Diane K. Boyd
speaker
610 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Diane K. Boyd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Right. So I had to bring them to the main office in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, where they were euthanized. So prior to that, in 1978, you couldn't euthanize wolves. They changed the status from endangered to threatened. And so when they were threatened— then under Endangered Species Act, you could actually euthanize them. And they didn't translocate them.
This is a really good question because they found over the years with studies in Minnesota and eventually in Montana too, that when you translocate or move a wolf who's causing a problem, That wolf very, very rarely survives to reproduce because it gets killed by other wolves. It comes back to depredate again. It moves on to another farm or ranch and does it again.
They don't generally survive, and so it was determined that it makes officials feel good to move them, and it's a good facade for the public to believe in, but sometimes it results in a pretty prolonged and inhumane existence for a few months or a year until they die anyway. So, yeah, it's...
It's tough once they learn to take cattle or sheep. It's tough to break that pattern. Let's put it that way.
Well, yeah. I mean, if it was me out there walking around and I had a choice between a deer that's going to kick me in the teeth or taking the cow, I'd pick the slow, dumb groceries every time. It's just me.
Exactly.
So it's a difficult challenge and wolves are continuing to expand everywhere in the West, the Midwest, Europe. And so there's more and more challenges, and a lot of the early excitement about wolves has changed into a bitter battle. Yeah.
95, 96, and then 96, 97. Those winters.
Yes. And so kind of the die was cast when those wolves were removed. And basically by the 1930s, there really weren't viable populations in the West anymore. There are wolves here or there in a pack here or there, but there weren't thousands. And they went inside the national parks. They have a picture in many books of rangers with cute little wolf pups that are like seven, eight weeks old.
And they took the pictures. This was in 1926. And then they killed them all. So they even removed all the predators within national parks. So people, historic memory, you know, we have really short memories. Historic memory of, say, for example, the northern range, northern herd range of elk out of Gardner. It was about 20,000 before the wolves were introduced. Way over carrying capacity.
Elk were starving. The browse lines as high up as they could reach, they ate everything they could eat. They were paying people, people were being paid to come in and kill deer and elk. And then they started the late hunting seasons out of Gardner, which I went in because my boyfriend at the time had a tag.
And they just have a shooting line in February and kill all these elk because they aren't going to make it anyway. And so you shoot a starving cow in February because it wasn't predators. So then when the wolves came back, two things happened. Number one, it was a new predator. But number two, in the winter of 96, 97, we had some of the deepest snows ever recorded in the mountains, ever.
And so many of the herd died from snowfall. And I've had hunters tell me, yeah, the population elk went from 20,000 to 10,000 in two years. Damn those wolves. And it's like, do you think 35 wolves killed 10,000 elk? Come on. Let's just do the math a minute.
And I'm a hunter. I get it.
From what? Snow. Yeah.
I would say, to the best of my knowledge as a biologist, that winter die-off is the limiting factor for ungulate herds. It's not lions and bears and wolves and humans and cars. Every so often, every 20 years or whatever, you get a massive winter die-off. And it takes quite a while for those populations to build back up. Predators can keep that at a lower rate. They cannot affect it.
I have to think back to what people say about wolves killing all the deer now. I think if you look to statistics in Montana and Wyoming, which both have had a lot of wolves for a couple decades, they're giving away more elk permits. I was just reading they proposed unlimited elk permits in Wyoming, and Montana's got basically in most of its management units more elk than ever.
And I just say there's more going on than wolves. And to point your finger at wolves all the time, you need to look at habitat. You need to look at access issues. You know, there's a lot of places where hunters want to go shoot these elk, but they're on large private ranches and you can't get on them.
Right. I mean, if the viewers can think of imagining a checkerboard and you're trying to get from one black square to the next black square, but you have to step over a tiny piece of white square to get there, right?
It's being battled in court right now.
Showing 141–160 of 610 · page 8 of 31
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