A Wolf Idea I Hate, But Translocation Is On The Mind Of WA Commission Chair

If the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission and I had any sense whatsoever, we’d spend our time and energy on something other than, yes, wolves.

Me, because for all the howling I’ve done over the years, I can’t say it’s accomplished a lot, but it sure felt good!

The commission because, in all seriousness, there are other species – actually endangered ones – that could use their attention.

I raise this in the wake of the commission’s narrow mid-July vote that left the status of Evergreen State packs as endangered rather than downlisted to sensitive, as experts at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife had recommended, based on an exhaustive population review, modeling showing negligible risk of future extinction, state listing rules and recovery in significant portions of their range.

Instead, commissioners led by Chair Barbara Baker gave more weight to Governor Jay Inslee’s directive not to downlist because of his concerns about the “extraordinarily damaging impacts of climate change on wolf habitat.” 

Give me a break. That is simply preposterous.

I’ve already litigated Inslee’s absurd argument here, but to recap in brief, gray wolves are a generalist species – “the planet’s most widespread large land mammals after humans and livestock,” says NationalGeographic.com, roaming from the Arctic to California’s southern Central Valley, Italy and Spain to Newfoundland – and they are categorically not threatened by climate change in the least. Especially given their “highly adaptable” nature, per a US Fish and Wildlife Service national assessment last February.

BUT SINCE BURNING years of staff time around developing the periodic status review of wolves and proposing the downlisting, holding public comment on it and then the vote apparently isn’t enough for the commission – not to mention 16 straight years of wolf angst since the Lookout Pack was confirmed in 2008, and all the money spent on a Wolf Advisory Group facilitator to bring disparate folks together while outside agitators lobbed their lawsuits and petitions and got Inslee to make WDFW waste even more time on wolf rulemaking that went nowhere so they got him to do it all over yet again – now Chair Baker wants to have a “discussion” about translocating wolves to Western Washington.

Baker coyly claims she’s not actually in favor of the idea but is throwing it out there to show that the citizen oversight panel is “taking to heart the concerns of the people in those areas where (wolves) are concentrated,” she told the ag-world-oriented Capital Press.

How thoughtful.

State Representative Joel Kretz (R-Bodie Mountain), who has long sought to share the joy of wolves that attack his constituents’ cattle, sheep, donkeys and more, would love to offload some to the Westside. And today in an op-ed, the Capital Press headlined it “A wolf idea we like.”

But with all due respect to two fellow veterans of Washington’s wolf wars, I think it’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.

Did the fallout of the mid-1990s’ federal reintroduction into the Northern Rockies not teach us anything?

Have we not torn asunder enough bridges between the various camps of wildlife advocates?

Do we need to do that now at an even finer local scale?

Do we really need to spend any more time or treasure on a species that is well on its way to recovery and has four damn legs of its own and is doing the job of dispersing for free?

NO!

Per WDFW’s annual wolf reports, the agency has spent $11,175,446 on wolf management activities since 2015, or about $1.2 million a year. It’s bought the state a minimum of 260 wolves in 42 packs at the end of 2023, including 25 breeding pairs. Two of Washington’s three recovery zones representing more than half the state have now met their recovery goals for three consecutive years – far longer for one of those zones.

Sure, fine, hold a one-hour commission discussion on translocation to check that box off, but has anybody thought about how much additional money it would cost to come up with a catch-and-release plan and then actually carry through with it?

And has anybody thought about consulting with potentially affected tribes? We did learn that lesson from the commission’s Conservation Policy, Best Available Science Policy and the whole Colorado-Colville wolf connection, correct?

The deep, dark secret of Washington’s wolf plan is that it doesn’t actually require a single damn wolf to exist on the Westside. True, the Westside/South Cascades-Northwest Coast Recovery Zone should carry its weight, but forcing the issue on more counties, livestock operators, local residents, hunters and others ain’t the way. Wolves will and are arriving on their own west of the crest, they will be a pain in the butt there just like in the state’s northeast and southeast corners, and then EVERYONE can fully enjoy the joy that is wolves.

If it sounds like I hate wolves, I actually don’t at all; it’s the wolf PEOPLE who have always driven me batsh*t. But failing to downlist wolves then wanting to talk about moving them around makes me dig my heels in deeper on an idea I have long loathed as I’ve reported obsessively on the species and their management.

I think the strongest argument against translocation may have been made by former Commissioner Kim Thorburn, who bemoaned Inslee and the commission’s focus on wolves diverting resources from critters that are urgently in need of attention.

“Take, for example, greater sage-grouse and Columbian sharp-tailed grouse that have lost nearly all their remaining habitat to wildfires since 2015. Habitat restoration and recovery is time-intensive and costly, and the department must rely on partners and scraped-together resources to manage their recovery,” she wrote in a July letter blasting the governor.

Thorburn told me that a Lincoln County winter habitat restoration project last May saw her and fellow birders as well as hunters, WDFW staffers and local landowners plant 700 trees and shrubs in a 2020 burn scar, providing “desperately” needed cover for sharptails and other upland birds and wildlife. It won one participating organization a $7,500 national habitat prize.

I like that kind of all-in, win-win-win, big-tent approach best, not self-interested notions that are going to rip open raw wounds. Animals have to want to be somewhere on their own initiative, not because commissioners or voters think it’s a neato idea.

I HEAR YOU, Dave Workman, and you can indeed make the argument that the Fish and Wildlife Commission should focus more on fish and wildlife that “pay the freight,” especially now with the arrival of chronic wasting disease in far Eastern Washington, confirmed in a dead whitetail doe found near Spokane. But until there’s a Department of Non-game Organisms, they fall in WDFW’s wheelhouse too.

Yet the exasperation of even agency endangered species czar Julia Smith was clear when she commented on Baker’s desire to now talk about moving wolves:

“We have finite resources for wildlife conservation. If we are serious about the biodiversity crisis then we need to allocate resources to the animals that are going extinct,” she told Capital Press.

I agree, but in their zeal to cuddle up with as many predators as they possibly can, many on this commission have already shown they just don’t want to listen to agency staffers’ expert analysis. They would rather spend the state’s valuable time, money and resources on widely distributed, populous carnivore species of literally least scientific concern – cougars, black bears and wolves.

And for what?

So they can win the blue ribbon at the fair for the Furriest State In All The Land? Most Fiscally Irresponsible & Unnecessary Response To Climate Change?

This activist commission has lost the plot. Time to reboot – and to boot wolf translocation to the heap of craptacular ideas.