Arizona Daily Sun (Original) Posted May 15, 2014, Editorial
There is no easy answer to the question: Why bring back endangered Mexican gray wolves?
The habitat in eastern Arizona and western New Mexico has been changed through logging and ranching.
The land beyond the initial release zone is full of dangerous, high-speed highways.
And there is strong criticism in the region of federal land management, undermining any federal effort to make the reintroduction program collaborative.
Any one of those factors would make the wolf project difficult; taken together, they would seem to doom it.
But federal wildlife managers have pressed on, and recently they have taken the initiative on two fronts.
One has them adding so-called "nuisance" payments to the money that already goes out to ranchers for the loss of cattle to wolves.
That seems only fair, since it is difficult to prove a livestock kill by wolves — just 19 proven claims were made in 2012.
So now, there is an 11-member Coexistence Council made up of ranchers, local governments and environmental groups. A rancher with wolves on his grazing allotment stands to gain not only if his herd is stressed by the pack but also if pups survive to the end of the year. The rancher, in other words, becomes a financial and program partner in the reintroduction project.
The other initiative is a plan to expand the recovery zone south to I-10 and north to I-40. There is some scientific support for going even farther north to the North Rim and the Kaibab Plateau, but for now the federal plan is to increase wolf numbers to as many as 900 in three distinct areas.
We've noted in this space in the past that Fish and Wildlife officials could have done a better job of floating this plan on a preliminary basis before putting it into a formal environmental impact statement. But now that it is out there, it is certainly receiving plenty of feedback.
One formal response has come from Arizona Game and Fish and a group of eastern Arizona counties and sportsmen's groups. Instead of the wolves migrating west and north, the Game and Fish plan wants them to head south toward Mexico, and in numbers that don't top 200 or 300.
If the southern corridor still had deer and other prey in the kind of numbers that existed before the expansion of the U.S. frontier to Arizona 150 years ago, this might be more realistic.
But as we reported Sunday, there is genetic evidence that the Mexican gray wolves of yesteryear headed north, not south, and interbred with northern gray wolves. The northern gray wolf is now firmly re-established in several northern states, and if there is hope for the Mexican subspecies, say most biologists, it lies in the more temperate sky islands of the Southwest, the Colorado Plateau and even the Rocky Mountains.
We don't fault Game and Fish for taking a different tack on wolf reintroduction than federal wildlife managers and asking for a full evaluation as part of the EIS.
But for the sake of credibility, the agency should have left out the list of two dozen stakeholders consisting mainly of hunting groups that would be competing with a new apex predator for game, were wolf numbers to greatly expand. And threats of lawsuits before the EIS is even finished don't inspire confidence that Game and Fish is committed to a scientific analysis of the two approaches.
As we said above, there appears to be no easy way to bring back Mexican gray wolves to self-sustaining numbers. Right now, however, it is clear that those numbers — fewer than 100 — won't work. If Game and Fish introduced its alternative because it is serious about finding a way to make the reintroduction work, then we hope it will take seriously whatever comes out of the scientific analysis in the EIS and work collaboratively to see that it succeeds.