Idaho Has Changed the Definition of a Wolf “Breeding Pair”

By Ken Cole
The Wildlife News

The Idaho Department of Fish and Game is using a new definition for “breeding pair” that differs from the definition used in the USFWS delisting rule of 2009. This definition is important because it is the primary marker used to determine whether wolves should remain delisted from protections of the Endangered Species Act or not. The state of Idaho seems committed to only maintain the absolute minimum number of breeding pairs it can to keep them from being relisted but Idaho Department of Fish and Game is having a difficult time monitoring wolves and documenting the minimum required number of breeding pairs because there has been such high mortality among collared wolves. This high mortality has caused them to lose contact with many of the packs they are trying to intensively monitor, in turn, it has led to them loosen the criteria they use to determine what constitutes a breeding pair. With the increased effort exhibited by Governor Otter to reduce the population even further, it may become even more difficult for Idaho Department of Fish and Game to conclusively document the minimum required number of breeding pairs.

There is a legal definition for what a wolf “breeding pair” is that is very specific and this definition has undergone changes over the years to make it even more specific. When the reintroduction of wolves was being contemplated during the 1980′s, the USFWS determined that it needed to define what a wolf breeding pair was so that they could accurately define the recovery goals.  The 1987 recovery plan “specified a recovery criterion of a minimum of 10 breeding pairs of wolves (defined as 2 wolves of opposite sex and adequate age, capable of producing offspring) for a minimum of 3 successive years in each of 3 distinct recovery areas…”

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What's the Matter With Idaho?

By Noah Greenwald
Huffington Post

Idaho's hateful treatment of wolves has reached disturbing new lows in recent weeks.

Late last month the sadly misnamed "Idaho for Wildlife" held a two-day "predator derby" out of Salmon, Idaho, offering prizes for the most coyotes and wolves killed and the biggest wolf taken.

Fortunately, no wolves were killed. But roughly 21 coyotes were gunned down in the event which was pitched as a family friendly opportunity to teach kids about responsible hunting.

How killing as many animals as you can, none for food, qualifies as responsible hunting defies reason -- but not Idaho law.

Also last month the Idaho Department of Fish and Game -- with approval from the U.S. Forest Service -- hired a bounty hunter to trek into the largest wilderness in the lower 48 states, the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, and kill two entire wolf packs.

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" All Dogs Go To Heaven" - Watch This Inspiring Video About the Loyalty of a Dog

Wolf slaughter is un-American

William Gibson

4th November 2013

The return of the wolf to the USA's Northern Rockies has brought out some dark undercurrents in American culture and history. A spineless political establishment has fallen into line.

This photograph above is yet more evidence that, two years after political reactionaries led a successful campaign in the House of Representatives and then the Senate to remove the North Rocky Mountain gray wolf from the endangered species list, the slaughter of wolves continues to escalate as wolf hunters fall deeper in their paranoid fantasy that the wolf represents a liberal conspiracy against rural communities.

The Facebook page  that originally posted the image belongs to two Wyoming hunting outfitters, Colby and Codi Gines. The Gines run CG Wilderness Adventures, headquartered in a highly remote part of Wyoming’s Bridger Teton National Forest, bordering on the southeast section of Yellowstone National Park.  "Wyoming is God’s country, and we invite you to come see it for yourself", says the Gines' website.

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For more wonder, rewild the world

Wolves were once native to Yellowstone National Park -- until hunting wiped them out. But when, in 1995, the wolves began to come back (thanks to an aggressive management program), something interesting happened: the rest of the park began to find a new, more healthful balance. In a bold thought experiment, George Monbiot imagines a wilder world in which humans work to restore the complex, lost natural food chains that once surrounded us.

In his book "Feral," George Monbiot advocates the large-scale restoration of complex natural ecosystems.

Living with Wolves - The Sawtooth Pack

Lions are critically endangered in West Africa

A report published today concludes that the African lion is facing extinction across the entire West African region. The West African lion once ranged continuously from Senegal to Nigeria, but the new paper reveals there are now only an estimated 250 adult lions restricted to four isolated and severely imperiled populations. Only one of those populations contains more than 50 lions.

Led by Panthera's Lion Program Survey Coordinator, Dr. Philipp Henschel, and co-authored by a team from West Africa, the UK, Canada and the United States, the paper The lion in West Africa is critically endangered was published yesterday in the scientific journal PLOS ONE. The report's sobering results represent a massive survey effort taking six years and covering eleven countries where lions were presumed to exist in the last two decades. The new, very fine resolution information builds on an earlier continent-wide review of lion status produced by Duke University, to which Dr. Henschel also contributed. Both surveys received funding from National Geographic's Big Cats Initiative (BCI).

Panthera's Dr. Philipp Henschel explained, "When we set out in 2006 to survey all the lions of West Africa, the best reports suggested they still survived in 21 protected areas. We surveyed all of them, representing the best remaining lion habitat in West Africa. Our results came as a complete shock; all but a few of the areas we surveyed were basically paper parks, having neither management budgets nor patrol staff, and had lost all their lions and other iconic large mammals."

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Large carnivore decline puts humans at risk , study says

by John Roach, NBC News
A few years after wolves were reintroduced to the Northern Rockies in 1995, fifth-generation Montana rancher Rick Jarrett gave up on the

parcel of federal land near Yellowstone National Park that he grazed for 20 years. The carnivores harassed his cattle so much that they stopped gaining weight. Skinny cattle don't sell.

"It wasn't worth being there anymore," he told NBC News. To turn a profit, he now confines his livestock to several thousand acres on and around his ranch in Big Timber, where his cattle and sheep are free to pack on the pounds — for now. The wolves, he said, will eventually get there, too.

While Jarrett is bitter about having to live with wolves, such coexistence is increasingly necessary if the world hopes to reverse a downward spiral of its largest carnivores such as wolves as well as lions, tigers, and bears, according to a review study published Thursday in the journal Science.

As the carnivores decline, ecosystems and food chains that humans depend on for survival are unraveling and, in many cases, adding to the economic woes of everyone from farmers to ecotourism companies.

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Top Yellowstone Expert Takes on the Wolf Critics

Speaks to “Non Native Subspecies” Charge and “Surplus Killing”

Recently, the Montana Pioneer spoke with Doug Smith, Yellowstone National Park Wolf Project Leader and Senior Biologist at the Yellowstone Center for Resources, about the nature of the wolves introduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, including the “non native subspecies” charge advanced by critics, and about ongoing research on wolves in the park.

MP: What were the genetic sources of wolves introduced into YNP—where did the existing wolf population originate?

DS: Forty one wolves were introduced to YNP in 1995. There were 14 in 1995 from Alberta, and 17 in 1996 from British Columbia, and 10 in 1997 from near Choteau, Montana. We have genetic evidence that some of those wolves went on to breed. So, 10 of the wolves that were introduced were from Montana, and 31 were from Canada.

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The Lone Wolf Returns

Last month, the first wild wolf recorded in California in ninety years made a quick return to the Golden State. The wolf’s story was the subject of a feature by Joe Donnelly in the September/October 2013 issue of Orion.

The lone gray wolf known to scientists as OR7—and to anthropomorphically inclined fans as Journey—has sealed his reputation for the dramatic, or at least the symbolic, by crossing back to California for a couple of visits in December.

The large male wolf made a return appearance to the happy hunting ground where he spent all of 2012 and the first few months of 2013. And he arrived just in time to shine a spotlight on the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s long-simmering petition to protect gray wolves under the California Endangered Species Act.

Some brief backstory: When intrepid OR7 first made it to California, right around this time in 2011, he didn’t just add a milestone to his remarkable trek south from remote Wallowa County in northeast Oregon—he also enlisted California in the cultural and political civil war that’s been chasing wolves across the West ever since their successful mid-1990s reintroduction into the Northern Rockies. That OR7 happened to spend a significant amount of time sniffing around Lassen County, where the last indigenous Californian gray wolf was killed for a bounty in 1924, added a touch of poetry to OR7’s journey.

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