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Park's goat herding dog gets his goat

| July 13, 2016 2:00 AM

The May 29 Inter Lake (“Border collie trained to work at Logan Pass”) carried the news that Mark Biel, GNP’s natural resources program manager, will soon begin using his own personal dog Gracie to herd (“harass”) mountain goats away from tourists who approach the animals too closely, raising concerns that a visitor might be injured.

Biel appears to have unilaterally come up with this pet project despite admitting that, “As far as we know, there have been no reports of anybody getting injured, but there are some pretty eyebrow-raising interactions that we see of people getting too close for a picture or surrounding the goat and cutting her off from her kid …”

Program Manager Biel’s decision to turn his border collie loose on park wildlife after a too short two-month training is a “solution in search of a problem” since it’s clear that visitors are creating the problem — not the goats. That a compliant park administration has approved this nonsense, and a foolish Glacier National Park Conservancy funded it is all the more disturbing.

As someone who spent more than two decades as a park ranger and later a natural resources program coordinator, I find this breakdown in careful, conservation-based park management appalling — particularly by a program manager whose prime directive is preserving and protecting park wildlife.

Over the last 20 years, I have visited Logan Pass hundreds of times and have observed park visitors approaching goats too closely or blocking their path as noted above. In every case it was humans behaving badly, while the goats responded calmly and non-aggressively. Also obvious was that the park consistently under-staffs this well known concentration of people and goats — while claiming to be concerned about it.

An actual solution to the real problem would therefore be to dedicate two seasonal rangers to separately patrol the Hidden Lake Overlook Trail, educate visitors, break up “people jams” around goats, and protect park wildlife while preserving a valued park experience.

While this ill-advised project is bad enough on its own, it’s compounded by the fact that its been hatched in a vacuum with no public notice or public input. Park administration seems to have forgotten that Glacier is a national park owned by 310 million Americans, not their private game reserve where they can do as they please with no oversight.

Finally, has Manager Biel never heard of the precautionary principle when managing wildlife, or the “law of unintended consequences?: What will he do when Gracie, trained on domestic sheep, kills a mountain goat kid and a visitor posts it on YouTube ? What will he do when one of the big male goats reacts to Gracie as though she’s a coyote or wolf and kills her? How does the park know that the harassment of being “herded” won’t elevate the goat’s stress levels, and lower their survival? How does Biel know that the goats will only move away from the boardwalk by 50-100 yards rather than abandoning the area altogether — damaging the park experience for hundreds of thousands of visitors? The answer of course is that he doesn’t.

It’s well past time for Mr. Biel to check his ego, and his dog, at the door, abandon this exercise in park mismanagement, and hire more staff to handle the real problem — people, not goats.

Brian Peck

Columbia Falls.