Erik Molvar
John Howard, a former Stakeholder Advisory Group member, recently published an opinion piece titled “Politics undermines Colorado wolf plan.” It’s an accurate title — but his premise arguing pro-wolf political interference was warping the state’s wolf management plan is 180 degrees wrong.
In reality, Colorado’s approach to wolf reintroduction was tainted with anti-wolf bias from the outset. Conservationists rolled out a ballot initiative to bring wolves back to their original habitats in the Colorado Rockies specifically because we had lost confidence in Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s ability to get the job done. Wolf opponents complained bitterly a ballot initiative was intruding into wildlife management, the turf of professional wildlife managers. But CPW neglected to admit the agency had intransigently resisted wolf reintroduction, and blocked and delayed efforts to return this native wildlife species to its rightful ecological niche in Colorado.
The political forces that drove the wolf extinct in Colorado in the first place — the livestock industry and the more extreme anti-wolf hunters — quickly formed political action committees like the Stop the Wolf coalition, laboring to keep wolves extinct.
CPW’s proposed wolf plan showcases political agendas rather than sound science. It steps out beyond recommendations from the Stakeholder Advisory Group (SAG) and the Technical Working Group (TWG), appointed to exaggerate representation of hunting and ranching interests far beyond their population numbers in Colorado. Neither committee agreed to trophy hunting of wolves, yet CPW inserted this option (likely illegally, in light of nongame status adopted by the voters). The TWG recommend lethal removal of wolves should not be a first option to mitigate livestock conflicts, but should be permitted only after nonlethal alternatives had been attempted. In contrast, CPW’s plan proposes trophy hunting after state de-listing, introduces the concept of killing wolves to prop up prey populations and fails to clearly predicate lethal wolf removal on first trying nonlethal coexistence methods.
Recommendations from committees appointed to forge political compromise aside, the ballot initiative (now state law) that compels CPW to reintroduce wolves before the end of this year also requires the wolf plan be based on the best available scientific data. Science is not a popularity contest (Howard should be forgiven, being an investment broker and not a scientist, for confusing a NWF report on the opinions of selected scientists for scientific conclusions). Science is limited to conclusions that result from rigorous hypothesis testing, verified by unbiased statistical analysis.
Importantly, no science shows recreational killing of wolves is necessary (or even useful) for maintaining healthy ecosystems. Wolf hunting (and killing of all kinds) is forbidden in Yellowstone National Park, where the ecological benefits of wolves have most abundantly been shown. Wolf killing is also useless for building social tolerance; tolerance for wolves is greatest in national parks, and much lower on surrounding unprotected lands where wolf-killing is allowed. A new study from the upper Midwest shows legalizing wolf hunting led to an increase in wolf poaching, the most objective measure of social tolerance.
Scientific evidence also demonstrates wolf hunting (or killing) cannot increase big game populations or hunter success rates. A definitive new study from Alaska shows decades of aerial gunning programs failed to increase moose populations or moose hunter success. In addition, the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone (and the growing wolf population that followed) failed to decrease elk populations in the three surrounding states. Indeed, state wildlife agency counts show elk populations are comparable or higher today in all three states.
There is also an absence of scientific support for killing wolves in the wake of livestock losses to minimize livestock deaths. In the northern Rockies, three studies probed the question; the first found killing wolves actually increases cattle losses, the second reanalyzed the data and found the opposite, and the third found statistical problems and reanalyzed, finding that wolf-killing increased cattle losses initially, with minimal livestock loss reductions predicted decades later. Another study that examined studies from around the world found nonlethal strategies to be far more effective at reducing livestock losses than predator-killing.
In the end, it was CPW introducing unscientific political agendas into Colorado’s wolf plan, to the detriment of successful wolf recovery. The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission now must cut through the politics — and the wolf-killing political agenda — and craft a science-based blueprint that supports a successful wolf reintroduction and leads to flourishing native wildlife. That includes wolves.
Erik Molvar is Executive Director of Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit conservation group dedicated to protecting a restoring wildlife and watersheds throughout the West, and bringing science into public debates about land and wildlife management. He is a wildlife scientist with published peer-reviewed research in moose population dynamics and the role of wolf and grizzly predation in the evolution of group dynamics in Alaskan moose.
