Our View - Monday

In their sights

Montana rancher under fire for wolf kills

Montana rancher Roger Lang isn’t one of those ranchers who believes the only good wolf is a dead wolf. On the contrary, Lang has gone the extra mile to find ways that his ranching operation and federally reintroduced wolves can coexist, using nonlethal means to keep the packs from eating into his bottom line.

But now Lang has found himself in the cross hairs of wildlife officials, and faces federal criminal charges for killing a protected species after hands on his Madison Valley ranch killed two wolves.

According to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, Lang “experimented with fencing, herders and other nonlethal measures to reduce (wolf) mortalities” on his ranch, despite the growing toll the packs were taking on his livestock. But this year, with the local pack growing to 13 animals and instances of predation on the increase, Lang took a more aggressive stand.

After five yearlings were killed, federal wildlife officials approved culling two adults from the pack. But before federal officials could do the removal, one of Lang’s hands, responding to an imminent threat, killed a pup (he says mistakenly) and an alpha female, making it an illegal take. And that landed Lang in hot water with federal officials and wildlife advocates. He has accepted responsibility for the killings.

Under such circumstances, it seems excessive, and perhaps even outrageous, to prosecute the rancher. It’s the flawed nature of the federal government’s wolf reintroduction effort that should be indicted, not the ranchers and farmers on whom this burden was imposed.

Ranchers can’t always wait for federal officials to show up to remove problem wolves. And the convoluted rules under which ranchers and others must operate understandably try their patience, as the number of wolves, and kills, grows.

And it’s not as though the killings on Lang’s ranch pose any threat to the viability of the program. Wolf populations have been growing at an annual clip of around 20 percent, even as the number of predations and removals also trend upward.

“We’ve got more wolves in more places than we thought we’d ever have,” said Ed Bangs, who heads the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Northern Rockies wolf recovery program.

But now that they’ve unleashed these animals on Westerners, wildlife groups want to tie our hands in managing them. The Natural Resources Defense Council has launched a media campaign in a number of wolf-impacted states, opposing the policy of removing or killing problem wolves. They say that if such killings are allowed, and as states are given more of a role in managing wolves, we could see wolves once again driven to the brink of extinction in the northern Rockies.

But that’s highly unlikely. The program has evolved to the point that states can take the lead. And the feds can reassert themselves any time the population dwindles.

“The bottom line is, the population needs to be controlled in some way, and the state is eager to be able to manage the population,” said a spokeswoman for Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal. And we’ll want that leverage in Colorado, as well, when the animals migrate here in significant numbers.

It’s unlikely Lang will land behind bars for his alleged “crime.” But the mere fact that he faces such a threat for doing nothing more than defending his livestock and livelihood against a pack of wolves is outrageous and unfair. It’s symptomatic, we think, of a rabid and runaway federal government, which, under the guise of doing good, will snarl and bare its teeth at those who don’t go along with the program.

Leave No Child Left Behind behind

In what appears to be a desperate attempt to salvage some semblance of a legacy from a lame-duck period, President Bush indulged in a bit of political theater Tuesday. He assembled a group of civil rights leaders at the White House and herded them into the Rose Garden to plead with Congress to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, the 2001 bill that sought to establish federal performance standards for schoolchildren and ensure that all children achieved proficiency in them by 2014.

Congress would do well to decline the honor. Unfortunately, failing to act would leave the original law in place. Since most politically feasible reforms would make an already flawed law significantly worse, however, that might be the least objectionable outcome.

The centerpiece of No Child Left Behind is a requirement that all students be tested in every year between third and eighth grade and once in high school for proficiency in basic academic skills.

Since schools that do not show improvement on standardized tests can lose federal funding and states still set the standards for “proficiency,” a perverse result of the act has been that some states have lowered their standards to avoid federal sanctions.

Instead of directing more money to classrooms, the act has increased administrative burdens. And the federal government now has more control over issues that were once determined, and rightly so, at the state or local level.

A couple of Republican legislators have proposed a reform called Academic Partnerships Lead Us to Success (A-PLUS, cute, eh?) that would allow states to opt out of No Child Left Behind and reallocate funds toward programs determined at more local levels. Unfortunately, this reform has little chance of passage in the current Congress. Almost all the proposed reforms that have a chance of passage involve even more federal control.

The least-worst course, then, is to ignore the president’s plea and work on reforms to the flawed No Child Left Behind act in a non-election year.