March 11, 2017 - Dear Editor of Grant County Beat

The U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) is an unusual government agency in that there is no oversight of it, no other agency to whom it must answer, no entity which tells it what to do. It operates across state lines and has self-autonomy about its programs and projects. It does not even seem to be required to stay within any budgetary requirements. The USFWS has spent millions of dollars and decades of man-hours on projects that were supposedly based on good science, but which failed miserably, like their Whooping Crane project at Gray's Lake, ID.

Since 1988, the agency has been promoting a Mexican Wolf Re-Introduction Program by releasing captive-bred wolves in Arizona and New Mexico. A recent article in the Payson RoundUp described at length, the problems the program is encountering because the wolves are all closely related, mostly brothers and sisters (Peter Aleshire, Mar. 7, 2017). However, the article does not admit that they are using dogs to introduce diverse genetics into their limited wolf population gene pool. The drawbacks from mixing dogs with wolves are legion, so those facts are also being swept under the rug.

Another fact that no one is mentioning is that the entire premise of re-introduction is false. Mexican grey wolves did not go extinct in this area of the country (the Gila, Apache-Sitgreaves, and Tonto National Forests). Mogollon mountain wolves occupied northern NM and AZ; they are the breed that was eliminated. So, the USFWS is trying to reintroduce a breed of wolf that was not here in the first place (http://cosmosmith.com/mogollon_mountain_wolf.asp. http://knowledgebase.lookseek.com/Mogollon-Mountain-Wolf.html).

In wildlife biology there are lumpers and splitters. Liberal wildlife biologists are usually splitters. Any time a group of individuals exhibits a minor mutation or is separated from the rest of its species by geography (like when an earthquake separates a watershed) and they become inbred and then exhibit any difference (even so much as a color variation or spot); splitters rename the group as a new sub-species. This also occurs when two subspecies interbreed, resulting in hybrid individuals or group. Wildlife biologists often declare trout, i.e., Yellowstone cutthroat or Gila Trout are a G