U of A professor weighs in on wolf population control in Banff

Wednesday, 19 March 2008

An experiment proposed earlier this month by the University of Alberta has been under fire by some environmentalists groups, being denounced as a “bone-headed wolf cull poorly disguised as research” by James Pissot, executive director of Defenders of Wildlife Canada.

Professor Evelyn Merrill of the U of A’s Biological Sciences department has stated that one of the justifications of the project, which involves shooting wolf pups and sterilizing older wolves, would be to provide more elk for hunters.

The experiment is controversial, sparking debate between different governmental organizations. The plan has the support of the provincial government and the Alberta Fish and Game Association (AFGA), but is opposed by Parks Canada. Maurice Nadeau, president of the AFGA, has expressed concern over shrinking ungulate herds due to predation by wolves, while a spokesman for Parks Canada pointed out that attempts at predator control in the 1960s have created unnaturally high prey densities and other problems that are still prevalent.

Mark Boyce, U of A professor and Alberta Conservation Association Chair in Fisheries & Wildlife, clarified the proposal.

“There is not a proposed cull; there is a proposed research project that would explore ways to try to reduce the cull,” he explained. Boyce observed that the current cull is motivated by two factors: livestock depravation and the protection of the Little Smoky caribou herd near Grand Cache.

Boyce noted that a program conducted in the Yukon territories and published in 2004 demonstrated that if the alpha pair in a pack of wolves were sterilized and the pack was reduced to just those two animals, that those two wolves would maintain the territory. The idea is that decreasing the pack size to two wolves would reduce predation while allowing the pack to maintain their territory.

According to Boyce, “It’s going to be a very intensive program” involving “heavy manipulation of the local wolf population.”

The program is proposed to run for five years beginning in 2009, but Boyce is concerned with the ongoing maintenance of the program, explaining that “the danger of entering a wolf cull program like this is that the minute you stop, the wolf population will rebound. This is the sort of thing that you have to keep up year after year.”

Another practical issue raised by Boyce involved the difficulty of detecting the alpha pair. The alpha female would be relatively easy to identify after being seen near a den, but the alpha male would be more difficult to identify, and researchers would have to go by cues such as the wolf having its tail up.

“I’m not in favour of such an intensive proposal, because I don’t believe they are a long-term solution,” he stated. “Predator control is generally not an effective solution, except for in the short term.”

Evelyn Merrill was unavailable for comment.

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