The huemul (Hippocamelus bisulcus) is endangered, with 1500 deer split into >100 subpopulations along 2000 km of the Andes. Currently occupied areas are claimed-erroneously-to be critical prime habitats. We analyzed historical spatiotemporal behavior since current patterns represent only a fraction of pre-Columbian ones. Given the limited knowledge, the first group (n = 6) in Argentina was radio-marked to examine spatial behavior. Historically, huemul resided year-round in winter ranges, while some migrated seasonally, some using grasslands >200 km east of their current presence, reaching the Atlantic. Moreover, huemul anatomy is adapted to open unforested habitats, also corroborated by spotless fawns. Extreme naivety towards humans resulted in early extirpation on many winter ranges—preferentially occupied by humans, resulting in refugee huemul on surrounding mountain summer ranges. Radio-marked huemul remained in small ranges with minimal altitudinal movements, as known from other subpopulations. However, these resident areas documented here are typical summer ranges as evidenced by past migrations, and current usage for livestock. The huemul is the only cervid known to use mountain summer ranges year-round in reaction to anthropogenic activities. Losing migratory traditions is a major threat, and may explain their presently prevalent skeletal diseases, reduced longevity, and lacking recolonizations for most remaining huemul subpopulations.

The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation represents a dynamic framework of policies and laws that have evolved over time. Consequently, some knowledge of North America's wildlife and human history is necessary for understanding the origins and architecture of the Model itself. Not to be overlooked here are the oral traditions of Native Americans, such as those represented by Larry Littlebird from Pueblo culture in New Mexico.(1) Discussions of the evolving nature of wildlife conservation efforts in Canada and the United States also need to take into account how the concepts of naturalness and protectionism may be at odds with some of the basic Model principles that have been so important for past conservation successes. In this chapter we outline North America's ecological history in broad terms, providing a basis for understanding the more detailed explorations of relevant issues in the chapters to follow.

This chapter introduces the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, including its basic principles and their significance within the framework of conservation achievement. Support mechanisms such as public engagement and funding are also referenced. The authors reflect on the Model's strengths and weaknesses and consider its continued relevance and efficacy in terms of historical, political, cultural, and social realities.

Deliberate habituation of wildlife to humans, while enormously useful and at times indispensable, is a double-edged sword. It may lead to a rich harvest in scientific knowledge, but it is also a source of mortal danger to wildlife practitioners, to the animals, and to hapless third parties. Inadvertent habituation, in which wildlife accepts or seeks out the presence of humans in order to benefit from food, shelter, and security, entails risks and generates management and public relations problems for public agencies. Negative habituation, in which systematic human activities lead to avoidance of humans by wildlife, also has costs, such as the loss of wildlife populations via alienation; its benefits include the systematic avoidance of humans by predators. Habituation has non-trivial ramifications for the safety of the observer, visitors who are naïve about habituated or tame wildlife, and for the animals being studied. Habituation can lead to attacks on humans, leading ultimately to the demise of the habituated animals. These are ongoing concerns when supervising graduate students in the field, for habituated animals will signal attacks, and the observer must be able to interpret such signals correctly. Failure to do so can lead to injury and death. Habituation and its ramifications are, therefore, almost constantly on one’s mind when doing field observations. The demise of Timothy Treadwell and his girl friend Amie Huguenard was predictable. Treadwell was an amateur naturalist who lived among the grizzlies for 13 summers in Katmai National Park, Alaska. In October 2002, grizzly bears that the couple had habituated killed and ate them (Medred 2003). Unfortunately, there are other cases with similar endings; however, these failed to receive the same ghoulish public attention as Treadwell’s demise, primarily because the victims were not guilty of the misleading messages and self-promotion typical of Treadwell at the expense of hapless bears. We now have reasons to suspect that Treadwell lasted as long as he did in part because carnivores are more timid and, thus, less likely to attack than ungulates. However, not every animal that tolerates humans is habituated. Some may already be “tame,” that is, engaged in predictable, voluntary, and reciprocal interactions with humans. Other animals may have had negative experiences with humans at close range and tolerate them only at a distance before moving off. Some animals may tolerate humans due to a maternal tradition. There is no way to tell a priori why an animal tolerates humans. Tame and negatively-conditioned animals are usually not very dangerous. Unfortunately, habituated animals are potentially dangerous because habituation is a state of unconsummated interest on the part of the animal, expressing itself as tolerance of humans. One discovers this through systematic habituation and taming.

Although science forms the basis of wildlife conservation in the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, advocacy and inadequate scholarship have led to conservation legislation that is destroying the wolf as a species. “Wolf science” is flawed due to the denial of historical information about wolves, ignoring how wolves explore new prey, ignoring long-standing research on the social organization and its changes in wolves, ignoring hybridization as a cause of the genomic extinction, the use of genetic data without a taxonomic verification of specimen, misuse of mathematics, and espousing meaningless statistics. Wolves cannot be conserved as a species in settled landscapes. So called wolf conservation in North America and in Europe is in need of reevaluation, as it is destroying a genuine canid species.

Habituation of wildlife, deliberate or accidental, can be a useful tool in research, a profitable tourist attraction, a serious nuisance, and even a mortal danger. It is the first stage of an animal gaining familiarity with humans and is always a state of unconsummated interest by the animal in us. The next stage following habituation, taming, is always initiated by a habituated animal, which thereby continues gaining information about us. In some carnivores this may be an attack to test for edibility. Even tame animals may continue to explore humans by addressing us in their species-specific sign language as if we were social companions of their own species. In my work with free-living but tame bighorn sheep, females began to treat me as a super-female, while males addressed me with dominance displays and attacked me. Since the sign language of different species of mammals may be unintelligible to us, it has led to “unpredictable” fatal attacks in zoological gardens and national parks. In reality, species that are testing us for dominance will signal the intention to attack redundantly and long before it happens. Inability to read the body language, coupled with ignorance of a species’ biology can have fatal consequences. Exemplary is a large and rather safe tourist industry that has developed around habituated and tame bears in North America, while some persons have lived with tamed black and grizzly bears for decades. Negative conditioning to habitat can lead to deliberate or inadvertent population crashes. The survival of large predators may depend on systematic conditioning to avoid humans. Cannibalism among predators involves larger stalking smaller, with predators made wary of being stalked. It is proposed that by targeting stimuli to which large carnivores cannot habituate, such as the sounds of stalking or the bold behavior of armed humans, they can be systematically conditioned to avoid humans. Inefficient and enduring hunting does that, generating a “Freedom of the Woods” – that is, safety for all outdoor users.

From the outset, humans evolved with severe conflict with wildlife, but which they mastered with great ingenuity. We are the only primate that can exist on the ground with large predators, day and night, and are not dependent on climbing trees or cliffs for security. Consequently, we regressed in climbing adaptations and body strength. Without that mastery over predators, there would have been no human evolution. This mastery led to a transfer of resources from predators and competitors to our self, followed very early by dispersal out of Africa into Europa and Asia. The archaeological record keeps hinting at predator-free conditions. At the end of the last glaciation, mega-faunal extinctions generated new challenges for humans, as the virtual absence of mega-herbivores profoundly changed the ecosystems, as fires replaced herbivores in consuming vegetation. Also, wolves escaped extinction, but not their enemies and competitors. Consequently, since the natural limitations on their numbers had been diminished, wolves had to be controlled, and native people rose to the task. Only in societies with disarmed citizens were wolves a menace, and legislation that frees wolves from human control eventually recreates that very menace. North America's Pleistocene native wildlife survived under extremes in predation, such as was not experienced in Eurasia or Africa. Consequently, our native wildlife species, being quick and accurate learners, readily habituate and are very good at taking advantage of us. Problem wildlife may be created by humans' irrational wishes which conflict with the biology of a species. This is well illustrated by current efforts at wolf conservation here and in Europe, where the unintended consequence is the assured destruction of the wolf as a species.

Regulated hunting is the foundation of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. This conservation paradigm arose out of a movement, lead by prominent hunters, to stop over-exploitation of wildlife by market hunters and the desire to have wildlife accessible to all people. Since then, hunters have contributed billions of dollars to wildlife management that benefit countless wildlife species. These funds support wildlife management agencies which manage all wildlife species, not just those that are hunted. This unique and successful conservation paradigm is responsible for supporting a wide variety of conservation activities, including law enforcement, research, information and education, habitat management and acquisition, as well as wildlife population restoration and management. Although wildlife conservation activities embrace far more than the hunted species, hunters continue to be the primary agents of financial support, management assistance and organized advocacy.

To assist with conservation of Endangered Patagonian Huemul Deer (Hippocamelus bisulcus), the Huemul Task Force (HTF) reassessed information on appendicular morphology, paleobiogeography, and historical distribution as potential factors in recovery efforts. Traditional claims of being a mountain specialist of the Andes were refuted by empirical evidence showing huemul morphology to coincide with other cervids rather than the commonly implied homology to rock-climbing ungulates. It thus supports historical evidence of huemul in treeless habitat and reaching the Atlantic coast, which cannot be dismissed as past erroneous observations. Instead, pre- and post-Columbian anthropogenic impacts resulted in huemul displacement from productive sites and in survival mainly in remote and marginal refuge areas. The process of range contraction was facilitated by easy hunting of huemul, energetic incentives from seasonal fat cycles and huemul concentrations, the change from hunting-gathering to a mobile equestrian economy, and colonization with livestock. However, areas used presently by huemul, as supposed mountain specialists, are also used by wild and domestic ungulates that clearly are not considered mountain specialists, whereas the only other Hippocamelus successfully uses areas homologous to tree-less Patagonia. Rigid application of modern habitat usage to infer past habitat use and ignoring historic extra-Andean accounts is unwarranted; these conclusions reached by the HTF indicate new opportunities for recovery efforts by considering morphological and historical evidence. For instance, reintroductions to other portions of the landscape used formerly by huemul, which tend to be more productive sites than those currently occupied by many huemul groups, would present a promising avenue.

Wolves are not dangerous when they are well fed, by virtue of successfully preying on abundant wild prey where they have either, very little contact with people, or where they are hunted. This is no novel conclusioni[i]. However, wolves can learn to avoid hunters and yet persist in attacking livestock. Wolves are also less dangerous to humans where there is an adequate buffer of readily available domestic livestockii[ii].

If my argument is valid, then true woodland caribou are only the very few, dark, smallmanned caribou scattered across the south of caribou distribution. They need the most urgent of attention.

Researchers studying Dall’s sheep (Ovis dalli dalli) associated with a large mineral lick on Dry Creek in the central Alaska Range south of Fairbanks, Alaska, USA, claimed that removal of nearly all mature males by intensive harvest of three-quarter curl or larger males by hunters during the 1980s resulted in accelerated mortality of young males and low productivity in female sheep. Changing to a more conservative harvest of seveneights and then full-curl males purportedly reversed these trends and resulted in higher overall sustained harvest of males. Review of Dry Creek study reports and of original data records revealed questionable assumptions and errors in data analysis and study design. Conclusions about accelerated mortality of young males were based primarily on resighting data from marked males at the mineral lick, but data from aerial surveys of the larger study area around the lick indicated much higher abundance of males than was apparent at the lick. Reanalysis of data showed that males had low fidelity to the lick, and many years the lick was not observed frequently enough to detect all sheep that may have used it. Harvest only reduced abundance of mature males by about one-half and had no discernable effect on survival of younger males. Low ovarian activity and high rates of parturition in 2-year old females (thought to be associated with alternate year reproduction in later life, and therefore undesirable) were attributed to low abundance of mature males from 1972 to 1979, but most

On 18 September 2004, The Wildlife Society (TWS) published an official policy statement on economic growth and wildlife conservation. We believe this policy statement did not adequately address the issues. Thus, TWS missed an opportunity to lead the natural resource profession in refuting the fallacious rhetoric that "there is no conflict between economic growth and wildlife conservation" through the adoption of a strong policy statement on economic growth. Although we commend TWS Council for adopting a policy statement on economic growth, we believe the final wording contains several weaknesses. Here, we take a closer look at the statement and further evaluate how it might be strengthened in the future.