Beware Of “Natural” Wildlife Management
March 2, 2007
Dr. Valerius Geist, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science at the University of Calgary in Alberta, is a renowned expert in wildlife management and conservation practices. In addition to teaching, writing about, and lecturing on the subjects, Dr. Geist has performed years of in-the-field research on big game species. He has authored 16 books, seven documentary films and contributed 40 entries to various encyclopedias.
I found this article in the Outdoorsman, July 2004 edition, Bulletin Number 5, and thought I would share some of it with readers. Geist begins his article by stating that the reintroduction of wolves into the Yellowstone National Park region isn’t a simple matter of wildlife management. He describes it as a “clash of deeply held values” and a “rural versus urban clash”. He further explains that “some ecologically based philosophies” have been presented to the people in this country as truths. These urban based people sporting these philosophies he refers to as “nature protectors”.
He then begins to dispel the “myths”.
They proclaim two myths as self evident or as scientific “truths” to the general public: that predators in general and wolves in particular are an “ecological good” no matter how many; and that “wilderness” is the “natural” pre-Columbian state of North America, then presided over by noble natives who selflessly maintained its ecological integrity which ecologically insensitive Europeans subsequently destroyed. In addition, they operate on the assumption that wildlife is a free gift of Nature, a gift of God, and not a resource painfully restored by human hand over the last 80 years in North America.
The wildlife we currently enjoy is not wildlife that was left over from the past, but wildlife restored by a continental system of wildlife conservation that arose after its near destruction a century ago. It is one of the great cultural achievements of North Americans in the 20th Century, the greatest environmental success story of that century, and a highly successful system of sustained development of a natural resource.
Geist relates some history to us which includes the very successful wildlife management programs put in place over the last 80 years or so in efforts to build a bigger more useful population of wildlife. He also speaks briefly of how having the right balance of predators is good and that too many can be bad. He describes it in terms most of us can understand.
It’s analogous to sugar: a little in the coffee is great but ingested by the pound it becomes a significant health
hazard.Put another way, if someone proclaimed that deer, as predators of plants, eat only the sick and decrepit plants, sparing the vigorous growing ones in order to insure the health and well being of the range, that individual would not be taken too seriously. Moreover wolves, as Siberian immigrants unlike mountain lions or coyotes, are not expected to be co-adapted with North American species and can be incredibly efficient in removing other species.
Geist uses Vancouver Island as an example of the effects of too many wolves. Where once deer kill from hunting was 25,000 a season, it is now a mere 4,000, claiming that deer are really only found in the suburbs and close enough to humans that would prevent all but the most daring of wolves from attacking.
Then Geist goes on to talk more specifically about the argument that wilderness should be left alone, unmanaged by man and letting “nature” take its course.
The argument is that wolves must be introduced in a hands off fashion so as to restore aboriginal pre-Columbian wilderness ecosystems.
Current research indicates that pre-Columbian North America was a well settled, quite severely exploited land, with native people practicing highly skilled horticulture. The latter is a development to escape starvation brought on by food shortages in native
ecosystems.Instead of maintaining wilderness, native people manipulated the land to make it yield sustenance, no different from people on other continents. When European diseases devastated native tribes rapidly in the 16th Century, thus lifting the heavy hand of red man off the land, “wilderness” was the result.
Far from being the natural state of the land, wilderness is an artifact of European colonization. The ecology of North America was not “natural” in pre-Columbian days. Not only because of agriculture and skillful landscape manipulation by fire, but also because
native people had all but destroyed the mega fauna in colonizing the continent.The lesson from this is that we need not be slaves to some pre-Columbian fiction but may do just as pre- Columbian natives did – generate our own land use and conservation practices in which the maintenance of biodiversity is the only bottom line requirement. Yes it is quite all right to have areas with minimum predation to raise bountiful wildlife for broad public use.
He counters that more management is the more desirable approach, not less, explaining what effects this will have on not just game herds but our overall system of wildlife.
To let predation go unchecked, “letting it be management,” is bound to diminish much more than the game herds that were built up from next to nothing over the past 80 years. It risks our public system of wildlife conservation and the great Public Good that flows from it.
As game herds drop so do license sales and revenue to game departments. The public guardians of wildlife have less and less wherewithal to do their job, and ultimately have no job.
Despite all the controversies about public wildlife management, it is on the whole infinitely superior to private management of wildlife for the marketplace. Superior in conservation achievements and far superior in economic returns or as a creator of wealth or employment.
There is little doubt that with the loss of significant public participation in the harvest of wildlife, most public land will lose its political clientèle and, as sure as the sun will rise, will slide into defacto private ownership. There will be little wolf conservation under private condition, or cougars, grizzly bears, etc.
Letting predators run down game herds will indirectly weaken the framework of wildlife conservation. Together with other opponents of public wildlife such as game farming and the anti-hunting and animal rights movements, this may succeed in destroying the greatest environmental success of the past century – the return of American wildlife.
It would be replaced by a mixture of European, South African and shooting preserve type wildlife management – if one can call it such.
Tom Remington
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[...] one year ago, I wrote an article that referred to an article that was published in The Outdoorsman, Bulletin #5, July 2004; pages 4 [...]