Wolf Talk
brings Solutions.
Most of the 30 people who came to hear
Sadie Parr speak in Vernon on December 5th, left with a new understanding about
wolves. Far from being freeloaders on the top of the food chain, wolves benefit
the ecosystems around them, from the survival of forest and riverbank vegetation
to the health of the caribou, deer and other animals on which they prey. The
brutal war against wolves that is waged all over the world and is now proposed
in BC, is leading to the extinction of one of the most intelligent and
beneficial species that inhabits our forests.
"Yellowstone Park is a prime example
of how wolves benefit an ecosystem. In the 1920's when the park got rid of
wolves, elk, moose, caribou and other ungulates thrived and behaved very
differently than when the wolves were around. Now they ate everything in sight,
including the vegetation along stream banks, causing severe disruption to the
ecosystem. The fish and the beavers disappeared, along with numerous birds and
other species. The animals left no longer thrived but got weaker and susceptible
to disease. Seventy years later, the park reintroduced wolves. Browsing animals
started behaving differently, allowing the vegetation to grow tall enough to
reproduce. Now the fish and beavers have returned along with the plants needed
to support biodiversity" said Parr.
The streams
have benefitted too. The beavers keep the rivers from drying up while, at the
same time, healthy vegetation keeps the rivers from flooding, and all this
biological interaction helps maintain rich soil that better sequesters carbon —
gets it out of the atmosphere and back into the ground. In other words, by
helping to maintain a healthy ecosystem, wolves are connected to climate change:
without them, these landscapes would be more vulnerable to the effects of those
big weather events we will increasingly experience as the planet warms.
Parr stressed that there are only a
few places left in Canada with enough genetic diversity to allow wolves to
survive if left alone. “If wolves can't be allowed to live in BC, where will
they live?” she added. She also dispelled the thoughts that wolves are killing a
lot of cattle, saying that transport, disease, and other occurrences are
responsible for most of the deaths and that the best way to protect one's farm
animals is to shepherd them as used to be done by farmers. Wolves fear people
and will not attack when a human is present.
“Habitat destruction is to blame along
with government's misled "management" plan for the low numbers of the caribou.
These animals need large tracks of old growth forests, not little islands here
and there.” The provincial management plan includes sterilization that most
often leads to rejection, sickness and eventually death, helicopter chasing
until complete exhaustion, gunning down wolves year-round, trapping which often
results in weeks of extreme suffering, trophy hunting, and even offers bounties
for the largest animals. Since wolves live in family groups, killing a large
member can leave the pack without the ability to hunt successfully or even
survive.
She urged everyone to write the
provincial government to ask for an extension to the deadline for commenting and
to let them know that the barbaric wolf management plan they propose is not what
we want for the wolves, our forests, and for BC. Instead what BC needs habitat
corridors, where large tracks of forests are connected so that a healthy
predator-prey system can survive.
Jungyon Drake
250-307-7442
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