Picture Perfect Competition Is Chasing Wildlife Photographers Out Of The Wilderness And Into Animal Farms Where The Grizzlies Are As Tame As Lassie

The photograph is stunning.

A young mountain lion is crouched on a fresh layer of snow near Glacier National Park, ready to spring on its prey. Backlighting from the late-afternoon sun accentuates the wild animal’s flawless fur.

A wildlife photographer might have spent hours waiting for the seemingly perfect photo op. But not this time.

The mountain lion in this case is Ginger, a yearling cougar housed at Wild Eyes Photo Adventures north of Columbia Falls, Mont. The “prey” she was ready to attack was an empty orange-juice jug tied to a rope, a playtime prop used to coax the animal into different positions.

The growing use of captive wildlife in the outdoor photography market has been driven by economics and availability.

Why spend thousands of dollars to sit in the wild for days, without a guarantee of a finished product, questioned Jakob Luke, the new owner of Wild Eyes. It’s easier and often cheaper in the long run for professionals to rent an animal on an hourly basis at a wildlife farm.

“We have cost control and risk control,” Luke said matter-of-factly.

It’s a trend that irks the purists who refuse to step foot in a captive animal environment.

Meanwhile, the public is largely oblivious of the controversy.

Don Jones, a wildlife photographer from Troy, Mont., who has written about the issue for Bugle magazine, said he believes the public would and should be appalled that most of the picture-perfect photographs that illustrate calendars, postcards or wall hangings are scenes created in a captive environment.

“They’d be disgusted, or at least disappointed,” he said.

Jones makes his living photographing wildlife without assistance from game farms. He refuses to photograph any wild animal that’s kept in a controlled environment.

“Wildlife in captivity, that’s an oxymoron,” he said.

Jones does, however, photograph habituated animals, like elk near Jasper National Park that don’t mind people meandering close by. Or mountain goats in Glacier National Park.

Well-known wildlife photographers Erwin and Peggy Bauer of Wyoming have used game farms like Wild Eyes for many years and see advantages.

“We photograph animals that are rare or endangered that would be difficult to impossible to get on film in any other way,” Peggy Bauer said. “By these photos others can see and appreciate creatures they may not have been exposed to in the past.”

Wolves are a good example, she said, noting that photographs of wolves helped create public support for reintroduction programs like the one in Yellowstone National Park.

The Bauers, like many professional photographers, shoot both wild and captive animals.

Luke said the preservation of endangered species is an argument for wildlife farms. The two white tigers he’s getting this year may have been extinct by now if they hadn’t been sheltered in captivity. The last one killed in the wild was in 1957.

Captive wildlife is well cared for, he added.

“These animals have it better than any other in the wild,” Luke said. “They get special blends of food. We spend a lot of time with them.”

Photographer Tom Ulrich, who lives just a mile away from Wild Eyes, has worked on both sides of the fence. He was among the first wildlife photographers to shoot at Triple D game farm in Kalispell in the mid-1970s.

“I did it, but it’s just not the same as being out in the wild,” Ulrich said.

His business has grown to the point he can choose the assignments he wants, and these days, they’re all in the wild.

Ulrich has conducted photography workshops at Wild Eyes, however, and said he has thousands of slides in his collection that are from the game farm. He pointed to elusive animals like the Canada lynx and mountain lions.

“I’ve done lynx in the wild, but they’re not marketable,” he said.

Magazines are gradually starting to differentiate between captive and wild shots in photo captions, but many still don’t, Ulrich said.

National Wildlife magazine labels a photo as “under controlled conditions” if it’s taken in a captive environment, but the willingness of many editors to use controlled photos is ruining the essence of nature photography, Jones said.

Young fox cubs, pictured in a den with flowers blooming all around is not what one would actually see in the wild.

“Fox dens are trampled to death,” he said, and that makes it difficult to sell “real” pictures of fox.

He doesn’t like the way animals are posed and provoked, all for the sake of a photograph. He wondered if the public would accept the practice if they knew mountain lions were occasionally “smacked” in the shoulder to evoke a snarl. Grizzly bears are posed with butterflies and beehives for a cute effect.

“If you don’t have a mountain lion doing a pirouette on a rock, give it up,” he chided.

A captive environment produces animals that look good all year round. Any wildlife photographer knows that a wild wolf in May almost always looks skinny and scraggly, Jones said.

“If the animal is rare and wild, why shouldn’t the photos depict that?” he asked.

As wildlife farms proliferate, it becomes more difficult for purists like Jones to compete for book deals and other projects.

“It’s hard to go backward. It’s getting so the real stuff won’t have the credibility it once did,” Jones said.

Carrie McGregor, a trainer at Wild Eyes, said the bottom line is simple: “A good picture is still a good picture.”