Wolf Country

by John Theberge

  In retrospect, their motive was transparent, but at the time we were mystified. We had not yet seen the letters. By studying only two packs, we would have no data on the wolf population as a whole that could be used to comment upon the adequacy or inadequacy of the park to protect wolves.

  We remembered Doug Pimlott’s prediction years before when he handed us the wolf research. He told us that “they will throw endless barriers in your way.” His prophecy was coming true. We were learning that although some MNR people supported our research, others, in particular the politically sensitive senior managers, were looking at us askance for raising difficult issues. Issue-avoiders rather than issue-solvers often taint government departments, especially at senior levels. These are people who see their job primarily as “protecting their minister.” Wolf management invariably becomes a hot political issue that many politicians, and therefore senior managers, would just as soon avoid. Better to get rid of the individuals raising the problems than to solve them.

  MNR personnel were familiar with our research because we had to apply for an annual permit. They also knew it because we made the unfortunate tactical mistake in those early years of offering to do research cooperatively. Perpetually short of money, we applied to a government-funded program for university research called the Ontario Renewable Resource Research Grant (ORRRG) and were successful for a while. The government, however, acted as if its contribution to our research, which is largely funded by World Wildlife Fund Canada, implied control.

  So, over the course of a few frustrating, hot summer days we sat on our deck at home and rewrote a research outline to focus on two packs. MNR biologist Dennis Voigt provided telephone guidance. When completed, the MNR approved of our now-innocuous research — “good science” — and we drove back to the park. The time lost in the field had cost us some important continuity in our data.

  After the meeting in Huntsville, we became an excuse for a couple of delegated watchdogs to get out of the office periodically “on inspection.” Our student crews were visited in the field by these people who were seemingly just passing through, although often our camps were remote, not in the sort of places you get to just by chance.

  There were more meetings, never as openly hostile as the first but obviously intended to find some reason to discredit our data or us. We even learned of a mid-level employee in the Huntsville office who was told that “we have been trying to close them down for three years” and then was directed to “try to get something on them.” Instead of complying, he told a member of our research group.

  By then the script was becoming obvious, and MNR senior managers played it out without flaw. Confrontations such as this between researchers and bureaucrats occur often enough that they are discussed and joked about in a bitter way in university faculty lounges across the continent. They represent government’s usual reaction to those whose research points to needed but politically difficult changes in policy. Knowing the expected train of events removed any element of surprise. In the first act, research objectives are questioned and criticized as either not worthwhile or not justifying the funds. In the next act, the researchers typically find themselves faced with a mountain of administrative trivia, followed by threats of closure for non-compliance over a host of minor logistic procedures. The third act features efforts to refute the research findings. The bureaucrats raise technical issues related to sample sizes, research design, and related topics. The last act, in plays that go on that long, is the dramatic finale: attempts are made to discredit the researchers themselves.

  I know of a university scientist whose career in Ontario was ruined because he was among the first to find compelling evidence that acid rain was a serious problem. At a large gathering of scientists a decade later, the Environment Minister publicly acknowledged both the problem and the attempted, and for a long time successful, cover-up.

  After the first winter of death, 1990-91, the need for a buffer zone to protect wolves outside the park became even more apparent. As we published technical papers and wrote memos for the MNR documenting the increasing wolf deaths, we sensed the MNR’s heightening determination to thwart us. Some of our friends in the MNR, field people who were interested in Algonquin Park, began to keep their distance.

  The following summer and fall, Mary contracted a serious illness that for a time caused us to put aside any thoughts about research. She ate an improperly cooked hamburger at a fast-food outlet the day we began our 1991 summer field work and consequently spent six weeks in an Ottawa hospital, two of them in intensive care. “Hamburger disease” is fatal in many cases and causes permanent kidney failure in most others. Taken by ambulance at top speed to Ottawa, she had a very close brush with both.

  In the Ottawa hospital, as she recovered, we had many long days and evenings to reflect on the situation: people were killing park wolves, the government was refusing to stop them and, worse, appeared to be intent on avoiding the problem by getting rid of us. For a time we thought about closing up, going part-time at the university, and taking trips to see the wildlife spectacles of the world. We resolved to see the migrating wildebeests and their interactions with the big cats in Kenya, the wintering masses of monarch butterflies in the highlands of central Mexico, the humpback whales in the Bay of Fundy, the harp seals on sea-ice off Prince Edward Island, the muskoxen of the western high arctic, and the steaming tropical rain forests of Costa Rica.

  We have acted on that resolve. The periodic trips to far-off places have provided necessary release from the increasingly frustrating aspects of our research. But after coming so close to the end, we viewed the research in a new light, as one of the best wildlife studies anywhere.

  In late August we drove back to the park with renewed respect and love for its wildness and new dedication not to let the MNR beat us. Mary was still too weak to hike, so we just camped in a few favourite places and bathed a few nights in the howls of our radio-collared packs — Jack Pine and Basin Depot.

  Then came the second winter of wolf deaths, not as severe, but following the same pattern of deer and wolf migration and vulnerability. By spring we were willing to face whatever the MNR dealt us to end the wolf killing. Graham had collected sufficient data for his Ph.D. and we had protected him long enough. While we had complied with the MNR and redesigned our research to study two packs, we had made that only a minor add-on. The entire study had continued with only minor modification, as before. My university obligation did not allow me to be manipulated into abandoning a Ph.D. student with an approved research design partway through his degree.

  In the summer of 1992, we were camped north of Basin Lake when Monte Hummel, president of World Wildlife Fund Canada, and his wife, Sherry Pettigrew, came to visit. They came each summer, partly to be sure WWF research dollars were being wisely spent but more because they wanted to get away from the city to the park and its wolves. They have been two solid supporters, buoying us up at crucial times. Monte is universally cheerful.

  For most of their visit we sat in the truck and watched it rain. Their trip was turning into a disaster. In hopes of salvaging it, we proposed an afternoon and night canoe trip down the chain of Turcotte, Guthrie, and Clover lakes to see which of two packs was using an interface area there. At the portage, as we unloaded the canoes in the downpour, Sherry asked if we would be doing this even if they were not there. “Oh sure,” Mary replied with obvious overenthusiasm. We started off, hoping the rain might eventually stop and we would be rewarded by hearing a signal or a pack howl after dark. Instead, the sky stayed grey from horizon to horizon, without a break. At Clover Lake we built a huge pine-stump bonfire to ward off hypothermia and huddled around it. Finally in a premature dusk, we climbed into the canoes and paddled back, rain in our face the whole way.

  At our campsite, the more we talked the more we realized that our efforts to reason things out in meetings with the MNR had failed. It was time to open the issue up for wider public scrutiny. Conservation victories are won out in the open wit
h public exposure. It has always been that way; in a democracy, it should be.

  We also talked of the added danger that going public posed to our research. There is a shameful history of university or independent scientists being closed down by governments over their public opposition to existing policy or recommended change. I think of the pioneering grizzly bear researchers of Yellowstone National Park; the biologist who conducted the first major North American study of wolves, in Alaska’s Denali National Park; a biologist who watched a government research team move in and begin studying the same packs he was already studying; all suffered a similar fate. Then, right at home, Doug Pimlott was closed out of Algonquin Park by the same government that now was trying to do the same to us.

  We knew the Pimlott story well. Doug believed that attitudes about wolves would change only if he tackled them in public. By doing so he raised debate over government policy. Doug also repeatedly, publicly criticized the government over its mismanagement of parks. One day, without any warning, he was advised that he could work in Algonquin no longer. At the time he had a master’s student halfway through his field work. The president of the University of Toronto, where Doug worked, wrote the premier of Ontario that the government had no right to interfere with university research and gave the premier a deadline to change the decision by midnight on a certain date. At 11 P.M. on that day, Doug received a telephone call and was granted permission to continue. He predicted, however, that endless roadblocks would be thrown in his way. So he decided to move on to other things and handed the Algonquin research over to us.

  Our intent was to give broad public exposure to the excessive killing of park wolves and the failure of the MNR to live up to its own wildlife and park conservation mandate. A ban was needed on wolf killing in the townships adjacent to the park. We hoped that public criticism would be more effective than our attempts at reasoning with MNR officials, and that the minister would be embarrassed into taking action.

  We began late in the summer of 1992 with a request to talk with the MNR staff in Pembroke. To a room unexpectedly full of people, Mary and I explained our data and advised that we were going to the public with it. Later, in a leaked confidential memo, district manager Ray Bonenberg reported our intentions to director Al Stewart. In his conclusion, Bonenberg swung his support behind us: “We support in principle that society should not be hunting down and killing an excessive number of wolves due to cultural or social biases.” He had been superintendent of another large provincial park and understood the validity of wildlife protection. Without his decision to support us, we may have accomplished little.

  It was a good start, but our hopes for a quick success were dashed when we advised MNR head office in Toronto of our plans. Chief of wildlife, Jim MacLean, inhabited a typical glass tower in north Toronto. He knew all about the issue and us, but explained that he could not do anything because MNR biologists — George Kolenosky and Dennis Voigt from the research branch and Algonquin Park’s chief interpreter, Dan Strickland — were saying that additional protection for park wolves was unnecessary.

  They claimed that we had not documented a decline in the wolf population. They ignored the evidence in the scientific literature that the level of annual mortality we were finding clearly is not sustainable by wolf populations. They stated that the wolves had been migrating out of the park for many years and the population had managed to survive, ignoring Doug Pimlott’s evidence collected in the 1960s to the contrary. They said that it does not matter if park wolves are killed by humans because a certain number have to die anyway. They paid no attention to our appeal to consider the fractured social system we were documenting.

  We are by no means alone in insisting that wolves and other social carnivores are much more than numbers. Wolf packs are ecological teams; individuals play different roles; skills develop through experience. Alaskan biologist Gordon Haber has argued that the loss of particular individuals, especially the experienced elders in a pack, is equivalent to a basketball team trading away its stars because it can recruit just as many rookies from the minors to replace them and so keep the team the same size. Fitness in a wolf population depends upon the persistence of its social order, and that is impaired when experienced elders are lost.

  We asked Jim MacLean to consider the possibility that he was being given poor advice and to respond officially to our upcoming press release. He said that we would hear from him within ten days. Seven months later we were still waiting. We waited all through the third winter of death, 1992-93, through the loss of the Travers, Grand Lake East, Grand Lake West, and McDonald Creek packs. As we picked up dead wolves week after week, we saw the faces of these men, who to our way of thinking were as much responsible for killing those Algonquin Park wolves as the individuals who set the snares.

  On September 15, 1992, a few days after the MacLean meeting, Graham, Mary, and I drove up from Waterloo, and Monte came from Toronto, to address the Hagarty-Richards Township Council.

  These townships make up most of the Round Lake deer yard. Because we booked this meeting well in advance, we expected a room packed with people, but only the council and one visitor were there. We also had offered to address the Barry’s Bay Rod and Gun Club, but its president wrote back that “the membership feels that no useful purpose would be served by your attendance.” Later, we were castigated in the media for not consulting with local people.

  The council members listened politely to our presentation. After we finished, the mayor explained that she and others feared to let their children out of the house because there were so many wolves around. One councillor asked a familiar question: “What good is a wolf anyway?” The meeting adjourned and we knew we had accomplished nothing.

  Monte headed back to Toronto, and Mary and I drove into the park to collect scats in a rendezvous site used a few weeks before. We put our tent up in the headlights of the truck. The next day among the flaming red maples and yellow poplars, we mulled over the gulf between the two world views and talked about how you can ever answer a question such as the one put to us so often: “What good is a wolf?”

  The WWF press release came out three days later. It called for an “upgrade of provincial wolf conservation policies, as Ontario still allows wolves to be killed all year round with no limit, and with no reporting of the number killed.” The release drew attention to the unwarranted killing of Algonquin wolves. It received a modest flurry of media attention, but did not usurp as much space from the usual topics in the front sections of newspapers as we later would.

  Still, we waited for an MNR response, all the time picking up dead wolves, our anger mounting. The director of parks, Norm Richards, who should have been concerned, declined to answer our letters. Dan Strickland wrote a defence for doing nothing in the Barry’s Bay newspaper, emphasizing that because many pups are born every year, many adult wolves have to die anyway. Renfrew County petitioned the Minister of Natural Resources for permission to reinstate the bounty that was lifted in Ontario in 1972.

  Finally on March 22, 1993, wildlife chief Jim MacLean responded with good news and bad. Good was that the MNR intended to grant our first request, a review and revision of provincial wolf-management policy. That was easy for him to do. Such reviews often are used to shield inertia. They can, and this one did, drag on for years. Today, more than five years later, the completed review is still “at the printers.” The bad news was that “I do not foresee a closure of wolf hunting or trapping in the Round Lake and Whitney areas as you request.”

  Monte answered that “I’m afraid your response has not met our concerns.… ” Mary and I replied, “You are violating your wildlife management policy, your parks policy, your general purpose MNR statement. And for what possible reason — to support a wanton slaughter of animals? Why do you back these people and what they are doing? We were patient to the extreme to wait six months for you to answer our last letter, all the while picking up dead wolves as a result of your inaction.”

  We accompanied ou
r letter with a “Report on Extensive Movements and Mortality of Algonquin Park Wolves, Winter 1992-93” to give the MNR an opportunity to reconsider. Then we prepared a more headline-catching media release describing the killing and MNR indifference, and contacted members of the provincial Opposition party to arrange for the minister to be questioned in the legislature.

  Then, unexpectedly, the MNR phoned to request a meeting in Huntsville. We complied, ready for yet another confrontation, our adrenalin levels high. Director Al Stewart was absent, though the meeting was held in the room next to his office. We wondered why. Only later did we find out that because the outcome of the meeting had been pre-determined, he did not need to come.

  Again we presented graphs, showed slides, explained our results. When we stopped talking, in contrast to every other meeting with MNR officials, we were not immediately put on the defensive. On the contrary, we watched in amazement while the MNR people nodded in accord. They said they should do something to stop this killing, as if they had never known about it before. They discussed among themselves various strategies including appealing to local people or drafting a new game regulation, and decided on the latter. Then they turned to us and asked directly, “What is your bottom line?” We had to think fast, and replied that we wanted closure to wolf hunting and trapping in Hagarty, Richard, and Burns townships while the Algonquin Park wolves normally use that area, December 15 until March 31. To our complete amazement, they agreed.