By Richard Cockle, The Oregonian
The muscles of Carter Niemeyer’s right shoulder are slightly bigger than his left, from skinning hundreds of animals that Montana ranchers and others thought were killed by gray wolves.
Every predator leaves a signature — and with wolves, it’s massive hemorrhaging visible only under the hide from a wolf’s powerful jaws, says the retired federal wolf recovery coordinator.
Niemeyer’s conclusion: Five percent of the dead animals he’s seen in wolf country succumbed to wolf attacks, 95 percent died from other causes.
“I think wolves are a national treasure,” the 65-year-old Niemeyer said Tuesday. “But at times they’re going to be a problem, and we have to deal with that, too.”
The author of a memoir, “Wolfer,” Niemeyer will discuss his quarter-century with state and federal wolf recovery programs on Wednesday night in Portland.
Niemeyer made a bumpy transition from an Iowa-born federal trapper and “hired gun of the livestock industry” as he puts it, to someone now recognized in animal welfare circles as a champion for canis lupus.
When the Clinton administration decided in the mid-1990s to reintroduce 31 wolves into Yellowstone National Park and another 35 into the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho, it wasn’t something Niemeyer could imagine being part of. He’d spent his career until then killing predators, and ultimately he went on to kill 14 problem wolves, too.
But before he was finished, he’d captured and handled more than 300 gray wolves, most of them radio-collared, relocated and released, working for the federal Animal Damage Control, later renamed Wildlife Services; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; and Idaho Department of Fish and Game. In the process, he came to view wolves as one of the most feared and persecuted species in human history, and, paradoxically, among the most worshiped.
His memoir is as much a commentary on human psychology as a journal on wolf recovery.
Livestock producers summed up the 6-foot-6 Niemeyer as a wolf lover, while wolf recovery advocates figured he was in the ranchers’ hip pocket. Niemeyer, meanwhile, annoyed practically everybody including his bosses by skinning dead livestock down to their hooves to find out what really killed them when wolves were suspected.
He angered ranchers by telling them their cows weren’t wolf casualties, canceling any chance of a payout by Defenders of Wildlife, which reimbursed ranchers for livestock killed by wolves. When the killer actually was a wolf, he said so, annoying animal welfare advocates.
“I don’t think we agree on every single thing Carter says,” said Sean Stevens, executive director of Oregon Wild, a wolf advocacy group that is sponsoring his talk. “But he brings a very rational tone to a conversation that has often been irrational and dominated by misinformation.”
“He’s a great voice for reason when it comes to wolves,” said Jeff Welsch, spokesman for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition in Bozeman, Mont., another environmental group. “You hear nonsensical stuff from the far right and far left. Carter is someone who has dealt with wolves for a long time and been down in the trenches.”
Niemeyer might have something to say about OR-7. He dislikes the trendy practice of “humanizing” wolves by naming them, such as OR-7’s new name of “Journey.” Wolf populations matter, he learned in Biology 101 at Iowa State University, individual wolves don’t, he said.
If wolves kill livestock, deal with them, he said. “The rest of the time, I tell people to enjoy them when you have the opportunity to see them and hear them.”
Wednesday night
Carter Niemeyer speaks at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at Jam on Hawthorne at 2239 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd., Portland.
It was Niemeyer who collared B-300, one of Oregon’s first breeding female gray wolves and the alpha female of the Imnaha pack in Wallowa County. B-300 is the mother of wandering OR-7, arguably the world’s most famous gray wolf.