Wolves and People - Open letter to ONO Hearing Officers

MGW Impacts – Apache County Federal Hearing

Wolves and People

Open letter to ONO Hearing Officers

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

To the Office of the National Ombudsman officials overseeing Regulatory Fairness Hearing, September 9, 2015, Springerville, Arizona:

In an attempt to maintain civility on the matter of the extralegal expansion of the Mexican gray wolf (MGW) program in Arizona and New Mexico, many of us out here with duties, responsibilities, and investments in directly and indirectly impacted lands affected by the wolf appreciate your willingness to hold this meeting. Heretofore, any federal agency meeting that was held was an exercise in hierarchy condescension. It is quite obvious that no amount of pleading or local displeasure of the program had any effect on the agency’s action.

Their agenda was crystal clear from the onset. The wolves were coming, the wolves had legal status, and the rights of the wolves held dominion over any input voiced or submitted by the citizenry.

In the absence of any substantive congressional moderation of the wolf impact, one externality that has come from this societal war of attrition is the self education of the citizenry. Many people can not only quote verbatim from various laws, they can debate the spirit of the original intent. For example, they know that a major flaw of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is the open-endedness of the cost for species salvation.

As a matter of interest, the estimated accrued expenditure for the MGW measured on a per acre basis in the recovery footprint (4.4 million acres) is $16.59. That is money taken from taxpayers and will never be returned.

Wolf prey is various, but any four legged ruminant is fair game. Wildlife is mobile and can theoretically disperse from wolf pressure. That is the clarion cry by the wolf advocates. Domestic livestock cannot. It is confined by fenced administrative boundaries. Since, there was never any habitat or prey based studies done that reflected the recovery area specifically, the impact to livestock must be a major cost and certainly one of high interest to your body of officials.

You have likely received some credible input on costs, but I will submit another model for the attempt to quantify the actual loss over time from predation of livestock compounded by joint agency livestock management. The factor of significance in the heart of the wolf recovery area, the calculated value of my data for net weaned calves for sale, is 64%. Based on that factor and rainfall, total returns to management (federal and private), capital and risk should run about $5.25 per acre annually. That suggests that, over the life of the program, the opportunity cost, the unharvested revenues resulting from the consequences of the wolf program and agency management, amount to about $3.25 per acre per year. Since the inception of the program, that now equates to $58.50 per acre. That is a monstrous tax imposed on the release area citizenry.

If Catron County, the land most affected by the release of wolves in New Mexico, had a population that would meet the minimum criteria in the federal review of the nation’s “most at risk counties”, it would be jump to one of the top three counties at highest risk. Factors of most concern in those counties relate to unemployment, the ratios of demographics (relative proportion of young to older age groups), shortfall of tax harvest, the opportunities for youth, the relative concentration of private enterprise jobs as a percentage of total jobs, and other factors.

In short, Catron County is one of the nation’s most at risk counties, and the overwhelming dominion of federal agency impact is the major contributory factor. The wolf is a major part of societal dismemberment in that county.

The recovery area is a major sink of regional and national treasury. The net losses to society and the sagging fortunes of its citizenry are staggering. A number equating to $75 per acre of loss in recovery area over the life of the program is likely conservative. When an economic multiplier affect is considered, the total loss approaches $450 per acre.

The subjective pleas from the citizenry for relief have gone for naught. Mental health concerns, the departure of family units, the stagnation of the economy, the loss of pets and livestock, the repeated requests for local land planning consideration, and even the simple suggestion the wolf is not a legal endangered species has failed to gain traction. It doesn’t matter what the local logic has been. It wasn’t adequate to alter the scope or the thrust of the program. The federal government has demonstrated it is oblivious to local needs. The wolf and its organic protection, the ESA, have held sway as the agency and the federal government’s priority.

People don’t matter.

What must matter, however, is the cost of saving the contrived MGW program through ESA. The total cost to the counties and to the nation has now likely passed the $2 billion mark and it shows no suggestion of moderating its meteoric explosive rise. Somebody ought to start noticing this cause celebré in the southwestern wilderness. Tax payers in the other 48 states must recognize that $2 billion here and $2 billion there start adding up to some serious billions for the existential gratification of having animals running around that don’t have the DNA to adapt to the world today.

A gigantic treasury sink exists. A gigantic raid on national wealth exists. A gigantic displacement of rural society is in progress. A gigantic hoax has been promulgated on this nation and it will never change or get better under the current habitat, prey base, and genetic capability of the main actor, the Mexican gray wolf.

Someone out there please listen … we’ll leave the light on for you.

Sincerely,

Stephen L. Wilmeth

Rancher from southern New Mexico

“In the annals of time, wolves and man have never existed as active coequal competing alpha carnivores. Only false science or worse will convince society to continue this madness.”