Plan to Return Wolves Makes West Turn Wild : Environment: Ranchers say that bringing back native animals, including bears, cougars and buffalo, will threaten their livestock.

Kenneth Pawley can’t figure it. The idea of bringing wolves back to this part of the country is “about the craziest thing I’ve heard,” said the 71-year-old sheep rancher.

They’ll tear his flocks apart, he said. “A sheep is just about the most helpless thing in the world.” His dog, lame and half-crippled, barked the flock into a swirling frenzy around Pawley to prove the point.

Wolves, bears, cougars, buffalo: The “no vacancy” sign is out for all kinds of wild creatures in the West. This part of the country spends much of its time arguing about bringing back animals that man once drove away. Like a line from a bad Western movie, many here feel the great outdoors isn’t big enough for both man and nature.

“We’re going to have to turn it over to the animals or the people,” complained an outdoorsman from Billings, Mont. “And the damned people ain’t going to like that when they realize what that means.”

Whether it is grizzly bears or black-footed ferrets, the arguments rage over how and where and whether these animals can return to lands they once roamed.

“The key question is whether we have reached a point in our evolution that we can share a part of what we have with the species that used to be here,” said Louisa Willcox, a conservationist. “Some people have evolved to that point; others haven’t.”

Farmers and ranchers complain that the clock cannot be turned back to a time when this was unending prairie without fences or fields or cattle herds to be tended.

Animal fanciers say it is high time to stop man’s exploitation of the land at the expense of the original four-footed inhabitants. They favor returning some species to their native lands.

When that happens, there is inevitably some bumping of territories. The return of bison to Yellowstone National Park, for example, has been successful. From a mere handful of bison in the early part of this century, the herds in and around Yellowstone have swelled to nearly 2,500.

But the big animals have a habit of lumbering out of the park boundaries and onto nearby ranch land. This is threatening to cattlemen, because some of the buffalo carry brucellosis, a disease that could infect their cows and cause considerable economic loss.

Rangers have tried blank shotgun shells, dogs and even a helicopter to buzz the straying animals, but could not drive them back into the national park. The buffalo do not like to be told where to go.

“They just have minds of their own,” said rancher Ocile Portmann, who found bison foraging on his cattle pasture recently. One buffalo wandered into a KOA Kampground and settled in.

When all else has failed, rangers occasionally have had to shoot wandering buffalo.

But shooting always causes such a hassle. Montana officials found that out last spring when they opened a limited hunting season for grizzly bears. Hunters got three bears, and lawyers bagged lots of work as animal-welfare groups dragged the state into court.

Federal officials first backed the grizzly hunt, then backed off, to the dismay of Montana Gov. Stan Stephens. He accused the agency of “hand-wringing and whimpering.”

Federal agencies sometimes cannot win. When the U.S. Forest Service suggested moving problem grizzlies from Yellowstone to the isolated Targhee National Forest in Idaho, it got lambasted by the Mormon Church, which operates a girls’ camp in the area.

The government also is caught in the middle of a plan to bring wolves back to Yellowstone Park, where they once loped in fearless packs. Federal wardens at Yellowstone helped trap, poison and shoot wolves to near-extinction here in the 1920s, but now find themselves defending a proposal to reintroduce the wolves.

“We all recognize the U.S. isn’t going to be what it was in 1820,” said Wayne Brewster, a Park Service researcher. “But there is 5 million to 8 million acres in the park and surrounding wilderness areas, with very abundant wolf prey. We think it’s manageable.”

Pawley, the sheep rancher, and others in the states surrounding the park disagree. They are convinced that the wolves will not stay in the park boundaries.

On most years, Gene and Louis Walsh drive 600 or 700 head of cattle from winter low grounds to a summer pasture near the Centennial Range of mountains near the park. The cows are largely untended up there and would be easy prey for wolves, the ranchers say.

“Why do you think they paid a bounty on these wolves in the first place?” asks Walsh. “A wolf to a rancher is like a bank robber to a bank.”

Despite laws that threaten stiff fines for harming endangered species, “I think people are going to shoot, shovel and shut up,” said a rancher who asked not to be named.