WNMU and the Call of the Wolf

Life before Responsibility

WNMU and the Call of the Wolf

A Cornerstone of Environmentalism

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

     The scene was all set.  The bota bags were scattered around and somebody had put some “real” Rhine wine in them.  The lights were dimmed and the audio had been started.  It was going to be “night on the African plains” and it was show time at the Biology Department’s “Friday Nighter”.  As the lions coughed, the hyenas laughed and the birds of the night ascended into a cacophony of nighttime madness, the students had been brought to a similar crescendo of excitement. What a place that Africa was with all of its guttural rawness of nature and mother earth.  What utter environmental bliss that was!  If only we had that here in North America!

    The Process continued

    The scene would be repeated for years as the hair grew longer, the subject more orgasmic, and the insulation ever more protective in the hallways of the Science Building on the campus of Western New Mexico University (WNMU). The instructors were more akin to elder siblings than they were professors. There was no negative feedback in their world.  They didn’t have any requirement to create a student who could actually do something.  The student just needed to be learned and intellectual, and, of course, support and expand the cause.

     The student group itself became increasingly populated by such diversity as spouses of locals who needed to find themselves and redirect their seven year itch problem into a rediscovered realm of self confidence and worth, or outsiders who had burned their brains and their families’ patience. Career preparation was something that the less enlightened would have to deal with, or, at least, the working spouses or parents who financed the educational process.   

    And, of course, there just north of the campus in Silver City, New Mexico was the grandest thing south of Yellowstone itself, the Gila.  There it stood in all of its glory to be studied . . . and protected.  The first of the regional environmental watchdog groups, the Gila Watch, came into being.  It fielded a team of a zealot-ettes who concluded that at ground zero of the environmental world, the Gila, their world would just be better off if it was not encumbered by anybody who actually had to rely on an extractive industry to make a living.

     The injection of a glimmer of science

     The first of the grant funds for the grand protection effort came in the early ‘70s with money to trap and catalogue mammals in the Gila Wilderness.  Into that wilderness, the learned WNMU professor went following his faithful assistant and a loaded packhorse.  From the Double S to the Trotter Place and from the Zig Zag Trail to the Crest Trail, they trapped, documented and studied.  Peromyscus from Bud’s Hole, Hells Hole, and any and all holes were trapped and relieved of their skin for the important survey.  Mist nets, .22 birdshot, .38 slugs, snares, and traps of all sizes and types were their tools and instruments of scientific discovery.  The unofficial chant could almost be heard, “Peromyscus as by day and Myotis as by night!”

     As the environmental movement grew, the EarthFirst! influences affected by the Gila phenomenon began to grasp a bigger picture.  The Endangered Species Act offered a more sophisticated body of tools than the simple pannier contents on the pack animal that labored for that first Gila survey.  “Man, if you could just add some real wolves to the nighttime audio of the Gila, well, man, that’s be just too cool . . . man!”

     In 1998, that became a reality when the first of the Mexican grey wolves were introduced into the Arizona/ New Mexico Recovery Area.  More than $23.5 million later and less than 50 reported collared wolves to show for the effort, the project has decimated local communities in the area and it has driven a stake into the heart of citizen/ federal government relationships to the extent that generations of Americans will never trust the Forest Service or the USFWS again. 

     For the purposes of record, that expenditure stands at more than $525,000 per collared animal.  That is a pretty high price in order to capitalize and prove the evolutionary process null and void, or, more correctly, the wolf extinction wouldn’t have occurred if the right people had been extant.

     The evolutionary phenom; the little wolf

     In its spread eastward, the coyote made its first known appearance in New York State in 1912.  It had come south from Canada crossing the ice-bound St. Lawrence River.  In 1925, a coyote was finally shot in Belmont Center in New York’s Franklin County.  Little more was documented until the ‘30s when several more were killed.  By the ‘40s, coyotes had spread across the north half of the state from the Hudson River to Lake Ontario. 

     To combat the expansion, New York sportsmen demanded a bounty be placed on the little predators as early as the ‘20s knowing that expansion of the coyotes would be harmful to native game.  By the end of the ‘20s, that bounty was a whopping $300.  Despite the attempt to halt the expansion, though, the little wolves flourished and by the ‘40s they were in neighboring New England states.  By the ‘60s, they were in Pennsylvania.

     Genetic studies from the ‘50s demonstrated that on the frontier of expansion, the coyotes were found to carry dog genetics.  As the populations stabilized and became resident, the genetic pool tended to become more pure coyote.  The coyotes were not only efficient in adapting to new conditions of food procurement, they were efficient in creating a genetic bridge when their own population dynamics were not supportive of expansion.  They were highly adaptive.

      The environmental hoax; the big wolf

      In the history of the North American wolf, the wolf is robust and adaptive only where food is “superabundant”.  Historically, that was near buffalo or caribou herds, or in the presence of high game concentrations mixed with cattle of the West.  When and where those conditions disappeared, the wolf disappeared similarly . . . each and every time.  Unlike the coyote, wolves have been unable to adapt themselves to life with man.  They have always been highly non-adaptive.

    But in the conceptual thinking of the Rewilding Project, the wolf was important.  It was one of the keystone species that meant so much to that collective effort.  The thinking has been it must be saved regardless of the cost in terms of human and or resource degradation and destruction.

     Over the last two years, there has been more and more evidence leaking out of the Mexican Wolf Recovery Project that the problem with the recovery wolf population is that the genetic pool is not pure.  Could that be the problem with the inability to increase the wild numbers?  In the coyote model, the model of real adaptability and evolutionary success, the crossover genetic bridge was exactly what occurred to build numbers as range expanded.  On the other hand, the wolves seemingly cannot use any accelerator opportunity to make anything work.  They can’t multiply whether they are bastardized or not!

    By all means use science if it is convenient

     In the real world there is always the propensity to expect some return from investment.  There is also a growing skepticism about the intent of research investments when government bureaucracy and institutions of higher learning are involved.  Seemingly, science is used not for matters of fact, but, rather, for matters of yet more funding endeavors which are tied to agendas.

     Would it have been too much to expect that the mammal survey done back in the early ‘70s actually yield data and information that would guide events and projects that included the eventual wolf recovery effort?  Who even saw the results?  Who was objective enough to interpret the facts?

     It is very likely that the only meaningful scientific facts collected during that effort were the records of the learned professor’s faithful assistant.  If his diary was scrutinized, it would quantify how, in the wilderness proper, there was a startling absence of game.  A deer here . . . a group of deer there . . . a score for the week. 

     Before elk numbers increased, the absence of game in the wilderness in the last half of the 20^th Century always confused and disappointed the observer who knew what game numbers really should be.  The stories of the hundreds of deer in McKenna Park were simply stories, but that bit of intelligence was never even considered for the wolf recovery project.

     As for the reasons for the absence of game, the standard and rote “overgrazing by cattle” was the clarion cry by all the learned experts.  The fact that cattle had been removed starting in 1944 from the wilderness and that the catastrophic fire management strategies by the Forest Service had been in place since before 1920 was of little scientific interest.  The truth was that those who were depended upon from the WNMU scientific staff to provide sound data could care less about game.  They were not hunters and the only one that ever ventured into the far wilderness at that time certainly wouldn’t have carried the message back to his colleagues. 

     “Superabundance” of a food source for the wolf project in the Gila was never even a consideration nor was it a concern.  The Endangered Species Act gave the green light and the spending spree was on, but food sources remain the most basic denominator. Spending more than a half million dollars on each surviving wolf and less than 50 still survive should make some observant leader skeptical of the future success of the program.

     The ultimate wrong

     The Achilles heel of the wolf recovery is that there aren’t enough food sources for this project. There wasn’t during the human wolf conflicts leading up to the wolf eradication nor has there been since the wolf became extinct in the Gila.  His habits and his success in the presence of man depend on a very narrow set of circumstances.  Evolutionary pressures do have implications and they cannot be turned on and off depending on the politics of the moment.  Put another $50 million in this deal and the outcome will not change.  It is long past time to replace the condescension of runaway government with a return of a culture that is less divisive to citizens who must suffer the consequences  . . . and pay the bill.   

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a native son of New Mexico and a graduate of WNMU. “WNMU will be a cornerstone of the whole Gila movement.  With no repercussions of actions and no consequences of mission, the false science of environmentalism took seed and sprouted at that institution.  From that genesis, the Gila country was converted from a faltering economy of production to a false economy of idealism.  It is ground zero in the conflict of private rights and government and it cannot exist in it current form without a constant infusion of tax money.”