Should We Have Wolves or Livestock on Public Lands?
WOLVES!
Photo by Hans Veth
In the American West, the vast majority of public lands are leased to ranchers to graze their livestock. The ranchers can’t seem to get along with any of the wild inhabitants. Coyotes, ravens, eagles, mountain lions, prairie dogs, grizzly bears, beavers are all targeted for elimination by the livestock industry, for its sole convenience. Ranchers carry rifles in their pickup trucks, and coerce state legislatures and game agencies to classify native wildlife as varmints so they can be killed in unlimited numbers. And ranchers have federal, state, and local government agencies as their private wildlife-killing death squads to roam the landscape, snuffing out wild species at their request. But the livestock industry has a special hatred for the wolf.
There is plenty of evidence that livestock and wolves can coexist on public lands, but most ranchers seem stubbornly opposed to coexistence. In light of those who refuse to coexist, let’s examine the comparative merits of having wolves versus having livestock on public lands.
First there’s the question of public safety. While most of us grew up with fairytales about the “big bad wolf,” there is precious little evidence that North American wolves are dangerous to people. Yellowstone National Park has multiple packs of wolves, and gets 4.7 million visitors every summer. Yellowstone tourists are famous for stupid human tricks, and there are plenty of incidents of visitors killed by bison or other wildlife. But although wolves are the most popular attraction in the Park, the number of wolf incidents in Yellowstone is zero. Alaska is a state with an abundant wolf population, yet humans coexist with wolves, and problems are few, and rare. I studied moose in the Alaska Range for several years, and once found myself between a wolf pack and its pups at a range of 30 yards on either side. I was never in any danger. Contrast this with cattle, which kill, on average, 22 people in the United States every year. Wolves, on the other hand, kill and average of — wait for it — zero.
Advantage wolves.
Western public lands are popular destinations for sport hunters. This demographic, like many, has a lunatic fringe, and the sportsmen’s loonies have a bloodthirsty hatred for wolves, claiming wolves kill all the game that hunters want for themselves. Let’s compare wolves and livestock for their impact to game species.
Wolves live in a dynamic equilibrium with their prey species. While prey species can reproduce rapidly and tend to fill up the landscape to the point that they become food-limited, wolves limit themselves through territoriality to population levels far below the number that could be sustained by the number of elk, deer, and other herbivores based on food availability. Wolves cannot limit prey populations except under unusual circumstances. In Alaska, where wolves are abundant, it was once thought that wolves were responsible for major caribou declines, but science later debunked this assertion. The State of Alaska had an on-again-off-again policy of aerial gunning of wolves, but when this policy was subjected to scientific scrutiny, it was found that the wolf-killing program had no effect on either prey populations or hunter success. Despite Alaska’s abundant wolf population, the state is considered a “lifetime dream hunt” destination. This experience has been repeated in the West with the Northern Rockies wolf reintroduction of 1995; elk in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho are equally or more numerous today than they were before wolves were reintroduced to these states.
Now let’s consider the impact of cattle and sheep on big game species. Prior to the EuroAmerican settlement of North America, there were an estimated 10 million elk, 55 million bison, 10 million mule deer, 35 million pronghorns, and 1.5 to 2 million bighorn sheep. At the same time, there were an estimated 380,000 wolves in the western United States and Mexico. Today, thanks in significant measure to the livestock industry, we are down to an estimated 1 million elk, 31,000 wild bison, 3.4 million mule deer, 750,000 pronghorns, and 70,000 bighorn sheep. The removal of wolves from most of the West hasn’t limited prey populations; livestock have.
According to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report, each cow-calf pair eats enough forage to support two elk or five mule deer. Five sheep eat an equivalent amount of forage. The Bureau of Land Management authorizes 12 million Animal Unit Months (AUMs) of public lands grazing each year, equal to 1 million cow-calf pairs foraging for 12 months a year. The Forest Service authorizes an additional 9.9 million AUMs, or 825,000 cow-calf pairs all year. Assuming an equal boost to elk and mule deer, the removal of cattle and sheep from western public lands would support 1.825 million more elk and 4.563 million more mule deer if all the cattle and sheep were shipped back to private lands. Then there’s the impact of livestock diseases on game species. Domestic sheep carry pneumonia pathogens deadly to bighorns, and these are the primary reason that bighorn sheep – both in the mountains and the deserts – are a scarce remnant of their original populations.
So, from the perspective of hunters (not to mention the far-more-numerous wildlife viewers), western public lands would be far better off with abundant wolves than with cattle and sheep.
And consider the consequences from streams and rivers, the desert oases so important for western biodiversity. Cattle are especially hard on waterways because they congregate along streams, grazing heavily in the bottomlands, impoverishing these rich and important wildlife habitats. Streamside overgrazing denudes the woody vegetation that would otherwise shade the water, and causes heavy erosion that silts in and smothers the spawning gravels required by trout and salmon to complete their reproductive cycles. As a result, most native subspecies of trout in the West are dwindling toward extinction, salmon runs are depleted in grazed areas, and opportunities for recreational anglers and commercial fishers based on these stocks are badly degraded.
Conversely, wolves rebalance the distribution of native wildlife to the benefit of streams and rivers. An overwhelming body of scientific evidence from Yellowstone National Park shows that the return of wolves caused a redistribution of elk and other herbivores on the landscape, pushing them out of valley bottoms and into the timbered hills. The result was a resurgence of willows and aspens in key streamside areas, which supported a rebound of songbirds, beavers, and other wildlife, even helping to restore the steam channels themselves. That’s why a team of scientists recently recommended that the best way to restore native ecosystems in the West was to remove domestic livestock and bring back the wolves and beavers.
Finally, there is the question of what’s in the public interest. The livestock industry has long had a stranglehold on western public lands: The Bureau of Land Management currently rents out an astonishing 83% of the lands it manages to private livestock operations, authorizing the cattle and sheep to take out 50 to 65% of the edible forage that will grow for the entire year. That level of overgrazing has led to serious land health problems – according to the agency’s own assessments – on half of western public lands. And our fieldwork indicates that the ravages of overgrazing are far more widespread than federal officials are admitting. The result has been infestations of flammable, invasive cheatgrass across hundreds of millions of acres of public land. The consignment of public lands to private profit not only degrades native ecosystems and decimates native wildlife, but also ruins the recreational value of public lands by splattering it with cow manure, contaminating the water with fecal coliform, a major human health hazard, and depleting native wildflowers (including desert “superblooms”).
Now that we’ve examined the costs, let’s not neglect the benefits. Ranchers like to claim benefits to soils and carbon balance, but researchers have found a steep climate deficit for cattle production, steepest on public lands with their low-quality forage. Then there’s the mirage of food production, jobs, and economic aspects of public lands ranching. Researchers found that only 1.6% of beef production happens on public lands, so consumers wouldn’t notice any changes at the grocery store or the hamburger stand if cattle and their impacts disappeared from public lands. Owners of western ranches typically have to get jobs in town to supplement their income anyway, so there are no real job benefits. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association commissioned an economic analysis to quantify the financial impact of public-land ranching in three western states. When the economic output was compared to state economies, though, it ranged from a paltry one-half of one percent in Wyoming to a low of two-hundredths of one percent of the Oregon state economy. Thus, the employment and economic contributions of public lands ranching are miniscule, and the only real benefit of leasing public lands for private livestock production is, well…. Nothing comes to mind.
In the final analysis, the renters are trashing the premises. If it comes down to a choice between wolves and livestock on western public lands, the clear winner is wolves. Let’s extend the benefits all across the American West. The case for leasing public lands for livestock production? That’s a tougher sell.
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