How does this story sound to you?
The White House has tapped a former leader of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game and the Idaho Wildlife Federation as the wolf czar to oversee the federal response to keeping the invasive species out of the Northern Rockies.
On a conference call today with Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo and other congressional leaders, President Obama’s Council on Environmental Quality announced the selection of John Doe to lead the near $80 million, multi-pronged federal attack against wolves.
“This is a serious challenge, a serious threat,” Crapo said. “When it comes to the wolf threat, we are not in denial. We are not in a go-slow mode. We are in a full attack, full-speed ahead mode. We want to stop this wolf from advancing.”
Gray wolves, which have steadily moved toward Oregon and Washington since the 1990s, present a challenge for scientists and wolf biologists. The wolves are aggressive eaters, consuming as much as 40 percent of their body weight a day in killing and eating prey, and frequently beat out native wildlife for food, threatening those populations.
They are also prolific breeders with no natural predators in the U.S. The wolves were imported in the 1990s to help balance our ecosystems. Uncontrolled management allowed the wolf to expand and then move into Utah, Colorado and points west and east. Some species can grow to more than 130 pounds.
The challenge for Doe will be to make sure millions in federal money is spent efficiently, to oversee several on-going studies — including one looking into the possibility of permanently shutting down the public lands and private lands and to bring together other states currently locked in a courtroom battle over the response to the wolf threat.
“Certainly there are some legal questions that are in process, but there has been a history already of good cooperation among the states,” Doe said. “I believe that will be one of my strengths, talking at the level of the department of fish and game in each of the states so that we can very carefully coordinate our efforts.”
Today also marks the second day of what is expected to be a three-day hearing in federal court in Missoula, Montana to deal with wolves. Montana and four other Rocky Mountain states are suing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management to try and force closure of all public and private land where wolves are known to be.
Testimony on Tuesday focused on the reliability of the environmental DNA research that has been used to track the movement of wolves through the area as they have inched closer to downtown Boise. The architect of the research, University of Notre Dame scientist David Lodge, said the method is sound and that wolves pose a “a very imminent risk of invasion.” He added that such “invasions are often irreversible.”
Attorneys for the defense countered that the DNA research has never been used in this manner and was unreliable. They argued that even scientists disagree about the likelihood that wolves are capable of sustaining a large and destructive population if allowed to enter the city.
This is of course a fictional story. However, it is not as fictional as one might think. This exact story can be found here and it is a story about dealing with Asian carp. I simply took out the word(s) Asian carp and replaced them with “wolf(ves) and changed some other names and locations to make the story sound plausible.
So, I ask! If wolves lived under the water and Asian carp walked the lands and forests of the West, which species would be considered “a very imminent risk”?
Tom Remington
