Government sharpshooters may soon stalk elk in Rocky
Mountain National Park, picking off one animal at a time. They
promise to do their shooting in the early morning, so as not to
disturb park visitors, and officials have assured the press that
they plan to preserve the herds’ “viewability” throughout all of
this. After all, the elk are one of the park’s main attractions.
Some 500 miles south of the park, federal officials
occasionally shoot or trap Mexican gray wolves after the canines
have killed three or more domestic animals. The Fish and Wildlife
Service has also initiated a program to allow citizens to shoot
wolves with paintballs in order to scare them away.
Though both situations sound bizarre, perhaps even farcical, they
are both very real. And both use absurdly unnatural methods in an
attempt to bring out-of-whack nature back into a natural balance.
In Rocky Mountain National Park, the elk killing – or, in
Park Service lingo, culling – is intended to protect native willow
and aspen groves from hungry ungulates that number in the
thousands. The elk that aren’t shot will be kept away from native
flora by fences, herded away by dogs, and scared away by park staff
shooting blank ammo. This is all necessary because, after elk and
their predators were hunted out of the area in the late 1800s and
early 1900s, hunting was banned in the park. Then elk were
reintroduced. The elk returned with a vengeance; their less
politically correct predators never did.
Down south, the
feds shoot or trap wolves as one of the more twisted parts of a
government program to bring the wolves back to the wild; by
removing wolves that get “three strikes” by killing livestock, a
hostile populace is kept somewhat appeased. Mexican wolves once
roamed across the Southwest, but beginning in the 1800s, hunters
whittled down their numbers. By the 1970s, when the Mexican wolf
was listed under the Endangered Species Act, it was nearly extinct.
The reintroduction program, which John Dougherty explores in this
issue’s cover story, began in 1998, to the extreme displeasure of
many of the folks who live in the recovery area.
Ten
years later, the wolf program has devolved into a fiasco. Wolves
have died in alarming numbers. Some were shot by poachers, some
were accidentally killed after they were trapped, some were shot
because they developed a taste for beef. Today, the number of
wolves remains far below biologists’ goals, and just recently
another pack was trapped and another one vanished altogether. The
problem, as Dougherty discovers, is anything but simple: Politics
have crowded the wolves into unrealistic boundaries, bad genetic
stock has left weak animals in the wild, and scared and angry
ranchers aren’t about to give the wolf, or the wildlife agencies,
any breaks.
If only the Mexican wolves could be
transplanted to Rocky Mountain National Park, both problems might
be solved – the elk would get eaten, and the wolves would have some
insulation from ranchland (wolves released in Yellowstone
ultimately thrived). Unfortunately, northern Colorado is far from
the Mexican wolf’s range, and though park officials have considered
a strictly limited, intensively managed reintroduction of wolves
into the park as a tool for culling elk, it will likely never
happen.
I can’t help but believe that both the elk
program up north and the wolf program down south will ultimately
fail. Because in both cases, we’re trying to fix our mistakes using
the same approach that caused the problems in the first
place.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Canis fiasco.
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