BY COLETTE DERWORIZ, CALGARY HERALD
A debate over wolf bounties in Alberta is heating up as experts criticize the province for allowing private groups to offer incentives to kill hundreds of wolves in recent years.
The concern, which was first raised by conservationists in the spring, is that there’s no accountability for wolf management in the province.
“The bounty issue is archaic,” said Lu Carbyn, a wolf specialist who’s making a submission on Alberta’s bounties at a meeting of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “Bounties don’t … solve a problem. Basically, what you do is kill at random, get the money for it, and whether it does a good job or not is beside the point.
“It’s basically a willy-nilly killing of predators.”
Carbyn, an adjunct professor with the University of Alberta and a retired research scientist with the Canadian Wildlife Service, said Alberta is one of the few jurisdictions in North America that still allows a wolf bounty.
Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development said it has a wolf management plan, which lays out objectives for the species in the province.
“We have a number of goals for wolf populations,” said provincial carnivore specialist Nathan Webb, noting it includes maintaining the animals both for esthetic and ecological value, and for hunting and trapping.
It also acknowledges challenges such as wolves’ predation on livestock and threatened caribou herds.
Webb said the province tries to balance all of the competing interests through its management framework, but it doesn’t prevent wolf bounties.
“It’s not something that is prohibited, but it’s not something we provide as the provincial government,” he said. “The ones that are in place are either provided by private groups or municipal governments.”
Webb said they have the ability to adjust hunting and trapping seasons if necessary, but they don’t feel the wolf population is threatened in any way.
“On a provincial basis, the current hunting and trapping seasons are sustainable,” he said. “There’s also quite a bit of evidence the wolf population has grown in the past 10 to 20 years.”
The population is estimated between 5,000 and 7,000 wolves.
Carbyn and others said it’s not about the number of wolves, but the way they are being managed.
“We have private hunting clubs that have taken it upon themselves to put a $300 to $500 bounty per head on wolves and kill as many as they possibly can,” said Dwight Rodtka, a retired predator control specialist with Alberta Agriculture who’s been raising his concerns with the province for years. “It’s an abrogation of responsibility on the government’s part.
“They do it because that’s the easy way out.”
His figures suggest at least 600 wolves have been killed in the past five or six years — although the province was not immediately able to confirm the number. Some of those wolves have been trapped with snares, which Rodtka called inhumane because animals can live for days.
Alberta’s management of wolves was also condemned by Kevin Van Tighem, a former superintendent of Banff National Park who has recently released a book, The Homeward Wolf.
“We need to start managing wolves based on biology, not bigotry,” he said. “These are all sorts of violent things we are doing to these animals.”
Van Tighem said there’s no question wolves need to be managed.
“They are predators and can become a real problem, but you need to manage them humanely and based on their biology,” he said, noting the random killing of wolves breaks up packs and causes more problems because they lose their hunting ability.
The province, he suggested, is just standing back and letting everyone else “mismanage” wolves.
“At the very least, wolves should be managed by the responsible agency in this province,” he said. “The accountable agency is still accountable, but they are accountable for this chaos.”