Attempts to return animals to wild encounter resistance
By Pauline Arrillaga | The Associated Press
Posted September 15, 2002
BEAVERHEAD, N.M. — Mike Miller watched from a rocky bluff as the female
went down. The dart pierced her hip, its sedative seeping into her
bloodstream. A half-hour later, after a pursuit along the canyon wall, he
saw the gunner clip the male in the neck.
The cowboy felt a rush of elation.
He had ridden out to Railroad Canyon in the thick of the Gila National
Forest to watch as the feds swept down in their helicopter and scooped up
the Pipestem wolves, named for a mountain near the spot where they were
first set free.
He had come to celebrate one small victory in his and his neighbors’ war
against el lobo — sworn enemy of the cattle rancher for as long as there
have been ranches in the West.
He had, unabashedly, come to gloat.
When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service first proposed reintroducing the
Mexican gray wolf to the wilderness that connects Arizona and New Mexico,
ranchers warned: Wolves and people cannot coexist, and wolves and cattle
are a lethal combination.
This pair alone, Miller thinks, killed 19 calves on the outfit he manages,
although federal officials confirmed only two deaths. Some calves were too
far gone to say for certain whether a wolf was the culprit.
They had come within a stone’s throw of his home and his kids, terrifying
his wife.
“I can handle the bears and the mountain lions and the bobcats,” Debbie
Miller says. “When you see them, they take off. They’re scared of you.
These wolves, they’re not scared. And that’s what scares me.”
So on a quiet spring morning, after months of pursuing the marauding
predators, trappers with the federal wildlife agency arrived to return
them to captivity.
“I was glad it was done with,” Mike Miller recalls, although his relief
was short-lived.
This summer, a month after the Pipestem pair was removed, nine more wolves
were released in the wilderness straddling the Arizona-New Mexico border.
At least 21 wolves now roam the pine-studded woods, and an unknown number
have been born in the wild.
Sooner or later, this cowboy knows, el lobo will be back.
Last-ditch effort
It is considered their best chance at survival and, sometimes, their last.
When habitat restoration alone won’t sustain them, when there are so few
creatures left that the odds of natural recovery are slim, establishing a
new population of animals in the wild becomes the lifesaving solution for
many of the nation’s most imperiled species.
“It’s emergency-room treatment,” says Ed Bangs, who oversees restoration
of the gray wolf to the northern Rocky Mountains. “You’ve got a patient
that’s dying and you want to save their life. You do everything you can.
And then you wheel in the next patient.”
Wildlife reintroduction has become an integral part of the country’s
efforts to protect and restore endangered species. Without it, the
California condor would likely have vanished from Western skies, the
black-footed ferret disappeared from its prairies.
There would be no red wolves roaming refuges along the coast of North
Carolina, nor gray wolves for tourists to view in Yellowstone National
Park. Because of Bangs’ program, that species is recovered in Idaho,
Wyoming and Montana and could be removed from federal protection in those
states next year.
But success stories often are overshadowed by setbacks. Whether by gun
barrel or bulldozer, man rid the land of these creatures decades ago, and
man remains one of the biggest roadblocks to restoration.
In California, commercial fishermen went to court after sea otters were
found in a prohibited zone where the animals compete with man for
profitable shellfish. In Delaware, developers challenged building
restrictions stemming from a new population of Delmarva fox squirrels.
Lawsuits also come from the other side — environmentalists who insist the
government isn’t doing enough to promote or sustain re-established
species.
Programs involving captive animals face additional challenges. More than
two dozen condors raised in zoos had to be removed from the wild because
of adaptation problems such as roosting on the ground and interacting with
people at swimming pools.
Forty-five of the 144 condors released in Arizona and California since
1992 died, some from lead poisoning after feeding on bullet-riddled
carcasses and others from colliding with power lines.
At the heart of the debate over these programs are two divergent ideas of
how this puzzle that is our nation fits together. Can we put the pieces
back the way they once were, or have new parts created a landscape that
can no longer be altered?
“While we may all have this view of what the ‘wild’ ought to be, we don’t
have it anymore,” says Caren Cowan of the New Mexico Cattle Growers
Association, which sued unsuccessfully to stop the Mexican wolf program.
“There are a lot of people around a lot of roads that weren’t there 50
years ago.
“You can’t turn back the clock.”
Attitudes mostly unchanged
There are still old-timers in southwestern New Mexico who remember when
wolves roamed these parts as freely as coyotes and bears. They tell tales
of bloodthirsty predators who could take down a calf like a rag doll.
And they remember when, in the 1900s, the government came to their aid and
began systematically poisoning wolves and executing other “pests” seen as
economically crippling to farmers and ranchers.
While the government’s position changed, attitudes have fluctuated little
in this place where stories of el lobo pass from one generation to the
next, along with the land ranchers toil.
Laura Schneberger has heard them all, and now has her own tales to tell.
Like the time two winters ago when her 12-year-old daughter was feeding
chickens and saw a wolf prowling the hill behind their house. Or when her
15-year-old girl came upon a wolf while riding her horse.
“People didn’t kill these things out for no reason,” says Schneberger, a
third-generation rancher who raises 100 head of Brahma crossbreeds on 42
square miles of Gila wilderness. She blames wolves for the death of one
cow, although a necropsy was impossible by the time the animal was
discovered.
So when the Fish and Wildlife Service proposed reintroducing
captive-raised gray wolves in 1995, ranchers in Arizona and New Mexico
fought back.
In March 1998, despite their protests, the government released the first
11 wolves in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest on the Arizona-New
Mexico border. Within a month, a wolf had been shot by a camper who said
the animal attacked his dog. Within a year, four more were found shot to
death, a sixth was missing and the others had all been recaptured.
A total of 74 wolves have been released since the program began.
Twenty-six died, including 10 from gunshots, and 31 were recaptured
because of problems such as livestock depredations or straying from the
management zone. Some of those were rereleased.
Twenty-one radio-collared animals are now free in the forest, although
managers believe the numbers are higher because of wolves that have lost
their collars and because of newborn pups. The recovery goal is a
self-sustaining population of 100 wolves by 2008.
Meanwhile, residents have received more than $15,000 in compensation for
27 animals that have been killed or injured by wolves, including cattle,
horses and dogs. And neither ranchers nor some environmentalists consider
the program a success.
“I’ve got bruises on all sides of my body,” says program coordinator Brian
Kelly. “Most of the groups are coming to the table and trying to find ways
to work this out. If they’re doing that, there’s hope.”