With Mike Styler’s impending retirement as boss of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, Utah has a golden opportunity to make enlightened advances in how it manages public lands, waters and wildlife.
One of Styler’s most notable accomplishments, as described in The Tribune article, was to “prevent the reintroduction of the gray wolf into Utah" and to remove endangered species protections from the wolf by waiving “normal contract rules to allow upfront payment [over the course of several years and amounting to several million dollars] to consultant Ryan Benson, an associate of prominent and politically connected hunting advocate Don Peay.”
Styler’s only justification for this was to compare the gray wolf to T. Rex, which he later downgraded to the velociraptor, as portrayed in the movie Jurassic Park.
The new DNR boss, yet to be confirmed by the Utah Senate, ought to discontinue this practice unless the Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) publicly justifies it with an abundance of peer-reviewed scientific research.
DWR has steadily increased the number of mountain lion hunting permits over the last few years for no apparent reason but to offer “more hunting opportunities.”
In fact, the best available scientific data suggests that, contrary to received opinion, the most effective way to prevent cougar-human conflicts of all sorts is to not hunt them.
If a specific cougar becomes a problem, the remedy is to remove it. General hunts upset the social dynamics and land tenure systems of mountain lion populations, resulting in an increase in the number of conflicts with humans.
The reasons for this are complicated, but ignoring the relevant science could result in the state being sued should, heaven forbid, someone — possibly a child — be killed by a mountain lion.
Also, chronic wasting disease is sweeping through the Rocky Mountains and showing up in Utah’s deer herds. It is always fatal to deer and potentially transmissible to humans. Wolves and cougars selectively prey on diseased and weakened animals and would check the spread of this disease in a way that no hunting program possibly can.
Black bear hunting permits have steadily increased over the last few years, too, with the bulk of new permits going for bear baiting. This is the practice of dumping smelly garbage foods in the forest and shooting the unsuspecting bear from the safety of a tree when it shows up to take the bait. Sometimes baby bears are orphaned and die as a result.
This practice ought to be eliminated until a convincing moral argument can be made for it. It doesn’t square with the old-time hunter ethic of “fair chase,” let alone with contemporary ethical sensibilities regarding animals.
The coyote bounty program is managed by DWR and partly subsidized by taxpayers. Thousands of coyotes are shot each year. Yet there is virtually no scientific evidence that it does anything to benefit other species of wildlife or livestock. Again, the details are somewhat complicated, but this has been confirmed many times over by sophisticated long-term studies.
To the contrary, killing large numbers of coyotes has the potential to upset the natural dynamic ecological balance, thus resulting in more jackrabbits and rodents, and consequently less grass for grazing animals, plus an increase in ticks carrying Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
Last but not least, the new DNR boss would do well to pay attention to a recent scientific report on the decades-long national trend of the “traditionalist” view of wild animals (resources to be utilized) being replaced — even in the “Life Elevated” state — by the “mutualist” view of wild animals as fellow beings worthy of moral consideration.
Kirk Robinson, Ph.D., is executive director of the Western Wildlife Conservancy.
