9UNP1259HD_Eric_Olson_WordPress

>>Welcome all of you to our Madeline Island Wilderness Preserve Summer Lecture Series. The Wilderness Preserve is a private, non-profit land trust on the island. Part of our mission in wilderness preservation is education. So we hope that through our learning about wolves tonight, we’ll all enjoying living with them more and understanding them. We have a number of programs going on. I encourage you to visit our website. It’s a tremendous organization run by volunteers and supported by people who simply love this island. 
Next I want to thank the—we partner with the museum to keep their doors open tonight, so we can use this lovely facility for a free program. I also want to thank the Apostle Islands community fund. 

We’ve partnered with them this year and they are supporting this lecture series. I had the wonderful opportunity to attend their award program. And they do such a great job of nurturing so many things in our community. From renewal centers, community funds, community outreach, education series. So thank you and highest regards to the community fund if they’re here tonight. 
And Northland College where our speaker, guest speaker is from, is a rich resource of environmental studies and learning for our whole area. We are so blessed and so we’re thrilled that Northland is here tonight.
And for the best part, I want to introduce Dr. Erik Olson. Graduate of the University of W--Wisconsin in Madison. 

He is associate professor of natural resources at Northland College, so is it right up there so I wouldn’t get it wrong, thank you. Anyway, we’re so excited to have you here. Thank you, Erik.
[applause]
>> Well thank you for that introduction, Bonnie. And for the promotion. [laughter] I’m currently assistant professor of natural resources. So thank you all for being here tonight. I greatly appreciate it. And I’m really happy to be out here on Madeline Island to talk about an issue that’s really--I find really interesting, and that is kind of the socio-political struggle or conflict around wolves and wolf management. 

And so today my talk is kind of titled Tug of--Tug of War Over Wolves. Kind of—kind of reflecting back on that kind of social-political conflict that we’ve seen over the last decade and a half regarding wolves and wolf management. Both nationally and here within the state of Wisconsin. 
You’ll have to bear with me, I’ve got a lot of technology up here, so we’ll see what happens today. 
All right, so before we begin, I have to give a little bit of a background about kind of the key component of this talk which is human-wildlife conflicts. So—human-wildlife conflicts kind of has two major aspects to it: that is kind of the first which is symbolized by this man wrestling with the bear which is this kind of classical sense of human-wildlife conflict. When human and wildlife resources kind of overlap leading to competition between humans and wildlife for those resources.
This is, if you think of like the crop raiding elephant or the livestock depredating lion—this is what we—what we’re referencing when we talk about this erect human-wildlife conflict. 
Now there is a second component to human-wildlife conflict that’s kind of a little bit more nuanced, and that’s what most of this talk today is going to be focused on. And that is human to human conflict over how wildlife is managed. 

And so human to human conflict over how wildlife is managed is—I also refer to that as socio-political conflict over wildlife management. That occurs when management strategies do not necessarily overlap with the value set of a particular stakeholder. And when that competes with deep core values that may associated with the identity of particular stakeholder groups, it can lead to emotionally intense, prolonged and intractable debates. And there’s a really important component of scale when we’re talking about these kind of human to human conflicts about natural resources. Some call these conservation conflicts if you will. But this, this component of scale, it’s easiest if you think about it, the scale of the players that are involved, and the scale at which some of the conflict plays out. So, if you think of, you know, organizations that have, you know, kind of national organizations, they may have regional sub-organizations, and more local chapters as well. 
And you may have a national organization, you know, having conflict with more local organizations, and having that conflict play out in say, regional courtrooms, things like that. So there’s a real important component of scale here. Also to no one’s surprise, researchers have found that politics and elections play a really important role in influencing the volatility and cyclical nature of these kind of human to human conflicts, or socio-political conflicts around natural resources. 

And I think researcher Nie really describes it kind of well in this quote. And I read from Nie here. “Institutionalized political contention can lead to stalemate or to pendulum swings from one extreme position to another. As one side or another comes to political power. Extreme pendulum swings are certainly not beneficial when it comes to such things as endangered species recovery.” And so here Nie is using the analogy of this pendulum swinging back and forth to describe this kind of, this, this tug of war that I’ve used, this analogy that I’ve used, tug of war over a particular resource and I’ve kind of, going back and forth, as one side comes into political power and then the other.   
But what Nie is also pointing out here is that these kind of conflicts--this back and forth may not necessarily be good for natural resource management or endangered species recovery in this case is what he’s speaking to. Now Nie and Messmer and other researchers have referred to the predator pendulum. One that I find particularly interesting is this analogy of this kind of back and forth in management or conservation, you know kind of conservation politics and power—that power struggle. Others, I’ve heard others refer to it as a kind of a game of ping pong, essentially this kind of game of ping pong where it’s a game of win or lose for political power over how a particular species is managed. 

I particularly like this, excuse me, sorry. There is a—got too much analogy going on here, sorry. So there’s the ping pong analogy. I particularly like this tug of war analogy. Which I think you’ll kind of see that’s really evident here as I walk you through this timeline of wolf management status here in Wisconsin. You can come on in, there’s more seats. So what this timeline is, this timeline shows on the right-hand side, we have time periods when the state gained management authority to kill depredating wolves—these are wolves that are attacking livestock, or pets near homes. Okay, so that’s time periods where they’ve gained that authority. And then on the left side, is time periods where they’ve lost that authority. And so I’m kind of focusing in particularly on that, that what we call lethal control authority of the states. 

And I recently updated this just because I was missing a few more swings of the pendulum or more tugs of the rope if you will. But let me walk you through this and I think it’s enlightening to actually sit down and walk through this because it gets a little long. All right. So obviously before 2003 wolves were listed as endangered in Wisconsin under the endangered species act. In 2003 they were reclassified as threatened in the state—in the state of Wisconsin. Then in 2005, early 2005, I realize that might be hard for some of you to see in the back there. In early 2005 they were then relisted. Following that, the state got, got permits to then kill depredating wolves even though they were still listed as endangered species at the time. Shortly thereafter those permits were revoked. The state could no longer do that. 

The next year, in the early spring, the state got those permits back again. They then lost those permits again a couple months later. Wolves were then delisted in early 2007. The state had that management authority to kill depredating wolves at that time. They lost it here in ’08 when they were relisted as endangered species under the Endangered Species Act. They were then delisted in early ’09. I think that’s early ’09, I can’t, yeah early ’09. Roughly a month later they were relisted again. Then we went through a decent period where they were actually in one status for a little while. They were listed as endangered for a little while. 

Then more recently in early 2012 they were delisted. That same day legislation was introduced to list the wolf as a game species in the state. Eventually in April of that year wolves then became a game species and a harvest was legislated.  The species was then a game species for a number of years, and then more recently in 2014, the species was relisted again as an endangered species. Uff da. [laughter]
Okay, so I think you can see this back and forth here. There’s an awful lot over what I would consider a relatively short period of time. And so what I and some colleagues looked at was, what are some of the implications of this kind of back and forth in management status authority over time?  I mean that’s, that’s pretty significant changes in just a short period of time. 

So we looked at that, and that’s what I’m going to be talking about here today. And we kind of asked ourselves, well, well the kind of decisions on wolf management are playing out in courtrooms across the country, in legislative chambers, and in, in public hearings. We asked ourselves, what were some of the implications of the back and forth on the ground, in the state of Wisconsin.
So here’s a graph. One of the first things we looked at, we said, well how did the wolf population change over time? And I want to kind of point out the time period we mainly focused in on here was from 2003 till 2011. Okay? So this time period. Oh, sorry, this time period right in here. 2003 to 2011. 

That’s the time period that we mainly focused in on. But I wanted to show you that the whole thing. That time period correlates with that kind of very frequent back and forth, and we were working on this work in 2011 and 2012, so we couldn’t predict the future quite yet at that point. But if you look at that you see that during that time period the wolf population continued to increase. And you also see what we plotted in the background here which not many people pay much attention to is basically the distribution, the expanse of wolves across the state. That also continued to increase. And I’ll point out why that’s—I’ll talk about why that’s so important—here in the next slide. So as the wolf population continued to and the spatial spread of wolves across the state increased, we see that wolves started to move more—so originally they, they kind of established on public lands which was kind of their core habitat areas. But then they started to move into areas that were, had greater potential for wolf-human conflicts. And I mean, even though there’re still largely focused on these public lands, they’re starting to move into areas that have greater potential for these wolf-human conflicts. 

And I think this is, kind of exemplifies that. This image here is just—I was on a flight with a DNR when they were doing aerial telemetry for wolves somewhere in the central forest region—I don’t recall exactly where—but this is wolf range. We’ve got, you know, a landscape that’s a mosaic of agriculture, you know, rural residential areas, forested areas, and so there is potential in there. And as those core forest areas, those public lands begin to fill up with wolves, wolves start to expand out into the less, if you will, prime habitat, there’s greater potential for conflict. So then we looked at, so if that’s the case as conflict increased over time, and what we found was that indeed during that time period that we’re looking at—again if you remember we’re looking at the 2003 to 2011 time period. During that time period wolf-human conflicts did in fact increase. And then you see more recently a drop in wolf-human conflicts associated with the lethal control and, as well as the harvest that was allowed over the past three years. Or since 2012 I should say. 
So what’s also interesting is that the rate of increase in wolf-human conflicts—so you don’t necessarily need to focus in too much on the details of this graph, but the rate of increase was greater than that of the increase in wolf numbers, as well as the geographic spread of wolves in the state if you will. So there’s a increase, that was suggesting that they’re starting to move into areas that did indeed have greater potential for wolf-human conflict. 

So I looked then at an environmental assessment for—this is an environmental assessment that was written by the USDA APHIS Wildlife Services, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. And this was an environmental assessment of the impacts of lethal control or the killing of wolves that attack livestock or pets near homes—the implications of that and kind of the justification for why that’s a useful tool in, in wolf management. I’m going to—I took some quotes out of their report. “A government which simultaneously imposes the risk of wolf depredation, in other words supporting wolf recovery. And prohibits individuals from effectively reducing those risks—in other words, no chance of removal of problem wolves, is creating an intolerance of wolf presence.” The WDNR has identified social tolerance of wolves as one of the primary factors eliminating the expansion of Wisconsin wolf population. I continue to quote, “If no government sanctioned relief from loss of livestock is in sight, intolerant stakeholders will likely adopt anti-wolf behaviors including illegal killing.” So here they’re suggesting that there is with increasing conflict on the ground, you may start to see changes in how people view wolves. You may see a decline in tolerance towards wolves. That decline in tolerance towards wolves could impact wolf conservation and you could see an increase in anti-wolf behavior such as illegal killing.” 

These were kind of all hypotheses that were kind of supported by some of the data, but we thought to ourselves, did this actually happen? And so nobody had really looked at this and put this together to see if it really did.  And so what we did then was we looked at some existing data from researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison who looked at Wisconsin residents from 2001 or 2004 and 2009. And they resampled that same population again in 2013. They found that positive attitudes towards wolves decreased. Negative attitudes increased. They largely attributed those changes due to perceived competition over deer and a concern for personal safety. And they saw, found and increased support for wolf management, particularly for lethal controls. That again, lethal controls being killing of wolves that are attacking livestock or pets near homes. So another researcher also out of the UW-Madison looked at—this is a colleague of mine—looked at focus groups. 

She kind of went across the state and did, held focus groups with bear hunters, livestock owners, and deer hunters across the state. And talked to them about wolves. And found that there was pretty—there was frustration with the federal involvement in wolf management, suggesting that—some of them saying literally that they felt it tied the hands of the DNR. And an overall feeling of lack of empowerment to deal with wolves, particularly these problem wolves.
And this is a quote from her research, “I am mostly neutral. I don’t like them, but what really bothers me is that our hands are tied behind our back protecting ourselves and our herd.” I believe that quote was from a livestock owner. She also found that many indicated that they would be, they would try to kill a wolf in certain situations even though it was currently illegal at that time that she did, she did that initial survey. 
The other research that I referred to earlier also found that hunter respondents that would illegally kill wolves also increased over this time period that we’re talking about when we saw those conflicts increase. So here we’re seeing what appears to be a—a changing attitudes towards wolves over this time period where we have a lot of this kind of back and forth in wolf management status. 

We see changes in the inclination to participate in anti-wolf behavior such as illegal killing. And here’s a little bit more of—oh, sorry. Here’s some quotes regarding kind of illegal killing and this kind of inclination to illegally kill wolves. These are also from Browne-Nuñez et al 2015. Now I’ll just kind of pull out the bottom one here. A bear hunter’s philosophy is if you shoot a wolf, don’t even tell yourself. And this northeast farmer on the top here, there’s not a cattleman that wouldn’t thank you for shooting a wolf if you’re hunting on his property or his neighbor’s.  Just so you’re—I’ll shorten that up a little bit. But her research really kind of looked into the depth of how people viewed wolves. Um, at least a particular sub-set of people viewed wolves, and particularly was—drew out some of these kind of conflicts and this inclination to illegally kill wolves. 

Now what we found was when we said, okay there’s an increase in inclination to illegally kill wolves, has there actually been an increase in illegal killing of wolves over this same time period? Because that would be, that would, that would kind of confirm those earlier suspicions of that environmental assessment. What we in fact found was that indices of illegal killing did in fact correlate with percentage of the year that the state had management authority to kill those depredating wolves. And so we found that proportion of the collared wolves that were legally killed correlated significantly with state management authority, proportion of annual mortality that was a result of illegal killing for both the total population and the subset of the population that was radio-collared. We also found in a separate analysis that a radio-collared wolf was twice as likely to die as a result of illegal killing following a summer that did not have any lethal control in place during that summer. 
What we also found which was kind of surprising, was we were able to calculate an estimated, because some illegal is not able to be detected, we were actually able to using the proportion of the radio-collared population, that was illegally killed. We were able to actually calculate a kind of an estimate of overall illegal killing for a year. And what we found in this graph, just to kind of summarize it real simply is that there appeared to be even more cryptic killing of wolves when the state lost that management authority. So kind of what I mean by cryptic killing is people poaching it and trying to—trying to hide it essentially. 
So this is similar to what we’ve seen. 

Or what Erica Von Essen, a researcher, has documented over in Sweden and Finland. She’s found kind of what appears to be a very similar story in Sweden and Finland where this—the marginalization of the rural—is experienced by hunters under the EU conservation policy. That’s led in part to, she argues, to a radicalization of the hunting sub-culture in these two countries. And failure to grant recognition to that sub-culture has led to radicalization of some individuals and led to illegal killing. And that this practice is basically terminating this political discussion about how to manage wolves in those countries. And it represents a danger to political legitimacy. 
Now additionally my, this, I, I would also argue that this kind of inconsistency in management authority also set the stage for the, the wolf, the legislatively mandated wolf harvest bill to be introduced and then passed through the state legislature and then signed into law. And that, that happened fairly quickly with, and it was, it was a fairly prescriptive harvest time, which I think probably led to some court challenges in both the state and federal level. 
So how do we kind of, how do we get a grasp of all this? How do we maybe slow down this kind of conflict that keeps bringing wolves from endangered to not endangered and hunted and how do we slow down that—kind of moderate the frequency and the arc of that pendulum? 

Well, I turned to the researchers here Red Path et al who wrote this paper on conservation conflicts which is just another synonym for the human-human conflicts that I’ve been talking about today. 
And they mainly looked at elephant crop damage. Red grout and raptor conflict over in Europe. They looked at a variety of different situations. Spotted owl in the logging industry. And what they’ve, what they’ve pointed out is that when two groups—two stakeholder groups view a conflict as a win or lose situation, it will eventually result in what’s in game theory, is a zero-sum game. Where one, one stakeholder group wins and the other loses. And these researchers argue that in order to push that from a zero-sum game to some other—some non-zero-sum game—possibly a compromise which we see. Oh, what just happened here? Ha ha. 

There we go. Okay. Which we see here. I’m just going to use the laser pointer. Which we see right here—we see a compromise—or a win-win, or a lose-lose. Those would be your non-zero-sum games. So basically where—a compromise is where, you know, the two groups, neither is necessarily winning, but neither is necessarily losing. Or the win-win where they’re both kind of, it’s a compromise that actually works out and benefits both of them equally. So, um, what they argue in order to move from this, these kind of win-lose games into this non, into the win-win or the compromise, is that the two groups need to. In order to be, you know, cooperate, they need to actually realize that it’s a shared problem. 

And I think what our research has done that I presented here to you today, actually demonstrates that it’s indeed a shared problem. And that the two groups should probably start working together to achieve these non-zero-sum games. Outcomes, excuse me. So kind of in summary, in summary I would argue that there have been some unintended consequences of this back and forth in wolf management authority. Mainly we see an increases in illegal killing associated with a less proportion of the—less of the year with state management authority. And we also see declining attitudes—declining tolerance towards wolves. In addition to that, I would argue that in order to moderate this kind of socio-political conflict, and that might provide greater flexibility for managers that are trying to meet the conservation goals for the species. In order to do that we need to mitigate wolf-human conflicts. I have, I’ve done a lot of research on this particular component, but that’s one thing that I think, you know, continuing to work on mitigating wolf-human conflict is really important, and I particularly want to emphasize this point: empowerment. Empowerment of locals who live with wolves, especially when wolves have reached populations that are deemed recoverable. 

Empowering locals who live with wolves, to deal with problem wolves is very important. And what’s, what’s not talked about enough is also empowering non-consumptive users. Non-consumptive users obviously want a voice at the table in wildlife management and I think it’s important to find avenues for non-consumptive users to continue to provide a voice in wildlife management, as well as fund wildlife management, because currently a lot of wildlife management is funded through, you know, fees for, for licensing and permits from hunters and fisherman and anglers, excuse me. And also in order to achieve this, we’ll need to address this perceived conflict over deer. Is it reality? And how do we address this? How do we manage this relationship between predator, prey, and us. And I would argue that states should avoid prescriptive harvest legislation. Otherwise it may result—as it did in the state of Wisconsin—in continued back and forth following the prescriptive harvest legislation of the wolf harvest bill we saw both state level court cases as well as a federal court case. And instead focus a little bit more on conflict resolution by bringing the various stakeholders to the table in a, in a, as a group and discuss the various issues to try to find as common interests and work on those common interests instead of focusing on the points of disagreement. 

And lastly we actually—I’m referring to myself and some of my collaborators—on this research. We also recommend that maybe a step wise delisting process through the endangered species act could help facilitate—excuse me not facilitate but could smooth that transition from federal to state management authority. What we saw there was that first wolves were reclassified, if you remember that timeline—wolves were reclassified to threatened status in the state. That still has some levels of protection for wolves, under the endangered species act, but also allows the state to—some authority to remove depredating wolves. And so that, that, but then after that you saw it went from straight delisted to relisted. And so having that step-wise delisting process could help smooth that transition because it’s kind of a grad—instead of jumping from full federal authority to full state authority it’s kind of an intermittent step in there. 
And finally, I want to conclude by acknowledging all the many people that have helped me develop these thoughts, and worked with me very intently on this project. I should acknowledge this work is based on a recent publication that was just published in the Journal of Conservation Letters. You can look it up online if you’re interested. But that was with some co-authors Tim Van Deelen, Adena Rissman, Adrian Wydeven, Zack Voyles, Christine Browne-Nuñez, Victoria Shelley, Jen Stenglein—I think I’ve covered everybody—but, and beyond that there’ve been a lot of other people that have supported this work in exploring this avenue of wolf management with me. 

I also want to thank, you know, the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, Department of Natural Resources, National Science Foundation, USDA APHIS Wildlife Services. For obviously their folks are doing, collecting a lot of the data that I’m using. As well as the Department of Natural Resources folks, and last but not least, Northland College. So with that I’ll take. I like to save a lot of time for any questions, so with that I’ll take some questions.  
[applause]

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