Former wolf hunter turns advocate in new book

Biologists have documented just a couple of dozen wolves that live in eastern Oregon. Nevertheless, the Legislature is considering four bills this session to control them. One state senator e-mailed his Klamath Falls constituents last week that these "vicious, imported predators" killed two pregnant cows outside Enterprise in "the most cruel way imaginable. These sadistic creatures," wrote Sen. Doug Whitsett, R-Klamath Falls, need to be confronted. He introduced two of the bills "before we are forced to take up arms to protect our communities and our children." Cattlemen call them Canadian gray wolves who don't belong here. Suzanne Stone of Defenders of Wildlife counters such animosity, saying that three of the bills would upend the 2010 Oregon wolf plan, a broad compromise reached last fall between cattlemen, wool growers, hunters and conservationists on how to manage wolves until they are no longer listed as endangered. "The hardest part of wolf management," she says, "is people." So it takes a big man who would stand between the two sides to explain the astonishing biology and sociology unleashed when wolves were returned to the American West. At 6-foot-6, Carter Niemeyer arrives in Portland just in time to elaborate. The author of "Wolfer, A Memoir" is an unlikely guide, an Iowa farm boy who spent most of his career as the federal government's hit man against predators...more