Ranchers Who Cry Wolf

By all accounts, the reintroduction of the wolf to Yellowstone National Park beginning three years ago this week has been a smashing success. Well, by all accounts except for livestock ranchers living on the periphery of the giant park. The ranchers will not accept the wolf’s restoration to its rightful place in the Yellowstone ecosystem on any terms.

Beginning in 1995, the Department of Interior imported 66 Canadian wolves to Yellowstone and a wilderness area in neighboring Idaho. The population has grown to as many as 150. And the wolves already have had a dramatic effect on the biological diversity of the regions they roam, restoring it to a more natural balance of the preextinction days early in this century.

The wolf has thinned the perennially overpopulated elk herd in the park and, by leaving ample carrion on the ground, restored a historic food source to other meat-eaters, from grizzly bears to golden eagles.

But now the entire experiment is threatened. The American Farm Bureau Federation challenged the wolf plan in federal court, arguing that the wolves were improperly introduced on an experimental basis under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

In fact, proponents of the wolf plan deliberately used that provision of the act in an attempt to ease ranchers’ fears, because it allowed the ranchers to shoot any wolf that strayed from the park. And the Defenders of Wildlife have fulfilled a promise to reimburse stock growers for any wolf losses, paying out more than $20,000 for the loss of 84 sheep and seven head of cattle.

None of this deters ranchers from their abhorrence of the wolf. The Farm Bureau claimed the wolf importation plan clashed with the law because of evidence that some other wolves have migrated naturally back into Idaho and perhaps into Yellowstone. The law forbids the killing of a wolf that may inhabit an area naturally. The mixing of wolf populations puts an impossible burden on the gun-toting rancher trying to determine which wolf might be natural and which imported, the stock growers argued.

Thus the ranchers took the very provision designed to make the wolf program more acceptable to them and used it in an attempt to once again wipe out wolves from the park. Worse yet, a federal judge in Casper, Wyo., has agreed and ordered the wolves removed. Presumably the only way to remove them is to kill them all, say proponents of the program.

The judge’s order has been stayed while it is appealed to a higher court. We hope the appeals court will restore some logic and balance to this argument and validate the wolf restoration plan for what it is: a spectacular and beneficial conservation achievement.