Large Carnivore Conservation

Integrating Science and Policy in the North American West

Susan G. Clark, Murray B. Rutherford, Susan G. Clark, Murray B. Rutherford

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226107547
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

Drawing on six case studies of wolf, grizzly bear, and mountain lion conservation in habitats stretching from the Yukon to Arizona, Large Carnivore Conservation argues that conserving and coexisting with large carnivores is as much a problem of people and governance—of reconciling diverse and sometimes conflicting values, perspectives, and organizations, and of effective decision making in the public sphere—as it is a problem of animal ecology and behavior. By adopting an integrative approach, editors Susan G. Clark and Murray B. Rutherford seek to examine and understand the interrelated development of conservation science, law, and policy, as well as how these forces play out in courts, other public institutions, and the field.In combining real-world examples with discussions of conservation and policy theory, Large Carnivore Conservation not only explains how traditional management approaches have failed to meet the needs of all parties, but also highlights examples of innovative, successful strategies and provides practical recommendations for improving future conservation efforts.

1

Large Carnivores, People, and Governance

SUSAN G. CLARK, MURRAY B. RUTHERFORD, AND DAVID J. MATTSON*

Introduction

Large carnivore conservation involves complex practical and policy problems that severely challenge our capacity to make well-reasoned decisions for the common good. Consider the recent series of decisions about managing grey wolves (Canis lupus) in the Northern Rocky Mountains of the United States. In 2008 the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) removed the region’s wolves from federal protection under the Endangered Species Act, but conservation groups quickly obtained a court injunction blocking this delisting. The agency revised and reissued the delisting for states other than Wyoming, but the revised delisting was soon overturned by another court decision. The US Congress then stepped in, adding a rider to a budget appropriation bill that directed the USFWS to reissue the delisting. Not surprisingly, conservation groups sued to challenge the rider. In his ruling on the challenge, Judge Donald Molloy complained of “legislative prestidigitation” and called the rider “a tearing away, an undermining, and a disrespect for the fundamental idea of the rule of law” (Alliance for the Wild Rockies v. Salazar 800 F. Supp. 2d 1123 [D. Mont. 2011]). He decided, however, that the sweeping language of the rider precluded him from declaring it to be unconstitutional. His decision was upheld on appeal and the states of Idaho and Montana assumed control of wolf management within their jurisdictions. Then, in the fall of 2012, the USFWS delisted wolves in Wyoming, and conservation groups promptly sued to challenge this decision as well. Whatever the eventual outcome of this latest lawsuit, it seems highly unlikely that anyone involved with these convoluted processes would consider this to be a reasonable and appropriate way to make public decisions.

Why are decisions about large carnivores so bitterly contested, and why is common ground so elusive? In this book we contend that conserving and living with large carnivores is as much a problem of people and governance—authoritative decision making in the public sphere—as it is a problem of animal ecology and behavior. Governance is essentially about who gets what, when, and how, and who gets to decide (Lasswell 1936). For large carnivore conservation, governance involves how people interact, how they make and implement decisions, and how those decisions affect carnivores, people, and the settings in which carnivores and people live together.

People and Large Carnivores

The case of wolves in the Northern Rockies may be an extreme example, but large carnivore conservation is often characterized by conflict, contested science, litigation, and dysfunctional decision making. A USFWS decision to delist grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) in the Yellowstone region was disputed in the courts for four years before it was overturned in November 2011 when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals restored the threatened status of grizzlies under the Endangered Species Act. In California the Fish and Game Department’s proposal to institute sport hunting for mountain lions (Puma concolor) was rejected in 1990 as the result of a public referendum in which 52 percent of voters supported a prohibition on hunting. A subsequent referendum to allow sport hunting of mountain lions was rejected in 1996, this time by 58 percent of the votes. In Alberta, Canada, the government-appointed Endangered Species Conservation Committee recommended in 2002 that grizzly bears be listed as threatened in the province, but the recommendation was contested by hunters and industry, and the provincial government did not follow through with the listing until eight years later. Of course, listing grizzlies did not end the dispute, as hunters argued that the status of bears should be assessed separately for each local region rather than for the province as a whole, and conservationists argued that the new protections were still inadequate. Meanwhile, the number of grizzly bears in Alberta has declined from an estimated pre-European population of as many as 6,000 bears to less than 700 (Alberta Sustainable Resource Development and Alberta Conservation Association 2010).

LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE IN LARGE CARNIVORE CONSERVATION

This book, then, is about more than people trying to conserve and live with large carnivores; it is also about people trying to live with other people and make decisions about the collective good in spite of diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives, beliefs, and values. As the following chapters illustrate, people hold radically different notions about appropriate attitudes and behavior toward large predators. These notions are readily catalyzed into conflict by the symbolic potency of animals that not only can threaten human life and property, but also can engender an uncanny sense of kinship. Our case studies examine the intense conflict associated with large carnivore conservation, the diverse measures taken to alleviate this conflict, and the effectiveness of such measures.

We believe that governance in large carnivore conservation can be substantially improved and that better governance is the key to reducing conflict and ensuring that large carnivores continue to survive. We also believe that better governance will ultimately lead to greater overall civility and dignity among those involved with and affected by large carnivore conservation. Accordingly, the book’s overall goal is to offer insights from practical experiences about how to improve governance processes in large carnivore conservation.

In the chapters that follow, the authors use an integrative interdisciplinary approach drawn from the policy sciences to analyze the problems of governance in large carnivore conservation. Chapters 2 through 7 are case studies of carnivore management or conservation initiatives in North America. In each case, a governmental agency, nongovernmental organization, or group of individuals has attempted to improve decision making and alleviate troubling conflict between people and carnivores, or among people, or both. The authors apply a standard set of evaluative criteria to assess the decision-making processes in these cases and develop recommendations for both the case at hand and other settings. The case studies are followed by chapters that adopt a broader focal lens, examining higher-level governance and sociopolitical factors that apply across all the cases in this book and elsewhere, and offering lessons of broader relevance. The book concludes with a summary of common themes and recommendations. Later in this chapter we describe the integrative approach and associated evaluative criteria used by our authors, but first we offer a brief introduction to the context of large carnivore conservation in North America, highlighting factors that make governance so problematic.

Our cases focus on wolves, grizzly bears, and mountain lions. These animals all weigh more, on average, than 25 kg as adults. Carnivores of this size are especially prone to endangerment because of a combination of comparatively low reproductive rates, large range sizes, and low densities (Mattson 2004). When in contact with humans, these animals tend to die at rates that exceed reproduction. One important factor contributing to this high mortality rate is that people typically have many reasons to kill large carnivores: carnivores occasionally kill or injure livestock, they prey on ungulates that might otherwise be targets for human hunters, they provoke fear for human life, and for some people they simply engender intense dislike. A substantial number of people also have a strong desire to hunt these animals, recently evidenced by the fact that in 2011, the year wolves were delisted in Montana, more than 18,000 wolf-hunting licenses were purchased (Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks 2011). As a result of these and other factors, wolves, grizzly bears, and mountain lions have been extirpated from large parts of their former ranges, especially in the United States and the eastern and southern portions of Canada (Laliberte and Ripple 2004).

Our case settings extend along the mountainous spine of western Canada and the United States from Yukon to Arizona. The settings encompass not only a spectrum of biophysical environments, but also a variety of social, political, and jurisdictional arenas. In Yukon, relations among Aboriginal peoples, European descendents, territorial government, and federal national parks administrators create a unique dynamic. Farther south in Canada, the problem of carnivores interacting with livestock in agricultural landscapes is featured, alongside contested federal and provincial management in and around national parks that have objectives of not only protecting nature, but also providing “visitor experiences” and commercial opportunities. In the northern US Rockies, the focus is on federal management of officially designated or prospective endangered species, controversies over recovery efforts and delisting, and the struggles of western states and local communities to control or at least influence decision making. Finally, farthest south, we examine state-level management of a comparatively abundant species, the mountain lion.

SYMBOLIC CREATURES

Human cognition is shaped by language and emotion. Our consciousness is correspondingly narrative in nature and encoded in symbols. It follows that, despite being biological entities, large carnivores are almost entirely represented as symbols and emotions in the cognitive processes through which we construct meaning in the world. We respond not so much to the carnivores themselves as to our own ideas of these creatures, encapsulated in evocative narratives. Few people in western North America have to deal in an immediate physical way with large carnivores. Instead, the vast majority of people deal almost exclusively with these animals as they exist in their imaginings or in the narratives and imaginings of other people. Thus, the emotive symbolic constructs we call “wolves,” or “grizzly bears,” or “mountain lions” are rarely empirical. There is ample evidence to suggest that they are instead largely creations of our cultures, upbringings, personalities, neuroses, and even psychoses. Whatever immediate experiences we may have with large carnivores during a lifetime rarely penetrate and transform our symbolic constructions. More typically, we interpret our experiences in ways that fit with and reinforce our established worldviews. Consider the awe of the environmentalist who, while hiking in the backcountry, sights a pack of wolves across the valley, or the anger of the rancher who, while checking on his cattle, finds the carcass of a calf that was chased and taken down by wolves.

The large carnivores featured in this book have different symbolic profiles, albeit layered on core similarities. These similarities include the fact that all these animals eat meat, some exclusively, which perhaps engenders some degree of bond with our (mostly) meat-eating selves. Like us, they also tend to be intelligent and provide their offspring with relatively prolonged care. These traits position large carnivores and humans closely typologically, especially compared to creatures such as rodents or ungulates. This nearness can generate both empathy and fear. Many of us are drawn to our imaginings of large carnivores as strong and noble. For others, large carnivores are savage, bloodthirsty, and cruel—for the same physical reasons. Humans seem to have a particularly strong symbolic affinity for bears. Like us, bears are omnivores and intelligent in similar ways for many of the same reasons. Like us, they provide lengthy care for their offspring, and, of great symbolic import, they enact the miracle of virtual death and rebirth through the annual cycle of hibernation. This relatedness between bears and ourselves is richly expressed in the mythology of Aboriginal peoples, still vigorous in arctic and subarctic North America (Clark and Casey 1993). By contrast, wolves are more often demonized, especially among descendents of Europeans, rooted in stories and ancestral memories that trace back to Eurasian rather than North American experiences (Casey and Clark 1996). Wolves did prey on and scavenge humans in Europe, probably for reasons with little physical relevance to North America (Graves 2007). Yet the myths persist. In contrast to bears and wolves, mythologies of mountain lions are not as well developed, probably because of the reclusive and cryptic nature of these large cats (Kellert et al. 1996). However, mountain lions may still evoke fear, respect, a desire to exert dominion, and other emotional responses.

Aside from the unique ways in which people have mythologized large carnivores, these animals are also caught up in broader attitudes or perceptions of wildlife and nature. Such worldviews are particularly relevant to policy cases such as the ones we examine in this book, largely because these more encompassing perspectives touch on many facets of human relations and governance. Some researchers classify human attitudes toward nature along a single gradient, which has been given a variety of names, including intrinsic versus instrumental, protectionist versus consumptive or utilitarian, and eco- or biocentric versus anthropocentric. Although these bipolar schematics give a sense of the strong differences in perspectives that may underlie people’s positions on a particular problem, they fail to capture important nuances that influence not only how people respond to large carnivores, but also how they frame policy issues. Other researchers have put forwar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Large Carnivores, People, and Governance
• 2. State-Level Management of a Common Charismatic Predator: Mountain Lions in the West
• 3. Wolves in Wyoming: The Quest for Common Ground
• 4. Science-Based Grizzly Bear Conservation in a Co-Management Environment: The Kluane Region Case, Yukon
• 5. Wolf Management on Ranchlands in Southwestern Alberta: Collaborating to Address Conflict
• 6. Human–Grizzly Bear Coexistence in the Blackfoot River Watershed, Montana: Getting Ahead of the Conflict Curve
• 7. Collaborative Grizzly Bear Management in Banff National Park: Learning from a Prototype
• 8. Large Carnivore Conservation: A Perspective on Constitutive Decision Making and Options
• 9. The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation: An Analysis of Challenges and Adaptive Options
• 10. Complexity, Rationality, and the Conservation of Large Carnivores
• 11. Improving Governance for People and Large Carnivores
• Contributors
• Notes
• Index