Wolf Program Pits Neighbor Against Neighbor
	From the 2000

Sunday, July 16, 2000
By Rene Romo
Journal Southern Bureau
    GILA HOT SPRINGS — Isolation normally binds together this tiny community of a few dozen homes, but the reintroduction of Mexican gray wolves to the nearby Gila Wilderness has sown division.
    Suspicions are so deep between the pro- and anti-wolf sides that when a wolf killed a lamb June 15 on a 100-acre ranch a few miles south of the Gila Cliff Dwellings, environmentalists suspected the lamb was bait intended to stymie the program.
    After the fatal lamb attack, the suspect — the alpha male from the Pipestem wolf pack — was trapped and placed in captivity. When he will be released is uncertain, and it is possible that a year's breeding cycle in the pack will be missed because the alpha female will have no mate, said Brian Kelly, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's wolf reintroduction program.
    While the suspicion that someone deliberately enticed the wolf into a kill appears unfounded, the attack's effect has been the same, environmentalists say.
    Kelly said the alpha wolf had been targeted for removal before the lamb kill because it showed no fear of humans, as wild wolves typically do. Also, it had made several forays into the Gila Hot Springs area since its release in the McKenna Park area about 12 miles north of the settlement in the spring.
    But the wolf's capture was a frustrating example of what environmentalists say is a management policy so sensitive to livestock owners that wolf reintroduction is being hampered.
    The 2-year-old program, first started in Arizona, is aimed at restoring an endangered species that was virtually wiped out by ranchers and government agents early in the century.
    "The problem with this whole wolf program is that it bends over backward so much to address the concerns of owners of domestic animals, it's like one quarter of 1 percent of the people of New Mexico controls treatment of wolves instead of the other 99 percent," said Michael Robinson, a Pinos Altos-based coordinator of the Southwest Center for Biological Diversity.
    "This is polarized," said Allen Campbell, owner of the killed lamb and a critic of wolf reintroduction. "I have environmental friends who are so incensed, they don't know if they can continue being friends with us. I don't talk politics or environmental stuff with these people, because we are friends and we have a lot of other stuff in common. Why kick over a hornet's nest?"
   
Sheep in wolf's clothing
    In a June 29 letter to the Albuquerque Journal, Gila Hot Springs resident Thomas Cobb suggested the Campbell Ranch's "oddly timed introduction of the animal (Navajo Churro sheep) that everyone knows is supremely vulnerable to predators" was suspicious.
    Cobb said the Campbell clan, longtime ranchers, had not had sheep for years until the wolves were reintroduced.
    Allen Campbell scoffed at the insinuation. "We've done everything we could to prevent this from happening," he said.
    The Campbells said they first purchased two sheep two years ago to graze on weeds, which their horses will not eat.
    The family began planning in December to purchase a small herd of sheep. The Campbells brought in 15 ewes in April, about the same time the five-member Pipestem wolf pack was released from pens in the Half Moon area of the Gila, about 15 or 20 miles north of the cliff dwellings.
    The Campbells run about 40 horses on a 65,000-acre allotment surrounding the cliff dwellings.
    The sheep graze on the Campbells' property, a rambling ranch just off N.M. 15 with a garden, corrals, penned hunting dogs and several roaming peacocks. The sheep generally graze within 200 yards of Campbell homes, family members said.
    During daylight, the grazing sheep are kept behind 3-foot-high plastic fencing topped with a low-voltage electrified line, the family said.
    As the sheep are moved from pasture to pasture on the property, the plastic fencing and electrified wire are moved with them for protection, Allen Campbell said.
    At night, the sheep are penned inside a partially sheltered corral of timber, thick-wired fencing and electrified wire at the top and bottom of the fence.
    For several days after the wolves were reintroduced in May, Becky Campbell slept outside next to the sheep pen with a hunting dog tied to her bedroll. When the dog alerted her to the presence of wolves, she would shine the flashlight on them to frighten them off, Allen Campbell said.
    Allen Campbell said he never expected wolves to come into the community, even with sheep present.
    But, he added, even if the family did purchase sheep "as a subterfuge, it's all perfectly legal."
   
Wolf rumors
    Suspicions about the sheep attack were stoked because, Allen Campbell said, it was Becky Campbell, his sister, who contacted the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau in Las Cruces after a Gila Hot Springs writer had a tense encounter with two Mexican gray wolves during a jog May 16.
    Farm and Livestock Bureau executive vice president Norm Plank quickly issued a news release that day asserting that the woman, Renee Despres, had been attacked by wolves.
    "I can assure you that no human is a match for a starving pack of wolves in a feeding frenzy," Plank wrote. "Enough about wolves not attacking humans. They do and they just did. Who's next? You? Your grandchildren? Your children? Your pets? Can you 'get used to that'?"
    Despres, however, later said she was never attacked. Despres said she saw two wolves outside Doc Campbell's Post, a general store on N.M. 15 named after the Campbells' father, Dawson "Doc" Campbell, and threw rocks at one wolf when it approached within 10 to 15 feet, apparently interested in her two dogs.
    Despres, a wolf reintroduction supporter, said she did not feel threatened by the wolves.
    Both sides in the ongoing debate over wolf reintroduction claim they represent local interests. Silver City-area resident Deirdre Wolff said most locals welcome the wolves, adding, "The attitude I'm seeing is people are saying: What we did in the past was wrong, we were greedy, but we're fixing it and we're proud of it."
    Ranchers say locals are overwhelmingly opposed to wolf reintroduction and that support comes mainly from city dwellers and outsiders.
    "Here's all these meatheads that want to hear the sound of wolves," said Pinos Altos taxidermist and trapper Jeff Lehmer. "When the Endangered Species Act came out, it wasn't meant to destroy rural America."
    The tone of the simmering debate has grown acrimonious.
    When Lehmer went on a fishing trip June 2 on the Gila River, his truck, which advertised his taxidermy and trapping services, was vandalized. A magnetic sign Lehmer placed on his truck read: "Skunk Buster — Problem Animal Removal."
    Someone slashed all four tires on Lehmer's truck and wrote "killer" in marker on his windows, according to a report with the Grant County Sheriff's Department.
    In March, when wolf reintroduction in New Mexico was being contemplated, a flier advertising a meeting of the conservative group People for the USA said wolf "infestation" was a ploy used by environmental "terrorists" to kill the cattle industry. The flier compared reintroduction to the actions of Adolf Hitler's "green uniformed soldiers" in targeting ethnic and social minorities.
    Gila Hot Springs resident Connie Barlow, a writer and self-described "radical environmentalist," said the wolf reintroduction issue represents "the first time where we've actually had something occur in our area where there's been profound disagreement."
    How the community deals with it, Barlow said, "can have such a profound influence on this national policy issue."
   
Behavior problems
    Both the Pipestem and Mule packs released in New Mexico in April have had setbacks, Robinson said.
    The Mule pack originally consisted of an adult male, a pregnant female and two male yearlings. When the three male wolves moved onto a ranch along Bear Creek within weeks of their release, the three were recaptured to be moved farther away from cattle.
    The two yearlings are still in captivity, Kelly said, and the adult male wolf was returned to his mate, which had a leg amputated in an earlier trapping accident. Fish and Wildlife has not confirmed whether the pair have pups.
    The Pipestem pack originally consisted of the alpha male and female and three yearlings.
    One of the yearlings dispersed alone south of Springerville, Ariz., and the radio signal of another yearling who migrated southeast of Silver City has not been picked up since June 30. Kelly said the yearlings' dispersal before the age of 2 was atypical of wild wolf behavior.
    The alpha male, who led the other wolves into the Gila Hot Springs area, is in captivity.
    Kelly said he understands the perception that wolves are punitively recaptured and moved, or placed into captivity, for any contact with humans or predation of livestock. But Kelly said wolf management is governed by a set of guidelines that take into consideration concerns of different segments of the public, the types of incidents involving wolves and where the incidents occur — on public or private land.
    Captures and releases of wolves are guided by a goal of having wolves that breed and have an "innate fear of humans," Kelly said. Wolves in captivity may be released at later dates.
    "What we are trying to do ultimately is to get animals in the wild who behave and act like wild wolves," said Kelly, adding that wild wolves rarely approach human beings. "The problem we have now is that we are dealing with captive wolves ... wolves who have been habituated to human beings."
    Kelly said he believes wolf reintroduction is working, but he said it takes time to establish the first few generations of wild wolves.
   
Fear thy neighbor
    In the meantime, Allen Campbell said he would work with environmentalists to try to accommodate the wolves.
    He said he is interested in an offer by Defenders of Wildlife, an environmental group that compensates ranchers for livestock killed by wolves, to pay for a portable corral that would fence about one acre.
    Though he has the legal right to kill a wolf if he saw one preying on one of his sheep, Allen Campbell said he would run the predator off, instead.
    "I cannot afford to do anything like that for just a sheep," he said. "I can't afford to have my house burned down over doing something that horrible for protecting just a sheep."

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