Protected Wolves Still Caught In Trap!

[Guest guest]

The following was published in the High Country News.

Trappers often argue that leghold traps are " humane "

because they use them to trap endangered animals for

relocation to new areas where people are working to

reestablish populations. After all, who would want a

mutilated animal to begin a reintroduction project

they argue.

 

But as this article shows, wolves suffer horribly in

traps.

 

Otters have also been trapped for reintroduction

projects. When otters were trapped to be relocated

into Indiana, 53% of the otters had to receive

veterinary attention because of lacerations and

amputations of toes caused by leghold traps.

 

These cruel devices must be banned.

 

http://www.hcn.org/wotr/dir/WOTR_001107_Robinson.html

 

 

'Protected' wolves still caught in a trap=

 

 

by Michael Robinson

TALK BACK - Discussion Forum

 

 

Many people justly celebrate the reintroduction of

wolves as a reversal of the federal wolf extermination

policy of most of the last century. But look below the

surface, and the policy may have changed a little less

than it appears. In particular, a three-legged Mexican

gray wolf roaming New Mexico's Gila National Forest

indicates how, in some respects, the Old West still

reigns.

 

She's called F189, but her progenitors in the same

predicament several wolf generations ago, from the

1880s to the 1940s, were given names at once both

visceral and pedestrian: Two Toes, Three Toes, Old

Lefty. These and dozens of others all came to their

titular disfigurations in the same manner:

Working to free themselves from leghold traps placed

by the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey.

 

Old Lefty of northwestern Colorado had twisted and

torn the tendons in his trapped limb until only loose

skin kept his useless foreleg in the trap. He bit

through the skin and hopped away alive and forever

wary -- but

finally tricked into another, final trap by a federal

agent who used his fear of traveling on established

trails against him.

 

Back then, in 1921, though the goal was extinction,

the individual wolves took on mythical hews and some

of the killers themselves waxed nostalgic as their

work petered out with the last few " renegades. "

Government

publicists used the wolves' sobriquets to foster

popular interest in the extermination campaign.

 

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is a direct

institutional descendent of the old Bureau of

Biological Survey. Ironically, now dedicated to wolf

recovery, the agency eschews naming wolves -- even as

breeders and docents in some of the zoos that

participate in the Mexican wolf captive breeding

program assign their charges monikers: Rio, Francisco,

Sheila, Paquito, Zuni. Instead, the government gives

each animal an identifying number.

 

The reason can be inferred from the fact that aside

from putting the animals on the ground in the first

place, the Fish and Wildlife Service has prioritized

livestock interests over wolves in the face of any

conflict.

 

And such a policy, taken to an extreme in order to

mollify still-furious ranchers, has brought us full

circle to the three-legged wolves of yore.

 

F189 was released in spring 1999 in the Blue Range of

Arizona, accompanied by a male wolf and their four

newborn pups. The pack roamed ponderosa and juniper

forests preying on deer and elk. Two other packs,

meanwhile, tempted into preying on stock by cattle

carcasses on which they had scavenged, had been

trapped and removed from the wild -- to the

accompaniment of

venomous rhetoric by the livestock industry. In the

course of removing those other packs in the fall, F189

was accidentally trapped, and lost two toes on her

left front leg.

 

Fish and Wildlife Service was desperate for Mexican

wolf " success " stories, and the Mule Pack still seemed

a good prospect. Hence, four months later, when the

pack discovered a cow and a horse carcass on the

national

forest,and scavenged on them, the federal agency

decided to move the wolves to an area without stock.

But this time their trapping went even more awry, and

F189 was left overnight in cold January weather to

struggle against the trap. When the government trapper

found her, she had suffered frostbite and her leg had

to be amputated.

 

Today, she roams the Gila National Forest of New

Mexico alone. Though her pack was released with her, a

previously cohesive social unit broke apart:

Her mate took off running, along with her two

surviving yearling sons; the latter are back in

captivity, and her mate has recently joined with two

other wolves from a pack that was similarly fragmented

due to equally aggressive management.

 

F189 displays the same perseverance and will to live

as her injured kin from decades past. She has avoided

domestic animals and despite missing a leg has

survived by bringing down wild prey. And unlike in the

early 1900s, the government favors her survival,

having provided veterinary care after her accidental

injury and re-releasing her when she recovered.

 

But the eerie similarities to past three-legged wolves

can't help but remind us that managing wolves with

leghold traps will always be risky, and that the

perceived need to trap and remove wolves -- in this

case before any cattle were bothered -- will

inevitably involve accidents. The underlying logic of

wolf extermination still holds true: Livestock will

graze the

public lands and anything that interferes will be

removed.

 

As long as that notion holds sway, expect more injured

wolves. But don't be surprised if the agency that once

trumpeted the myth of such wolves as outlaws,

assigning them characters and fame, now relegates them

digits

like " 189 " -- an ironically antiseptic substitute for

the very real digits lost to the snap of a trap.

 

Michael Robinson is a contributor to Writers on the

Range, a service of High Country News (www.hcn.org).

He is a longtime wolf advocate and lives in Pinos

Altos, New Mexico.

 

 

 

 

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