The Nation's Pulse: Tap Dancing With Wolves
Adams, James Ring
"The Nation's Pulse: Tap Dancing With Wolves" by James Ring Adams Tap Dancing With Wolves Washington unleashes its favorite pet on Yellowstone....
...Wolf numbers surged with the abundant nutrition...
...Cowboys, still a substantial working class in this part of the world, pass on stories from their fathers about the havoc the animals brought to livestock before they were wiped out of the region in the 192o's...
...There were many barrooms on Dudley Street, so my father tied this guy to a street sign and came by every few hours to give him a taste but keep him holding the sign for J.M...
...Playing God, Chase's account of federal park mismanagement, was banned from Yellowstone's gift shops by the Reagan administration...
...The letter writer who said that Nixon cost conservatism its integrity is so right...
...Critics warned that elk over-population was destroying the park...
...After six months of delay, the forensics lab of the U.S...
...Knippers has taken more than her share of lumps over the years...
...A letter from New York City, while critical of Nixon in some ways, comes up with the completely asinine contention that Nixon, along with Reagan, helped to win the cold war...
...He treated China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe as if they were honored members of the family of nations...
...In the crisp late June evening, herds of elk and mule deer drift to the higher altitudes, seeking summer forage and relief from the lower-lying insects...
...In December 1967, a summer ranger driving down the Lamar River Valley on vacation saw a flash of gray cross the road...
...It was this amendment, in fact, that made wolf reintroduction possible, says Hank Fischer, northern Rockies field representative for Defenders of Wildlife and a long-time leader in the wolf lobby...
...The Yellowstone supervisor rewrote the record of past sightings, to show that wolves might have hung on in the park...
...Through the early 197o's, the official line was that wolves still lingered in remote areas of the park, even though rangers and field biologists never saw any signs of them in on-going studies of the park's elk herds...
...Schlafly said), broke with him over his Sino-Soviet policies and now considers Nixon a liar...
...Indeed, before the animals were even released, the Environmental Impact Statement required for all federal programs that could affect natural surroundings drew formal comments from over 16o,ooo groups and individuals-quite possibly...
...A new team of park biologists announced that mortality rates would soon bring the Yellowstone elk herd into equilibrium with its food supply, without the help of slaughter or natural predators...
...Ugly rumors circulate here that rich, well-connected stockmen get off easily while smaller ranchers face jail time...
...It would eliminate livestock, remove all fencing, and bring back a bison-based subsistence economy...
...Such is the bizarre world of wildlife protection, however, that this choice made some opponents of the wolf decide that they were better off with the reintroduction program...
...The wolf controversy was created by eighty years of failed federal policies, 18o-degree shifts, and bureaucratic cover-ups...
...Even in this environmental age, few animals have so aroused the imagination of the East, or sparked a bigger fight in the West, as Yellowstone's newest residents...
...He did nothing to get rid of Fidel Castro...
...Then, in 1967, a shift in park personnel produced a scientific breakthrough...
...Now I realize that 1968 third-party candidate George Wallace was not a respectable figure, and the wounds that year were still far too raw from 1964 to risk Ronald Reagan...
...I respect Mrs...
...Too many conservatives love to be humbugged...
...Land use limits were far less draconian, and would end when ten breeding pairs set up housekeeping...
...That may be the point at which the U.S...
...Is the wolf a scourge of humanity, to be extirpated, or an essential regulator of the ecosystem, to be protected and restored...
...The Canadian gray wolf, they said, was substantially the same as the Yellowstone forbear...
...The wolves of Yellowstone, reintroduced to the region in the newest and possibly most controversial federal wildlife program, have become one of the park's biggest tourist attractions...
...This March a wolf from the Soda Butte pack was shot on a calving pasture at the Deseret ranch near Meeteetse, Wyoming, more than 75 miles away...
...In truth, this is completely irrational...
...Their legendary efficiency in killing cattle and sheep still makes them hated by western ranchers...
...As a national fad took off for wolf movies, T-shirts, and posters, Wyoming natives began to snap up a poster of their own...
...He has more brains and courage than all the Kennedys put together...
...His rigorous critique of ecological assumptions has made him as popular in the park as Socrates was in Athens...
...It was too big to be a coyote, so he called in park rangers to make an identification...
...That is what brought about Watergate...
...The usual treatment of "endangered species" draws finer and finer distinctions to produce new wards, but the exigencies of the wolf reintroduction program have caused federal biologists to define the wolf species in the broadest of strokes...
...Maybe that would have been the end of the GOP, and Nixon would have died a bitter, broken man before the end of the 196o's...
...By the mid-twenties, the last wolves had been eradicated from Yellowstone...
...Nixon was a conservative only in that he considered "rightist dictators" to be worthy allies, and he felt nobody had the right to ques tion him on that score...
...Arlene Hanson of Wapiti, on the eastern entrance of Yellowstone, is spokesman for the No-Wolf Option Committee...
...Deprived of one feast, the proliferating wolves quickly developed a taste for beef, and then lamb...
...Although the Park Service denies there was any covert program, leading wolf biologists now agree with Chase that the wolves of 1967 had been transplanted to the area by human means and decided to go back home...
...the largest such public response to any type of federal proposal in our history...
...Without bothering to tell reporters from the east, the Rocky Mountain wolf lobby redefined the issue...
...Quoting Kysar, it read: "There are no wolves in Wyoming...
...The Globe hated him because he saw the paper as a snort-nosed liberal rag, which it was and still is...
...But the cars and vans that crowd the frequent turnoffs are looking for another kind of wildlife...
...But a change to the act in 1982 allowed looser rules for "experimental populations...
...On their own, said the statement, wolves would make their comeback by 2025...
...According to her biographer, Carol Felsenthal, Phyllis Schlafly, who had backed Nixon in 1968 ("I still had faith in Nixon," Mrs...
...The key to such Lewis Carroll logic is the 1973 Endangered Species Act, the most anti-scientific piece of legislation since the ban on the teaching of evolution...
...The American Spectator . September 19 9 6 91...
...Both were excellent, the more so because they were in a secular publication...
...Faced with the contradiction, Yellowstone's managers did the natural thing...
...He was a master deceiver and dissembler, telling conservatives what they wanted to hear, not what he genuinely believed...
...In the welter of gossip and argument, there is agreement on one thing: when the East turns sentimental about some federal policy in the West, people who live in the West are going to pay dearly...
...In the face of such well-founded suspicions of evidence tampering, perhaps the Park Service has only itself to blame for the view of some local critics that the wolf reintroduction program is a hoax designed to beef up appropriations...
...It was a sight to behold...
...the animals were over-grazing the grassland, consuming "browse" such as willow and aspen essential for the vanishing beaver, and squeezing out other ungulates (hooved wildlife such as mule deer and antelope...
...Humans could forget about making a living from thee land around its habitat...
...But as government plans progressed to trap wolves in Canada and fly them south to Yellowstone, wolves began to return to the park region without any help...
...A tall, patrician former college professor, Chase gave up his tenured position as chairman of the Macalaster College philosophy department to move to the Yellowstone River valley north of the park...
...Park officials, went the story, had covertly imported the wolves from Canada...
...Ranchers fear the wolves, but they are even more afraid of the environmental regulations that may follow with them...
...Bulger is small, but he's a giant in his neighborhood...
...Is it good, bad, or even necessary, as wolves return on their own...
...She and her organization, the Institute for Religion and Democracy, have been fighting a lonely battle in this arena (persecution of Christians) for a long time...
...The main alternatives now, according to the Interior Department's Environmental Impact Statement, were reintroduction of an "experimental population" and natural recovery...
...But in 1916 the newly organized National Park Service took over...
...The federal program would restore the Yellowstone population by the year zooz...
...Upscale professionals and immigrants to resort centers like Jackson Hole look on the wolves as long-distance pets...
...JAMES RING ADAMS is an investigative writer for The American Spectator...
...Chase recollects that he was personally present when the Yellowstone party line changed abruptly in 1985: "William Penn Mott, Reagan's Park Service director, made a grand entrance to Yellowstone...
...Most likely, he would have suffered Gov...
...In 1992, a moose-hunter named Jerry Kysar shot a large canid south of Yellowstone...
...Just as the park managers desperately needed some means to check the elk explosion, wolves made a sudden reappearance...
...In 1907, the U.S...
...To me, it is utterly depressing that so many conservatives still claim Nixon as one of their own and defend him...
...Clinton will cut your taxes...
...By all accounts wolves roamed Yellowstone in 1872, when it became the first of America's national parks...
...The return of the wolves arouses a strong reaction and heated conflict along every segment of the social and economic spectrum...
...Is a federal program to reintroduce wolves, with rabies shots, radio collars, and helicopter relocations really a restoration of the wilderness...
...In the long run, no one expects the wolves to stay in the park...
...JIM FOLEY Waltham, Massachusetts Nixon Without Tears I have read with interest the commentary on Oliver Stone's film Nixon and the letters commenting on it and Nixon himself in your past few issues, including the most recent...
...As outside academics were cut out of the loop of the park's biological research, they began to suspect that the "natural regulation" theory was a political convenience for the park bureaucracy, rather than science...
...Cavalry...
...Sometimes I wish Nixon had been stupid enough to openly challenge the Goldwaterites at the Cow Palace in 1964...
...In 1961, the park began organized slaughters to reduce the elk herd, in horrifying scenes that soon raised a public outcry...
...JAN S. MONNINGH Locust Grove, Georgia Never Again The reference in your August issue to "Hillary Milhous Clinton" was unkind, unfair, and disrespectful...
...The task became top priority for the first park rangers, who received part of their pay in wolf pelts...
...Neither that book nor his recent, more thorough-going attack on "eco-system" theory, In a Dark Wood (Houghton Mifflin), are yet to be found in the park's bookstores...
...Wayne Brewster, the Park official in charge of the packs, says they are likely to range in the national forests around Yellowstone, following the elk...
...But at least Reagan and Wallace said what they really thought...
...WILLIAM R. BROWN Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Lonely Are the Brave Congratulations for Tom Bethell's "He Keeps on Ticking" and David Aikman's "Rescue to the Christians" in the July issue...
...Nelson Rockefeller's fate, and Goldwater would have lost worse than he did, perhaps even to the point of being wiped out outside the Deep South...
...He clearly settled for a divided Korea and a divided Vietnam...
...No one has forgotten that during the comment period, one environmentalist in all seriousness proposed a "no-cow option...
...In addition, Fischer proved an unusual Green in his willingness to admit that stockmen had valid concerns...
...I was particularly pleased to see the reference to Diane Knippers in Aikman's article...
...The wolf issue also exposed a hypocrisy in the Endangered Species Act that has cost the American economy untold bil (Continued on page 9r) 63 The American Spectator . September r996 drinker working at one of the election polls on Dudley Street in Dorchester...
...Heavy pressure from cattle and sheep interests at the turn of 62 September 1996 • The American Spectator the century put the federal government into the business of destroying predators injurious to agriculture and animal husbandry...
...Extreme environmentalists see the animals as a wedge to expand federal controls on land use...
...The occasional wolf-killing creates still other divisions...
...Montana writer Alston Chase first told the tale in his 1986 classic, Playing God in Yellowstone, a rare case of clear-headed policy analysis from a committed conservationist...
...He persuaded his group to set up a fund to reimburse ranchers for losses...
...Clusters of re-established bison graze yearround along the narrow highway, often sauntering malevolently across the potholed macadam to stare down motorists...
...They lied...
...Fish and Wildlife Service finally confirmed that it was a wolf...
...Restoration biologists countered that they had discarded earlier studies that found up to twenty-four different wolf species...
...Wonderful book review...
...The Park Service praises some ranchers for their cooperation in investigations, but comes down hard on others suspected of hunting the protected animals...
...Then they disappeared...
...Disappearance of the once abundant beaver was especially dangerous, since its network of dams and ponds had stemmed erosion and preserved ground-water...
...she sees a trap in the too-wolf population goal...
...At first Yellowstone stayed exempt from the slaughter because it was under the control of the U.S...
...Richard Nixon was never that kind of man...
...One biologist proposed a new species, canis lupus irregardless...
...The elk herd continued to grow...
...Biological Survey, formerly devoted to protecting water fowl, undertook the job of exterminating the wolf...
...It saw wolf-killing as a way of winning friends among its neighbors...
...De mortuis nil nisi bonum," say I. Mr...
...Chase blew the whistle on the episode...
...Under the wolf program, ranchers could shoot wolves they found attacking their cattle...
...It couldn't be shot, for instance, unless it directly threatened human life...
...The creatures continued to show themselves for the next five years, gradually drifting north toward Canada...
...The motto etched into the dust on one Wyoming car says it all: "Spot Wolf or Bust...
...Since the first pack was released in the park in March 1995, newspapers in Montana and Wyoming seem to have devoted more space to killings of livestock by wolves (and wolves by humans) than to homicides...
...Curley...
...If the wolf came back on its own, it would be a protected species, hedged around with rigid rules...
...It was a time in which the white man was producing a drastic shift in the West's animal populations...
...y the time the road along Lamar River and Soda Butte Creek leaves the northeast comer of Yellowstone National Park, it will top elevations of 9,000 feet...
...They might well win...
...T H E N A T I O N' S P U L S E by James Ring Adams Tap Dancing With Wolves Washington unleashes its favorite pet on Yellowstone...
...JOSEPH R. STARR Lonoke, Arkansas The Notion's Pulse (Continued from page63...
...Schlafly for that...
...In the history of Yellowstone, the government has followed one policy and then the other, each time denying publicly what it was doing...
...The concessions in the Endangered Species Act helped win political support for the wolves, but they don't reassure westerners who feel their way of life is under attack from all quarters...
...Cattle and sheep men fear a federal assault on their way of life...
...He managed to grab a movie camera, and produced Yellowstone's first irrefutable wolf sighting in thirty years...
...The story is much more involuted than eastern sentimentalists might suppose...
...The facts are that Nixon was the softeston-Communism president in American history...
...And Elvis lives in Jackson Hole...
...Independent biologists couldn't see the evidence for the new theory...
...He found park employees who confirmed at second hand what locals widely suspected...
...But we shall never know...
...After talking to advisers that day about wolf reintroduction, he said, `I'm in favor of it' All of a sudden, the official park position went from `we don't need wolves because we have them' to `we need wolves...
...lions in stifled development...
...At first, the changes greatly benefited the wolves...
...BYellowstone National Park, Wy...
...Nixon is dead and should not be subjected to further gratuitous malice...
...But the law that established the Park Service charged it with preserving its wildlife "for the enjoyment of future generations...
...And they've already spread further than expected...
...It is tough to be a conservative or evangelical in the so-called mainline denominations, and Ms...
...Literally-the park refused Freedom of Information Act requests for its data...
...With the buffalo on the way out, ranchers moved in herds of livestock in the great cattle boom of the 1870's...
...Fish and Wildlife Service has promised to take the wolf off the endangered list, but militant Greens are ready to go to court to block the move...
...Critics argued that the wolf imports wouldn't really restore the original Yellowstone species canis lupus irremotis, which was now extinct...
...Alston Chase observes that Canadian authorities consider a viable population to be closer to 1,zoo...
...The slaughter of the buffalo herds littered the plains with carcasses, a fortunate feast for the canine scavengers...
...I suggest you not use the phrase again...
Vol. 29 • September 1996 • No. 9
