A radical management plan for gray wolves: hunting

Hunting outfitter Ray Rugg toes a crusted depression in the snow. "Wolf tracks," he says. The tracks crisscross this small meadow past a piece of front leg and scraps of hide, the last remains of a white-tail deer.

On this damp early Spring afternoon Rugg's only looking for signs of the six wolves he frequently sees on his ranch in the rugged Bitterroot Mountains west of Superior, Montana. But come September, these predators will become prey. Rugg plans to guide hunters into these mountains on both sides of the Montana-Idaho border when the first legal wolf hunting season in the contiguous United States begins.

"I already got a line of clients waiting to put in an application if the hunt goes through," says Rugg, whose family has guided hunters in pursuit of deer, elk, black bear or mountain lion in Montana and Idaho for over sixty years.

As the first wolf hunts begin in the Northern Rockies, state and federal wildlife officials hail the transition to state management with public hunting as a major step forward in wolf conservation. They say it will develop greater acceptance and a conservation constituency for the contentious carnivore among hunters like Rugg and the public at large, because citizens will have a hand in management. But critics contend that a more enlightened ethic is unlikely, and the wolf's long-entrenched malevolent symbolism, and the backlash it incites, will persist.

For many ranchers, hunters and outfitters like Rugg, the opportunity to hunt wolves has been long in coming. To varying degrees people in Rugg's circles harbor a deep resentment of the presence of the wolf, an unwanted predator their forebears were wise to eradicate, revived by an intrusive federal government. They've watched wolf numbers rise — along with conflicts with livestock and domestic animals. Rugg's had wolves fight his dogs right on the porch, powerless to legally do anything about it.

Rugg believes wolf numbers are too high and blames wolves for declines in area deer and elk populations. He says he's come to accept the presence of wolves, he just wants to reduce their numbers, "to help the deer and elk population more than anything."

Last month's removal of gray wolves in the Northern Rockies from the endangered species list, a scant thirteen years after they were first reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho, marks a seminal moment in the history of American wildlife conservation. For the first time, a species officially recovered under the Endangered Species Act will be managed with public hunting.

"We're trying to develop a fair chase ethic around wolves that allows hunters to take ownership in their management," says Carolyn Sime, wolf coordinator for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. "Without that ownership it's a damage program, not a wildlife program."

Sime believes public hunting will develop a strong hunter constituency that advocates for wolves politically and helps protect and improve habitat, just as hunters do now for other animals like deer, elk and mountain lions.

The key is for hunters to move beyond the view that they compete with wolves for big game. The statistics show that with the exception of a few elk herds, wolves have not had a negative effect on big game populations or hunter success rates, Sime says.

Steve Nadeau, large carnivore manager for Idaho Fish and Game, agrees. And he points to a recent survey conducted by his department that found 80 percent of hunters in Idaho oppose wolf recovery efforts. That number switched to 60 percent in favor of recovery efforts if wolf populations were managed through hunting.

Public hunting has played a central role in the restoration and conservation of wildlife in North America for the past century. It was a group of famous sport hunters concerned with the decimation of wildlife, most notably Theodore Roosevelt, that launched the country's unprecedented wildlife restoration, says Jim Posewitz, executive director of the Orion Institute and author of three books on hunting ethics inherent to the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation.

The first half of the story is well known, but it bears repeating. As Americans pushed west during the 18th and 19th centuries, they encountered a landscape teeming with wildlife. Americans trapped or hunted species after species, from beaver to trumpeter swans, deer to wolves, until "we had stripped the continent clean," Posewitz says. In the best known example, market hunters and government agents intent on crippling the economy of the Plains Indians wiped out tens of millions of bison in just a few decades.

The second half of the story is less well known. While a few Americans, most notably Henry David Thoreau and George Perkins Marsh advocated for protection of wildlife and wild places, it was not a widespread public sentiment.

"The American culture didn't have a conservation ethic. That just wasn't something people had," Posewitz says.