livestock - Cascadia Wildlands

Conservation Groups Exit Oregon Wolf Meeting Citing Potential Increased Killing

nsc425 — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 19:13:40 +0000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 7, 2019

Conservation Groups Exit Oregon Wolf Meetings Citing Potential Increased Killings, Flawed Process

Oregon Officials Unwilling to Follow Science on Wolf Management

PORTLAND, Ore.— Four conservation groups have notified Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and the state wildlife commission that they are withdrawing from stakeholder meetings about the management of the state’s wolf population.

The groups cited a number of concerns, including a flawed process for updating the state’s wolf plan and lobbying by wildlife managers wanting to make it easier for the state to kill wolves, which is often done at the behest of livestock operators.

The meetings were convened at the governor’s urging after the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife repeatedly proposed revisions to the state wolf plan that lacked support from the environmental and scientific communities, as well as ranchers and hunters.

The conservation groups’ letter to the governor and commission cites unwillingness by the state fish and wildlife department to address the groups’ concerns through meaningful negotiations.

Instead, the department appears to be moving forward with a proposal that is worse than when negotiations began, allowing the killing of wolves more quickly than before in response to livestock predations.

The proposal runs counter to a growing body of science showing that killing wolves is less effective than nonlethal measures and, in some cases, can even increase livestock losses. It also runs counter to the wishes of the vast majority of Oregon citizens who don’t want to see the agency killing endangered wolves.

Stakeholder Quotes

“Gov. Brown’s well-intentioned stakeholder process has failed miserably because her wildlife managers wouldn’t listen to the most recent science or Oregon residents who say we need to stop killing wolves,” said Amaroq Weiss, West Coast wolf advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’ve tried for years to come to an agreement, but the state won’t fix its broken, outdated approach to wolf management.”

“From the beginning, we advocated for a real stakeholder process with neutral oversight and guidance to encourage meaningful discussion and collaborative brainstorming,” said Quinn Read, Northwest director for Defenders of Wildlife. “Unfortunately, ODFW drove the process toward a seemingly predetermined outcome to allow more wolves to be killed in deference to livestock. As there are less than 150 wolves remaining statewide, these terms are unacceptable. We need to raise the bar on prevention of conflicts between wolves and livestock instead of folding to constant demands to kill more wolves.”

“Poll after poll has shown that Oregonians support wolf recovery and believe that conflicts with livestock should be avoided through nonlethal approaches, and yet ODFW continues to insist on a plan that makes it ever-easier to kill wolves without any enforceable standards,” said Sean Stevens, executive director of Oregon Wild.

“The return of wolves to the Pacific Northwest is an incredible wildlife success story that all Oregonians should be celebrating. Instead of assisting this recovery, our state government is fixated upon killing the species at the behest of the commercial livestock industry. There are between 100 and 200 wolves in the state total; this is absurd,” said Nick Cady, legal director at Cascadia Wildlands.

Background
After being extirpated in the mid-20th century, wolves have begun to make a comeback in Oregon but remain largely absent from nearly 90 percent of the state’s potential habitat.

A few wolves have been present west of the Cascades since 2011. There are currently only two known wolf packs in the western half of the state. Most of Oregon’s wolves — which number 124 according to the report issued by the department in April of 2018 — occupy territory in the eastern half of the state.

The Fish and Wildlife Commission prematurely removed wolves from the list of state endangered species in 2015, and a lawsuit filed by several of the same conservation groups challenging that action is still pending.

The post Conservation Groups Exit Oregon Wolf Meeting Citing Potential Increased Killing first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.

Official 2017 Washington Wolf Count Released

nsc425 — Sat, 17 Mar 2018 15:23:20 +0000

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife released its official 2017 wolf count this past Friday. You can find the report in full here, but fourteen wolves were killed by humans and the overall state population grew by just seven. Concerns over high levels of human-caused wolf mortality are one of the reasons Cascadia Wildlands is challenging the state’s “lethal protocol” that permits agency officials to kill wolves in response to livestock depredations. You can read more about that lawsuit here.

The post Official 2017 Washington Wolf Count Released first appeared on Cascadia Wildlands.

Of Wolf Experts and “Wolf Experts”

bob — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 18:35:51 +0000

By Bob Ferris

Male wolf in Oregon (ODF&W)

When I was in graduate school we learned an awful lot in our core areas of expertise. But we also spent time talking about scientific ethics and acceptable practices. Part of those discussions dealt with issues relating to research and publications such as why a certain person should be identified as a primary author or how study animals should be treated during the course of a project and after. The ethics and process trainings were not always formalized in a classical sense, but by the end of my graduate school tenures I had been exposed either though instruction or example to a broad spectrum scenarios that I and others assimilated into our own personal scientific ethos.

This grounding has served me well over the years. It has made me speak up when I felt that was required and it has also made me hold my tongue and not speak when I lacked the necessary grounding or experience to comment or serve as a credible voice in a particular debate. And where I have not had the academic credentials to speak—climate science, economics, and energy policy, for examples—I have made damned sure that my comments were directed by accepted peer-reviewed research or were vetted by acknowledged experts in the field prior to my speaking out on the topics. In short, I take time to do my homework and am always very upfront about my credentials and my sources. And I have observed others in similar situations doing the same—this is extremely important if we are to retain our credibility as voices for science.

Because of this I am sorely disappointed by those with science backgrounds allowing themselves to be characterized as “experts” in areas where they have little or scant experience. We have certainly seen this in the climate change “debates” and it also seems to be a key component in the wolf discussions. This comes to my mind because I recently read a headline that went: Wolf Expert to Speak Thursday. Doing a little research we find that the “wolf expert” is actually trained in hydrology—an expert on water not wolves.

Mission of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association’s Wolf Task Force: This committee will work to defend rancher’s rights to protect their livestock from wolf predation and require full compensation to ranchers when wolf predation on livestock does occur.

Now the person in question is certainly not responsible for the above headline, but he is not absolutely faultless in the matter because he has spent a lot of time and energy publicly talking about wolves as part of his role with the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association’s task force on wolves. And he like others who are being trotted out by anti-wolf forces such as Jim Beers or even Val Geist should take some time to think back to their own ethical grounding and back away from what should be considered an exercise in un-informed advocacy leveraged by the false specter of credentials.

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