Opponents Outman Supporters At Wolf Hearing
	From the March 2000

This Styrofoam wolf roamed Silver City streets Thursday on the roof of Van Clothier's car. Clothier and Helen Francis hoped to bring attention to the public input meeting on wolf recovery being held Thursday night at Light Hall. Sun-News photo by Lisa Parker

By Lisa Parker
Sun-News

One of the biggest events of the year in Grant County turned out to be the public input hearing Thursday on wolf translocation into the Gila Wilderness. Some 800 people turned out to show their colors on the issue; it appeared few people were without a strong opinion on the topic of wolves in the wild.

The hearing started out at Western New Mexico University's Light Hall. Half an hour before the scheduled start time of 7 p.m. the small auditorium was wall to wall people, with hundreds more waiting to get in. The meeting was soon moved to the 1,000-seat Fine Arts Center Theater on campus.

Translocation of wolves is a management practice for the wild wolf population designed to aid the wolves in the recovery process. Since the wolves being released into the primary recovery zone of the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area --the south end of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest -- have been raised in captivity, they've been compared to children that have to learn how to take care of themselves once on their own.

Translocation is a practice designed, to some extent, to get wolves out of trouble once they've got themselves in. 1999 and early 2000 haven't been good for the wolf recovery program, with most of the wolves in the wild being recaptured after preying on livestock in Arizona and New Mexico. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to place the recaptured wolves into the Gila Wilderness -- in the secondary portion of the Recovery Area -- in the hopes they will have fewer conflicts with livestock.

The issue to be addressed at the meeting --whether to release wolves in the Gila with the use of pens to acclimate them to their new habitat (soft release); to release them directly into the Wilderness (hard release); or to not release them into the Gila Wilderness at all -- was mostly ignored by the dozens of people who stated their opinions for the record. The audience didn't want to talk about how Mexican gray wolves should be managed, but whether they should be returned to the wild at all.

After about two hours of comments, speakers supporting wolf recovery were outnumbered almost two to one, and a call by proponent Sharon Morgan of Silver City urging wolf supporters to stand left about 2/3 of the audience in their seats.

Many of the comments in support of the recovery effort came from people from other areas, and representing organized environmental groups. Representative of the Greens, Animal Protection of New Mexico, Forest Guardians, and the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance were some who spoke in support of the program. At least eight of the 15 people who spoke in support by 9:25 p.m. were from Las Cruces, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, or Tucson, Ariz. This -- along with a perception that the government is "cramming wolves down our throats" -- seemed to be a major sticking point with opponents of the program.

One speaker, Jim Wetzel, said people from outside the area of wolf reintroduction "don't have to live with them (wolves) every day and deal with their consequences." He said these people may "think it's fun" to have wolves in the wild, and compared wolves to a "nudie bar," saying people may want to go visit it once in a while, but they wouldn't want one in their backyard.

Teresa Tackman, a rancher's wife from Alma, said she moved to the area from upstate New York and is "sick of people coming from urban areas and telling us how to live. ... It's not about the wolves. It's about people coming from some place else --telling country people how to live."

Susan Swaim of Beaverhead -- who called herself and other rural residents "law abiding, God fearing, taxpaying" people -- brought hundreds of cheering people to their feet when she said the wolf recovery effort is "yet another government program being crammed down our throats."

Many other comments dealt with a belief that the 1996 Environmental Impact Statement, which the wolf recovery project is based on, uses "bad science." This charge was repeated several times along with a call for a new EIS. Tom Diamond, a rancher in Catron and Sierra counties, said of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, "I believe everything you've done is results oriented," charging that the Service had decided to reintroduce wolves to the Apache-Sitgreaves and Gila national forests before any research was done. He charged that the recovery effort has "failed in Arizona. We don't want you to fail in New Mexico."

Another concern with the 1996 EIS is the Duda and Young poll done to gauge residents' support for wolf reintroduction. Grant County Sheriff H.R. "Bodie" Chavez was among a few people who said the poll, which excluded Spanish-speaking people from participating, was "discriminatory" and in Chavez's words, a "civil rights violation."

Others voiced concern that the Gila National Forest is "dead" because it is overgrown with timber. They claimed there are low numbers of game on the forest, not because of cattle grazing, but because of a high density of timber growth crowding out feed for prey animals. "Your forest is dead and it's dead because of mismanagement by the Forest Service," a Catron County woman charged.

But it did not appear any minds were changed during the evening. Supporters cheered when one of their own spoke; opponents did the same. A few people called for cooperation, including Todd Schulke of the Southwest Forest Alliance. He noted "a lot of hate and animosity" in Grant and Catron counties regarding the issue, and said he hoped people could learn to work together to overcome objections to the wolf recovery.

One man, Kestral Blackburn of Alpine, Ariz., voiced support for hard release of the wolves into the Gila. "I think it's a mistake to overmanage these wolves" through feeding and keeping them in a pen. "Let's see if the land can support the wolves," he said. "End of story."

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