Sarah Gilman of High Country News provided us with an informative piece on the little sheep station that could - talking, of course, about the feds' ARS Sheep Experiment Station. The station, headquartered near Dubois, ID, has been minding its own business for years, providing research information to the sheep industry. But then came the grizzly bear, the Endangered Species Act, and other federal agencies whose conservationist mandates have come into direct conflict with the station's sheep experimentation.
The place is the Centennial Mountains, an east to west range on the Idaho-Montana border. If you're having a hard time pinning the place in your mind, think of the range on the border that stretches from Island Park west toward Spencer. The station grazes sheep there as part of their research, as they always have. The problem is that the grizzly bears are moving into the area, and conservationists who want the grizzly population to do what it will, know that the sheep are their biggest obstacle.
But how do the sheep keep the grizzlies from moving on, further up and further in to the rest of Idaho's and Montana's unadulterated grizzly habitat? It's simple. If a grizzly eats a sheep, he's a dead grizzly. The fear is that the grizzlies may become such a predation problem that the only solution is to put them down. But the sheep station doesn't see it the same way.
The station says it won't be a problem. The conservationists say it will. Who's right? I don't know, but it would seem that the conservationists probably are. If the grizzly gets a taste of one lamb, the station might not scream. But if he comes back for more, and then more, and then more... well, the scream will come sooner or later from a research station running out of sheep to research. And I do imagine that the grizzly will come back for more chops.
But this sort of internal bickering, while amusing, doesn't even get to the crux of the related issue that nobody seems to be talking about. That is - why exactly do we want the grizzly bears to spread anyway?
I understand that conservationists, and the federal agencies that carry out the agenda, want the wild to transform back to the way that Lewis and Clark found it. And the Centennial Mountains are the link to getting grizzlies back up into Montana, and up all the way into the Selway Wilderness. That is their goal, and it's not one that I share.
So for now, I hope the little sheep hold in there as the trap that can keep the grizzlies back.
~ J. Bunch
