by Brian Griffith
If even our cities are growing wilder, the rural villages, farms, and ranches tend to be further down that path. And as the lines between settled and wild areas break down, the realms of people, domestic animals, and wild ones increasingly interpenetrate. Of course this merging of human and animal domains is largely a matter of humans intruding into every animal habitat and leaving the animals no place to themselves. For example, the bears of Pennsylvania are so surrounded by farms, roads, and suburbs that it wasn’t that much of a stretch when a black bear recently walked through the automatic doors of the Pittsburg Mills mall, and went romping through the Sears department store until wildlife police sedated and hauled her back to the fragmented forest.
The road network alone is a huge intrusion which divides the countryside into thousands of segmented parcels. A roadway commonly extends 300 feet to each side, and the sum total of such land occupations in the USA comes to about 1% of everything. Even inside the USA’s national forests there are about 380,000 miles of roadways, which fragment the wilderness into wood lots. Besides that, the whizzing roads and rails are so dangerous for illiterate animals that a survey around Canada’s Banff Park found that 87% of all known wolf deaths happened on roads or railroad tracks. It was a big help when Alberta built 22 wildlife underpasses and two vegetation-covered bridges for animals to get across the Bow River Valley section of the Trans-Canada Highway. It was just good traffic management, and auto collisions with animals went down by 80%.
Despite the many hazards of uncontrolled humans, some creatures are clearly learning to thrive in the ever-more humanized countryside. The cougars have recently extended their range into Texas, north to Ontario, and east to Connecticut. In the past, these animals would be commonly shot on sight. Now most creatures have a partly recognized right to exist. In that case, our countryside is a permanently mixed-use field of ranchers, farmers, and wild beasts, living in a semi-wild landscape. If wild animals and farmers are learning to co-exist, how do they manage it? In the past there were usually two kinds of animals on the farm: tame friends, and wild enemies. Now there are also dangerous friends, to be accommodated with caution. How’s it going?
Living with Wild Animals on the Farm
The expansion of farms illustrates the global problem of environment management on a micro scale. Each farm or village tends to encroach on the surrounding landscape, slowly filling in the gaps, as in the spaces between Chinese villages. At the same time we have a counter-trend, where the world’s marginal farmlands are going wild. As people abandon family farming and gravitate to other work, a lot of land across Russia, North America, or Australia is getting left behind. A UN report in 2005 said that 2.1 billion acres of former-agricultural land have been overgrown with bush or “secondary” forest. In these abandoned areas, the animal populations tend to revive. And in crowded areas, the surviving animals face more contact with humans. Either way, the need for sentient beings to get along tends to rise. In many cases, the conflict between species is only getting worse. For relations to improve, it takes both tolerance and ingenuity.
Traditionally, village people across the world believed they had to keep good relations with the spirits of nature. If they got too greedy chopping the woods, diverting water, or destroying their animal neighbors, they would suffer dire consequences. And though many modernizers have tried to dispel such superstitious nonsense, there actually are consequences. The water tables fall. Local rainfall declines. The soil erodes. The underground sediments also tend to dry and shrink so that big fissures can appear, like the sudden fissure that swallowed a horse near Chandler Heights, Arizona. There’s also blowback as wild animals take revenge. For example, the bears of Asia were generally reclusive in the past. The honey bears of Malaysia or sloth bears of India stuck to their jungles, living on honey, fruits, or insects. But with encroachment on their forests from all sides, these bears have increasingly grown violent. In hundreds of cases in India we hear of people attacked and slashed by the normally lazy sloth bears. The Malaysian honey bears also seem bent on crime, reportedly lashing at people without clear provocation. The problem is rarely so bad in places with bigger patches of woods like the bear-infested forests of Romania, or in US states like Pennsylvania and Michigan.
This kind of blowback from animals is a growing problem across much of Africa, and farmers are left defending their crops the way pastoralists have always defended cattle. Without enough forest food, the wild monkeys take to lurking around African villages for something to steal. The more they do it, the bolder they get. Overcoming all shyness, they break into houses and bite people who get in the way. Some villagers in East Africa try to fortify their fields against baboons by surrounding them with trenches filled with sharpened spikes. The local baboons just pull out the stakes, toss them aside, and go in to eat. The villagers try to trap and kill baboons that are raiding the gardens, but they have a saying: “Never look a baboon in the eye.” That would make it too hard to kill these almost human creatures.
In Ethiopia, farmers take turns guarding their crops with slings, hurling rocks at animal intruders. And in 2005, officials in Soro district reported that hungry lions had attacked 14 villages, killing 20 people and 750 farm animals. Over 1,000 people fled their villages, and the police saw no option but to exterminate the lions. However, a 13-year-old Kenyan boy named Richard Turere recently invented “lion lights” to protect farms. He rigged up a series of LED lights on poles around the cattle coral and wired them to a switch box, powered by an old car battery that was recharged by a solar panel. The switch box was set to flick the lights on and off intermittently, giving the impression of people coming around with lamps. This worked in keeping all lions from the family cows, and dozens of farmers across Kenya picked up the trick. Some Kenyan farmers have also had success warding off hungry elephants by setting up rows of profitable beehives. Elephants don’t like messing with bees.
In Malawi things have been much the same, but worse. The international CITES treaty for protecting endangered species included limits on killing Nile crocodiles. But Malawi is one region where crocodiles are far from endangered. The country reduced the legal cull quota on crocodiles by three-quarters, which led to a substantial population boom. By 2000, the crocodiles were killing about two people a day. Seldom was there a better case for getting borehole wells for the village women. In Botswana’s Okavango delta, the fishing villagers understandably hated and killed crocodiles on sight. But then some local entrepreneurs opened the Krokovango crocodile farm, and started raising 5,000 crocs at a time for the meat and leather markets. Then, during 2008, local conservation workers met with the village leaders to explain the importance of wild crocodiles for the health of the delta fish stocks. The villagers had faced declining harvests of fish for years. After due consideration, they approved the release of 88 farmed crocodiles to replenish the delta populations, in hopes of keeping all things balanced.
In Western Europe, re-wilding the countryside has involved very close living arrangements. Spain determined to protect its Iberian lynx, partly by reserving a portion of its habitat as the Doñana park. But like most parts of Europe, this area gets more crowded all the time. First, the land surrounding the reserve became Spain’s chief area for growing strawberries. The farmers were constantly sinking unauthorized boreholes to water their crops, drawing down water in the park’s marshland. To defend the lynx, some conservation activists called for an international boycott of Spanish strawberries. Next, some of the park’s buffer-zone was turned into a golf course. Also, a team of archaeologists proposed that the Doñana wetlands were actually the site of the legendary Atlantis, so that digging was in order. Besides that, the Virgin of Rocío festival draws hundreds of thousands of devotees each year, on a pilgrimage route that passes through the middle of Doñana park—during the middle of lynx breeding season. Still, the lynx protection program showed progress, and it seemed a mainly practical matter to make Spain lynx-friendly. With culverts for passage under roadways, less toxic farming, and better protection of pets or livestock, it’s quite possible that the lynxes, badgers, mongooses, and Spanish imperial eagles of the coastal marsh can cohabitate with strawberry farms, golf fairways, and tourist cottages.
The United Kingdom banned the hunting of badgers in compliance with EU Bern Convention agreements, and naturally the populations of badgers rose. When cattle farmers reported an increase in bovine tuberculosis, some blamed the badgers as disease carriers. The problem was serious, as in recent years this disease cost the UK economy around 100 million pounds per year. England’s Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs proposed some culls of badgers through “free shootingˮ for limited periods in limited areas. And while many experts opposed the policy, some farmers threatened to take the killing into their own hands. Gangs of men in Northern Ireland started trespassing through village areas, using tracking dogs to root out badgers. Animal welfare activist Stephan Philpott described it as “organized persecution” (Adair, 2012, March 12). The tie between badgers and cow tuberculosis wasn’t proven. But as in medieval times, people had to choose which village rumor to believe.
All these frustrations of farmers seem like bad news for wild beasts. But rising incidents of conflict also reflect a certain increase in wild animals, as the human-infested countryside provides more food than danger. The UK’s deer population is getting frightfully big, prompting calls for major culls. And some of Britain’s wild beasts are obviously getting larger. In Scotland during the winter of 2012, a farmer named Alan Hepworth made the news by shooting a fox that weighed 38 pounds. Experts at the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust said this was unheard of till recently. The foxes are clearly getting more food these days in the semi-urban countryside.
As for wolves, Germany and Poland removed their laws requiring property owners to kill of wolves on sight in 1990. Within a dozen years, a pack of gray wolves appeared in German forests along the Polish frontier. For shepherds of Central Europe, the original need for guard dogs was back. In Romania, the shepherds had always lived with thousands of bears and wolves all along, and according to Caroline Fraser, their attitude towards co-existing with predators made American cowboys look like a bunch of crybabies (2009, 95). But in Western Europe, the crybabies also prevailed. Though a general sentiment for nature protection was popular, most Western Europeans still showed zero tolerance for big predators. In France, farmers rioted against a proposal to re-introduce wolves. Norway and Switzerland opened hunting seasons on wolves, though the total population in each country was probably around ten. When a single bear wandered into Germany in 2006 (from Italy), the German media went bananas over the “brazen,” “rogue” animal, till a concerned citizen shot it. Therefore we speak of a country’s “cultural carrying capacity,” in which the cap on animal populations is the local culture’s level of toleration for a given species to exist.
In Italy, a slightly greater tolerance for other beings prevailed. After the country banned wolf killing in 1971, wolves began infiltrating a countryside dotted with small abandoned farms. As many farm families drifted toward the cities, people in rural areas increasingly sold hunting leases on unfarmed land, and even introduced more boars or roe deer to boost the business. This also was good for the wolves. Some hunters poached the wolves, but their numbers were growing. By recent years their howls could be heard near the outskirts of Rome.
A Wilder Kind of Ranching
Traditional ranching with fences has generally been a kind of animal mono-cropping. One chosen species was grown, and all others treated as pests. Though antelope, elk, or bison could also turn grass into meat, most North American ranchers assumed that every mouthful of grass eaten by these animals was a mouthful lost to their cows. Although the prairies used to naturally support both millions of buffalo and a probably equal numbers of pronghorn antelope, these herds were industriously eliminated, the way Brazilian ranchers burned rain forests.
It’s been widely assumed that only ungulates from the nuclear Near East are suitable for ranching, though Laplanders domesticated reindeer, and the Neutral tribe of Ontario was called “the people of the deer” because they kept pens of white-tailed deer. And actually, buffalo ranching soon proved quite feasible. The first ranchers who tried to protect the nearly extinct buffalo were just hoping to set up small game parks. They wanted to fence in a few of the last buffalo, and sell hunting leases for people to shoot them. Then, as baby buffaloes grew up on these ranches, they got used to fences and cowboys. They became basically domesticated, though it’s still not safe to pose for a picture beside one. Slowly, buffalo ranching grew similar to cattle ranching, and the herds rose to around half a million. It was a significant diversification of the American ranching industry. And in that case it was demonstrably true that it was never necessary to replace buffalo with imported cows. It was not necessary to irrigate grass on the high plains to meet the needs of cows from Europe. As Wallace Stegner claimed, the cowboys could have been herding buffalo and pasturing them on native, unirrigated grass.
If more kinds of animals and plants were deemed beneficial, then ranches could diversify beyond mono-cropping cows or sheep. What about the antelope, deer, elk, and moose?
By 1900, the pronghorn antelope were reduced from populations of perhaps over 20 million to around 20,000. Then a combination of controls on hunting and establishment of protected areas allowed the herds to slowly recover. Also, the assumption that antelope must directly compete for grass against cows proved simplistic. Actually, the pronghorn can live on land too arid for cows, and they eat some plants that are poisonous to cows. Having antelope around can help weed out cow-poisoning plants. The ranchers can then diversify their incomes by selling hunting leases, which is actually an alternative form of ranching, somewhat like the free-range ranching of early Mexican cowboys. If the antelope were therefore part of the ranching business, then ranchers had a financial interest in sustaining their numbers. So, for example, the Sieben Ranch in Montana practiced rotating pastures, and letting the fallow pastures attract impressive herds of elk. Their hunting policy allowed a large cull on a sustainable basis, with good lease income to the ranch.
After the first wave of industrial-scale cattlemen overstocked most rangelands to the point of environmental collapse, ranchers tended to assume that grass is a scarce, finite commodity, that must be protected for use by the cows. There were only so many standard animal units (the amount of grass a 1,000 lb. cow eats) available. That limit placed a cap on how many cows a ranch could sustainably raise, and it seemed that any additional grazing by wilder animals could only push the cow-carrying capacity lower. Of course growing more grass would permit more animals. And that would require irrigating portions of the ranch. So, rivers and streams across the West were diverted to ranches, often leaving little or no water for anything downstream. The first-come-first-serve right of stream capture trumped all rights of downstream creatures. And all this hoarding of grass and water tended to generate more scarcity in the surrounding landscape. It could also get expensive, especially for pumping water. And that expense came to involve federal government subsidies for propping up the industry. Ranching was increasingly a corporate welfare case. And some ranchers started looking for better ways to make their land more productive.
One of the more obvious ways to improve the land was to stop killing beavers. Beavers slow down the steams and help recharge the water table. In a single season they can turn a dry, washed out streambed into a green oases. Of course part of the problem for streambeds is the cows, who tend to gather and trample mud around the watering places. To avoid this, Jack Turnell, of the Pitchfork Ranch in Wyoming, looked for a breed of cattle that had less tendency to linger around water. He brought in cows of the Salers breed, which were developed in the French Alps, and rotated them between segments of pasture that were left fallow every third or fourth year. Where the beavers returned and cattle movement was better controlled, the eroded streambeds started to re-vegetate. Even ranches in Utah and Arizona started to recover green, water-filled streams that looked like the settlers found them. Texas rancher Charles Pettit was proud of his section of the East Bosque Creek. As Richard Phelan described it, this creek “entered the Flat Top Ranch as a waterless gully, ruined by misuse of the lands upstream, and left it five miles further down as a small full stream, alive with fish and birds and beavers enclosed by banks in deep grass” (1976, 137). Phelan felt that Charles Pettit was a manager the world could learn from: “Mr. Pettit was that rarity, a businessman who understood that conserving the natural world is more profitable than plundering it. He wanted to make money, and he did so by stopping erosion, planting grass, and stocking his land with wild turkey, beaver, quail, pronghorn, and deer” (p. 136).
Another helpful step was to stop exterminating prairie dogs. The plains used to hold over a billion prairie dogs, which lived in concentrated “cities.” These cities, or dog towns, took up about 12% of the whole central prairie, and these were the places of best grazing. Rather that eliminating the grass, the dog towns aerated the soil, loosened it up, and provided passageways for rain to run into the ground. The buffalo and antelope herds used to spend a disproportionate amount of their time eating at one “gopher garden” after the next. Wherever the prairie dogs were no longer exterminated with poison like rats, the range tended to support more plant life.
Of course some means of population control on all these animals was still needed. Without predators, the beavers, gophers, deer and antelope would go into boom and bust cycles, leaving the range just as defoliated as if it was grossly overstocked with cows. And the most natural way to keep a healthy balance was to stop exterminating coyotes, or even let the wolves return. With bands of these former outlaws on the loose, the elk or deer could no longer multiply to a point of browsing every baby tree to death. Stands of young willows or cottonwoods could reappear by the streams and on hillsides, as happened to the Lamar River valley in Yellowstone Park after the wolves returned. The ducks of the Dakotas could regenerate, because coyotes were controlling the egg eating foxes and raccoons.
As wolves began returning to Idaho, the Nez Perce tribe held a ceremony to celebrate, and tribe elder Horace Axtell offered a prayer: “We ask the Creator that wolves may be allowed to run free again, that they may be able to live, to be part of us, to be a part of our land, to be part of the creation for which they were intended” (Grambo, 2005, 150). And with the top predators back, the old balance of creatures in the West could be basically restored. The danger of attacks on cattle returned, but there were other means of protecting cows than by exterminating the land’s wildlife. Some ranchers brought in guard dogs, or made selective use of solar-powered electric fences. Nez Perce tribe ranchers focused on protecting the youngest and weakest animals. If cows were rotated between fenced segments of pasture, only limited areas had to be guarded at a time. Such means of predator control could be a lot cheaper than, for example, the 2,500-mile dingo-proof fence surrounding the sheep ranching zone of Queensland. Wildlife officers could also place radio collars on wolves, and ranchers could respond to alerts with shotgun cracker shells or rubber bullets. The Defenders of Wildlife Fund got involved to help ranchers adopt such measures, and to help compensate them for cattle lost to wolves or coyotes. The goal, as managers of the Bailey Wildlife Foundation’s Wolf Compensation Trust explained it, was “to shift economic responsibility for wolf recovery away from the individual rancher and towards the millions of people who want to see wolf populations restored” (Fraser, 2009, 51).
Of course many ranchers totally rejected such ideas. In accordance with a supposedly traditional zero-sum story of life on earth, a car bumper sticker in Idaho said, “Save 100 Elk. Kill a Wolf.” And the popularity of that feeling induced both Idaho and Wyoming to take wolves off the endangered species list. As of the summer of 2012, the Wyoming government estimated that 270 wolves roamed the state, and the policy was to cull them down to 100. Only the national parks and the Wind River Indian Reservation would still be safe havens for wolves. A director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service said “You’re going to hear, I think, a fair amount of rhetoric of unregulated killing and trapping and open seasons and free-fire zones” (BBC News, 2012, August 31). In Arizona it was worse. After wildlife officers reintroduced wolves in the mountains, local ranchers promptly gunned them down. Only the White Mountain Apache accepted wolves on their 1.6 million acres of land. The Apache planned an ecotourism program that mixed wolf tracking with performances by the Apache Crown dancers, to dramatize their relationship with the wolves. When asked why their attitude differed from that of the Anglo ranchers, the Apache said that they and the wolves had both suffered in the same way.
Clearly in the future, controlled culls of wolves would grow necessary, and ranchers would be able to kill wolves in defense of their herds. But for people with some respect for the wider contribution of wolves to the landscape, this killing would resemble wolf killing by Native people. It would be a matter of killing particular offenders, not waging a war to eliminate the species.
By finding the benefit in wild animals rather that treating them as enemies, some ranches attained a restored, healthy environment, and found this to be better for business. Dan Dagget reported of the Deseret Land and Livestock ranch in Utah, “the Deseret offers unmatched opportunities for viewing larger animals, such as elk, mule deer, and moose. When I was there, I saw more animals and a greater diversity of species in two days than I did in two weeks at Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Glacier national parks combined” (1995, 85). The Deseret ranch had a Chief of Wildlife named Rick Danvir, who said “Now I don’t think there are good and bad animals, just good and bad managers” (Dagget, 1995, 83).
Another part of the solution to range degradation was to make the cows behave more like herds of buffalo. The buffalo used to come in huge, concentrated herds, eating almost all the grass in limited areas, leaving a trail of dung and urine, and then moving on to return years later. Ranchers like Tony and Jerrie Tipton in Nevada tried to reproduce this primordial condition on their ranch. They concentrated their cows on small portions of pasture, letting them eat up all accumulations living or dead grass, and then rotating them to other small segments of the ranch. The heavily trampled and manured fields looked like a buffalo herd had just hit them. And then stands of rich grass emerged, unlike anything seen in the region for many decades. As Dan Dagget praised this effort, “the Tippton’s animals … have become a tool for improving the land rather than [just] a commodity produced upon it—a tool unlike bulldozers and bureaucrats, with the advantage of being able to pay its own way by creating cash flows as it restores” (Dagget, 1995, 90).
Extremely Wild Ranching
Some ranchers have moved toward totally wild ranching, which dispenses with domesticated cows, sheep, or goats altogether, and replaces feed lots and slaughterhouses with hunting. In the most extreme cases they’ve tried exotic game ranching, with imported wild animals and eight-foot high game-proof fences. On these ranches, hunters can be charged premium fees for their chance to shoot gazelles, ibexes, Arabian oryx antelope, elands, or sika deer—without going on a foreign safari. The first such businesses started in Texas during the 1930s, as the King Ranch brought in Nilgai antelope, and the Patio Ranch placed surplus animals from the San Antonio zoo on its land. An Exotic Wildlife Association (EWA) formed in 1967, and populations of such beasts climbed sharply. By the mid-1990s there were around 200,000 exotic animals of 71 species ranched in Texas. In South Africa it was roughly the same. In recent years that country had 5,000 private game ranches, and 4,000 that mixed livestock with game animals. Eighty of these kept elephants, with necessarily strong fences.
Controversies have abounded over the morality and safety of this practice. For many observers it seemed absolutely ridiculous that species endangered in Africa were bought and shot in Texas. The way the Texas Hunt Lodge in Kerr County explained it, it seemed almost like a convenience store:
The Hunting product that we offer to our clients is Unparalleled, even for Africa Safari standards. From World Record Yak, to Trophy Axis Deer, Mexican White wing Hunts, Monster Whitetail Bucks, Trophy Fallow Deer, Texas Dall, Eland, and Aoudad Sheep, we have the Exotic Hunt that you want … if you don’t see a species of Exotic Game animal on our website which you would like to hunt, please let us know, and we’re fairly confident that we can locate it for you. (http://www.texashuntlodge.com/ranches.asp)
With such schemes, species that were endangered in their home ranges, like the scimitar-horned oryx or the dama gazelle, soon had larger migrant populations in the New World than those that remained in the Old. It seemed like these animals were getting a new lease on survival through violating the Endangered Species Act. The CBS television show 60 Minutes explored the matter, asking “Can Hunting Endangered Animals Save the Species?” The show suggested it was possible. But ranchers in Colorado or Wyoming tried to exclude exotic ranches, lest they bring diseases and environmental catastrophes worse than those already brought by imported cows and sheep. Zoo managers came under fire from animal rights activists, after the activists exposed zoos for selling surplus animals to hunting ranches. In reaction to such blowback, a spokesman for the animal-selling San Diego Zoo condemned self-righteous animal rights protesters as “carrion-seeking, flesh-eating vultures” (Wallace, 1991, Sept. 19). But as for the seemingly fascistic exotic game ranchers, maybe they were actually doing something slightly better for the planet’s ecosystem than mono-crop cow ranching.
Heavy-duty Rewilding
Beyond any such small-scale schemes, some environmentalists spoke of “Pleistocene re-wilding,” by which North America’s pre-human megafauna would return. The elephants, camels, wild horses, and lions which roamed the land down to 10,000 BCE would be restored, for a countryside rich as it was in those days. The advocates claimed it would fill holes in the ecosystem, create a New World for African animals, and create jobs. Josh Donlan, of Cornell University, said it would have to be done with due consideration for public concern: “We are not advocating backing up a van and letting elephants and cheetahs out into the landscape. All of this would be science driven” (BBC News, 2005, Aug. 18). It would be done, Donlan explained, in stages. First, Mexican giant tortoises would be brought to Big Bend Park in Texas, with prairie grassland parks receiving Przewalski’s horses, Asian asses, and Bactrian camels. Phase two would involve releasing cheetahs, elephants, and lions on private properties.
The rewilder advocates said these things could be done using surplus animals from zoos, such as the accommodating San Diego Zoo. But some African critics saw another attempt to plunder their continent’s resources, and perhaps steal the Serengeti for Kansas. With reassuring devotion to Africa’s wildlife, one observer wrote, “Thank you for planning to rob Africa of her animals so you can beautify your barren great plains with her native animals!! Why come after the animals that support our tourism. Leave Africa and what is hers alone, thief!!!!!!” (Stolzenberg, 2011, locs. 2840–42).
All efforts to restore the range to its former glory, however, faced certain brick walls. First, perhaps most ranchers and farmers who heard of re-wilding swore they’d shoot any lions, cheetahs, etc. on sight. As one observer put it, “You are a fucking moron if you release killers in our homeland. I hope the cattle rancher guys shoot your ass or feed you to those lions if you release those killers into our ecosystem” (Stolzenberg, 2011, locs. 2862–66). It may be understandable that North Americans are far more passionate about security than most people who live with big animals in other lands. But there is a certain irrelevance to this argument, in that private game ranches or parks are already stocking many of these animals. And it’s quite likely that at some point these creatures who once stalked North America will escape from their Jurassic Parks.
A second brick wall is that the range is now parceled into a galaxy of fragmented properties, each managed differently by different managers. And one basic condition of the old range was open migration across the landscape. Still, some range and wildlife managers hope to reduce even this restriction. In perhaps the biggest open-range effort, a coalition of organizations, including the American Prairie Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund, began buying up adjoining portions of unwanted rangeland in Montana. After accumulating 58,500 acres, which connected to the 1.1 million acre Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, they released 16 buffalo to roam the new Buffalo Commons. The long-range goal was to replace non-profitable, state-subsidized farms on the high prairies with a sustainable economy based on native animals. To extend such ranges up and down the plains, perhaps it would only take linking corridors, like country roads between buffalo and elk cities.
The wild birds needed a similar set of feeding habitats, strung out along their seasonal migration routes. And motivated partly by concern to ensure stocks of game birds for hunting, an ambitious North American Waterfowl Management Plan has expanded to protect nearly 16 million acres of waterfowl habitat from Canada to Mexico. These wetlands are like periodic feeding stations, without which the great migrations of ducks, geese, and swans can’t succeed. And in a paradox of conservation, this whole system has been funded by a tax on guns, ammunition, and hunting licenses. The recent decline of duck hunters actually put this conservation program in danger of funding cutbacks, which made it seem clear that ducks need their hunters. And for birds migrating further south, the Nature Conservancy formed partnerships with various Latin American organizations to protect the winter habitats of North America’s birds. In one case, the American Bird Conservancy paid to preserve a cloud forest in Colombia where the cerulian warbler goes for the winter.
Many kinds of animals, however, didn’t need much human help finding links between habitats. The rising populations of deer, antelope, elk, and moose have proved impervious to most boundary fences. With seasonal and zoning restrictions on killing these animals, plus the drastic reduction of all their natural predators, these ungulates have multiplied so greatly that by recent years around 4% of all motor vehicle accidents in the USA were collisions with deer or moose. In Pennsylvania alone there were around 20,000 collisions with deer per year in recent decades. A lot of these animals come to lick salt applied to winter roads. The country roads have become corridors where animals are killed, and predators gather to eat road kill. Naturally, the highway departments put up signs warning people of zones where deer commonly cross. And naturally, somebody in North Dakota asked that the deer-crossing sign be moved, so that the deer would cross elsewhere. In eastern Canada, some provinces have embarked on expensive schemes to erect wildlife fencing along the roadways. Of course it would be cheaper if they just hired wolves.
References:
Adair, Gordon (2012) “Badger Baiting.ˮ BBC News, March 12.
BBC News (2005) “Big Game ‘Could Roam U.S. Plains.’” August 18.
BBC News (2012) “Wyoming Drops Federal Protection of Gray Wolves.” August 31.
Dagget, Dan (1995) Beyond the Rangeland Conflict: Toward a West that Works. Gibbs Smith, Publishers, Layton, Utah, pp. 83, 85, 90.
Fraser, Caroline (2009) Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution. Picador, New York, pp. 51, 95)
Grambo, Rebecca L. (2005) Wolf: Legend, Enemy, Icon. Firefly Books, Richmond Hill, Ontario, p. 150.
Phelan, Richard (1976) Texas Wild: The Land, Plants, and Animals of the Lone Star State. E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., New York, pp. 136–137.
Stolzenburg, William (2008, e-book version, 2011) Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreakage in a Land of Vanishing Predators. Bloomsbury USA., locs. 2840–42, 2862–66.
Wallace, Amy (1991) “Zoo Official Calls Animal Activists, Media ‘Vultures’.” Los Angeles Times, September 19.
(Excerpted from the upcoming ANIMAL WARS, by Brian Griffith, Exterminating Angel Press Fall 2014)