SACSACRIFICIALRIFICIAL RAMRAM Alberta’sAlberta’s trophy-hunttrophy-hunt auctionsauctions havehave raisedraised millionsmillions toto supportsupport wildlifewildlife researchresearch thethe provinceprovince nono longerlonger fundsfunds BYBY SIDSID MARTYMARTY Grande Cache Sustainable Resource Sulphur River Development depart- 16 ment. Two years ago, Hinton Guinn Crousen, a 40 Gregg River Texas businessman, 16 Nikanassin Range Luscar paid $200,000 (U.S.) JASPER Fiddle Cadomin Valemount Pass and took an Alberta Jasper Luscar Redcap Mountain Mountain ram that beat the world- NATIONAL record trophy set by an 93 PARK 11 Alberta rancher in 1911 (see R BIGHORN A sidebar on page 46). O L C B For provincial fish-and-wildlife K Columbia E departments, managing wildlife popu- Icefields Y R lations is a tough job at any time. They B T HIGHWAY A PHOTO R enforce game laws, monitor wildlife popula- I BANFF tions, police industrial activity that affects T YOHO NAT. PARK I 1 NATIONAL S PARK 2 wildlife and remove wildlife which endangers hu- H mans or preys on livestock. To manage effectively, Calgary Banff 1 they need access to good research. But in Alberta, fewer C 95 and fewer dollars for such research are coming from the gov- O KOOTENAY M ernment. In June, the department of Sustainable Resource De- L NAT. PARK Turner Valley U O High River velopment announced cuts of $8 million from its $190 M U 93 Sheep River N million budget. Eighty jobs were to be cut, including some 34 B 95 Prov. Park 2 I T people in the Fish and Wildlife Management program. A A I Alberta is just one of the many governments, from Arizona N Claresholm to Mongolia, that auctions off trophy animals for big bucks. S Livingstone Lethbridge Eighty-five percent of the money raised in Alberta hunts goes Range to wildlife conservation in general, 15 percent to adminis- 3 Beaver 2 tration. Money from the trophy auctions now finances Mines BRIAN HAY/SPECTRUM STOCK; PREVIOUS PAGE: STEPHEN KRASEMANN/DRK West Castle River derness astle Wil The C wildlife research that the government is no longer willing to Barnaby Ridge Victoria Peak very fall, Alberta’s little band of national Majestic and serene ruminators, trophy-sized bighorn fund with tax dollars. The work of wildlife managers is be- Blind Canyon Prairie Bluff Waterton Lakes Nat. Park park wardens and provincial conservation of- sheep (Ovis canadensis) are abundant in and around Jasper ing compromised by their own politicians, who are selling off CANADA U.S.A. Glacier ficers joins forces in a cat-and-mouse game National Park (PREVIOUS PAGE), and are hunted outside of it. Alberta’s official mammal to the highest bidder while off- National Park MONTANA with a dedicated band of bighorn sheep Surrounded by controversy over Alberta’s wildlife loading financial commitments for wildlife research and (U.S.A.) hunters. The wardens and officers try to up- management strategies, a battery of rams (ABOVE) lounges management onto hunter-based conservation charities, hold the law, while the hunters try to get a le- about 650 metres up a mountainside in the Bow River many of which were established in the 1990s. Increasingly, gal trophy. The game goes on today much as it did in the valley. Bighorn sheep range (MAP) from northern Mexico government biologists must appeal to these private charities E to Peace River country and from south-central British 1970s, when I was a warden in Jasper National Park. But the for research funding. With the Minister’s Hunt, the bighorn ALBERTA BRITISH Columbia to the badlands and Black Hills of the Dakotas. stakes are higher, because the value of a world-class bighorn has, in effect, become Alberta’s sacrificial ram, offered up COLUMBIA ram to collectors has risen from around $50,000 a few every year at the altars of privatization. Meanwhile, the an- CANADA decades ago to about a million bucks today. You don’t have to is. The unscrupulous will stop at little to obtain this prize. imal’s habitat is under assault on all fronts by industrial de- be a Freudian to analyze this obsession with big horns. One of the worst incidents occurred two decades ago near a velopment, and some of the remaining sheep seem more like WASHINGTON I am a hunter. Not a trophy hunter, but one grateful for the campground parking lot at the Columbia Icefield in Jasper game-farm animals than wild bighorns. NORTH STRY OF FORESTS; ALBERTA MONTANA DAKOTA chance to provide my family with healthy wild meats, free of National Park, where Michael Shipsey, a millionaire hunter OREGON SOUTH penicillin and growth hormones. Trophy hunting, once the from California, shot a trophy ram on the highway with a pis- f all the animals hunters wish to conserve IDAHO DAKOTA WYOMING , WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE sport of aristocrats, is something entirely different. Teddy tol while his Canadian guide fed the sheep bread crusts. The in the face of ever-diminishing habitat, none is Roosevelt, for one, popularized the sport merely by partici- guide was apprehended, spent 75 days in jail and paid a more prized than the trophy bighorn ram. The NEVADA COLORADO UTAH pating in it. Anyone, of course, can pursue a trophy sheep, but $5,000 fine. He lost his guiding licence and his hunting ter- bighorn’s most famous haunt is Blind Canyon on CALIFORNIA it takes big money to find the best. The obsession with ram ritory in British Columbia. In an international investiga- OSpread Eagle Mountain, in the southwestern corner of the UNITED STATES horns reached a fever pitch in the early 1950s with the cult tion coordinated by Jasper park warden John Steele, Shipsey province. It is renowned in the sheep-hunting community be- ARIZONA of the grand-slam hunter who, to prove his superiority as a was convicted in the United States on seven counts involving cause it was here, in 1911, that rancher Fred Weiller shot a NEW BIG GAME OF NORTH AMERICA sheep hunter, had to shoot a trophy from each of the four illegally killed game. He received a $14,000 (U.S.) fine, 40 ram which would eventually rule the Boone and Crockett Range of the MEXICO main types of wild sheep: Dall (Ovis dalli), Stone (O.d. days in jail and five years’ probation. record book, the big-game hunter’s bible, for 36 years. bighorn sheep Historical TEXAS stonei), Rocky Mountain bighorn (Ovis canadensis) and Cal- On the legal side, Sherwin Scott of Phoenix, Ariz., spent (Many will say 89 years, but the ram was not officially mea- Modern ifornia bighorn (O.c. californiana). $1.1 million at auctions in 1998 and 1999 for a permit to sured until 1964.) The canyon still looks much as it did 0 500 km Of the four, most hunters will tell you, the Rocky Moun- hunt Alberta rams in special out-of-season “Minister’s Hunts” then, but the lands around it, known unofficially as the Cas- MEXICO FISH AND WILDLIFE DIVISION; tain bighorn is the hardest trophy to obtain — legally, that held during the rut and sanctioned by the provincial tle Wilderness, have changed dramatically. STEVEN FICK/CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC; SOURCES: BRITISH COLUMBIA MINI 3 8 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 CANADIAN GEOGRAPHIC 3 9 Spread Eagle Mountain greets the prairie steppe without a fees — is controlled by hunting and fishing groups. As a “del- screen of high foothills, the kind that are otherwise common egated administrative organization” under the Alberta along most of the Rocky Mountains’ East Slope in Alberta. Wildlife Act, it has been given control of a number of pro- Cliffs of green and red mudstone rise to the summit bastion grams once run by the provincial Fish and Wildlife Division. topped with eerie castellations and gendarmes of stone. Blind Despite the best efforts of these organizations and the fine Canyon cleaves the rocky southern wing of the peak, a great work they do, however, the system fails at the level of hands- gap guarded by two high ridges, its bottom lined with aspens on field management. Consider one real-life scenario: a gov- and old hay meadows. ernment biologist notes a decline in a ewe population, while Such dry basins, covered with tough blends of fescue hunters complain about a lack of mature rams. Without grasses and sedges and exposed to chinook winds that clear ewes, you don’t produce new rams, so it might be prudent to away the snows every winter, made this the prime North close the area to sheep hunting for a while. The biologist needs American habitat for bighorn sheep and trophy rams until to conduct research to see whether the population is crashing 1982, when an epidemic of disease, probably introduced by due to disease or declining from predation or other causes. But a strain of pasturella virus in domestic sheep in British Co- the biologist’s budgets have been cut so much, there’s no lumbia, decimated the population. money. So instead of doing research, the biologist must give The remaining sheep are protected today thanks to the ef- presentations to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, the Al- ‘We have to rely on other organizations to do the research to support the management strategy’ forts of conservation groups led by the Rocky Mountain Elk berta Conservation Association, the Foundation for North Foundation, composed mainly of hunter-conservationists, American Wild Sheep and Shell Canada, soliciting private which purchased 65 hectares here for $134,000 and set it funds to carry out a public responsibility. Meanwhile, thanks aside as wildlife habitat in 1995. This money came from the to political pressure from hunters, the hunting continues.