A specific issue raised in the posts was whether the wolf population estimate that was released at the 4/29 advisory committee meeting in Wausau was based, in part, on an annual open meeting of interested parties where tracking data and other numbers were openly shared, discussed and debated.
While a DNR spokesman had told me that the process used prior to the April meeting was the same as in past years, others disagreed, and Rachel Tilseth, one of those stakeholders, has written for this blog, below, her personal experience with the process.
Her guest post is below:
I was a Wisconsin wolf stakeholder as a WDNR volunteer wolf tracker from 2000 until I resigned in the spring of 2013.
You are right that a very important meeting is missing from the tracking and gathering of wolf population numbers prior to the 2014/15 hunt.
This meeting was held every spring and helped get accurate numbers on wolves as well as discussion/input on wolf recovery.
I also was in on the process of wolf recovery and the wolf management plans. The 350-wolf population number the WDNR uses now as its goal was only a gauge to measure when the wolves could be taken off life-support early on in wolf recovery.
But since then, the pro-hunt camp has seized on that number as an end goal that they allege can sustain the wolf population.
Wisconsin can support more than 350 wolves.
There is the matter of social carrying capacity, whereby the questions become whether people living in wolf country can tolerate wolves. Then it becomes a question of education and helping people to learn to live with wolves as neighbors.
The WDNR has dropped the ball on that concept, restricted public involvement and turned too much of the process over to hunting advocates.
- - - - Rachel Tilseth
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Rachel Tilseth WDNR volunteer winter wolf/carnivore tracker 2000 to 2013. Photograph taken winter of 2005, Northern Wisconsin.
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Rachel Tilseth is the founder of Wolves of Douglas County Wisconsin, a wolf advocacy grassroots organization first started in the summer of 2012 for the purpose of getting dogs out of the wolf hunt. Rachel is an artist and educator living in the heart of wolf country in northern Wisconsin.
Rachel ..thanks for your blog on DNR …and 350 was NEVER intended to be the number of wolves…but hunters and hunting politicians..ran away with that number and changed the meaning…thank you for pointing that out….it is a sad thought to reduce wolves to a mere 350…tragic!
ReplyDeleteWolves NEVER should have been re introduced to wisconsin in the first place! But now that they are here it is our right to hunt them. We shouldn't have to learn to live with them , we were fine without them. they were extinguished for a reason. I would be happy if they were once again gone from our landscape. The only reason they were brought back was for MONEY , on license plates and fund raisers. The picture of the wolf tugs on many heart strings to loosen the pocketbook. But those same people don't have to live with them
ReplyDelete"Unknown"- Wolves were not "introduced" to Wisconsin-they gradually moved back from neighboring Minnesota into suitable habitat. There are plenty of people who would agree with you-"gone from our landscape" but some would mimic the same for deer, or rabbits or bear or....the list goes on. Wolves and other large carnivores, along with native wildlife, where here long before we were-we have moved into their back yards, not the other way around. Yes, if we live here, we do need to learn to live with them-no easy solutions but eliminating a species we don't feel is as important as another is not natures way, nor should it be.
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