Fish and Game Politics

Under Sando the department moved aggressively to protect and restore fisheries resources, both resident and anadromous. His main priority was instream flows. But, although water rights were purchased from willing sellers, this displeased irrigators, particularly the Idaho Farm Bureau Federation. There's a lot of trout habitat in Idaho that has been dried up by irrigators--on the Big Wood River, the Lemhi, the Little Lost, the Pahsimeroi, to mention just a few. Sando wanted to restore dewatered trout habitat, and he would have if he'd had the chance.

While the department doesn't own or manage much land, it tells federal agencies such as the Forest Service and BLM what they need to do to protect and restore fish and wildlife. For example, cows shouldn't be allowed to wallow in trout streams and rip up their banks as they currently do throughout Owyhee County and on such waters as the East Fork of the Salmon River, the Pahsimeroi, Bear Valley Creek and Marsh Creek, one of the most important spring chinook producers on the Columbia system. The Idaho Cattlemen's Association deeply resented this advice, even when it was ignored. What also incensed the Idaho Cattlemen's Association, its allies in the legislature and a small but shrill group of elk hunters in the Clearwater country was Sando's alleged softness on predators. In the Clearwater National Forest elk are way down because the winter range can no longer support them. Huge fires in the early 1900s created massive brush fields and, in turn, an explosion in the elk population. But as trees matured, the elk faded away. "A lot of the winter range there is probably on a 500-year [growth-burn] cycle," says Lonn Kuck, Fish and Game's former big-game manager who retired last July after 32 years with the department. "There is an element out there that is convinced that predators are the limiting factor. That element simply can't comprehend that habitat isn't always constant; it thinks that if you kill the predators, we'll have elk coming out of our ears."

Helping me understand what Kuck meant was one Ed Lindahl, board member and past president of the Concerned Sportsmen of Idaho—as far as I can determine, the only hunting-and-fishing outfit that was glad to see Sando go.

"Sando was an embracer of wolves," Lindahl declared. "That put him at odds with us. We're dead set against wolves. What our forefathers did to them should have remained so. Reintroducing wolves was the most extreme of environmentalism. I'm a retired Army officer, and I take the same view of militant Marxism throughout the world."

According to Lindahl, the elk that get away from the wolves are eaten by bears and cougars. Almost as bad as predators are trout fishermen, with their preservationist mindset against clearcutting and roading: "I bump up against the Orvis men of the world who don't want to see the forest opened up," he declared. "You know, the purists who want only wild fish--groups like Trout Unlimited that file knee-jerk appeals and lawsuits on any timber sale that may help elk." And, of course, there's the "extreme environmentalism" pushed by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation which "embraces the roadless initiative that the Clinton administration rammed down the West's throat." Such talk makes eminent good sense to a lot of Idahoans.

Last October a golden ax, in the form of gross "predator coddling" by Sando, fell into the laps of the Concerned Sportsmen of Idaho, the governor, the Idaho Cattlemen's Association, the Idaho Farm Bureau Federation and the legislature. According to the report filed by conservation officer Bob Sellers, this is how the incident went down: The wife of a caretaker at a ranch near Mountain Home, an area where cougars have co-existed with people and livestock for decades, saw a small lioness and her two cubs at one end of a pasture. They seemed to be looking at some horses at the other end—hungrily, she thought. Neither she nor anyone else saw the cats chasing the horses. But guessing what they had in mind, she phoned a local hunter, Bob Corbus. When Corbus arrived the cougars were nowhere to be seen, so he drove around in his truck until he found them, then shot all three. The mother and one cub died quickly. The other cub, unable to move, lived for another day until Corbus got around to shooting it again. In Idaho you can only kill cougars if they're attacking your livestock. So, after getting clearance from his supervisor and the local prosecutor, Sellers cited Corbus for game-law violations. Although Corbus wasn't a member of the Idaho Cattlemen's Association, president-elect Ted Hoffman wrote a letter to Sando, demanding that he fix the ticket.

A heavy predator-control element in the commission left Sando with only a one-vote margin, and one of his supporters—Nancy Hadley, who had cast the tie-breaking vote for his raise—was coming up for reappointment. Clearly, Sando was toast.

When Sando left the department Kempthorne expressed astonishment. But Don Clower, one of the governor's own appointees to the commission, set the record straight. "I watched on TV as the governor said that neither he nor his staff had anything to do with Rod's forced termination," he told me. "That just wasn't true. They took us into little groups of twos and threes so they didn't violate the open meeting law. They spent 45 minutes telling us all the bad things Rod had done and to go fix the problem." Clower reports that the governor himself showed up for one of the meetings.

Kempthorne sees Clower, whose term is up June 30, as a major mistake. But Clower has built an enormous following among sportsmen, and it's not clear that they'll let the governor replace him. I asked Clower what sportsmen in other states needed to do to keep the politicians out of wildlife decision making. "Get involved," he said. "As a group, we're an apathetic bunch. The only time we rise to anything is when we're directly threatened."

While Idaho hunters, anglers and environmentalists were contemplating their navels the state legislature was eroding the Fish and Game Commission system, doing away with staggered terms and shortening term length from six years to four so that new governors could bring in more new members. Kempthorne, for example, brought in four.