Founder's Blog

This is no time to be fearful of the recent news that the USFWS is appealing the decision to protect wolves in the lower 48 states. Instead, it is time to vote. There is reason for hope for wolves with a possible Harris Walz Whitehouse.

We know many are very concerned that the Biden administration’s USFWS is joining the appeal to overturn the endangered species listing of nearly all wolves. Here are some insights we have to help keep you calm:

• USFWS always supports delisting no matter who is in the Whitehouse. So rather than point fingers at the current administration, realize there are powerful special interest groups influencing agencies’ actions when it comes to wildlife.

• One of our best push-back levers is at the ballot box. Voting is an important tool and we have the opportunity to use it. We will vote like wolves depend on it.

• The Trump administration took all wolves out from federal protections and called it a day on wolf recovery. Then the slaughters happened.

• Harris and Walz both have far better track records when it comes to wolves. 

• Our courts help keep agencies in-check. The courts have generally protected wolves from the USFWS’ delisting up to this point and government lawyers for USFWS have lost every time. Which is why wolves still exist in the lower 48 states.

• If you care about wolves, you have to care about the courts. The future of the federal bench  is in the hands of the next president and congress—so vote pro-wolf.

• The appeals case is complex and will take time, likely more than a year. 

 Of course, we shake our finger at the Biden administration for allowing the USFWS to join appellants like the State of Utah and Safari Club International to stop wolf recovery. This shows the power behind the push to stop wolf recovery.

For local Minnesota races— early voting starts September 20, 2024!

We know the candidates in Minnesota who will stand up for wolf packs at the State Capitol. Every seat in the MN House of Representatives is up for election this year.  

To see your local candidates’ positions on wolf hunting and trapping in Minnesota, as well as other issues affecting Minnesota wolves, follow the link to the 2024 candidate survey responses and incumbents’ votes at the legislature. 

 LEARN ABOUT YOUR CANDIDATES' POSITIONS > 

     In northern Minnesota we have a 2 week firearms deer season. This 2014 season was from November 8th to sundown on the 23rd. Several events this year are note worthy enough to cite here.

     1. The Minnesota Deer Hunters Association (MDHA) held a series of public meetings with the MN DNR last year in order to arm twist them into acknowledging that the deer herd is drastically down. The MDHA, which the DNR considers a "client," bowed to the MDHA wishes and greatly curtailed the number of doe permits which made the season (mostly) bucks only.

     My take on this: The Minnesota deer herd, if down, is still too high. Deer numbers are impacting the ecology of our forests. Nearly all forest ecologists agree that behind climate change, an over populated deer herd is number 2 in posing a threat to the health and longevity of MN's forests. As for the poor hunter success rates of tagging whitetails by the states deer hunters is more the cause & effect of too many hunters who have become dependent on a plethora of gadgets. From what I see and hear from others, the vast majority of hunters rely on ATV's to get anywhere in the woods during the hunt. One need look no further than the thick catalog of Cabala's to see where many hunters focus their attention. Deer are nocturnal animals and with tens of thousands of ATV's rumbling throughout Minnesota's forest lands during the hunting season, it's no doubt that the numbers of deer harvested (I don't like that term "harvest") is down. Who but anyone in their right mind would doubt this. In the woods around me, opening morning sounds like military maneuvers at Camp Ripley. It's tail gates dropping, ATV ramps banging, two stroke engines warming and noisy engines heading off into the land of the elusive whitetail deer.

     2. The weather during this entire period was below normal in temperatures and saw some winds that were persistently strong.

     My take: If you are a serious hunter, there are ways to effectively hunt in these conditions. One very effective way is to "still hunt", which is slowly taking a few steps, then stopping and looking and listening, then repeating this stop and go method - the movement helps keep the blood moving, something hard to do if you can't get your butt off your ATV seat. When bucks are in rut and does are in estrus, they will move, unless the woods is full of motorized traffic....then deer wait till sundown when the noisy machines and ignorant hunters leave.

     3. And the presence of wolves and the third MN wolf hunt with 250 permits issued is also another issue with hunters.

     My take: During the entire week preceding the rifle hunt, I was in the woods daily with my stick bow. During this period, I saw unbelievable numbers of deer and most especially some nice mature bucks. Once opening weekend of the rifle season started, the numbers of deer I saw dropped about 50%. Deer have always tended to become more nocturnal during the gun season but during the last 20 years this tendency has greatly increased. I attribute this to the modern gadget addicted hunter rather then having hunters who have the basic understanding of the habits of white tailed deer which I refer to as being the soul of caution.

     Last Thursday evening well after sundown, I and my son-in-law heard a pack of wolves howling quite persistently at a distance of not more than 200 yards from my backdoor. During the next 2 days, we saw between 12 and 15 deer. And they were heard again at sunrise on Friday but at a greater distance. Now, I am not suggesting that the deer we saw is wholly attributable to the wolves but I am saying that wolves move deer around and that's a good thing for hunters like me. A deer has senses more acutely attuned to his world than our meager understanding will ever grasp. They can, in a metaphysical sense, disappear into thin air from us dumb humans. Wolves root them out and move them around. As I have written before, as among most Indian people, including the Koyukon's of Alaska, see the wolf as “the master predator among the animals of the north, possessing intelligence and strength, keen senses, and above all the ability to hunt cooperatively. Like the humans that they watch from afar, wolves multiply their muscle and mind by cooperating in pursuit of prey, then share the spoils. Indeed, for the Koyukon, the similarity between wolves and humans is no coincidence – in the Distant Time, a wolf-person lived among people and hunted with them. When they parted ways, they agreed that wolves would sometimes make kills for people or drive game to them, as a repayment for favors given when wolves were still human.” [Make Prayers to the Raven,” Richard K. Nelson, p.159]

     In hook & bullet publications and letters to editors I read extreme embellishments of the number of wolves in N MN. Hunters report seeing more wolf tracks than deer tracks, that wolves are out of balance and need management, and wolves going on killing sprees. I live in the woods, I study the interactions of all wildlife and I do not see this. Yes, there are wolves distributed throughout the northwoods but as for claims of our forests being over taken by wolves is just ridiculous. Wolves do a good job of remaining in balance within their range. It is the whitetail whose numbers exceed the sustainability of the forest. I have been hunting deer for a half century. I have a perspective that most hunters do not. In the 1960's, with wolves absent from most of their current range, deer population was without question, the lowest it has been in my lifetime. The deer population from 2000 up to today has exceeded one million - the largest numbers of whitetails in history. This same period (2000 to 2014) coincides with a steady population of 3,000 wolves. How do these anti-wolf hunters explain this?

     Time after time, I see the wolf as an asset rather than a liability. Hunters need to get out of that group think mentality and observe more closely the plant and animal communities in which they hunt. Hunting was never meant to be a 21st century gadget driven pass-time till the recreational-industrial complex got into the equation, it was and is meant to be a link with our far distant past. It is to be a port-hole into that past. It is not the job of government resource departments to make game farms out of the northwoods. We are still lucky to have a semblance of wildness in our northern forests. Remove the wolf and the wildness is gone. As Wisconsin's great conservationist, Aldo Leopold said, "...the autumn landscape in the north woods is the land, plus a red maple, plus a ruffed grouse. In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre. Yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead. An enormous amount of some kind of motive power has been lost." I would argue that by removing the wolf, or reducing him to a remnant, we have removed or crippled that great "motive power," "we toppled the spire off an edifice a building since the morning stars first sang together." The wolf, the deer and the raven have been together since we were throwing spears. They are the front line of wildness, yet untamed by man and industry.

PROTECTING WOLVES, ONE HEALTH AND HUMANITY:
STOP CRYING WOLF! CRY FOR THE WOLVES
By Michael W. Fox, BVetMed, PhD, DSc, MRCVS

Wolves embody the same spark that ignites and sustains the human spirit, and the One Health of Earth.
I speak and write about wolves as a veterinarian, scientist and bioethicist who has raised wolf
cubs and studied their behavior, development and communication. Without wolves in my life, I
would not likely have earned the doctor of science degree in animal behaviour/ethology from
London University, England. I have authored and edited several academic books about wolves
and other wild canids, and the award-winning book of fiction for children, The Wolf.
One of the founding fathers of the science of animal behavior/ethology, Nobel prize laureate
Konrad Lorenz, MD, proclaimed “Before you can really study an animal you must first love it.”
Native American Indian Chief Dan George put it this way: “If you talk to the animals they will
talk with you and you will know each other. If you do not talk to them, you will not know them,
and what you do not know you will fear. What one fears one destroys.”
Those who know wolves would respect rather than seek to destroy them. I can attest to their high
degree of intelligence, insight, playful humor and empathy as detailed in my popular book The
Soul of the Wolf. Wolves are exemplary parents, instilling obedience in their cubs so essential for
their survival as well as self-control, gentleness and pack-cooperation/mutual aid. They will
bring food to a pack-mate who is injured, most often while hunting. Conflicts between packs are
rare but when food is scarce there can be injuries, deaths and dispersal.
The vital role of wolves in contributing to the health of deer and other wildlife and their
ecosystems, and to public health have been well documented. The ecological, environmental and
public health services that wolves provide help rectify the ecological, environmental and public
health costs of the livestock industry, too long denied. (https://drfoxonehealth.com/post/wolves-
and-human-well-being-ecological-public-health-concerns/).
When subjected to human encroachment, shooting, trapping, snaring, denning and poisoning. the
integrated nuclear-family and stabilizing pack and clan associations of wolves are disrupted,
resulting in suffering, starvation and social conflicts. From a humane as well as from the
scientific and bioethical perspectives of One Health, it is enlightened self-interest to protect
wolves and engage in planetary “CPR” (-conservation, preservation and restoration). Supporting
cattle ranchers by exterminating wolves and other predators and subsidizing the beef industry
simply fuels global warming, climate change and loss of biodiversity. It also perpetuates the
unquestioned cultural norm and consumer health risks of meat-based diets.
The fundamental lesson from the ecology of wolf and other large predators is that they naturally
control their numbers (Arian D. Wallach et al. Oikos Feb. 16 th
2015. https://doi.org/10.1111/oik.01977 See also https://nywolf.org/2021/06/wolves-naturally-
limit-their-own-numbers-2/). There are too many of us who kill billions of animals annually from
land and sea to consume as a dietary staple to not harm the environment. The most significant
correctives are to transition to plant-based diets and the implementation of new food

biotechnologies such as animal cell bioreactors producing safe and nutritious, cruelty-free
analogs of meat and other animal products. This would eliminate the justification of predator
control/killing; cruel farm animal factories and feedlots; stressful transportation and mass
slaughter of terrified animals; put an end to hunting and fishing and to many food-borne
illnesses; and reduce climate change and loss of biodiversity.
The giving and taking of lives, predators and prey, as the dynamics of forest, deer and wolf
demonstrate, evidence how the ecological whole of biodiversity is maintained and sustained.
Add the human takings of timber, mining, agriculture, hunting deer, incursion of livestock and
land developers, and taking of wolves as trophies and for their fur is a crime against Nature and
to the spirit and sensibilities of our own humanity.
Environmental/ecological eugenics is a relatively new and imprecise science involving the
selective extermination of invasive species and re-introduction, like wolves into Yellowstone
National Park and beavers into their original wetland habitats where they were trapped to
extinction, with documented benefits in terms of enhanced natural biodiversity. Such eugenics of
wildlife management and habitat restoration and conservation contrasts the harmful
consequences of agribusiness food-industry eugenics with the selective killing of insects, for
example, with insecticides that now threaten bees and other vital crop pollinators and have
decimated naturally pest- controlling insectivorous amphibian, reptile, avian and bat populations:
And the killing of predators to protect livestock that infect other wildlife with diseases, the
absence of predators accelerating the loss of biodiversity and incursion of invasive species. The
only justification to ever cull or relocate a wolf pack would be if they were to put endangered
species at risk, which has never occurred. We humans put the most species at risk.
It is, perhaps, poetic irony, if not Nature’s retribution, that we are suffering the catastrophic and
escalating consequences of climate change and of potentially pandemic diseases transmitted
from animals to humans that natural biodiversity once helped contain, as the science and
bioethics of One Health affirms. An amendment to the U.S. Constitution incorporating the
essence of a Universal Bill of Rights for Animals and Nature codified in 2011 in my book
Animals and Nature First could establish the U.S. as the leader for the formation of a United
Environmental Nations to collaboratively achieve the One Health imperatives of planetary CPR-
(conservation, protection and restoration). We are surely not powerless to stop the wanton
destruction, the needless killing and endless suffering. In a restored democracy there would be
justice for all. From the Christian perspective of the Rev. James Parks Morton, “Ecology is the
science of the body of Christ through which we of the Earth community learn our sacred
connections.”
In respecting and protecting the wolf we do no less for our humanity. Chief Black Elk, an Oglala
Lakota Sioux holy man, warrior, and survivor of Wounded Knee, proclaimed: “Nothing will be
well unless we learn to live in harmony with the Power of the World as it lives and moves and
does its work.” This Power of the World, from Nature’s life-sustaining biodiversity, is in every
creature and breath we take. In harming this Power of the World, we fall from grace toward
extinction as a rational, responsible and compassionate species. What kinds of human
phenotypes/subspecies emerge from the Anthropocene apocalypse of what scientists are now
calling Earth’s sixth mass extinction, remains to be seen.

We are the mothers and fathers of tomorrow, and how well we care for and protect wolves and
all of our relations in Nature’s biodiversity today, will be our legacy. The Call of the Wild-the
spirit of creative freedom and genius loci- will be no more if we do not effectively address the
Nature Deficit Disorder in children and the escalating Empathy Deficit Disorder in most
societies today. All school districts should have access to Natural History and Wildlife Education
and Rehabilitation centers and on-line educational materials incorporating environmental
education. The animal circus and road-side zoo “animal experience” is detrimental to a child’s
cognitive and emotional development. We must recover the kind of sensibility expressed by
Australian aboriginal elder Bill Neidjie: “If you feel sore…headache, sore body, that mean
somebody killing tree or grass. You feel because your body in that tree or earth. Nobody can tell
you, you got to feel it yourself.”
None of us could function well with half a lung; broken bones and blood poisoning; impaired
nervous, endocrine and immune systems. Neither can planet Earth. These and other medical
conditions are evident in analogous form in the environmental dysbiosis we have caused: felling
forests, lungs of the Earth; breaking mountains apart and poisoning streams and waterways;
polluting our air, food and water; decimating and disrupting terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems
and the lives therein, plant, animal and microbial. These ecosystems are now disintegrating on
the path toward extinction. Only in the advancement of One Health is there reason for hope,
forever nascent in the spirituality of reverence for life and embedded in the principles of justice
and frugality.
Wolves revered by indigenous peoples East and West. ( https://ralphhaussler.weebly.com/wolf-
mythology): In the Shinto religion of Japan the wolf is a guardian when it is properly attended to
and cared for. Farmers used to worship wolves at shrines and left food offerings near
their dens, beseeching them to protect their crops from wild boars and deer. Hindus traditionally
considered that the hunting of wolves was a taboo since they feared that it may cause a bad
harvest. According to Minnesota Ojibwe elder Jim Merhar “When the world started, the wolf
was put here to help people. You can think of it almost like dogs today. The wolf is a partner to
man.” ( https://northernwilds.com/culture-prophecy-bind-ojibwe-people-wolves). In 2010, the
Red Lake Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota, was the first to adopt a wolf management plan. They
designated the band's 843,000 acres of land as a wolf sanctuary in an effort to help save wolves.
To live and let live is a democratic ecological principle; a consummation devoutly to be wished
in accord with the Golden Rule. Saving the wolf today will help save our humanity tomorrow.

Dr. Fox lives in Golden Valley Minnesota. Email IPAN@erols.com. Website
www.drfoxonehealth.com
Addendum: Minnesota’s updated wolf plan “strengthens wolf conservation.”
The DNR has finalized an updated wolf management plan that incorporates the diverse views of
Minnesotans and will guide the state’s approach to wolf conservation for the next 10 years. The
plan includes summary information about Minnesota’s wolf population and the history of wolves
in the state. It details the diverse and changing public attitudes about wolves, the legal status of
wolves, tribal perspectives on wolves, and ways to support a healthy and resilient wolf

population while minimizing conflicts between humans and wolves. The plan also includes a
framework for how the state will approach decisions about wolf hunting or trapping if the wolf is
delisted federally.
A full version of the updated plan and information about the planning process is on the  DNR
wolf plan page.
For an excellent recording of wolf howls, visit  https://youtu.be/JQUHDWHa7WQ

WILDLIFE RESEARCH NEEDS BIOETHICAL BOUNDARIES AND VETERINARY SUPERVISION

There are several documented, and many word-of mouth accounts of chemically immobilized and otherwise restrained endangered species like the Asian elephant and African wild dog being severely injured, killed or dying soon after capture and/or release. In some instances there was an association with the animals being injected with un-tested and un-approved modified live virus vaccines. In other instances the injured or killed animal was a pregnant or nursing mother.

 Experienced veterinary supervision is called for especially when research biologists are loose in the field using drugs and vaccines on their animal subjects and applying various methods of capture and restraint which may cause serious injury, capture myopathy and even death. (Dr. Hackett's note: Stress Cardiomyopathy is due to the emotional stress of the capture and causes cardiac muscle to be unable to contract properly and pump blood because it becomes like an octopus' motion under the massive surge in stress hormones. The federal trapper whom I discussed this with did not believe me until I informed him this is a common clinical event seen in captive animals and people too--he had no clue. Thus the need for veterinarian supervision).

Wildlife continue to be harassed, stressed, and subjected to these in-field risks so that tissue and blood samples can be taken (though DNA evidence can be obtained from feces and rubbing/marking areas), radio collars and even cameras fitted,  and microchips implanted. The generation of more scientific data from such field research may help advance careers and engender more funding, and give some substance to wildlife management schemes. But when the animals in question are put at risk, and there are no in-place regulations and effective law enforcement to protect and restore their existing habitats, and to extend same in order to help minimize accelerating loss of genetic biodiversity, then these wildlife researchers should cease and desist.

 Such activities alone have nothing to do with wildlife conservation and at best give the false impression that something is being done, the foreign presence alone being a deterrent to poaching etc etc. Yet in reality from a bioethical perspective, the risks to the animals far exceed the immediate and foreseeable benefits. So I appeal to all appropriate institutions, governmental and non-governmental, for-profit and not-for profit, to encourage alternative, non-invasive wildlife research, and to cease funding and permitting any form of wildlife capture except for urgent veterinary and conservation-translocation reasons.

---Dr. Michael W. Fox

www.twobitdog.com/Drfox/