 |
| Livestock Guardian Dog checking out the calves. |
A thoughtful and clear look at Carnivore management.
Thank you Kevin van Tighem for allowing me to share this on my blog,
to people like Joe Engelhart who manages the cows grazing on "his" reserve, and for those Environmentalists and "wolf lovers" such as Sadie Parr, that see the value of working with ranchers, to protect wolves and habitat.
I think finding solutions, common ground, and collaborating with ranchers and environmentalists, is absolutely the way to move forward.
Wolf lovers who scream anti-beef sentiments and ranchers who call for the extermination of all wolves, do more harm to their respective "sides", than good.
Rethinking CarnivoresTalk to the Agricultural
Service Boards of Alberta, January 26, 2017
by: Kevin Van Tighem
I’m here to argue that how we
manage carnivores should be based on biology, should be humane, and should
advance the public interest. I’m going to focus mostly on wolves. In my view
what we’re currently doing doesn’t meet any of those tests. I’ll come back to
biology and humaneness but I thought I would start with some thoughts about the
public interest.
This is 2017. Alberta is very
different from back when I was in diapers.
Back then, in the early 1950s,
Alberta was a predominantly rural province and agriculture was the heart of its
economy. The oil giant was just starting to awaken. Our provincial government
was Social Credit, a party whose roots were prairie agrarian. The Provincial
Cabinet contained farmers.
By the time, I became a young
adult in the early 1970s, the urbanization of Alberta was well underway. The
economy was on crack cocaine with booming oil prices. Resource industries were
fast outstripping agriculture in importance. The political face of the province
changed accordingly – we elected a government of mostly urban lawyers and
oilmen.
Now as I enter old age, the
trend lines have taken us to yet another place. Alberta is overwhelmingly
urban, the clock is ticking on the oil economy, agricultural families feel
forgotten and our new government represents the socially-diverse,
politically-progressive urban centers far more than the agrarian hinterland.
With electoral boundary review, we’re going to see that shift to urban power
accentuated. If you’re rural, that can feel more than worrisome. But Alberta is
not just you, or me; it’s everyone, and most of us are urban animals now.
So, how might carnivore
management serve the public interest today?
It’s in the public interest to
keep people from being injured or killed by potentially dangerous animals. That
part of the discussion goes mostly to bears, which I’ll return to briefly
towards the end but today I’m focused mostly on wolves. It’s in the public
interest, certainly, to ensure that wild predators don’t kill our livestock.
But just last month, my MLA tabled a petition signed by over 10,000 Albertans
asking for more humane and biologically-sound treatment of wolves. So, it’s
also in the public interest, in 2017, to maintain healthy wild populations of
those predators across their natural ranges. The petition reflected how much of
our province’s population values the role predators play in nature and is
concerned about wildlife ethics. There will be those who want to dismiss the
petitioners as naïve, misinformed urban idealists. Some are. So, what? They are
still Albertans. They are entitled to have their views respected as much as you
or me. And anyway, many aren’t. My signature is on that petition and so are
several southern Alberta rancher and farmer friends.
There
is another piece of the public interest that I think applies here. We hear a
lot about social license in discussions about our bitumen, oil and gas
industries. You can’t secure and protect markets for your goods, and
permissions to operate on the landscape, if you don’t have social license to
operate. Basically, people need to think what you are doing is legitimate and,
if not necessary to them, at least acceptable for them to tolerate.
Social license is an ongoing
issue in agriculture too. We see it in challenges to GMOs, the use of
antibiotics and growth hormones in meat production, factory-farming and so on.
Those are all social license issues. When I was a toddler in the 1950s farming
and ranching had no substantial social license problems; it was how Albertans
saw Alberta. It isn’t like that now.
I recently attended a meeting
of the Porcupine Hills Coalition, a group of people who have pulled together to
make sure the Alberta government gets its sub-regional land use plans for the
Porcupine Hills and upper Oldman right (for a change.) I looked around the
table and saw several cattle ranchers, some acreage owners, land trust
representatives, biologists, and representatives of the major Alberta
environmental groups. It struck me that I was seeing the product of a
remarkable kind of social license building.
Thirty years ago, those
ranchers would not have been in the same room as those environmentalists.
Thirty years ago, as one of those environmentalists, I was publishing essays
like “The Curse of the Cow” calling for cattle to be pulled out of Alberta
public lands and forest reserves. We were adversaries. Now we’re allies.
Environmental groups, in case you haven’t been paying attention lately, are
increasingly lined up in support of public lands ranching in the Alberta
foothills. That’s a man-bites-dog story in the Alberta I used to know and it
came about, I believe, largely because of Cows and Fish.
Cows and Fish happened because
of bold people in the ranching community and bold people in the conservation
community who decided to get out of their echo chambers and into each other’s
lives. The ranchers stopped making excuses and acknowledged that their cattle
can do a lot of damage to creek bottoms if left to their own devices. The
conservationists stopped pointing fingers and acknowledged that ranchers care
about stewardship and know a thing or two about livestock.
Most of you know the story.
Where Cows and Fish projects came together, streams got healthier, riparian
areas recovered, and forage production and herd health improved too. And
adversaries became friends. And ranching strengthened its social license with a
growing sector of society that had spent much of the late twentieth century
antagonistic to it.
I would argue it’s in Alberta’s
public interest to manage carnivores not only to reduce conflicts with and
costs to agriculture, but also in ways that contribute to the social license
for agriculture. Agriculture is important socially, economically and, in the
case of range livestock production, ecologically. But there are other ways to
use rural land and if agriculture loses social license, those other land uses
could take over in a changing Alberta. Already, Brad
Stelfox’s
analysis of economic and land use trends says that rural residential
subdivision is the biggest threat to near-urban and foothills agriculture. But,
at least in Cows and Fish country, the ranchers aren’t defending the land from
subdivision on their own any more.
So, I think the public interest
in carnivores revolves around keeping their populations viable and visible,
keeping them from depredating on domestic livestock, and strengthening the
social license for rural agriculture in an increasingly-urbanized world that
judges failure harshly.
So, let’s hold that thought and
move on to biology and ethics and, again, I’m going to focus mostly on wolves
here because they have always been controversial and challenging, and because
I’ve spent most of my adult life among and around them.
Wolves are like us in some
ways, except that none are vegan. They are strongly family-oriented, they are
social and territorial animals, they learn by trial and error and apply that
learning to improving their life skills, they are capable of affection and
grief, and they are often very difficult to get along with.
So: like us.
Somewhere in deep history, that
similarity led us to bond with wolf ancestors to the extent that we adopted
dogs as favoured companions. But just as we are often conflicted in our human
relationships, so it is with canids. We may see the dog as man’s best friend,
but many of us see the wolf as our worst enemy. Many do; others sentimentalize
the wolf as a wild spirit – sort of like dog-elves.
Wolves are just wolves, but
most of us simply can’t see them that way. Nonetheless, as with everything else
on this planet, we have assumed responsibility for managing them.
The smart way to manage wild
animals is to be very clear on what you are managing them for, and then to work
with their biology to get the results you want.
In my view, then, Alberta is a
shining example of profoundly mis-managing wolves. We have it almost completely
wrong. We aren’t clear on what we are managing for, and the things we then do
in the name of management have the perverse effect of turning their biology
back on us and compounding the problems one might assume we are trying to
solve.
In terms of management
objectives, we say we are trying to prevent wolf problems. In reality, we are
trying to keep wolf numbers down. Those are not the same thing, but muddled
thinking makes us equate one with the other. The wolf problems we are concerned
with here, I would argue, are the killing and displacement of domestic
livestock. Others might say human safety or depredation of game herds are also
wolf problems. Human safety is not, although I can’t understand why. We’d be so
easy to catch, it seems strange wolves almost never try. I would argue that in
Alberta depredation of game herds is not an issue either, with the complicated
exception of some badly-impaired caribou ranges. We have deer, elk, bighorn
sheep and moose coming out of our ears compared to when I was young; where’s
the problem?
So,
that leaves livestock depredation, and wolves can certainly cause problems in
cattle and sheep country. Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t. They get
killed regardless. That’s a problem.
In the 1990s I worked in
Waterton Lakes National Park as a conservation biologist. During my time,
there, three young female wolves, all radio-collared, dispersed into the area
from Montana (the fools: they were protected there!) and became the founding
alpha females of three separate wolf packs. We called them the Belly, Beauvais
and Carbondale packs based on their den locations. I tell the story in more
depth in my book, but suffice it to say that soon I was working with Alberta
Fish and Wildlife and the Blood Tribe on a wolf-monitoring initiative. We kept
track of the collared wolf packs and also tracked livestock losses. A lot of
the producers in the area figured disaster was about to befall the cattle
industry as a result of those wolves.
Alberta’s wide-open
wolf-killing policies combined with a lot of local paranoia resulted in a blitz
of wolf-killing. Over the next sixteen months 54 wolves were killed in the
area. That included all the Belly, Beauvais and Carbondale wolves. Ironic,
because those wolves were never associated with a single livestock loss, other
than a possible kill of one calf in the Carbondale. Meantime, a small group of
uncollared wolves – apparently four in total – killed or maimed over thirty
head of cattle just north of our area in the Breeding Valley area. The last
three of those wolves finally succumbed to poison because without radio collars
the problem wildlife officers couldn’t locate them. They caused all the
problems, but were the last to die.
A few years later a friend of
mine took over management of a large grazing coop north of the Breeding Valley
area. He soon learned that he had a pack of 8 wolves in his area and that they
had seven pups. As he learned his way around the landscape and its wildlife
over the next couple years, he started to have some losses to wolf predation.
In 2003 things got ugly; he lost 28 head that year to wolves. It didn’t help
that an old grizzly was following the pack around and expropriating their
kills, forcing them to kill again sooner than they would have otherwise.
There were radio collars in
that pack too, as a result of a different study. The collars enabled Joe, his
neighbours and Fish and Wildlife to whittle the pack down to just four or five
animals by 2005. The pack produced pups again that year. Joe knew his way
around by then, so he made it a habit, which he continues to this day, to check
his herds every day or two, always at a different time of day, so that the
wolves are discouraged from spending time near them. He has essentially trained
those wolves to avoid his cattle and it has worked. He has had only one or two
losses to wolves since 2005. But he now lives in fear of losing wolves, because
he knows that if that pack vanishes he will have to deal with new wolves he
doesn’t know.
Last winter one of his
neighbours snared several of the pack. He is waiting to see if the survivors
keep the behaviours they had before. If he doesn’t lose cattle, it will be because
some of the wolves survived. If he does lose cattle, ironically, it may well be
because wolves were killed.
What
Joe has learned is that wolf biology can be our friend when it comes to
reducing risk to livestock. There is no wolf manager as effective at keeping
wandering young wolves out of trouble as an existing wolf pack. The established
pack will either chase away or kill any wanderers or, sometimes, incorporate
them into the pack in which case they become part of its established
behaviours.
Wolves are good wolf managers.
We aren’t.
When we manage wolves by simply
killing them, we can actually get some pretty perverse outcomes.
Rob Wielgus and Kaylie Peebles,
in an exhaustively-peer-reviewed analysis of kill records for Montana, Idaho
and Wyoming, found a result that, on first glance, seems to defy logic. They
found that killing wolves results in more, not fewer, livestock
depredations the following year. They had very detailed data on wolf
populations, wolf pack numbers, lethal wolf removals and livestock losses. They
found that for each wolf killed in a given year, there was a 4% increase in
sheep and a 5 to 6% increase in cattle killed by wolves the following year, at
a regional scale.
This is similar to what John
Gunson and Jon Bjorge found in Alberta in the early 1980s. Reducing a local
wolf population from 40 down to only 2 reduced cattle depredations for two
years – and was then followed by a significant increase as other wolves
dispersed into the area. They evidently didn’t have cattle producers who rode
their herds as regularly as my friend Joe does or they might have had a
different tale to tell.
Wielgus figures that what is
happening is that breaking up wolf packs increases pup survival rates, can lead
to new packs forming, and reduces predation efficiency. All those factors
increase the risk of livestock losses. Young wolves aren’t skilled; left to
their own devices they are likely to kill the easiest prey they can find. Small
wolf hunting units can’t defend their kills from bears and other scavengers, so
they have to kill more often than larger, established packs to get the same
amount of food. Wielgus and Peebles found that wolf killing only led to reduced
livestock losses in cases where more than 25% of the wolves in the area were killed
in a given year, because that overwhelmed the reproductive rate and actually
led to a population reduction. But, they pointed out, it’s awfully hard to
sustain that level of wolf killing and neither is it socially acceptable. Wolf
Armageddon is not the best way to strengthen the social license of agriculture,
especially public land cattle grazing.
In Alberta, the prevalent wolf
management paradigm is that all wolves are potential livestock killers and
therefore we need to keep wolf numbers down. If your objectives are to keep
wolf numbers down, then you need to kill an awful lot of wolves because they
breed prolifically and disperse constantly. But they’re hard to kill, so you
need to use the most lethal tactics you can, regardless of whether those tactics
are humane or not, and you need to get lots of people involved in the business
of killing wolves.
So in Alberta it is legal to
kill wolves year-round on private property and most of the year on public
property. Baiting is allowed as late as mid June in northern Alberta to improve
the odds. That virtually guarantees that every year nursing pups are left to
starve in their dens. Snares
are
not only allowed but encouraged, even though the heavy musculature and strong
gag reflex in wolves means that many take hours or days to die. Snares are
considered killing devices and, as such, trappers aren’t required to check them
frequently. Year-rounding shooting, baiting and snaring still aren’t enough,
though, so the controls on use of poisons are also pretty loose. The poison of
choice in Alberta is strychnine, which causes excruciating pain and often
results in secondary poisoning of other animals. It’s banned in the U.S. but
not here. And just to up the ante, unaccountable third parties are allowed to
offer bounty payments to encourage more people to kill wolves. I don’t need to
tell you that; some of your own Municipal Districts are in the bounty business,
using ratepayer’s taxes, ironically, to increase the risk of livestock losses.
For some reason, we find it
easy to absolve ourselves of humane considerations where wolves are concerned.
It goes back to the intense ambivalence we feel about wolves, I suspect, but
some of it simply goes to our human ability to close our minds to things that
are inconvenient to think about. We think we need to kill lots of wolves, so we
choose not to think about the suffering our killing techniques cause, not just
to the victims but to the survivors. Because, remember, wolves are like dogs
and humans in the intensity of their emotional bonds and their ability to
experience grief. What an inconvenient thought – it’s way easier to think of
them as dumb robots, isn’t it? But they aren’t.
And here’s the sick irony:
killing lots of wolves does not reduce wolf numbers. What it does is to
increase wolf problems. Because we are maintaining a state of social anarchy
out there in wolf country. Packs no sooner form and start to function than they
are broken up. Young wolves lose their teachers and also lose the social
discipline that kept them from breeding. We end up with more packs, younger
packs, smaller packs or lone dispersers – and much greater risk that those
inefficient hunting units will turn to easy prey. When they do, we have no way
of figuring out which wolves were involved, because there is no pattern to
things.
That’s what we saw in the
Breeding Valley area during my Waterton years – while established packs in the
Waterton area lived on wild game and kept other wolves away. That’s what Joe
Engelhart and his neighbours worked so hard to overcome in the early years of
this century and now try to maintain: a stable, intact wolf pack they know.
So we are not using biology to
manage wolves; just the opposite. We are not managing them humanely; just the
opposite. And we are not reducing livestock depredation problems; just the
opposite. And yet there are many who say we need to keep on doing what we have
always done to prevent the problems we are actually perpetuating.
What might a
biologically-based, humane and actually logical approach to wolf management
look like then?
It would be based not on
killing wolves, but on keeping wolf packs intact so that wolves are managing
wolf numbers, not us. It would put far more emphasis on prevention techniques
that have been shown to work – not perfectly, but well. Those include things
like actually tending one’s livestock herds (which helps not only with
discouraging predators but with reducing
stream
damage, improving range health and getting better distribution and use of
forage.) Things like the use of electric fencing and fladry for calving areas.
Livestock guard dogs. Combinations of these and other techniques – using our
thinking abilities rather than our instinctive reactions.
In addition to using old and
new technologies and simple brain power to reduce the risk of livestock
depredations, it would be worth considering the cost benefits of maintaining a
radio-collared sample in the wolf population. Not only could radio-collared
wolves be useful in helping livestock producers when the wolves are in the
neighborhood and might benefit from some encouragement to keep moving on, but
when depredations happen it would greatly increase the ability to determine if
wolves were responsible, which ones, and where to find them. Because sometimes in
spite of all your best efforts, wolves will get into trouble. When that
happens, it makes more sense to kill those specific wolves than to throw up
your hands and declare war on all wolves again. Having radio collared “Judas
wolves” makes it easier to find the right pack in a timely manner and humanely
shoot them instead of having to try and get lucky with poisons, snares or other
pitch-and-hope techniques that are both untargeted and inhumane. It worked for
many years in northern Montana after all.
One thing I hear sometimes in
discussing these sorts of things with livestock producers is a sort of
exasperation. Why should they be required to have to go to all this extra work
and inconvenience for an animal they don’t own and don’t even want around? How is
that fair?
Well, wolves aren’t going away.
We’ve proven that – in spite of decades of inhumane, aggressive killing, we are
estimated now to have more wolves than at any time in the past half century. As
long as we keep getting mild winters, there are going to be lots of elk, deer,
moose and sheep and that’s ultimately what controls wolf numbers. So we’re
going to be living with wolves – just as we live with poisonous plants,
lightning strikes, April blizzards, rustlers and bad genetics. If you want to take
live animals to market, you need to put some work into keeping them alive.
Discouraging wolves and bears is part of that. Yes it might be frustrating, but
it should also be a source of pride. In Alberta we live in the real world; in a
whole place.
And there is that social
license issue. I don’t know many livestock producers who want other people
making their decisions for them. The pressure continually builds in a changing
Alberta for better wildlife management and more humane treatment of animals –
all animals. A lot of Alberta livestock production depends on access to public
land. The future of agriculture depends on the much larger majority of
Albertans who aren’t in agriculture continuing to see it as a legitimate land
use in a changing world. Investing in more progressive approaches to predator
management not only makes sense in terms of being more likely to reduce
depredation losses, it’s an investment in social license.
It’s ethically right, it’s
logically sensible, and it’s strategically smart.
But I have another message for
another audience too – for the people not in this room. Livestock producers
don’t just produce beef or mutton or other products. They protect habitat
that
supports much of Alberta’s biodiversity, including many of our species at risk.
Well managed public land grazing leases in western Alberta are vital source
water areas in a water-scarce province. And when ranchers and farmers go that
extra mile to keep wolves and bears out of trouble, especially since its their
good land management that supports the elk and deer herds that attract
predators in the first place, they are keeping Alberta wild and healthy. Those
are all ecological goods and services for which producers get paid nothing.
Most do it because that’s who they are; it’s all part of their stewardship
ethic. But I think the rest of society needs to start recognizing the value of
those ecological goods and services and transferring some of society’s wealth
to the people who produce them. A more reliable and generous compensation
program for livestock losses to predators would be a good start. Where
individual producers take on extra costs for herding, electric fencing or other
measures, I’m not sure those costs should come out of their pockets.
Agriculture needs more than social license; it needs to be socially valued.
Good land stewards should be able to generate profits from all the goods and
services they produce, not just the agricultural products. We’ve seen what Cows
and Fish did in changing the social landscape around livestock production and
making allies out of former adversaries. Maybe it’s time for producers,
Agriculture Service Boards, environmental groups and others to start looking
into what a Cows and Predators program might accomplish. Or we can just keep digging
and wondering why the hole we’re in gets deeper.
Some useful references:
Niemeyer, Carter. 2012.
Wolfer: A Memoir
Bottlefly Press, ISBN
978-0984811304 338 pages
Proulx, Gilbert, Dwight Rodtka,
Morley Barrett, Marc Cattet, Dick Dekker, Erin Moffatt and Roger Powell. 2015.
Humaneness and Selectivity
of Killing Neck Snares Used to Capture Canids in Canada: A Review
Canadian Wildlife Biology and
Management 4(1): 55-65.
Van Tighem, Kevin. 2013.
The Homeward Wolf
RMB | Rocky Mountain Books, ISBN
978-1-927330-83-8 144 pp.
Waterton Biosphere Reserve.
2016.
Large Carnivore Attractant
Management Projects in Southwestern Alberta 2013-2014. Waterton Biosphere
Reserve, Alberta, Canada. (www.watertonbiosphere.com)
Wielgus, Robert B. and Kaylie
A. Peebles. 2014
Effects of Wolf Mortality on
Livestock Depredations
