NO CHANCES WITH WOLVES

by
Chris Genovali & Chris Darimont

Chris Genovali is the Executive Director for Raincoast Conservation Society. Chris Darimont is a Conservation Biologist and PhD candidate at the University of Victoria.

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Recent media reports have exposed the failure of the BC Ministry of Environment’s ill-conceived management prescription that involved sterilizing wolves in the province's Muskwa-Kechika ecosystem. Not surprisingly, however, the failure was entirely predictable. In fact, we had forecasted precisely this outcome in a letter to then Environment Minister Joyce Murray and her staff in early 2003.

Freedom of Information access to Ministry documents described uncertainty in identification of breeding wolves to be sterilized, and the potential of social disruption following sterilization. We informed the Ministry of this three years ago, warning that problems would include, among others, the difficulty of identifying the dominant breeding pair of wolves in a pack, and, even if they are identified, the changing nature of pack hierarchies means that a breeding pair one year may not be the breeding pair the next.

We suspect pack disruption and the subsequent increases in wolves were the result of an interaction between sterilization and continued harvests of wolves. Again, we warned the plan compounds the problems associated with sterilization because it proposes allowing, and even increasing, hunting and trapping of wolves at the same time. Sterilization, to be effective at all, requires a stable pack structure. Hunting and trapping risks the loss of dominant pack members, resulting in pack fragmentation, allowing more, not fewer, wolves to reproduce. Wolf packs in the Muskwa-Kechika are apparently booming despite the Ministry's suspect management actions. Controlling wolves by lethal or non-lethal sterilization is technically unsound as a long-term management tool. Lethal control has a dubious record of success as a means of depressing numbers of wolves over time, because removing individual wolves may fragment packs and allow more wolves to breed. When entire packs are eliminated, wolves from outside the control area often immigrate to fill the void.

In the case of the Muskwa-Kechika, the Ministry is counting on the sterilization of wolves to provoke less public opposition because in theory no wolves are killed. The reality of sterilization, however, appears to be something else. Its effectiveness has not been established. As a result, when the management objective of reducing wolf numbers is not achieved through sterilization managers have resorted to lethal methods of control. This option is recognized in the Muskwa-Kechika Wildlife Management Plan, which ominously states that if control objectives are not achieved through surgical sterilization or fertility-lowering drugs, additional methods will be considered.

One of the greatest and most obvious values of science is its predictive utility. That the Ministry chose to ignore our recommendations, along with voluminous scientific literature that would issue similar counsel, suggests they simply did not want science to interfere with their dubious sterilization experiment.

In our opinion the Ministry’s plan to sterilize wolves was ill-informed and anachronistic management masquerading as science. We suspect it was designed to appease their preferred constituents in the trophy hunting lobby, which complained that wolves were reducing opportunities to shoot ungulates for recreation and profit. The major goal of this plan is to manipulate an ecosystem to suit human purposes, not to save any endangered or threatened populations. It is management biased toward maximizing specific, preferred species to the detriment of others, and ignores natural and dynamic ecosystem processes.

Aside from the predictable inefficacy and ecological irresponsibility of the Ministry’s program, we propose that the forceful removal of the reproductive organs of wild wolves is morally indefensible, and we suspect the majority of British Columbians would agree.