Lewiston Morning Tribune Editorial 8/7/2010

If sheep ranchers want talks, they must give

August 7th, 2010

Marty Trillhaase

Idaho Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch are no doubt sincere when they suggest bringing domestic sheep ranchers and bighorn sheep advocates to the collaborative table.

It's a process Crapo and Risch have used to great success in resolving earlier natural resource disputes.

Just one problem here: The call comes a bit late.
Building on momentum from a successful legal campaign, people who care more about preserving the dwindling bighorn sheep herds won big last week. The Payette National Forest will cut domestic sheep grazing allotments 70 percent in the Hells Canyon and Salmon River canyon. The move keeps domestic sheep out of occupied bighorn habitat. Because science shows domestic sheep transmit a deadly form of pneumonia to the bighorns, the two species must be separated.

Collaboration - which Crapo utilized in creating his Owyhee wilderness package and which Risch, as governor, used to draft a management plan for Idaho's roadless national forests - seeks to avoid the winner-take-all, zero-sum game of the courtroom. If it works, all sides walk away with a package they may not like much but one that is infinitely better than losing it all.

To seek that process now, however, is the equivalent of asking the winning side in a trial to accept negotiations with the losers.

Several years back, under Crapo's auspices, representatives of the national wool growers, the Nez Perce Tribe and the Wild Sheep Foundation began talks.

Then Idaho Gov. C.L. (Butch) Otter convened a larger group - which included not only the tribe and the sheep foundation but groups as diverse as the Idaho Conservation League and the Idaho Farm Bureau.

If you follow the logic of science, the course of these talks would have drifted along two lines: How do you separate domestic and wild sheep? How do you mitigate the sheep ranchers' losses in the process?

Bighorn sheep advocates would have wanted domestic grazing allotments separated from bighorn habitat. There would have been buffer zones between. Monitoring of the species would have been extensive. And if the bighorn began migrating toward domestic sheep, corrective steps would be taken.

Faced with the loss of their traditional grazing areas, ranchers would be offered a "soft" landing. Perhaps the government would buy out their allotments. Or they could transfer to grazing allotments elsewhere.

At the same time, more resources would be dedicated toward developing a vaccine to protect bighorns from the deadly infection.

Instead, politics intervened. The latest example occurred in 2009 when Terreton sheep rancher - and state Sen. Jeff Siddoway - secured legislation that gave domestic sheep a leg up. In that effort, he was aided by former University of Idaho Caine Veterinary Teaching Center Director Marie Bulgin, who vouched for the view that domestic sheep had not conclusively transmitted the illness to bighorns in the wild. (To take that stance, she had to be unaware of research her own center had conducted.) No dissenting positions were presented in Boise.

The legislation, still in effect, dictates how Idaho Fish and Game proceeds. It protects sheep ranching at the expense of bighorn sheep.

A state law, however, has little bearing on what federal land management agencies decide to do. What might have more weight with the feds is collaboration. But the new law's chief consequence was its disruption of the collaborative talks. Conservation league and Nez Perce Tribe representatives walked away from the table.

Not that collaboration would have much bearing on the Payette National Forest decision. That was well underway. But the Bureau of Land Management, the Boise National Forest, Nez Perce National Forest and the Sawtooth National Forest have yet to resolve these same conflicts. Bringing all sides to the table may yet yield protection for bighorn sheep and a soft landing for domestic sheep ranchers.

Getting there is a straightforward enough path: Repealing Siddoways' 2009 law is step one. - M.T.