Why should a group, such as we have gathered here today, be 

 interested in predator control? I hope we're not going to be too 

 emotional about it. You just saw a film showing predators and what 

 predators do and saying this is all natural and a part of things. A 

 rancher protecting his flock is also fairly natural and a part of things 

 as they're going to be. The most upsetting thing about the polarization 

 between environmentalist, biologists, whomever you want to say, on one 

 side and stockmen and animal damage control agents on the other, is 

 that environmentalists and landowners should be working together. 

 There are no two groups that have more to lose or more to gain by not 

 working together or by working together than these two. The 

 polarization is not surprising. 



When predators were considered all bad some years ago there 

 wasn't much of a disussion about it. They were competing with man for 

 food or whatever, and they were to be destroyed. Biologists 

 conducting good field studies started to point out the worth of 

 predators' and the predators right to be and this caught on. That was 

 a very good thing. It started to bring this pendulum that was way 

 over here and predators being all bad, back towards the middle. But 

 it never stopped in the middle. It was happening in a time that 

 America was becoming urbanized. People were somewhat nostalgic for 

 the good ole days when things were more natural back on the farm. 

 Everything natural was good. Predators were a natural and predators 

 were all good. And they went clear over here. The pendulum went 

 from one side to the other. So if someone living in a big city who 

 thinks predators are all good trys to open a dialogue with a rancher 

 who is losing livestock to predators, you're pretty sure to have some 

 differences of opinion. Romanticism somewhat replaced reason in a lot 

 of people's minds. People that I call the predator cultists. And the 

 people in the predator cult talked to one another a lot and they got to 

 believing one another. 



And some pretty silly things came out of it. A coyote that's 

 capable of killing a full-grown deer, according to most 

 environmentalists, won't kill a lamb unless the lamb is sick and weak. 

 You hear "the sick and the weak" all the time. They're talking about 

 scavengers, not predators. You can find a lot of people that will insist 

 that it's never been proven that eagles do kill livestock. These things 

 have been proven time and time again, but there's a big gap there. 

 And it's a real hard one to break. The biologists themselves, a lot of 

 them, rode this pendulum over to this side, where predators are all 

 good, and I hear some pretty silly things from people that should know 

 a heck of a lot better. Maybe we learned it in college, I don't know. 

 Maybe the fact that I didn't go to college until I was 40 accounts for 

 the fact that I didn't believe everything I heard as much as some 

 people did. 



I'll just give you a couple of quick examples of the types of things 

 I've had biologists tell me. I had one fellow tell me how beneficial 

 mountain lions were in western Montana to the big game in that they 

 disperse them off the winter range--they harassed them on winter 

 ranges, spread them out and this was good for them. A half-hour later 

 we got to talking about snowmobiles and domestic dogs and he went into 



