You still won't be able to protect your hunting dog.








Wolves expected to grow in numbers

By SCOTT McMILLION Chronicle Staff Writer

PARADISE VALLEY -- Following a decade of acrimony, suspicion and lawsuits, the players in the ongoing wolf debate in Montana and Idaho have a chance to lower their dukes and see if they can all get along.

"It's about trust," said Dick Dolan, program director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a pro-wolf group. "Let's see if we can do this as a community and a region, to live with wolves, to have agriculture and ungulates and predators."





Ag, government and green groups often butt heads, especially over wolves.

Now they're being "asked to hold hands," said Carolyn Sime, gray wolf program coordinator for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. "It's scary, but it's refreshing. If all we do is throw rocks at each other, we'll never make progress."

The opportunity comes in the revision of what is called the 10(j) rule, a part of the federal Endangered Species Act, a big step announced earlier this month by Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton.

In Montana, it means that state officials, led by Sime, are now the "designated agents" of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for wolf management.

It also means that ranchers will soon have the ability to shoot any wolf that is threatening to attack livestock, or herding or guard dogs, both on private land and on federal grazing allotments. Outfitters with permits to operate on federal land will have the same abilities.

It means that any person can harass a wolf at any time, as long as the harassment isn't lethal, to teach it to stay away from people. (However, owners of pack stock on federal land, without an outfitter, cannot legally shoot a wolf unless it is in the act of attacking. Owners of hunting dogs cannot legally kill a wolf that attacks those animals.)

The new rule means state officials will take over most of the federal duties of monitoring wolf packs, collaring animals and tracking their movements, as well as educating the public, issuing kill permits to ranchers who have confirmed losses to wolves and a host of other duties.

"I feel a sense of responsibility because we are being given the benefit of the doubt," Sime said.

Sime sees it as a step toward a new way of thinking about wolves and new ways of managing them. It's time to change the focus from wolf recovery to long-term management.

Wolves are abundant and thriving in the three states around Yellowstone National Park. Biologically, if not politically, recovery has worked. Some voices still call for eradication, but they speak from the margins of the debate. Most people recognize wolves are here to stay.

The open questions center around where they'll be allowed to live, and in what numbers.

"We're on the cusp of a shift in mind set," Sime said. "Everybody will be making that transition in slightly different ways and at slightly different speeds."

The goal, over time, is to get more people to accept wolves as a natural part of the landscape, much the way bears and mountain lions are accepted. Those species are considered game animals that sometimes cause problems. When they do, they're removed.

Such acceptance for wolves could be a long way off. Legal battles are inevitable and social hurdles throw big shadows.

"As a society, we're still struggling to find a way to integrate wolves in a way that's acceptable," said Hank Fischer, a wolf specialist for the National Wildlife Federation who has worked on wolf issues in Montana for more than 20 years.

He said he believes we'll eventually see thriving wolf populations from Mexico to Canada. If he's right, Montana will help lead the way in a movement with big implications all over the West.

Most environmental groups in the region see the new wolf rule as a positive step. They say they're willing to let state agencies, along with ranchers and outfitters, do some limited wolf control. So do the big national groups, like the Sierra Club and the Wildlife Federation.

The Montana Stockgrowers Association, as well as individual ranchers, praised the new rule.

Only Defenders of Wildlife, the group that pays ranchers for confirmed livestock losses to wolves, denounced it.

"The new rule potentially jeopardizes wolf-recovery efforts just as they were beginning to show some success," said Nina Fascione, a Defenders vice president.

Federal wolf specialists say the new rule might mean up to 10 percent of wolves will be killed every year. But they also point to a 2003 study by David Mech, generally considered the world's top wolf expert, that says wolf populations can withstand human-caused losses of 25 to 35 percent a year and remain stable.

And Sime cautioned the new rule does not mean open season on wolves.

Any dead wolves must be reported within 24 hours, and there must be some evidence -- animals in a froth, trampled ground, tracks -- that a "reasonable person would have believed (an attack) was likely to occur at any moment."

People who kill wolves illegally still face heavy fines and possible jail time. (An Idaho man was fined $21,000 in July for poaching a wolf.) Federal lawmen will investigate all wolf shootings to make sure they were justified.

In cases where livestock is killed by wolves, but the wolves weren't caught, some ranchers will be issued kill permits to use if the wolves return.

"We won't even think about giving out these permits until we have confirmed dead or injured livestock," Sime said.

And each permit will specify how many wolves can be killed and where.

"It's not a wolf hunting license," Sime said. Rather, it allows "strategic, specific actions."

And even with a permit, killing a wolf is rarely easy.

Jim Melin is a Paradise Valley rancher who's suffered numerous losses to wolves. He's had kill permits from the federal government, but only shot one wolf.

"They're smart," he said.

Green groups like Defenders want more emphasis on nonlethal wolf control options -- fencing, guard dogs, flags, noisemakers of various types.

But those measures don't always work.

"Preventative and nonlethal control methods can be useful in some situations," the new 10(j) rule says. "They are not consistently reliable."

Wolf populations are likely to keep growing in Montana, even under the new rule.

The state's wolf plan calls for eventually installing limited hunting and trapping seasons as a way of controlling wolf numbers, the same way lions and black bears are hunted.

But the full plan can't be put in place until wolves are delisted from the Endangered Species Act.

How long delisting will take depends on court actions, political responses, and the willingness of people to get along: the willingness of ranchers and hunters to share some landscape, the willingness of wolf advocates to see some wolves die.

People have had their fists in the air over wolf issues for a long time. Dropping those hands won't be an easy step. But it's a necessary one.

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Same old BS, just a new wrapping. derf