Some hot news out of Salem in the last week has been the Wolf Plan adopted Friday, June 7, after a contentious series of hearings held by the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission.
According to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, which is overseen by the commission, which answers to the governor, commissioners reached a decision on revisions to the plan after hearing from 44 people who showed up to testify and reviewing “thousands of public comments.”
Testimony has come from all sides. Hunting and farming groups have, in the words of an Oregon Hunters Association news bulletin that came our way shortly after the decision, made a point of “never missing a meeting or an opportunity to provide input.”
Wolves are impressive, beautiful animals – when they’re not too close to you as you’re hiking or hunting, and when they’re not attacking your livestock, which has been a big issue in eastern Oregon.
The new plan, which was approved 6-1, includes language providing for the use of hunting and trapping as future management tools. It loosens restrictions on when wolves can be killed for attacking livestock.
Not surprisingly, those provisions in the plan drew ire from environmental groups and from the governor. There’s been finger-pointing, with environmentalists such as Oregon Wild blaming the governor for not keeping the regulatory body under control.
Gov. Brown herself said in an email quoted by the Oregonian newspaper: “Efforts in the wolf plan to evaluate depredations and prevent them fail to meet the Governor’s expectations for ensuring the health of the wolf population while also meeting the needs of the ranching community.”
It comes as no surprise that any move toward clamping down on the burgeoning wolf population in Oregon sparks criticism from the people who advocated for introducing Canadian timber wolves to Oregon in the first place.
A debate has continued for years over whether the current wolves are even similar to the ones that once roamed Oregon. Ranchers and those with historical knowledge of the wolves that once populated the region say the wolves that were wiped out in the early 1900s were smaller than the modern Canadian variety.
All that may be incidental, but it illustrates the degree of controversy that has accompanied the effort to re-establish the wolf.
What is going to be of larger concern for us here in east Linn County is that the wolves appear to be closing in on us.
At an open house last week to introduce a proposed timberlands management project in the Quartzville and Middle Santiam areas (see page 1), U.S. Forest Service officials openly acknowledged that they’ve known wolves have been present in the Willamette National Forest’s southern end for about two years, with that presence only recently being announced by ODFW.
Let’s see … wolves were confined to the far reaches of eastern Oregon a decade ago. Now they’re at our doorstep.
The reality is that wolves may come to our territory and they may affect local livestock and wildlife populations.
And when that happens, the results of wishful thinking in Salem, which have hitherto mostly affected our brethren over the mountains, will suddenly become very up-close and personal.