[00:00:00] Speaker A: It's hard to find out Temperate zones.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: And tropic climbs and n true currents and thriving seas Winds blowing through breathing trees, Strong ozone and safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:57] Speaker C: Hello, K SQUID listeners. It's every other Sunday again, and you're listening to Sustainability Now, a biweekly case good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. Grave wolves were once ubiquitous across California, but the state's last surviving individual was killed in 1924.
In 2011, the first documented wolf since 1924 was observed crossing into California from Oregon. Today, there are at least seven gray wolf packs in California with some 50 individuals. That's not so many. But three counties are worried about wolf attacks on livestock and people and are asking for permission from the state to allow more aggressive hazing, including shooting wolves with beanbags and rubber bullets. Is this really necessary? My guest today is Amaruk Weiss, senior wolf advocate at the center for Biological Diversity. Weiss has been working as a wolf advocate for the recovery and protection of these animals since 1997.
A biologist and former attorney, she's worked on wolf issues in the Northern Rockies, Alaska, the Southwest, the Pacific west, and in the federal domain. Her interviews have appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian, New York Times, Newsweek, and Time. She's been a contributing author and editor on multiple science and policy publications and education materials, and numerous op EDS for the Seattle Times, Sacramento Bee, San Jose Mercury News, and the Oregonian. So, Amaruk Weiss, welcome to Sustainability Now.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
[00:02:33] Speaker C: Why don't we start at the beginning? You've been a wolf Advocate for almost 30 years. What's your background, and how did you get into this line of work?
[00:02:42] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, Ronnie, I'm a biologist and a former attorney, but just like most human beings before that, I was a kid and I grew up in Iowa, and I spent most of my days climbing trees, watching tadpoles, watching minnows and streams. And I was, from the time I was very small, totally in love with canids, coyotes, foxes, which we still had in Iowa, of course, dogs and wolves, which we didn't have in Iowa when I was growing up there. But I had learned from my teachers that we used to have on the Iowa prairies, wolves and bison and grizzly bears.
And I would say that when I was in college studying science, I read a really formative book, Barry Lopez's Book of Wolves and Men, which is a book that even more than 40 years after it was published, I still encourage people to read.
Lopez is an exquisite nature writer, and this particular book is a beautiful and haunting portrayal of the actual wolf, biologically and behaviorally, but also of the wolf which exists in our imagination, for better or worse, and the long history of wolf persecution in the country.
I read another really formative book that got me launched in this direction. Probably 15 years later, in 1996, when I was a practicing attorney, I read Hank Fisher's book Wolf Wars. And that book chronicles the epic legal and policy battles that were required to get wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone national park in central Idaho. It took 20 years after they were listed to make that happen.
And that made me aware that the persecution of wolves that Lopez had described still existed and that these remarkable animals were still really misunderstood and hated by people who welded political power. And so for me, I thought, well, I'm a biologist, I'm a lawyer. I love wolves. I want to be in this fight.
And I was fortunate. At the time, I was living in Southern California. I learned of a wolf conservation and education center out in the Cuyamaca Mountains, the California Wolf Center. I went out there, met the executive director, said, I'm a biologist, I'm a lawyer, I love wolves. How could I help?
And so that was the start. And since 1997, I worked for the California Wolf Center, Defenders of Wildlife, the Mexican Wolf Conservation Fund, and I've now been working for the center for biological diversity since 2013, this entire time working on wolves and occasionally working on other gorgeous species as well.
For most of this time, I've lived in California, but for eight years, I lived in Oregon. And living in the two different states. I'm back in California now, has allowed me to participate as an appointed stakeholder in each of those states to advise and assist their state agencies in developing their wolf conservation and management plans.
And I've been fortunate to be able to work on wolves not just here on the West Coast, Washington, Oregon, California, but also work on wolf issues in the Northern Rockies, in the Southwest and Alaska, and even in the Northeast, where wolves are trying to make their way back. And I also work on wolf issues not just at the state level, but at the federal level. And I would say that currently my focus is very much on the three west coast states.
Getting wolves back to the Northeast. And then what's happening with wolves at the federal level.
[00:06:13] Speaker C: Yes. Which is not so.
Not so great, you know, as you're talking about. About wolf hatred.
That's a sort of an. That's an interesting topic. I. I started to look into this and. And of course, in European folk tales, wolves are usually are often portrayed as evil creatures.
And the more I looked, the more I found. You know, there's the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, of course, and there are werewolves.
But there are also wargs in Tolkien, which are wolves. Right. And fenris sulfur in North. North north mythology and among Native Americans and in old Looney Tunes cartoons and other places, you know, there is this. This image. And do you have any idea why this is? Why have wolves been regarded, you know, with such trepidation and hatred over history?
[00:07:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I can offer some reasons for sure, and I think as a starting point, it's helpful to think of a quote which you'll likely recognize when you hear it.
It's a quote attributed to Chief Dan George, who was for years a Bant chief for the sale Waututh nation in the area we now call North Vancouver. But his quote is, if you talk to the animals, they will talk to you, and you will know each other. And if you do not talk to them, you will not know them. And what you do not know, you will fear. And what one fears, one destroys.
And so this notion of destroying what you don't know and therefore fear seems to have been a really common idea regarding wolves held by Europeans and some Eurasians, not so much among Native Americans across North America. And here's some reasons I'll posit for that.
For one, in parts of Europe and Eurasia, there historically was a very high incidence of rabies. And any rabid animal is highly dangerous. This is no less true for wolves.
And there are accounts from hundreds of years ago of rabid wolves running through villages in Europe and Eurasia, attacking people. And the people who were attacked either died outright from the attack or they died weeks later after contracting rabies. That's a pretty horrific death.
And then healthy wolves in that part of the old world also scavenged on the bodies of people who died from bubonic plague, another fatal disease that is so horrific in how you die. It was called the Black Death. And so wolves were also associated with that horrible event in history as well.
The newcomers to the New World were not aware that North America, its incidence of rabies here is vastly lower than what exists in the old world. And they were coming here only like 200 years after the bubonic plague, which 200 years might seem a long time, but nearly 200 million people died in the black Plague, in the bubonic plague, like 20 to 30% of the entire European and Eurasian population. So it was hardwired in their system to have these fears to be scared of wolves. And so that meant that this old world hatred and fear of wolves was transported to the new world by men on their journeys of discovery. And because they were ignorant as to the nature of these diseases and as to the nature of wolves, which are highly sentient, sapient, and social animals, they live in family groups, much like us, and have culture much like us, they believed and they acted out exactly what Chief Dan George expressed with ignorance, leading to fear, which led to a desire.
[00:09:59] Speaker C: To destroy wolves, presumably. I guess dogs are descended from wolves.
[00:10:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that's true. And the thing about taxonomy with, like, wolves and dogs and coyotes and all of that, it continues to evolve.
So for a very long time, scientifically, wolves were called canis lupus familiaris, the familiar wolf, thinking that dogs were descended from wolves. But about 2015, researchers actually have concluded that wolves and dogs split off from a common ancestor about 37,000 years ago. And so the dogs that are most closely related to wolves are the dogs I happen to have, which are Siberian huskies.
But yes. And these are the animals that sleep in our living rooms every night. And we're not afraid of them.
[00:10:48] Speaker C: Yeah.
Can you give us a kind of a ecological history of gray wolves in the United States? You know, where were they found prior to European settlement? What do they hunt? How are they organized? You mentioned that they're very social.
And when they are. When the Europeans arrived. No, I can say, did. Did they kill people? You know, native Americans? I mean, are there records of that?
[00:11:15] Speaker A: So here's.
Here's what I can tell you. So going back to canis lupus, the gray wolf, this species was once the most widely ranging land mammal on the planet. North America, Asia, Europe. They occupied almost the entire northern hemisphere around the globe.
And when Europeans arrived in North America in the late 1500s, scientists estimate that there were up to 2 million wolves ranging across all of North America from the arctic down into Mexico.
The wolves that were alive at that time, they hunted whatever large, wild ungulate was within their range. Elk, deer, bison, moose, in some places, caribou. Up in the Arctic, musk oxen. And that is still what wolves prefer to eat. That is the prey they evolved with evolutionary. They've got this prey image in their head of these athletic, beautiful, robust animals which, more frequently than not, outrun them.
Wolves do also eat smaller prey. They did then. They do now. Rabbits, arctic hares, beavers. There's some wonderful studies coming out of Minnesota right Now, from the Voyagers National Park Wolf Project, I really suggest that people get onto their Facebook page and subscribe to see all the wolf research they're doing there, including some really fascinating research about wolves hunting beaver and how some of them are more skilled at it than others. You know, again, kind of a cultural feature that they pass on to their young.
Indigenous people that were already here live mostly peaceably with wolves for 10 to 20,000 years before Europeans arrived. And wolves are, they're notoriously shy animals. They really want nothing to do with people. So no, people are not and were not a prey item for wolves. And in fact, in the last 125 years, throughout all of North America, there has only been two instances of wolves attacking and killing a person. One in Canada and one in Alaska. In the case in Canada, the experts who testified at the inquest even disagreed. One said it was a bear that killed the man and he was then scavenged on by wolves. Another one said, no, the wolves killed him.
Wolves are really not a threat to people. They are huge in our imagination of being fearsome animals, but they really don't want to have anything to do with humans for the most part. And as I said, the prey image that they evolved to see and to chase are these four legged animals.
And you compare this to going back to your question, your comment about dogs. Every year in the United States alone, not all of North America, just in the US alone, 45 to 65 people a year are killed by dogs.
And we're not calling for the eradication of all dogs.
There are so many more things that people get attacked and killed by than wolves.
[00:14:24] Speaker C: Oh, sure. Well, I'm sure there are a lot more dogs, of course, than there are wolves.
[00:14:28] Speaker A: True. But even in places like Canada that have 40 to 60,000 wolves, as I said, you know, their most dangerous animal there is the horse and after that, moose.
[00:14:41] Speaker C: Because cars will run into them, I suppose that's probably the cars will run.
[00:14:45] Speaker A: Into them and people get charged by them, as we've seen in Yellowstone when people get too close to wildlife.
[00:14:51] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.
So. So the Europeans arrived and I can't remember exactly who wrote about it, but. But saw these dark forests. Right. And started to imagine. And I imagine they saw wolves as well. Right. And made connections back to the fear and hatred in Europe.
But as the European occupation of North America expanded into the west, farmers and ranchers went after wolves with a vengeance.
Why?
You know, what were the campaigns that went on to eradicate wolves and what were the consequences?
[00:15:28] Speaker A: The consequences were pretty swift.
After Europeans came here, within just a few hundred years, they'd wiped out almost every wolf in the lower 48 United States.
As they moved west from the eastern shores or here on the west coast, people came by ships and landed on our western coasts. As they moved inland, they cleared their land, the land for their grain and their livestock. And they were really following an ethos that was later came to be known as manifest destiny, which proclaimed that it was ordained by God that they conquer the wilderness, that they tame the wilderness. And so first, the settlers and the market hunters decimated the game populations, the deer, the elk, the bison. And they did that in part to send meat to the urban cities in the east coast, but also to starve out the Native Americans.
And they replaced those wild game with livestock, with cattle and sheep. And with the wild game so depleted, the large carnivores and omnivores, the wolves, the mountain lions, the bears, began to feed on the livestock. And so at that point, they began to eradicate all of these large carnivores and omnivores, Mountain lions, grizzly bears, and wolves, especially wolves.
As the states formed, each state became a state. They enacted bounty payments to encourage people to kill wolves. The very first bounty payment on wolves was enacted in 1630 in Massachusetts Bay Colony. That's how quickly this started.
And while the bounty system was somewhat successful, what really resulted in the near eradication of wolves in the lower 48 was when Congress stepped in in the early 1900s, they allocated money to an entity called the US Biological Survey to hire people called wolfers, who were paid specifically to kill wolves across the country. And kill them they did. Wolves were shot and trapped. They were snared. They were poisoned. Wolfers would go across the country, and they kill a bison, and then they'd lace the carcass with poison. And then any of the animals that came to feed on it, like wolves, would all die from the poisoning. They would lasso and dismember wolves on horseback.
It was a very successful campaign, considering the money was only allocated in the early 1900s, I think maybe 1905. By the 1930s, wolves were eliminated almost entirely from the lower 48 states.
[00:18:04] Speaker C: You're listening to Sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz, your host, and my guest today is Amaru, who is wolf advocate at the center for Biological Diversity.
And we've just been talking about the. You might say, the history of wolves in the United States and. And in Europe.
And I. I did mean to ask you earlier.
You sort of explained it But. But what does a wolf advocate do?
Ah, and you're senior wolf advocate. Does that mean there are junior wolf advocates at cbd, too?
[00:18:38] Speaker A: It doesn't mean that there's junior wolf advocates. It just means that I've worked in this field long enough that I earned the title of senior wolf. Means that I am a senior.
Yeah. So wolf advocacy takes a lot of different forms for me, because my background is biology and law.
For me, what that means is really being a policy person, keeping up with all of the scientific research on wolf behavior and biology and what works and what doesn't for resolving conflicts with livestock, talking to all of those scientists and then trying to transmit that into policy.
That's how, when you get to advise an agency on the crafting of a state wolf plan, you can then have input on what are some of the policies that should be used for addressing those rare livestock wolf conflicts? What are the policies that should be in place to help educate people so that they can really learn what wolves are all about and lose their fear of them? So I do testifying at hearings, calls and letters to elected and appointed officials to help them understand a perspective they might not otherwise know, help them learn some of the scientific facts about wolves so that we can help frame conservation of wolves as something that is based on science, recognizing that there is social conflict around wolves, but making sure that the social conflict isn't what's driving the policy. Because when it comes to wolves, social conflict gets tied right into persecution of wolves all over again, and then you're going backwards in time.
[00:20:24] Speaker C: Well, we'll come back to that in a. In a bit.
But so. So the. The last free range gray wolf in California was killed in 1924.
And I'm curious, what was the range of wolves across California, let's say, in the 19th century, since by 1924 there were no others left?
[00:20:46] Speaker A: Yeah, Ronnie. So evidence of wolf presence in California historically suggests that wolves were widely distributed across the state. What it doesn't give us clues for is how many wolves once lived here.
I can describe to you the two primary sources of evidence of wolf's presence throughout the state.
One is the native people who lived here, and the other are the European explorers and settlers and missionaries who came after.
So pre European contact, native people lived throughout California for at least 10,000 years. I believe that California had the highest density of native people of any location that became a state.
And so the wolf exists in their creation stories.
In other stories they tell about relationships with the natural world.
The wolf exists in their artwork in their dance regalia and very much in their languages. So when Europeans arrived here in California, what we call now California, there were at least 80 to 100 different native languages spoken here. And almost every one of them had a distinct word for wolf, fox, dog, and coyote. So they knew these animals and they distinguished between them.
And then you have the records that were kept by European explorers or naturalists and the missionaries and the trappers. So that we know from their records that in the 1700s, explorers arrived first along the coast in ships. And that's where wolves were first observed in, along the coast at that time period. And as the settlers moved in, they killed the wolves there and they moved further inland.
California, like other states, also passed bounty laws for wolves and coyotes.
Eventually, by the late 1800s, early 1900s, the only wolves that were seen were in the far eastern reaches of the state, and those were killed off, too. So California's last two known wolves were killed in 1922, all the way south in San Bernardino county, and in 1924, all the way north in Lassen County. And their remains are housed at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley.
[00:23:13] Speaker C: Okay, so let's, let's get to the issue of reintroduction. So in 1995, Canadian wolves were introduced into Yellowstone National Park.
What was the, what was the reason that this happened? You know what, what was the logic behind reintroducing wolves? I imagine there was opposition in the area.
I understand there still is.
And what have been the ecological impacts of wolves on the park?
[00:23:43] Speaker A: Sure. So before I go into why they were introduced, I want to very briefly touch on two key facts about their reintroduction. So first, while many people know that wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995 and 96, the general public often is not aware that at the very Same time, in 95 and 96, wolves also were reintroduced to central Idaho in the Frank Church river of no Return. And that's an important piece of information for when we talk a little bit later on, hopefully about wolves coming Oregon and then California. So keep that in mind. Wolves were reintroduced into Idaho.
[00:24:22] Speaker C: What part of Idaho is that? You know, I'm not really familiar with.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: Said the Frank Church river of no Return Wilderness is a really, really large wilderness area. And I'm not picturing on my head right now where it is exactly, other than it is central Idaho. It's not like up north in the.
[00:24:40] Speaker C: County north, and that's okay.
[00:24:41] Speaker A: South next to the, the Great Basin borders, it's large area of central Idaho.
The reason that they were reintroduced to both places is because this reintroduction of wolves was not intended solely to restore a missing keystone species to a national park, but to restore a missing keystone species to the overall northern Rocky Mountain ecoregion, which includes Montana and Wyoming, of which Yellowstone traverses both of those states, but also Idaho.
Secondly, while people refer to those reintroduced wolves as being Canadian wolves, that concept sometimes get twisted by wolf opponents because they argue, and you still hear this today. I've been hearing this for 30 years, that the wolves which were brought into the US from Canada are much larger and more aggressive than the wolves which once lived in the US in the northern Rockies and the West Coast. And they argue that the species or the subspecies of wolves reintroduced here are not the same type which once lived here. And that argument is false. So let me just put that to rest here for a moment.
[00:25:56] Speaker C: I just want to say I meant wolves from Canada, not Canadian wolves. So. Oh, you know.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Yeah, either way, you know, and people will say wolves from Canada, and they're not the same wolves. So you're good.
It's just. It's just an important.
You'll sometimes see this in conversations, particularly online or testimony at hearings. But. So again, Canis lupus, the gray wolf, once ranged across North America, Canada, and the U.S. it's the exact same species reintroduced here. And then there were two subspecies of gray wolf that ranged across the western United States and that portion of Canada where these wolves came from. Canis lupus nubilis, which is the plains wolf, and Canis lupus occidentalis, which is the Rockies wolf, or sometimes called the northwest wolf. And both of those subspecies, they weighed the same. They were the same height, they were the same length, they ate the same prey. It's the same wolf.
Okay, so why were they reintroduced? I touched on that a little bit by saying how important it was to restore an apex predator. And that's because of what they contribute to the ecosystem. And so scientists had actually, for several decades, been calling for restoration of wolves to the northern Rockies and other places.
And some wolves had started to make their way back across the Canadian border into northwest Montana and establish a few packs there. But the wolves could never get further south. People kept killing them up there.
And so an environmental impact statement was written, A wolf recovery plan was developed. And then that plan started being put into action in the mid-90s with the reintroduction after the 20 years of political battles to make that happen.
And so these ecological benefits that wolves have, why restore wolves?
First of all, this species presence and its natural hunting Practices it keeps wild ungulates healthy by culling the old, the weak, the sick, the young, the old. This is specifically what wolves target. And by doing that, that ensures that more forage is available for the members of the herd that are in the prime of their life, that are reproductively active and need that forage.
And then you have the way wolves hunt, which has an ecological offense. So they're what is known as coursing predators. Unlike mountain lions, which are stealth predators who simply leap on passing prey, wolves specifically chase their prey to see which one is old, weak, sick, which one has arthritis in its hoof. And by keeping those animals on the move, wolves are helping restore ecological processes in food chains that keeping them on the move prevents the elk and deer from over browsing the vegetation.
That allows vegetation to grow back. And in some studies, it's not just the plants that were there grew back bigger and more abundant. The species richness of plants became even more biodiverse in places where wolves exist. And that increased plant abundance and diversity provides building materials and habitat and food for other species.
And speaking of food for other species, wolves also ecologically benefit other species by literally putting food on the ground for them. So every wolf kill is visited by other species, from predators like coyotes, foxes, bobcats, and grizzly bears to scavengers like vultures and ravens and magpies and even hundreds of species of beetle.
Disease control. Wolves can help control disease in elk and deer and other species. There's a study I've read out of Italy where wolves eat wild boar, and the boar there carry tuberculosis, which is transmissible to humans. It's highly fatal if left untreated. And the studies there show that where the wolves are feeding on wild boar, it has decreased the incidence of tuberculosis in the bore, it has decreased the spread of tuberculosis in the boar, which means it is decreasing the risk of transmission to humans. That's an example in Europe. But here in the US we have a rapidly spreading disease among elk and deer, which hunters are very, very alarmed about. It's now in five Canadian provinces in 36 states. It's called chronic wasting disease, or CWD for short.
And it is the wild ungulate equivalent of mad cow disease in cattle. It's a brain prion disease.
So there have been confirmed instances of people eating diseased meat of cattle with mad cow disease, the people contracting it and dying. There have not yet been confirmed cases of people eating diseased meat of elk or deer that have CWD and dying from it. But there is the potential, and there's definitely the potential for hundreds of thousands of deer and elk to be wiped out by it. And again, because wolves are a coursing predator and they're out there hunting 365 days a year, they're much more likely to than a human to spot which animal is diseased. And you should kill that animal so it's not spreading to the rest.
There's an elk expert who has said that if we hadn't killed off wolves to begin with, CWD probably never would have taken root. Or if it had, it would be at such low levels, it wouldn't be a problem. So if I were a hunter, I'd want wolves back. There are enormous ecological benefits to having wolves back for so many other species for so many reasons.
[00:31:59] Speaker C: I gather, though, it's not the hunters who are up in arms about, about the return of wolves to the United States. You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host Ronnie Lipschitz. My guest today is Amaru, who is a senior wolf advocate at the center for Biological Diversity. And we've just been talking about the ecological impacts of reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone national park and central Idaho.
And this is PRI prior to their return to California. So I was just making the comment, which, I don't know, it looked like you were going to object to it, about hunters, you know, hunters not being opposed to the interaction reintroduction of wolves. But am I wrong on that?
[00:32:48] Speaker A: I'm afraid you are.
[00:32:49] Speaker C: Oh dear.
[00:32:50] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, and so specifically wolves and elk because when wolves begin to re establish in a new state, hunters there often worry that wolves are going to wipe out all the elk that the hunters want for themselves.
And so just think about this. If you love elk and deer, if you appreciate how fast and agile and athletic and robust they are, you have wolves to thank for that.
These animals evolved together over thousands of years. This predator prey relationship's been going on for millennia.
And hunters will claim that wolves that were reintroduced to the Northern Rockies have wiped out all the elk there. So let's talk about some facts. So 30 years later now, how are the elk doing there? Well, in all three northern Rocky Mountain states, elk numbers are up, hunter harvest is up, hunter success rate is up. So much so that the state wildlife agencies there have been calling this the second golden age of elk hunting.
Elk are at or above management unit objective in almost every elk management unit there. There are in fact more elk in these three states than there were when wolves were reintroduced there in 95 and 96.
Which brings you kind of full circle back to the understanding of how wolf presence actually benefits the wild ungulates.
[00:34:21] Speaker C: One of the things that was interesting to me when I was doing the reading was the fact that we're not talking about many wolves here.
The numbers were 120 wolves and nine packs across Yellowstone, which I calculated was 30 square miles per wolf, which doesn't seem like a lot. And what's the sort of, you know, area of terrain that wolf packs range over?
[00:34:50] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great question to consider because it actually varies quite a bit. And that's because pack territory size is dictated by more than one thing. It really comes down to two things. What is the prey availability and prey density?
And are there other wolf packs in the area?
And so that means that there can be really vast differences in territory size due to those two factors. So, for instance, in Minnesota, where deer density is off the charts really high, the average pack territory size There is about 40 square miles per pack, which tells you something about Yellowstone, doesn't it, in terms of the abundance of deer and elk, which is why those packed territories there might be only 30 square miles. They don't have to go very far to find food. In the Arctic, where the main prey is musk oxen, and the musk oxen population is not dense, wolf pack territories can be up to a thousand square miles.
[00:35:47] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:35:49] Speaker A: I think in Washington, the average pack territory size about 250 to 280 square miles. And here in California, we have some packs whose territories are around 500 square miles, in part because the wild ungulates are more spread out here, but also because there really aren't a high density of wolf packs in the state yet, so they can have larger territories.
[00:36:15] Speaker C: Well, let's, let's turn to gray wolves in California.
Tell us how the first one got here and where it came from and where the wolves are today.
[00:36:26] Speaker A: In California, it all began in late 2011.
That was the arrival in California of Oregon Wolf, or 7, also known as Journey. He was named or 7 by the Oregon wildlife biologists who captured and collared him because he was the seventh wolf to be radio collared in Oregon since wolf started returning there in 1999.
Oregon's first wolf packs were confirmed in 2008. And then World War 7 was born into one of those packs, the Imnaha pack in far northeastern Wallowa county in Oregon.
And he left his birth pack at age two and a half and headed west. And he went so far west that he actually became the first known wolf west of the Cascades in 60 years. And his travels spurred a naming contest by a conservation group. And that's how he got the name Journey as well.
So then after reaching southwest Oregon, he spent several weeks there, including a long time around Crater Lake and the Sky Lakes Wilderness.
Then in late December of 2011, he lifted a paw on the Oregon side of the border, set it back down in California and kept on going. And he became, in doing that, our first known wolf here in 87 years.
He spent 15 months in California, traveling across seven Barnworth Northeastern most counties.
He returned to Oregon in the spring of 2013. But then he did make at least five brief trips back here. A few that fall and then a few in early 2014.
He did finally find a mate in southwest Oregon in the spring of 2014. Another wolf who, like him, had dispersed across the state of Oregon and they paired up and formed the Rogue Pack and settled down in the Rogue River National Forest. And they had litters together for five years, 2014 through 2018.
And compared to other states, just thinking about the west coast differences.
When Journey came into California, our state laid a welcome mat for wolves. There were films made about him and books written.
[00:38:42] Speaker C: I remember.
[00:38:43] Speaker A: Yeah, he made international headlines, but he was just the beginning. So other wolves have dispersed to California and formed packs here.
Our first pack was confirmed in 2015, and today we have at least seven packs and possibly up to nine or 10 packs. But we're awaiting California Department of Fish and Wildlife Services latest quarterly wolf report to come out to let us know if we do in fact have more than seven packs. And I think it's going to show that we do.
So some of those packs have territories within one county only.
Other packs have territories which straddle multiple counties. So here's where the seven confirmed packs currently are. The Whaleback Pack is in Siskiyou County. The Lassen pack ranges across parts of Lassen and Plumas counties.
The Diamond Pack straddles portions of Plumas and Lassen counties. Also, the Bayam SEO pack is in Sierra County.
The Ice Cave pack has territory right at the intersection of Lassen, Pluma, Shasta and Tehama counties.
The Harvey pack is in parts of Lassen and Shasta counties. And then we have another pack like 300 miles further south, the Alumni pack in Tulare County.
And in addition to those named packs, there are several groups of just two to three wolves which don't yet qualify as a pack, last we heard about them. But again, I'm suspecting that when we get the next Wolf Quarterly, we'll find that they, they do qualify as packs and we'll have some new packs with new names.
[00:40:20] Speaker C: Two questions. How many wolves are there in California and how big are the packs?
[00:40:26] Speaker A: Yeah, so the, so I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you a variable figure on how many wolves there are because again, the quarterly hasn't come out. So CDFW has been very gracious in putting out quarterly reports. Many states only give yearly reports. So it's been nice that we've gotten information more frequently. So as of last September, there were 70 confirmed wolves in California. But by the time CDFW, their staff was giving a presentation I attended in February of this year, they were saying there were only 50 wolves. And I can bet you almost bottom dollar, the reason for that is natural pup mortality.
Wolf pups are only born once a year in April. Unlike dogs, wolves can only go into heat once a year. Those pups are born in April and that first eight, nine, ten months is really a test of survival for those pups. It is not uncommon for 50% of the pups to not make it through to the end of December.
The wolves that do make it to age one, about 50% of them may not make it to age two. So most recent announcement in February again was about 50 wolves. But the packs that have had pups this year will have just have had pups in April.
So that count may be going back up again. We may be back up at 70 or even 80 wolves at this point. But again, most, many of those pups won't survive to the end of this year. As far as average pack size, it's fairly variable. There are some packs that are only four or five members. There are some packs that have reached up to maybe 13, 15 members at a time. And that's because wolves, if they're not exploited, if they're not hunted or trapped or killed by humans, they do what we used to do. They live in multi generational families where you have the parents, you have their pups that were born that spring, you have yearlings that were born the year before and maybe 2 year olds that were born the year before that.
A lot of wolves will stay in their family group for a couple of years before heading out on their own. Some wolves will stay with their family group forever. And so this range in numbers of packs really has to do with how many pups were born in that litter and how many of the sub adults, the teenage wolves are still hanging around with mom and dad.
[00:42:55] Speaker C: Do they, do they then set out on their Own at a particular point, you know, as they mature.
[00:43:01] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. There's a Russian proverb that says the wolf is an animal that lives by its feet. And that is totally true. Wolves travel tens of miles, hundreds of miles, thousands of miles in this natural behavior called dispersal. And basically what it is is when a wolf gets to be anywhere from one and a half to three years old, it's very typical for them to leave the pack they were born into to go off and look for a mate of their own and establish a territory of their own. That is how we have gotten wolves coming from Idaho into Oregon. That is how we've gotten wolves coming from Oregon into California through this natural dispersal.
[00:43:43] Speaker C: I don't imagine they go back to live with mom and dad if they don't succeed.
Well, okay.
Ranchers and farmers always seem to be complaining about predators, you know, and particularly about gray wolves going after livestock.
You know, is. Is that the case in California, since we're really focusing on California? Or is this, you know, attribution without evidence?
[00:44:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I think.
I think what I can say about the nation as a whole, in every state that has wolves is true for California as well, which is that livestock wolf conflicts are actually rare. If you are an individual rancher and you're having conflicts with wolves, it can be a very stressful ordeal. And nobody who's rooting for the return of wolves wants to see wolves eating livestock. But the fact remains that livestock wolf conflict is really rare. And I will say that there are steps that ranchers can take proactively to prevent conflicts with wolves. But here's a couple facts that are important to keep in mind.
Most wolf packs don't predate on livestock. I think in Washington, we see something like 80% of their packs do not predate on livestock. And Oregon, it's something like 60% of their packs never have predations on livestock. And even of those that do, there's like eight ranches out of the 9,200 throughout Oregon that keep having the repeat problems. And that has to do with livestock management and proactively protecting your livestock.
But more importantly, the vast majority of life. Not more importantly, equally as important, the vast majority of livestock losses have nothing to do with any predator of any kind. And we know that because farmers and ranchers self report their losses to the USDA's National Agriculture Statistics Service, which puts out a report every couple years. And what those reports show is that 90 to 95% of cattle losses are due to things like dehydration, starvation, birthing complications, Eating poisonous weeds, respiratory ailments.
Of the 5 to 10% of losses that are caused by predators, wolves are not the top cause. In states with wolves, domestic dogs running loose in the country cause five times the amount of losses wolves do.
Wolf cause losses are a fraction of a percent of any state's livestock over a 15 year period. In the northern rocky states, which now have had wolves back for 30 years, wolf cause losses of average 1 in every 10,000 cattle and 3 in every 10,000 sheep.
Here in California we have 5.2, actually 5.7 million livestock and about 50 to 70 wolves. And last year wolf caused losses amounted to 1 9,000th of 1% of California's livestock.
So the overall effect on the industry is zilch. If you are the individual rancher having problems, it is a problem for you and there are a lot of steps you can take to avoid it and a lot of people waiting to help you.
[00:47:09] Speaker C: Well, like a lot of things, one incident gets blown up, I guess into, you know, sort of a. This is what's, you know, what's going to happen. You're listening to Sustainability Now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipchitz. My guest today is Amaru Qais, senior wolf advocate at the center for Biological Diversity. And we've just been talking about the, I won't say the fact, but that farmers and ranchers seem to be eternally complaining about predation on their livestock by wolves. And as Amaruk has carefully laid out, this is a very, very infrequent issue.
Nonetheless, three counties in California are asking permission to allow more aggressive hazing of wolves to drive them away.
Is that really necessary?
[00:47:58] Speaker A: So for a frame of reference, it's helpful to understand that California has a wolf conservation plan that actually addresses this very question.
The plan was adopted by the state in 2016. I was one of the stakeholders. There were about 18 of us. We met 44 times to advise the state on what should go in that plan, on how to manage wolves.
The plan is what scientists call an adaptive management plan, which means it has different phases. As the wolf population grows, it slips from phase one to phase two and then phase three. And with each phase, protections for wolves become less restrictive and options for how to address conflict become more flexible. And so we are now recently just dropped into phase two of the plan, which will allow for those more aggressive means of hazing wolves away, like shooting them with, with non lethal ammunition, rubber bullets, beanbag shells, being able to chase them on atv.
That can only happen if the US Fish and Wildlife Service agrees with it because wolves are still federally protected in California.
And I know that the state agency is in consultation with the federal agency on this and has been for weeks. We checked in with them recently and they said talks were going really well.
Those measures can work, and in some instances they may be necessary.
Every livestock conflict situation is unique. You know, what kind of livestock do you have? Are they out on a big grazing allotment or are they in a pasture right next to your house?
What age is your livestock?
How many wolves are in the pack? And what age structure is the wolves in terms of mouths that they need to feed?
What are the other circumstances there? There are very specific tools that can be used. I would tell you that the primary one is remove dead livestock. If you have carcasses or bone piles lying around from livestock that have died from other causes, bury them or haul them out of there, because otherwise you have really done yourself a disservice. You have drawn the wolves in and now they're right next to your live livestock. And it won't be just wolves. There'll be bears and mountain lions, too. So that is just like a basic common sense approach. But on top of that, there's a lot of actions short of killing wolves that can be used to prevent conflicts and should be used. Because what the science also shows is that killing wolves is not an effective way to prevent conflicts and that actually using non lethal measures, including changed livestock husbandry practices, is your best tool over the long haul for being able to coexist with wolves.
[00:50:46] Speaker C: Well, last question that I have anyway is, is what's going to happen under the Trump administration?
What does the, what does the administration propose to do? I've, I've heard a little bit about that.
[00:50:58] Speaker A: You know, I think again, going back to just general political opposition to wolves.
So that's been around forever under any Democratic administration and under any Republican administration.
The same forces that nearly eradicated wolves to begin with, the livestock industry, the sports hunting industry, the lobbyists and the politicians who represent them, the anti government factions, those continue to exist. And so what we have seen over the years is attempts to strip wolves of protections federally through two different avenues. And one has been the U.S. fish and Wildlife Service itself, which is the entity which has been recovering wolves in some places. They get immense political pressure from all of these forces. And so they strip wolves of protection by issuing a regulation that strips rules of federal protection either across the lower 48 or in portions of it.
And then groups like the center for Biological Diversity and our allies challenge them in court and Our legal arguments hold up. The courts find that U.S. fish and Wildlife Service has prematurely stripped rules of protections when they're not yet recovered, when the states aren't capable of managing them responsibly, and then they overturn that delisting. So you have this period going back and forth, going back to 2000 attempts to delist, then they get protections restored. Well, at one point in 2011, Congress intervened, and they passed a rider on a Department of Defense appropriations bill which required US Fish and Wildlife Service to strip wolves of protection across the Northern Rockies and parts of adjacent states and said it could not be appealed in court, which is why today, across the country, the Northern Rockies region and those adjacent portions are where wolves no longer have federal protections.
So at the same time, while these different lawsuits and Congress gets involved, this is what you're seeing again. And this again happens every single administration.
Right now, there is a bill to try to strip wolves of protection that is pending in Congress, sponsored by Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin. And again, they are trying to strip rules of protection throughout the lower 48, make it so that it can't be appealed in court.
And that bill is pending in the House.
There are hearings upcoming.
I think it will probably sail through the House, but I think it will be stopped in the Senate. And we'll see, you know, paws crossed. We'll see. You know, the thing is, it's. It's not representative of the science at all. The science shows that wolves are not recovered, and it's not representative of what people want. Across America, people are very, very supportive of having wolves back on the landscape.
But, you know, in our age of social misinformation, it's really hard to combat the noise that happens in politics.
[00:54:18] Speaker C: Well, amerikwais, I want to thank you for being my guest on Sustainability Now.
[00:54:25] Speaker A: Thank you so much. It's always great to talk to someone who has such a wide reach, because between you and me, we get to reach a lot of people. And that's certainly important for me, and I know it's important for you.
[00:54:39] Speaker C: You've been listening to a Sustainability now interview with Amaruk Weiss, senior wolf advocate at the center for Biological Diversity, about the return of wolves to California. If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] sustainability now and Spotify, YouTube, and Pocket Casts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K Squid your community radio station and keep it going.
And so until next every other Sunday. Sustainability now.
[00:55:21] Speaker B: Temperate zones and tropic climbs and natural currents and thriving seas and winds blowing too. Breathing trees, strong ozone, safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
