Utah prepares for possible future in wolf management
N.S. Nokkentved
THE DAILY HERALD
The man state officials have hired to help direct an effort to
write a state wolf management plan has raised eyebrows — if not concerns
— among conservationists and wolf advocates because of his connection to
a controversial Wyoming state wolf management plan.
Spencer Amend of the Dynamic Solutions Group deals in tough
issues.
“We were called in because it’s controversial,” he said. His
group specializes in helping groups work out natural resource and wildlife
management issues. He enjoys the challenge of bringing people together.
With the possibility that federal officials will hand off wolf
management to states in the northern Rockies as early as next year, Utah
hopes to write its own management plan.
Sheep and cattle ranchers want to see a plan that protects and
compensates them for livestock losses to wolves. Hunters want a plan that
will control wolf numbers to protect game herds. Conservationists want to
ensure that wolves are managed, not just controlled.
The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources hired Amend to help
the
state’s wolf work group write a state wolf management plan as directed by
the Legislature earlier this year. That group is set to convene next
month.
“We’re really excited about the project,” said Amend, who
lives
in Wyoming and holds a master’s degree in wildlife biology from Utah State
University, with some graduate work in public administration. In 1999 he
helped found Dynamic Solutions as a consultant group on wildlife and
natural resource issues.
Amend helped facilitate work on Wyoming’s wolf management plan
— which must be approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service along with
plans from Idaho and Montana before gray wolves can be removed from the
endangered species list, and management turned over to state wildlife
officials.
Conservation groups contend the Wyoming plan focuses on
control
rather than management and doesn’t provide adequate protection for wolves.
“There has to be a regulatory aspect in place that would keep
wolves from being persecuted again,” said Suzanne Stone, the Rocky
Mountain field representative of Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit group
that compensates ranchers who lose livestock to confirmed wolf kills.
“We don’t believe the Wyoming plan protects wolves in any
meaningful way,” she said.
Stone and some others wonder what Amend’s connection with the
Wyoming plan will mean for the Utah’s effort.
It’s hard to pin faults with the plan on the facilitator, said
Allison Jones of the Utah Wolf Forum. But she remains cautious and
skeptical.
“We have to do better than Wyoming,” she said.
But the makeup of the work group in Utah makes her optimistic.
It includes wolf advocates, livestock interests, hunters, wildlife,
political scientists and the Ute Indian Tribe.
Stone contends that the facilitator in any contentious process
is important. A good facilitator would ensure that all the interested
parties are included. Her group has asked but was not invited, she said.
Amend agrees that as a facilitator he wants to see everyone
with
an interest on the work group.
“I don’t want to see the plan shot down at the last minute by
someone who should have been on the group,” he said.
But there will be opportunities for public involvement as part
of the process, he said.
Wolves are a contentious issue, but it is not so much about
biology as it is about economics, sociology and politics, Amend said. He
will bring a team of three to facilitate the group meetings, keep the
group on track and run public meetings.
Kevin Conway, director of the Division of Wildlife Resources,
proposed the makeup of the work group to the Wildlife Board. But he did
not pick individual people; he picked interest groups and let them pick
their own representatives, he said.
“We’ll see the ability of Utahns to sit down to work through
this issue,” Conway said.
Ranchers are concerned over potential problems with livestock
and would like to see a plan that includes compensation and mitigation for
losses, said Brent Tanner, executive vice president of the Utah
Cattlemen’s Association.
The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation encourages federal officials
to delist the wolf and let the state manage the wolf like they do any
other species, said Ken Young, the foundation’s volunteer chairman for
Utah.
“The sportsmen don’t want wolves,” said Don Peay of Sportsmen
for Fish and Wildlife. They are concerned about the effects of an
uncontrolled wolf population on the wildlife herds that hunters have spent
million on to rebuild after they were all but wiped out in the early 20th
century, he said.
His group supports the effort to create a state management
plan — a plan that may in the end call for no wolves, he said. But he
remains skeptical of federal assurances that wolves will be removed from
the endangered species list.
That process could begin as early as December, said Ed Bangs,
head of wolf recovery in the northern Rockies for the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service.
Wolves have been declining since the first government bounty
on
gray wolves was set in 1622 in New England. By 1930, settlers and
government hunters had effectively exterminated wolves in most of the
West.
“We deliberately killed them,” Bangs said. The gray wolf was
listed as an endangered species in 1973.
In 1995 and 1996, Fish and Wildlife’s recovery efforts
successfully reintroduced 35 wolves to central Idaho and 31 to Yellowstone
National Park in Wyoming. They already had begun to re-colonize northern
Montana.
In those three states, wolves now number an estimated 700 to
800
animals, meeting the recovery goal.
But before the delisting process starts, Fish and Wildlife
must
approve wolf management plans from the three states. The Wyoming plan
still is under peer review, Bangs said.
If the plan is approved, the next step is to start the
delisting
process, which takes about a year. That means the wolves could be delisted
by late 2004.
No one doubts that wolves will make their way into the wild
country of northern Utah.
“There will be occasional wolves in Utah,” Bangs said. But it
will probably be decades before a breeding pair and a pack is established
in northern Utah, he said. The time to decide how to deal with them is
before they show up.
Utah, however, is under no federal mandate to accommodate the
wolf, Conway said.
“The fate of the wolf in northern Utah is up to people in
Utah,”
Bangs said.