Where’s the progress on that? Rather than trying to expand its hands-off approach to managing animals beyond the park’s borders, the park service could engage the public in a discussion about the consequences of its current policy. This probability may be heightened by the habituation of wolves to visitors in YNP, their likely naivete when they initially move outside the park, and current temporal patterns of increased movement outside the park that coincide with the initiation of wolf hunting season.”īack in 2008, YNP acknowledged the situation with habituated bears in a Yellowstone Science article, noting, “The next challenge for park managers is to find innovative, cost-effective ways to manage the large numbers of visitors that want to view and experience habituated bears, or to develop cost-effective methods to prevent habituation.”
The agency has long understood the risk of allowing wolves to become human habituated could result in those same animals being legally harvested by humans outside the park.Ī 2016 paper acknowledged: “However, the potential still exists for high harvests of wolves exiting the park in other areas, where wolf harvest quotas are substantially higher or unlimited, including in Idaho and Wyoming. It should be telling the public that within the boundaries of the preserve, park policy provides these great wildlife viewing opportunities for millions of people every year.īut then tell the public about the downside of this management policy: these constant encounters with people results in human-habituated animals and that has consequences – such as the 33 wolves that have been run over and killed by vehicles in the park since 1995. YNP officials are fully aware that its naturalness policy results in human-habituated predators, yet instead of openly informing the public of the benefits and consequences of this policy, it now casts dispersion on neighboring state wildlife agencies. The park service itself can’t afford its current program, and the states certainly can’t either. To expect state wildlife managers to manage large carnivores in the same manner as park officials would be a ridiculous ask. There aren’t teams of rangers with the authority to close roads because a grizzly bear lingers roadside.
Outside the national parks are human-dominated landscapes with a vast array of communities, land ownership, and multiple uses of natural resources and landscapes, and human livelihoods. Park officials fully understand that their policy to emphasize the management of humans inside the park while limiting management of animals is feasible only within the boundaries of the Yellowstone preserve. YNP created this mess, but looks to the states to fix it. They know that the wolf and grizzly bear populations have saturated available range inside the park and that these large predator populations will continue range expansion outside the park’s borders. Yellowstone’s “naturalness” policy is responsible for the human habituation of large carnivores in this ecosystem, but park officials then point the finger of blame at state wildlife managers when predators leave park boundaries and find themselves in human-dominated communities. Like it’s “natural” to have thousands upon thousands of humans lined up along park roadways daily to watch wolves and bears. A YNP official also claimed this hunter harvest outside the park screwed up wolf research in the park because “this is no longer a natural population.” I maintain that YNP intentionally stirs public outrage about “naive” wolves crossing outside park boundaries and subjected to wolf hunting in neighboring states. Last week’s column debunking the claim that wolf hunting outside Yellowstone National Park (YNP) had altered wolf pack behavior concluded by suggesting that YNP officials are trying to generate public pressure for state wildlife agencies to change the way they manage wolves. Natural, or Habituated: YNP sets predators up for failure, then wants States to fix the problem. ***For All Things Wyoming, Sign-Up For Our Daily Newsletter***