Back Off!

Apparently the passage didn’t impress the U.S. attorney’s office in Pocatello because in 2006 it successfully prosecuted one Tim Sundles for attempting to rid the Salmon-Challis National Forest of wolves by festooning it with poisoned meatballs, thereby killing at least one coyote, one fox, some magpies, and three pet dogs. He had been administering an anti-wolf website that provided detailed instructions on how to “successfully poison a wolf,” and he had shot a wolf near his home in Salmon, Idaho, after it allegedly had looked at his wife, hungrily. At this writing Sundles awaits sentencing.

Lionizing Sundles as a martyr for its righteous cause is the Idaho Anti-Wolf Coalition, which distributes bumper stickers that read “Save Idaho’s Wildlife: Kill Wolves.” And it offers instruction on how to violate the Endangered Species Act: When you kill a wolf, just claim “self defense.” The coalition is gathering signatures for a ballot initiative to eliminate wolves from the state. “There are three things that protect our liberties here in the West—the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box,” declares coalition director and former hunting outfitter Ron Gillett, who has done more than anyone to bring wolves to his hometown of Stanley (a place they had traditionally avoided) by feeding elk, which shunned Stanley before he put them on welfare. Gillett reports that the state population of “wuffs,” as he calls them, may be as high as 3,000 (2,327 above Bangs’s estimate).

In May 2006 one of Gillett’s neighbors called the game warden after he had fetched a rifle, presumably to dispatch a wolf that had killed a runt yearling elk. “If that wuff had taken one step toward me, I would have shot it in a second,” he told me. “Are you pro-wuff? ’Cause if you are, I don’t want to waste my time with you.” Luckily for the interview, he cut me off before I could answer. “Where you out of?” he asked.

“Massachusetts,” I replied.

“You guys have no idea what we’re going through.”

“That’s why I’m talking to you.”

After a lengthy dissertation on “kooks” and “eco-terrorists,” delivered in a loud, sustained whine, Gillett got down to wolf biology as he perceives it: “The wuffs follow the elk herds around in the spring and kill the calves as fast as they’re born. They kill all the prey first, then they kill all the other predators—mountain lions, bears, coyotes, bobcats. Anyone who likes wuffs doesn’t like wildlife. The people in rural Idaho will not let these wuffs kill everything off; it may take civil disobedience. Wasn’t there a thing called the Boston Tea Party in your state? I believe in private property. I believe that the U.S. Constitution is supreme, not the Endangered Species Act. We are small, rural Idaho communities that are trying to survive. And then you put out a land piranha like the Canadian wuff that kills everything. Local businesses that depend on tourism are going busted. Who wants to bring their family up here and camp out and worry about their kids being taken down by a wuff?”

Little such worry is evident in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where the Fish and Wildlife Service delisted wolves of this population segment on January 29, 2007. This was the result of enlightened management plans by state biologists and a lack of meddling by state politicians.

But in Wyoming and Idaho, politicians have hamstrung biologists. The Idaho legislature, for example, responded to the first wolf releases by enacting a law forbidding any state employee to work on wolf recovery. So Bangs asked the Nez Perce Indians—for whom the wolf is sacred—to do the state’s work for it. After a terrific job by the tribe and much good publicity for the state, the legislature rescinded its ban.

Then, on January 12, 2006—just a week after the service had granted Idaho most wolf management authority—the state Fish and Game Department bowed to political pressure from outfitters and hunters by proposing a 1920s-style predator-control project made possible by alteration of an Endangered Species Act rule by the Bush administration. Supposedly for the benefit of elk, the state would reduce wolves on land belonging to all Americans—the Clearwater National Forest—from about 60 to something like 15. The Fish and Wildlife Service was horrified. So were the Nez Perce, who accurately labeled the plan “junk science.”