Why Wolves Don’t Howl in Southwest America

Wolves howl again in Yellowstone. But in the Southwest, there is only wailing and gnashing of teeth, as environmentalists face reality: Stone dead are U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service plans to reintroduce the wolf to public lands in Arizona and New Mexico.

Politically powerful ranchers pulled the trigger on the Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi). Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), their ally, killed the wolf’s chances even in bleak and hostile places like New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range. At a time when most Southwesterners say they favor the return of the wolf, it’s outrageous that so few can impose their will on so many.

In northern Mexico, small but genetically diverse wild populations of the Mexican wolf subsist just across the border. Why not let these Mexican wolves encounter their zoo-bred pals in safe havens, where they can interbreed?

Not as long as The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the world’s wealthiest conservation organization, remains part of the problem. Not as long as all endangered species are subjected to heavy-handed federal management. Not as long as private landowners are expected to bear the direct costs of recovering endangered species, while the average taxpayer feels the bite only once a year.

A few years ago, the conservancy, pursuing business as usual, planned to buy the Gray Ranch, which occupies the corner where New Mexico, Mexico and Arizona meet, and resell it quickly to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, under whose management it would become the Animas National Wildlife Refuge. At the time, I was working for the New Mexico chapter of TNC. We were confident that if we had a large, intact tract of land, the Mexican wolves would evade the guns, traps and poisons of neighboring U.S. ranchers. Following biological imperatives, these wolves would slip through the seven strands of barbed wire that form the border and return to U.S. soil on their own, along with as many as 65,000 recreationists a year, drawn by the presence of the wolf. With the taxpayer footing the bill, it seemed like a good deal.

Then the ranchers started complaining. They blocked Sen. Jeff Bingaman’s (D-N.M.) request for federal funds, and the conservancy was left holding an $18-million bag. Desperate to unload it, TNC attempted to lateral it to Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. But when neighboring ranchers found out who the buyers were, they protested. Turner and Fonda retreated north, where they bought a different ranch in central New Mexico. Wasn’t there anyone who could save the Gray Ranch?

Enter Drummond Hadley, owner of a small, gemlike ranch in Guadalupe Canyon and an heir of the Anheuser-Busch fortune. After many millions of dollars, Hadley, with a little help from his son and his mother, bought the Gray Ranch through a hastily formed nonprofit corporation called the Animas Foundation. By discounting the market price by around $8 million (and by exploiting its nonprofit status to offer tax breaks to wealthy people), TNC retained a conservation easement stipulating that the Gray Ranch would remain undeveloped. The rest of the deal was that the conservancy would pitch in to monitor and manage the ranch, though there were--and are--no seriously endangered species on the land, whose biological value was always in its potential as wolf habitat. Incredibly, not included in the deal was a specific plan to open the Gray to the Mexican wolf. Once again, faced with the chance to do privately what could not be done publicly, The Nature Conservancy blinked.

Or did it? Can there--and should there--be wolves on the Gray Ranch? Is the 500-square-mile ranch a barrier to wolf dispersal or a potential haven for a desperately endangered species? TNC is silent on the subject. It was counting on the federal wolf-recovery program to bail it out. Hadley, for his part, is being unusually coy. When asked about the wolf, he told one writer: “Cowboys are like bears and lions. They need a certain range, a critical mass of land on which to exist. If we preserve the ranching culture, the habitat needed to maintain cowboys and other species that belong there will never get developed. As one has to prepare the land to reintroduce wolves, one sometimes has to prepare it to reintroduce fire.”

Fair enough. But how long will the wait be? Hadley and his neighbors are right to oppose the imposition of the wolf on their neighborhood. The wolf would bring an unwanted federal presence into a remote corner of the world that does fine on its own in terms of preserving large areas of land intact. Bigger is better. But if, and only if, the “bigs” have the incentives to ranch for big predators without federal interference. TNC could and should have guaranteed that.

As long as the mere presence of the wolf triggers the hated and feared federal presence, why should local ranchers welcome the wolf? Because it does not wish to offend its federal conservation partners, TNC has flubbed its chance. But the game is not over. The way the Endangered Species Act is administered could be changed. If we who care about wolves had the chance to put our feelings into action, we could reward ranchers who manage for wolves. Then the only howling we would hear would belong to the wolves.