Donald Trump picked up a pen on September 4 and signed an executive order called "Supporting America’s Ranchers," and on paper it reads like exactly the kind of thing that got him elected. The national cattle herd is at a 75-year low. Beef demand is up 10 percent over the last decade. The order tells the Interior Secretary to figure out whether gray wolves and Mexican wolves have met their recovery goals under the Endangered Species Act and, if so, start pulling them off the protected list. It loosens the rules for lethal wolf removal. It tells agencies to speed up depredation claims so ranchers aren’t waiting on some bureaucrat’s clipboard while their calves bleed out in a field.
Sounds like a win for the little guy. And I want to believe it is. I really do.
But here’s where the gut starts talking and the official story starts wobbling.
The government’s own USDA data, the numbers the experts compiled, show that gray wolves account for less than 0.01 percent to 1 percent of total cattle and sheep losses in states where wolves actually live. Non-predator causes, health problems, birthing complications, weather, old age, kill 90 to 97 percent of all livestock. Domestic dogs, your neighbor’s yellow Lab, kill more cattle and sheep every year than wild wolves do. One cow per tens of thousands in active wolf country. That’s what the federal reports say.
Stephen Pierce / PexelsSo I’ll ask the question nobody in the press briefing room is going to ask: if wolves are barely a rounding error in livestock losses, why is the federal government suddenly in such a hurry to strip protections and hand out shoot-on-sight authority?
You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to smell this. You just need to follow the money.
The order doesn’t just talk about wolves. Section 2 orders a full regulatory review across Agriculture, Interior, the Trade Representative, the FDA, and the SBA, every rule and guidance affecting ranchers, with recommendations due in 90 days. Section 4 opens the door to mandatory country-of-origin beef labeling. Section 5 says agencies should make sure all this "benefit American consumers in the form of lower prices." That’s a lot of moving parts for an order that’s supposedly about a predator that kills a fraction of a percent of the herd.
Here’s what I think happens when you pull ESA protections from wolves. The big ranching operations, the corporate ones with the lobbyists and the PAC money, get a freer hand on federal grazing land. They already got 2 million additional acres mapped and 1.6 million vacant allotments opened under this administration. Now they get fewer environmental reviews standing between them and however they want to use that land. The wolf delisting is the headline. The land is the story.
And the small rancher, the guy the order is written for, the guy whose name they put in the title? He gets to shoot a wolf that wasn’t killing his cows anyway. Meanwhile the corporate operation next door expands its grazing footprint, and the packers keep squeezing the price he gets at auction. But hey, at least he’s got a "Product of USA" sticker now.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission from US (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsEven Trump’s own people can see it. The Facebook post pushing back on this order came from a self-identified Republican and Trump supporter who pointed out that reimbursement programs already exist for ranchers who lose cattle to wolves. That person looked at the same data I just looked at and said, this doesn’t add up. When your own base is reading the USDA numbers and going "wait a minute," maybe the problem isn’t the wolves.
The Endangered Species Act has been a weapon the green lobby uses to lock up land for decades. Everyone knows that. The wolves were never really about the wolves. They were about control. But the answer to one group of elites using a law as a club isn’t to hand a different group of elites a bigger club. The answer is to stop letting any of them run the table.
Strip the wolf protections if the science says they’re recovered. Fine. But don’t tell me it’s about the rancher losing one calf a decade to a wolf when Fido down the road is doing ten times the damage and nobody’s ordering the Interior Department to go after him.
Something else is moving here. And 90 days from now, when that regulatory review lands, we’ll find out what it really is.