The Wolf Preservation Blog

Christopher Ketcham

March 13, 2012

“In April 2001, a U.S. government wildlife trapper named Carter Niemeyer choppered into the mountains of central Idaho to slaughter a pack of wolves whose alpha female was famed for her whiteness. He hung from the open door of the craft with a semiautomatic shotgun, the helicopter racing over the treetops. Then, in a clearing, Niemeyer caught a glimpse of her platinum fur. Among wolf lovers in Idaho, she was called Alabaster, and she was considered a marvel—most wolves are brown or black or gray. People all over the world had praised Alabaster, had written about her, had longed to see her in the flesh. Livestock ranchers in central Idaho, whose sheep and cows graze in wolf country, felt otherwise. They claimed Alabaster and her pack—known as the Whitehawks—threatened the survival of their herds, which in turn threatened the rural economy of the high country. She had to be exterminated. 

When Alabaster appeared in Niemeyer’s sights, a hundred feet below the helicopter, her ears recoiled from the noise and the rotor wash, but she was not afraid. She labored slowly along a ridge, looking, Niemeyer says, “like something out of a fairy tale.” 

Then he shot her. At the time, wolves were considered a rare species in Idaho and across the Northern Rockies, and they were protected under the Endangered Species Act. But they could be targeted for “lethal control” if they made trouble—if they threatened a human being, which almost never happened, or, more commonly, if they were implicated in attacking cattle and sheep. The Whitehawks allegedly had been enjoying a good number of cows and sheep that spring and were said to have killed at least one rancher’s guard dog. 

As a trapper for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and later as a wolf expert for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Niemeyer was trained to control predators, mostly coyotes and foxes. In 26 years working for the government, he had killed thousands of coyotes. But wolves are a different kind of kill. As predators, they are exquisite. Niemeyer had taken a liking to wolves. He respected them. 

There were four other members of the pack, scattered in the woods. The helicopter circled, flushing them out, and Niemeyer shot them as they ran. When he necropsied Alabaster at the kill site—gutting her, stripping her pelt—he found she was pregnant with nine pups that were two weeks from birth, almost fully formed. He buried each pup.

Canis lupus, the largest of the planet’s wild dogs, once numbered in the hundreds of thousands in the U.S. The creatures are powerful—the largest males, six and half feet from tooth to tail, weigh 140 pounds—and they are agile and cunning. They run in packs of seven to ten animals that consist of a father and mother—the alphas—along with pups and subordinate males and females, unrelated to the family but welcomed in their midst. The wolf is an apex predator, at the top of its food chain, keeping prey from overpopulating, which maintains a balanced ecosystem. 

With European settlement and the decimation of its native prey—buffalo, elk, mule deer—the wolf was bound for destruction. It was now killing for its meals the domesticated sheep and cattle that settlers had ranged across the grasslands and the mountains. Hated for its depredations, the wolf was hunted mercilessly—shot, trapped, poisoned with strychnine, fed glass shards stuffed in bait, its pups asphyxiated by fires set in their dens. By 1935, the gray wolf had disappeared almost entirely from the U.S. 

Decades later, during the high tide of 1970s environmentalism, conservationists began to agitate for a government-sponsored recovery. The evidence suggested that the loss of the wolves had destabilized the ecology of the Northern Rockies. Following the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service undertook the recovery of the wolf in the region. It wasn’t until 1991, however, that Congress mandated an impact study of wolf reintroduction. By 1994, funding had been approved for Fish and Wildlife biologists to remove 66 gray wolves from Canada, where the animals still numbered in the tens of thousands, and truck them south for release in central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park. 

Niemeyer, now retired in Boise, was among the trappers who traveled to Canada in 1995 to capture and radio-collar the reintroduced wolves. The reintroduction, he told me, had been one of the epic wildlife-recovery stories in U.S. history; in little more than 15 years, the number of wolves in the Northern Rockies had gone from 66 to roughly 1,600. Yet concerns about the threat posed by the wolves to cow, sheep, and elk populations had led to a stark reversal. After spending upward of $40 million studying the animals—then capturing, collaring, tracking, and protecting them—the federal government last year scheduled wolves to be killed in huge numbers across the Northern Rockies. In April 2011, following a series of lawsuits and an unprecedented intervention by Congress, canis lupus was removed from the endangered species list. 

Today, as a result of the delisting, anyone can shoot a wolf—you don’t have to be a government trapper. Wolves can in some circumstances be shot on sight. Niemeyer, who is six foot six inches and giant-shouldered, shot 14 wolves in the course of his government career; the Whitehawks were his last. He maintains a taxidermy studio in his garage and says he’s “not into the warm and fuzzy thing” when it comes to wild animals. “I’m not grossed out by wolves being hunted, trapped, killed,” he says. “I’d skin one today if you brought it to me. What I’m caught up in is honesty. What you have with wolf delisting is half-truths, untruths, hysteria, and just downright craziness.” 

The ranching industry in the American West has been the historic enemy of wolves, so it was fitting that ranchers in Montana and Idaho called for hunting them almost from the moment of their reintroduction. The American Farm Bureau Federation, a nonprofit advocate for farming and ranching interests, had even sued preemptively in 1994 to stop the reintroduction, but a federal court rejected the suit. In 2008, however, Western livestock interests found a sympathetic ear in the Bush administration’s Department of the Interior, which issued what would become the first of multiple orders to remove the wolf from protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Following a lawsuit filed by 12 conservation groups that challenged the decision, the U.S. District Court in Montana found that the department had “acted arbitrarily in delisting the wolf” and reinstated the act’s protections. Judge Donald Molloy pointed to a glaring discrepancy: Biologists had determined that only with the genetic commingling of the three “distinct population segments” of wolves—in central Idaho, Yellowstone National Park, and northwestern Montana—would the Northern Rocky Mountain wolf have a chance at long-term survival. A 2009 study in BioScience magazine concluded that absent this genetic exchange, the population would be “genetically depleted, small, and ineffective in terms of ecosystem function.” The Interior Department’s own environmental impact study, conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, had come to the same conclusion. Yet the department had removed the Endangered Species Act protections “without any evidence of genetic exchange,” wrote Judge Molloy, who found a “possibility of irreparable harm” if the delisting went unchallenged. 

The matter remained at an impasse until President Barack Obama’s newly appointed interior secretary, Ken Salazar, resurrected the Bush-era delisting plan in April 2009. The decision infuriated pro-wolf conservationists, though it was not unexpected. Salazar, a Colorado Democrat, comes from a family of five generations of ranchers. A new lawsuit was filed by a coalition that included 14 environmental groups, among them the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, the Humane Society, and smaller outfits like the Center for Biological Diversity. While the suit was pending, Idaho and Montana opened a hunting season that resulted in the culling of more than 500 wolves—some 32 percent of the entire Northern Rockies population. A year later, in August 2010, Judge Molloy again ruled in the conservationists’ favor. He determined that the de-listing violated the letter and the spirit of the Endangered Species Act; he found no evidence of genetic exchange among wolf sub-populations. He also ruled that Fish and Wildlife had failed to properly oversee wolf management plans in Idaho and Montana. The judge ordered that year’s wolf hunts to be canceled. 

The ongoing litigation drew the ire of Republican politicians throughout the West. Denny Rehberg, Montana’s lone congressman, presented two bills during 2011 for a legislative delisting of the wolf, including one to “amend the Endangered Species Act of 1973 to provide that Act shall not apply to the gray wolf.” The bills went nowhere, but Rehberg, who was gearing up to challenge Democrat Jon Tester for his U.S. Senate seat in 2012, had sparked a kind of arms race of anti-wolf rhetoric. The Republican governor of Idaho, Butch Otter, announced that he was ordering his state wildlife managers to “relinquish their duty to arrest poachers,” thereby freeing up Idaho hunters to continue shooting wolves. Otter also signed an emergency law that authorized him to declare a statewide “wolf disaster.” Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah unsuccessfully attempted to amend the Endangered Species Act so that it no longer applied to “any gray wolf.” Montana Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat, weighed in with the Delisting Gray Wolves to Restore State Management Act of 2011, which died in committee. Tester floated his own wolf-delisting bill; it also went nowhere. ”

**Special thanks to http://prospect.org/article/wolves-slaughter?fb_ref=.T19eDqMvtC8.like&fb_source=profile_multiline for providing this information.