the high desert around boise or burns you don't shoot gophers, you shoot ground squirrles.

[seth30]

The Wolf lovers will also pose as hunters to try and discourage responsible wolf management, hunters have to watch for this.

we have a few that have come and gone on this website, and a few active members now that I highly suspect of being wolf supporters.

[JohnVH]

Makes me wonder about him, because in the high desert around boise or burns you don't shoot gophers, you shoot ground squirrles.

or whistle pigs

[ArrowH]

or sage rats.
 It would be a slow day of hunting waiting for a gopher to pop up

[frostman]

Fellas, we are fighting a battle with long odds against us.

This story is a classic example of emotion based thinking common among liberal elite. Nearly all of our higher learning institutions are indoctrinating the young skulls of mush with this theology. It is the Bambi syndrome.

I would urge everyone on this site to not portray yourself as a Busch Lite Beer Drinkin Bubba that wants to wipe out all the wolves and "gophers", especially around the ladies (men included).

[Sitka_Blacktail]

I agree with much of this article, except the part about not hunting wolves. I have no problem with hunting them. They're as smart an animal as any game animal. They'll get by.  I also think that any caught molesting people or farm animals need to be taken out. But there is a place in the wild and the scheme of things for wolves.

No need to pose as a hunter, I've been one well over 40 years. I'm sure without a doubt I've killed more deer than 99% of the hunters on this board.  And a few elk and a few moose to boot.  You just have to trust me that there are hunters out there who think about facts and not emotion.  If anybody is being emotional, it's the kill all wolves at any cost people. They can't be reasoned with. Facts mean nothing.  If they did, people would pay attention when a biologist points out the benefits of apex predators.

Here's two he didn't mention although he did mention disease prevention. Chronic wasting disease and brucellosis.  Had there been wolves present when those two diseases broke into the wild cervid populations, it's very probable those outbreaks wouldn't have been as devastating to wild herds as they were. 

[frostman]

Sitka,
Are you a SE AK hunter?

What is your position on wolves in AK?

[rasbo]

everything we post on this site about wolves,in a illegal way, is taken and put on the pro wolf sites..or used in debates....the lies and the loons on both sides hurt each others argument..I think you will find  other states are  already going forth with hunting and trapping to be allowed as mangement tools..And many folks, hunters or not are ok with management,but SSS crowd really hurts the fight,and sounds very bad ...Im in an almost constant debate on management on another site,but its hard to argue against those that will break the law,and stain every hunters ethics...