- Filmmaker says reintroduction was ‘fraud’
GEORGE KINGSON/Staff writer
COEUR d’ALENE – It was a full house Thursday at the Kootenai County Reagan Republicans weekly meeting at Fedora Pub and Grille. The topic of discussion responsible for the large crowd was the ever-controversial Idaho wolf.
Documentary filmmaker Scott Rockholm, the meeting’s guest speaker, told the group: “Wolves kill for fun. It’s called ‘sport reflex killing’ and (Idaho) Fish and Game has chosen to hide this fact from the public.”
In 2010, Rockholm filmed and produced “Yellowstone is Dead,” a work he described as exposing the devastating effects of the importation of Canadian wolves into Idaho. He is currently producing a second film he said will expose illegal activities taking place in the wolf reintroduction program in the state.
Rockholm, a heavy construction crew chief with a bioscience degree from the University of Sacramento, told the group his film career began several years earlier.
“I’m a hunter and a father and a husband,” he said. “I wanted to live the Idaho dream. I was a free man who wanted to hunt. But seven years ago I began noticing how hunting had been changing and I wanted to know why. So I’ve been living, eating, breathing and exposing this problem for the past seven years.
“You know, when you’re living with wolves, you have to put up with all the damage that wolves do – not just to wildlife, but to humans, too. Introducing the Canadian wolf here was a crime and it was a crime based on scientific fraud as well as Fish and Game fraud.”
Rockholm said in the early ’90s, the indigenous Idaho wolf was “erased from the face of the planet” and that several years later, the gray wolves imported from Canada were illegally brought in. Fish and Game, he believes, broke the law in introducing the foreign wolf to the state while, at the same time, the Idaho Legislature chose to look the other way.
“Our indigenous wolf didn’t have the impact these imported wolves have,” he said. “Fish and Game seems to feel that a wolf is a wolf is a wolf and that’s not true.”
Rockholm’s presentation was accompanied by a slide show in which, among other exhibits, he showed photographs of what he described as the effects of wolf sickness.
“Wolves carry 29 different diseases,” he said. “Many are transferrable to humans, especially a disease known as echinococcus granulosis, a kind of tapeworm.”
And then, he said, there is the damage to other wildlife.
“A wolf will kill 25 elk a year to survive and then you can double that number just ‘for sport.'”
To Rockholm, the answer lies in controlling the wolf, not managing it. The solution, he feels, is to say “no” to more wolves.
According to Rockholm and his supporters at the meeting, Gov. Butch Otter’s recent push for a $2 million wolf control program is too little too late.
“After doing nothing for 20 years,” Rockholm said, “this request is inexcusable. Now Idaho will have to pay instead of the feds, who are the people who should be paying.”