Albuquerque Journal; Journal Southern Bureau
Wolf-Proof Shelters Go Up for School Kids
By Rene Romo
Sunday, December 2, 2007
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/state/266402nm12-02-07.htmLAS CRUCES— Catron County parents say they're just concerned
about the safety of their children.
Animal activists say it's an overreaction.
Reserve Independent Schools is building wolf-proof shelters for
school bus stops in southwest New Mexico, where the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service has reintroduced the Mexican gray wolf.
The decision to create coop-like bus stops in this mostly rural
school district stems from "numerous reports of wolf sightings and
wolf activity in close proximity to our children," Superintendent
Loren Cushman said in an Oct. 30 memo on the project.
Enclosed wooden shelters will have wire-mesh covered windows on
the front and sides. The goal is to install the first of about 20
shelters by late December, Cushman said.
"Whether a person is pro or con wolf, we think it's a deterrent to
build these shelters," Cushman told the Journal. "We need to do
everything we can to protect our children."
Catron County residents, ranchers and outfitters— as well as many
of the county's elected officials— have been outspoken critics of the
Mexican gray wolf recovery program.
In 1998, the program started reintroducing the federally declared
endangered species to the wilds of southwestern New Mexico and
southeastern Arizona, where they had been hunted and trapped to near
extinction.
Dave Parsons, a former Fish and Wildlife Service coordinator of
the wolf recovery program, says the district is overreacting.
Wolves, he said, "elicit a reaction that is disproportionate to
the evidence that they pose a real threat."
The federally led effort to restore the wolves to the wild has
struggled. At the beginning of the year, 59 wolves were in the
recovery area, which includes national forests in southwestern New
Mexico and southeastern Arizona.
Kids followed
Cushman's memo cited two children from the Reserve area who on the
last day of school in May reported they were followed by a wolf during
their half-mile walk home from a school bus stop.
"The situation could have become tragic very quickly," he wrote.
Cushman has a 6-year-old daughter and said he worries about her when
she is outside their Reserve-area home.
The May report, along with other wolf sightings and attacks on
livestock and pets, led the district to "take further steps in
protecting our children," Cushman said.
Brenda McCarty, mother of the 13-year-old boy and 11-year-old girl
who reported being followed by a wolf, said her children no longer
walk to or from the bus stop and are afraid to go anywhere outside the
house by themselves.
McCarty said she has seen wolves in the area three miles north of
Reserve, and her family regularly hears a wolf howling near their
home.
She said her children are not as spooked as they were immediately
after the May wolf sighting, but "They are very cautious. They don't
go anywhere by themselves. ... Once it's dusk, nobody goes outside
anymore."
Threat questioned
Catron County ranchers have protested the wolf reintroduction
program since its outset, mostly because of recurring livestock kills.
But increasingly, protests from residents— often channeled through
elected officials and livestock groups— have centered on fears for the
safety of children.
When the Catron County Commission last month announced plans to
try to trap what it considered a dangerous wolf, unafraid of humans,
Chairman Ed Wehrheim said, "Wolves in Catron County are displaying the
exact behavior displayed by wolves that killed and ate Kenton
Carnegie."
It was not a reference to a southwestern New Mexico incident but
one in Canada: the Nov. 8, 2005, death in northern Saskatchewan of a
22-year-old engineering student from Ontario. A coroner's inquest
found Carnegie's death to be the first recorded case in North America
in the last 100 years of a human being killed by wolves, though some
biologists disputed the finding.
There have been documented cases of wolf attacks on humans in
North America over the last century. And there have been documented
wolf kills of humans in other parts of the world, though unprovoked
attacks by nonrabid wolves on people are considered rare.
"For sure, wolves ought to be respected for their ability to kill
anything they want to, but the facts of the matter are they have not
demonstrated any proclivity to attack humans," said Parsons, the
former wolf program coordinator. He is now a conservation biologist
with the Albuquerque-based Rewilding Institute.
"Certainly, there are a lot of other things out there that are a
much greater threat," he said.
Parsons cited a recent study by Sarah Lathrop, a veterinarian and
epidemiologist with the state Office of the Medical Investigator, who
found there were 63 animal-caused deaths of humans in New Mexico
during the 12-year stretch from 1993 through 2004.
Dog maulings caused three deaths. Sheep, rams specifically, killed
two elderly women. Cattle were responsible for nine deaths.
But the majority— 43 deaths, Lathrop said in an interview— were
caused by human interaction with horses, either after a fall from a
horse or after having been bucked, kicked, crushed or dragged by a
horse. Two people died from blunt-force injury to the chest after
being head-butted by a horse.
Publicity ploy?
Cushman ordered the wolf-proof bus stop shelters himself after
informing the school board.
The shelters will be built by Reserve High School students in
vocational classes, the superintendent said.
The district is accepting donations to help pay for the shelters,
which require about $400 in materials each, and Cushman said
volunteers are welcome to help build them.
The Curry County Farm and Livestock Bureau board, over on the east
side of the state, voted in September to donate money to the effort.
"This is the world turned upside down when we have to put our
children in cages to protect them from wolves nobody wants, sicced on
the citizens by their own government," Curry County Farm Bureau
President Dee Brown was quoted as saying in the New Mexico Farm and
Livestock Bureau newsletter. "This has got to stop."
Michael Robinson, a Silver City area representative of the Center
for Biological Diversity, a leading proponent of the wolf
reintroduction program, said he considered the bus stop shelters a
stunt "designed to get the sympathy of the public when the real
concern is safety of their livestock."
Robinson said rural Catron County is full of potential threats,
including black bears, mountain lions, rattlesnakes and javelinas.
Unaccompanied children are at risk regardless of the presence of
wolves, Robinson said.
Cushman, whose family has seen wolves near their home about 10
miles north of Reserve, denied the shelters are a public relations
ploy. He said one of his daughters saw a wolf kill their barn cat
about a year ago.
"I actually woke up one night about a year ago thinking about it,"
Cushman said. "No, it's not a publicity stunt."