Commissioners vote to keep wolves out of county
By RUDY HERNDON, Free Press Staff Writer
ELKO — County commissioners have agreed to draft a resolution to keep
wolves out of Elko County.
The action came Wednesday, just days after a coyote trapper captured a
wandering member of Yellowstone’s Druid Peak wolf pack near Morgan, Utah,
about 30 miles north of Salt Lake City.
A resolution to kill wolves “by whatever means available” and to hold the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service responsible for any damages migrating
wolves may inflict on livestock, property or people, was drafted in
response to unconfirmed reports of gray wolf sightings throughout Elko
County.
But the board refrained from making a decision Wednesday and instead voted
unanimously to draft a resolution making Elko County a non-wolf habitat.
While wildlife biologists have not confirmed the presence of wolves in
northeastern Nevada, they believe that individuals from central Idaho
packs could wander into the area on occasion.
Commissioners Nolan Lloyd and Brad Roberts said the county needed to take
a strong stance against Endangered Species Act regulations that protect
the nomadic predator.
“Somewhere, there’s got to be some — local government has got to have
some sovereignty sometimes. I don’t know that they’re going to have it. We
yield to the federal government, the Fish and Wildlife and everything.
Where is it that the county is going to stand up and say ‘this is the way
it’s going to be.'” Lloyd said.
“When did the Endangered Species Act become more powerful than the
Constitution?” Roberts asked.
But Commissioner-elect Sheri Eklund-Brown and U.S. Forest Service Mountain
City District Ranger Dan Dallas urged the board to moderate its
resolution.
“I feel that we need to take into account the Endangered Species Act,
which already accommodates migratory wolves,” Eklund-Brown said.
“There’s a lot of flexibility and special regulations with this population
as opposed to normally listed species. And it gives flexible management of
wolves, including authorization for private citizens to take wolves in the
act of attacking livestock on private land,” Eklund-Brown said.
Section 4(d) of the act, which is already in effect in Minnesota, eases
restrictions on populations that have been downlisted to threatened.
Wolves that have preyed on domestic animals can be trapped and killed by
designated government agents.
“I was a little concerned with some of the adversarial language in there,”
Dallas said, pointing to a section of the resolution that attributes the
decline in the livestock industry to federal land management decisions.
Dallas added that he hoped state, federal and county agencies could act
together to improve their working relationships.
“With all due respect, sir, the adversarial language always seems to come
from the county. But when it comes from the other side, it’s acceptable,”
Roberts said. “This language — ‘non-essential (wolf) experimental
population.’ That’s adversarial to me.”
Public Land Use Advisory Commission member Bob St. Louis, who drafted the
resolution, told commissioners that wolves would devastate the county’s
big game herds.
“The statistics that I was able to read about clearly show that where the
wolves have been reintroduced, or where they’ve established reproducing
packs, they are very detrimental to the wildlife in those areas,” St.
Louis said.
“I believe that once we have reputable accounts of the wolves being in
this state, that there will be petitions to ensure that it is listed
here,” he added.
“To me, I don’t see the difference, you know, of bringing wolves into
establishment or these ones that just come in and establish,” Assemblyman
John Carpenter said. “We know what’s going to happen to our livestock and
our wildlife.”
Carpenter, R-Elko, told Commissioners he was certain that state
legislators would introduce a bill declaring Nevada “wolf-free.”
Lloyd and Carpenter questioned the Fish and Wildlife Service’s motives.
“I recognize our having to work with Fish and Wildlife, but it throws a
red flag to me. Our experience with them folks is not good,” Lloyd said.
“They’d have every wolf in every backyard.”
“We know what happens when we ask the Fish and Wildlife Service, you know,
and they’re going to allow all the wolves they can in here,” Carpenter
said.
“That is not true,” Fish and Wildlife Service spokesperson Randi Thompson
said today.
Thompson also disputed a section of the resolution which states that “the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has clandestinely approached the states of
California and Nevada in the hopes of enlisting the two states in wolf
habitat designation.”
According to a Fish and Wildlife Service document, “it is highly unlikely
that recovery would be successful” in Nevada and California due to a loss
of “suitable habitat” and the potential for conflicts with humans.
The agency’s proposal to delist wolves in Nevada and California has been a
matter of public record since 2000. That proposal has come under fire from
environmental groups, including Defenders of Wildlife, who argue that it
puts migrating wolves at risk.
The agency believes that recovery efforts in other regions will restore
populations to the point where the species no longer qualifies as
threatened or endangered, thereby easing management of “problem wolves”
who repeatedly stray from their packs, Thompson said.
Thompson noted that it’s currently illegal to kill a protected species at
random or without cause.
“They should not be encouraging citizens to go out and violate federal
law,” she said.
“People who kill wolves for no reason will be prosecuted,” she added.
Thompson suspects that Elko County residents may be seeing domesticated
wolf hybrids.
“The perception may be that a wolf is in the neighborhood when in fact
it’s somebody’s dog,” she said. “They’re kind of giving wolves a bad
name.”
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal Welfare
Information Center, many hybrids are bred specifically for their
aggressive tendencies and fighting abilities, whereas aggression is
generally detrimental to wolf pack survival. Hybrids also gravitate
towards human settlements, while healthy wolves will shy away from people.