The Battle To Correct Media Bias And Bad Information

An editorial should contain opinion. Is that so shocking? I editorialize everyday. I also present facts and document the source from which it comes. When a piece in a prominent newspaper is published as an editorial but is full of statements presented as facts with no source for them, it can’t be taken seriously.

The Salt Lake Tribune published what they labeled an editorial condemning Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s and Barack Obama’s decision to go ahead with the delisting of the gray wolf in Idaho and Montana. I don’t much care one way or the other about the opinions of the editorial staff of the Tribune. They can have all the wolves in their back yard that they wish. I’m sure many in Idaho and Montana would be happy to send them along. The problem is they have made statements that are false and offer no proof to support them. It is not presented as opinion.

Aside from the usual use of such flamboyant language used to discredit and demean hunters or anyone opposed to their thoughts, bold statements were made that are outright nonfactual. Let’s look.

Wyoming refused to adopt any limits on wolf killing.

Not true. Prior to the first delisting that was overturned by Judge Donald Molloy with his issuing of a temporary injunction to put the wolf back under federal protection, the state of Wyoming had a wolf management plan that was approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That plan obviously had restrictions on killing wolves. Those restrictions required that Wyoming maintain a specified number of breeding pairs of wolves and total pack numbers. At issue seemed to be that in most of the state the wolf was classified a predator that could be killed at anytime. Adjacent to Yellowstone, the state had to manage wolves as a game animal.

Despite the wolves’ rapid resurgence under federal protection, they can’t survive without it.

Again, this is a false statement. The 1994 Environmental Impact Statement called for 30 breeding pairs and 300 wolves over the Northern Rocky Mountain range Nonessential Experimental Population. That number has been vastly exceeded and yet wolf protectors find their own agenda-driven “scientists” who claim the numbers that exist now (well over 1,500) are not enough.

been hunted to extinction in unprotected areas early in the 20th century.

Let’s spread the blame around where blame is due and not continue with blaming only hunters. Everyone participated in the destruction of the wolf in the western regions, even Teddy Roosevelt who found quite a lot of sport in watching and participating in wolf hunts with hounds. (Here I make a claim and then back it up with written documentation.) Any means available was used by everyone present to rid the west of wolves.

But without federal protection, wolves will again fall prey to the only predator nasty enough to hunt them only for fun. Last March, when delisting took effect in Idaho, Montana and parts of Oregon and Washington, public hunts were quickly sanctioned. By the time a judge halted the killing with a temporary restraining order in May, 40 wolves, 10 percent of the population, had been killed.

The Tribune leads readers to believe here that when the wolf is delisted it no longer has any protection. This is a far cry from reality. As I pointed out earlier about Wyoming, the same is true for Idaho and Montana. As a matter of fact, both states wolf management plans call for maintaining wolf populations that far exceed the minimum numbers called for in the 1994 Environmental Impact Statement. It’s also a shame that the editorial staff thinks so lowly of the species they might be a part of.

Will these states have wolf hunts? Probably, as partial plans have been started but all hunts must have quotas as are spelled out in the plans approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who will be closely monitoring all wolf activities.

It is disingenuous that the Tribune lead its readers to think without Endangered Species Act protection, the wolf has no protection of management plans to insure its survival.

Hunters say wolves kill too many elk, but the wolves feed on the weak and old, improving the herd, while humans take the biggest, strongest animals.

Here exists two blatantly false statements. In some areas, as we have seen this past winter, wolves have destroyed far too many elk. Game management is done by management zones or regions, yet media, like the tribune which refuses to research for the truth, like to write about all the elk there are based on total elk populations across the state. While total population numbers might seem fine, when examining this by way of management zones, we discover in some zones where wolves are abundant, they have contributed immensely to the rapid destruction of elk and deer, to a point where biologists question whether these two species can recover.

The myth continues to be perpetuated that wolves ONLY kill and eat the weak and the old. Studies have proven this an inaccurate assessment. Recent studies have indicated that wolves are intelligent enough to be able to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy prey and opt for the healthy. It’s like you choosing a better looking steak.

In the book by Will Graves, Wolves in Russia: Anxiety Through the Ages, we learned that not only will wolves kill both healthy and unhealthy prey, they will also kill for sport or what has been labeled surplus killing. Some argue that even when wolves kill and leave their trophy behind they will return at another time and eat it. This is quite subjective and it becomes extremely difficult to verify if that is true.

Regardless, the idea which is continually passed around from media outlet to media outlet, is that wolves are these “sanitarians” of the forest, neatly cleaning up the weak and ill prey species making life in the forest all warm and fuzzy.

Another false statement made by the Tribune is that humans, assuming they are inferring hunters, take only the “biggest, strongest animals”. Recently Newsweek published an article claiming that trophy hunting was weakening the gene pool. This article and the studies referenced in it have been rebuked by scientists for some time and have backed up their claims. You can read about the gene pool here and findings from Dr. Valerius Geist here.

Game management is far more sophisticated than any editorial staff at the Salt Lake Tribune would know. They unfairly attempt to blemish the hunter as the villain of the forest, calling humans “nasty” and they refuse to give any credit to the science behind the management strategies of wildlife biologists at state fish and game departments.

Where needed, fish and game will issue hunting tags based upon the needs of game management goals. These goals are created based on scientific evidence about the habitat, weather conditions, predator presence, hunting pressures and an entire host of other factors. With these management methods it helps to insure that not all trophy animals are taken and that ratios of male to female and female to calf are maintained at scientific levels.

Do hunters go into the woods looking for a “trophy”? Sure, many do and many don’t. Some are successful and some are not. A falsity that also gets passed around without providing claim, is that the biggest body-massed buck with the largest antlers are the strongest of the gene pool. Evidence has shown that what man, the hunter, may perceive as the “trophy” may be more of a freak of nature than what nature defines as the strongest and fittest of the gene pool. How man measures the strongest and what is reality may not be in agreement.

As we can see wildlife management is complicated enough without interjection of politics. It is unfortunate that media outlets everywhere unfairly present fiction as fact without so much as an ounce of evidence to support their claims.

As I said before, I could care less what the opinions are of the editorial staff of the Salt Lake Tribune, the New York Times or the Country Courier. That’s what they do and that’s what I do. But if I or anyone else is going to make bold statements well beyond opinion, they need to provide the evidence of where it came from. Labeling a piece an editorial isn’t a license to lie.

Tom Remington

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