Wolf Nation

by Brenda Peterson

  More recently the USDA reported that Wildlife Services had “killed at least 3.2 million wild animals in 2015 alone—many of which were large predators. 1,681,283 of that total were animals native to the United States.” Coyotes (69,905) were widely targeted, but also 384 gray wolves, 284 cougars, 480 black bears, 731 bobcats, 3,045 foxes, 20,334 prairie dogs, 21,557 beavers, and even 17 domestic dogs. Birds took the greatest hit, with hundreds of thousands of starlings, red-winged blackbirds, and cowbirds—species that travel with livestock—all killed in this one year by Wildlife Services. This is especially bad news for the 47 million bird watchers in the United States, about 20 percent of the population. Contrast this agency’s “take” with the fact that Americans who view and value wildlife is increasing: Fish and Wildlife Services in 2011 reported 71.9 million wildlife watchers, including 13.7 million hunters (4.3 percent of the 318.9 million Americans) and 33.1 million anglers. In the United States hunters are mostly male and 94 percent are white, 3 percent African American, and 0.5 percent Asian.

  “Wildlife Services is one of the most opaque and least accountable agencies,” protested Oregon congressman Peter DeFazio. “They are a world unto themselves. And that’s a world we are not allowed to see into.”

  The tab that taxpayers paid for in 2014 for Wildlife Services to destroy all those wild animals was $1 billion. An award-winning investigative documentary, Exposed, by Brooks Fahy of predatordefense.org blows the whistle on this “barbaric, wasteful, and misnamed agency within the USDA and exposes the government’s secret war on wildlife on the taxpayer’s dime.” The film interviews former Wildlife Services trappers who have the courage to protest the carnage they were being asked to commit and keep secret.

  One former Wildlife Services trapper explained that the Wyoming Department of Agriculture was using poisons that had been banned since the 1970s to sell to predator control boards and ranchers. In a troubling echo of this revelation, a former special agent for US Fish and Wildlife Law Enforcement, Doug McKenna, said of his investigations, “It always seemed the words ‘eagles, coyotes, and wolves’ led us to poisons, and led us to Wildlife Services.”

  In a particularly harrowing story from the film, Rex Shaddox, a former Wildlife Services trapper who participated in the Wyoming sting operation that helped expose some of his agency’s animal abuse, narrates the turning point that led him to blow the whistle on Wildlife Services. He talks about the agency’s disregard for posting any poison notices, even along trails, leaving poisons exposed for “tree huggers and environmentalists to come in, take pictures, and mess with our units.” This is not only dangerous for animals but also for people, who might stumble on the M44 cyanide poison ejectors. If triggered, the poison can lead to permanent brain damage and paralysis in all species.

  These often-hidden toxins also poisoned, maimed, and killed people’s pets. When domestic dogs were found dead, Shaddox says, the Wildlife Services officials were ordered to “get rid of the dog’s collars, bury the dogs, and never report their deaths—that was standard practice. So that’s what we did.”

  Everything changed for Shaddox one morning when he was ordered to report to the city dump in Uvalde, Texas City. There he found other Wildlife Services trappers, his district supervisor, and the Animal Control officer from Uvalde. There was also a truckload of domestic dogs who were to be used to test the sodium cyanide pills often used to eradicate wolves. The pills were expired and supposed to be buried as toxic waste. Though it is illegal for the Wildlife Services to use sodium cyanide on domestic dogs, the Wildlife Services supervisor held down the dogs, and one at a time, force-fed them sodium cyanide pills.

  “Within seconds,” Shaddox recalls, “the dogs would start whining, dropping down in their hind quarters, hemorrhaging from their nose and mouth, eyes rolling back… in a lot of pain.” Then the Wildlife Services supervisor would pop open the nitrate antidote under the dog’s nose to revive the dogs and bring them back to life. That same dog would again be forcibly dosed with the sodium cyanide capsule, go through the same horrible pain, and finally be kicked in the side and rolled off into the garbage of the city dump. “And the dogs just lay down there,” Shaddox finished with a shake of his head, “hollering and whining until they died.”

  Shaddox got into a heated argument with his supervisor over the treatment of those dogs at the city dump. Shortly after his protests Shaddox quit Wildlife Services.

  “Predator management in the U.S. primarily means flying helicopters, setting cyanide ejectors, hiding traps, and using ambush and sniper tactics to slay animals,” writes federal and university researcher John A. Shivik in his book, Predator Paradox: Ending the War with Wolves, Bears, Cougars, and Coyotes. “Modern predator management looks like a war not only with predators, but one with nature itself.” Since the 1914 federal appropriation, the war against wildlife, says Shivik, is “the longest war carried out by the U.S. government.… The death toll is tremendous: 84,584 wolves, coyotes, bears, and lions were terminated by the Department of Agriculture and Wildlife Services, in 2011 alone. At 365, wolf deaths amounted to exactly one wolf a day for the year.”

  One wolf killed every day for a year. And in that same year the federal government delisted wolves, declaring them fully recovered and sustainable populations. This 2011 federal delisting was not based on sound science. In fact, many of the government’s own scientists in a peer-reviewed 2014 panel protested this political decision; in an independent and unanimous decision the panel determined that the delisting proposal was premature and not based on “the best available science.”

  Since federal delisting and the return of wolf management to the states, over four thousand wolves have been legally killed in five states. In Idaho, which is America’s ground zero for state-sanctioned wolf hunting, the battle has been particularly bloody. And yet even among government-hired wolf trappers there are those who, like the Wildlife Services whistle-blowers, promote a more ecological and humane approach to wolf management.

  Wolf trapper turned wolf advocate Carter Niemeyer, author of the lively memoir Wolfer, tells the story of leaving Wildlife Services after twenty-six years in 1999 to move to Idaho and work on wolf recovery issues for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Instead of killing wolves, Niemeyer began teaching biologists how to shoot running wolves with tranquilizer darts from helicopters for relocation. Often caught in the crossfire between antiwolf ranchers and prowolf advocates, Niemeyer’s decades of trapping and studying wolves lent him more informed knowledge of wild wolves than most in this polarized debate.

  “From the moment I arrived in Idaho,” writes Niemeyer, “I felt like I was in a war zone.” Wolf advocates were suspicious and insistent that he, a former trapper, wouldn’t be fair minded when it came to wolf recovery. On the other side, Niemeyer documents how the antiwolfers, with their “Idaho wolf hysteria” and “tedious, fire-and-brimstone style” scare tactics, triggered a statewide Anti-Wolf Coalition that had great influence on local politicians. Its founder, Ron Gillet, and his antiwolf “brand of evangelism” tried and failed to gather enough signatures for a ballot initiative to “get rid of wolves once and for all.”

  After trying to talk with such furious ranchers, Niemeyer concluded, “It wasn’t the wolves that made me more inclined to be on the wolf’s side, it was the macho swagger of people like this.” It reminded Niemeyer of the wildlife official, Ed Bangs, who commented about our wolf battles: “Wolves have nothing to do with reality.” Meaning that our human passion plays around wolf politics are not grounded in the reality of wolves in the wild. Hate them as terrorists or love them as noble remnants of the wild, the real lives of wolves are often overlooked in our own struggles for dominion and management. “My principal goal in Idaho was wolf recovery,” Neimeyer says, “but I was having the most trouble with people.”

  In Idaho, as in many states, the antiwolf voices were a minority, but they received a disproportionately high degree of media, political, and governmental attention. Niemeyer could “count o
n one hand the number of folks with real wolf trouble.” Because “most wolf issues happened on public land,” Niemeyer argues, for ranchers “losing livestock to predators should be an accepted cost of doing business.” But Niemeyer concludes, “Maybe livestock interests are too powerful. Or maybe most people are just unaware that the system still operates as though the West is still being settled.”

  A 2011 report from the Department of Agriculture documented that only 0.2 percent of all livestock losses that year were due to wolf predation. Compare this with over 50 percent of livestock deaths due to calving/birthing complications, respiratory issues, and bad weather. Yet the livestock industry still demands the US government manage wildlife to benefit humans over any ecological needs. Contrary to statements by the hunting lobby, new research shows that wolves are not really fierce competition for game animals. In the Bitterroot Valley researchers discovered that wolves are responsible for only 5 percent of elk predation.

  Other ranchers and hunters are taking a different tack when it comes to wolves. Their voices are often unheard, but they are powerful. In a special 2014 “Hunter’s Edition,” the National Wolf Watcher Coalition published many letters advocating for wolf recovery. Hunters across the country explained why they oppose wolf hunting. A hunting family from Pennsylvania submitted a photo of their sign, “REAL HUNTERS DON’T KILL WOLVES.” They write, “Hunting wolves is wrong and immoral… my family was brought up to respect life.” In New York a hunter believes, “the wolf encounter provides a connection. Such reverence both ways is impossible to experience in a predatory relationship.”

  Slowly the earlier centuries’ prejudices, regressive fears, and single-minded priorities are evolving as new generations consider the whole ecosystem. This means awareness not just of what humans need but also what the forest, the streams, and the wildlife need to thrive. Those who most successfully balance the ecosystem are not human hunters; they are the self-regulating predators, like wolves. With a single breeding pair in each family, wolves self-limit their offspring according to available food prey and climate conditions. Humans might consider modeling their appetites on that of the wild wolf. Wolves do not destroy an entire species or habitat as a way to defend their territory—there are limits to their hunting. Wolf parents pass down hunting skills to their young, comparable to what the Boone and Crockett Club, one of America’s oldest conservation organizations, calls “Fair Chase Ethics.” These guidelines advise their hunter members to “Behave in a way that will bring no dishonor to either the hunter, the hunted, or the environment.” Instead of more generations of wolf control, we need more self-control.

  As my hunter friends often remind me, “The wolf is a good hunter.”

  2. “WHO SPEAKS FOR WOLF?”

  There have always been voices raised in defense of wolves. In their creation stories Native Americans included the wolf and regarded them as First People. Clans named themselves after wolves and modeled this great hunter’s skills. They were Wolf People. The Lakota tribe recognized the Buffalo Wolf, Sung’manitu-tanka Oyate, or “Wolf Nation,” as another sovereign tribe that also claimed the Great Plains as its territory. That wolf bond was strong in the famous Lakota Sioux warrior, Crazy Horse.

  Many indigenous peoples—from the Hopi and Navajos of the Southwest to the southern Cherokee and Seminole, the northeast Penobscot and Algonquian to the midwestern Chippewa tribes—believed the wolf was a spiritual guide and ally. Here in the Far Northwest both the Makah and Quileute tribes with whom I’ve worked regard wolves as their own ancestors. The late Quileute elder Fred Woodruff explained his tribe’s creation story: “Our tribe originally descended from wolves. We believe they are our relatives and are always welcome in our land.”

  On one of my visits to the Quileute reservation in LaPush, Washington, Woodruff’s daughter, a talented Native artist, presented me with a wolf carving painted with the stylized red and black totemic design. Her father said thoughtfully, “We learned from the wolf how to survive and how to be more human. How to honor our elders, to protect and provide for our families—and we learned from wolves the loyalty you need to really belong to a tribe.”

  Native peoples talk much about “soul loss,” and shamans often don wolf skins to do their spiritual work from within the animal as they cross over into other worlds. There they call upon the wolf’s power to summon back lost or sick souls. The Shoshone tribe believes that the wolf can heal a person who is suffering soul loss. Wolf medicine confers the power to call our wandering spirits back. We risk soul and habitat loss when we destroy the wild wolf, who helps us bring our shared lands back to life.

  One of the most far-sighted and still ecologically true tales of the wild wolf is a traditional Oneida story passed down for thousands of years to the late Paula Underwood (Turtle Woman Singing). She translated the original oral history into English as “Who Speaks for Wolf?” This story is an example of the growing body of ancient and modern Native Science being reclaimed by researchers. The Oneida tribe, part of the Iroquois Confederacy, live in New York and Pennsylvania. The story begins with a familiar dilemma: “LONG AGO / Our people grew in number so that where we were / was no longer enough.”

  The tribe considered moving to a new territory. As in any council decision there was always someone “to whom Wolf was brother.” This tribal member “was so much Wolf’s brother / that he would sing their song to them / and they would answer him.” Taking the point of view of the animals who shared their homes, the tribe could then always heed the Iroquois admonition that we must make all our decisions with the next seven generations in mind. Those future generations include wolves.

  But in this choice about where to move their tribe, they did not consider the Wolf Brother’s counsel; instead, the tribe decided to resettle their tribe deep into wolf territory. The council said, “Surely the Wolf could make way for us / as we sometimes make way for Wolf.” The tribe’s new home was generous, with thriving forests, abundant game, and clear, cool streams. But as they settled, the hunters noticed that the squirrels and deer they’d hunted and slung up into trees for safekeeping would soon disappear. At first the hunters figured that sharing some of their hunt with wolves was “an appropriate exchange.” But this feeding of the wild wolves was not a good idea because “WE HAD NO WISH TO TAME WOLF.” To live in this land some of the hunters had to be always on alert to drive away the wolves, “AND WOLF WAS SOON HIS OLD UNTAMED SELF.”

  But this combative way of living with wolves did not please the people. The tribe now considered a task that would require much energy over many years: “to hunt down this Wolf People / until they were no more.”

  THEY SAW, TOO

  That such a task would change the People:

  they would become Wolf Killers

  A People who took life only to sustain their own

  Would become a People who took life

  rather than move a little

  IT DID NOT SEEM TO THEM

  THAT THEY WANTED TO BECOME SUCH A PEOPLE

  The Oneida tribe concluded that they had learned an unforgettable lesson: “Wolf Brother’s vision / was sharper than our own.” Never again would the tribe’s elders make a decision based on only their human needs. “LET US NOW LEARN TO CONSIDER WOLF!” So for thousands of years this wisdom was passed down:

  TELL ME NOW MY BROTHERS

  tell me now my sisters

  WHO SPEAKS FOR WOLF?

  BY 1856 most wolves had been hunted into extinction in the eastern states. Henry David Thoreau, author of On Walden Pond, was one of the very first writers to speak on behalf of the vanquished wolves, “the nobler animals.” Writing in his journal, Thoreau mourned living in a natural world stripped of top predators that was “tamed, and, as it were emasculated,” so now “lamentably incomplete.” He asked, “Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am conversant with? As if I were to study a tribe of Indians that had lost all its warriors. I listen to a concert in which so many parts are wanting.”

  Ironic
ally, some of the most poignant stories of wolves in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when wolves were being so relentlessly killed, are told by wolf hunters. British-born Ernest Thompson Seton, who later founded the Boy Scouts of America, worked as a young man trapping wolves. His best-selling animal stories were often devoted to wolves, especially the true story of “Lobo: The King of Currumpaw,” published in 1898 in Wild Animals I Have Known. The love story of the magnificent “King” Lobo and his delicate mate, Blanca, has all the catharsis—the pity and fear—of Aristotle’s Poetics. And for Seton, Lobo and Blanca’s tale would change his life’s course.

  In the vast, sometimes hallucinatory New Mexican mesas, Lobo, Blanca, and their small family pack reigned—and were recognized—as fierce wolf royalty. Powerful, cunning, passionately loyal, Lobo led his family on a five-year triumph over cattlemen, sometimes killing a cow a day. Such were Lobo’s sensory skills at scenting metal hidden along well-traveled trails or strychnine-laced bait—even when soaked in cow’s blood—that no one could trap him. With each inventive trap set for him, Lobo learned how to deny the trap its lethal due. Lobo shrugged off the thousand-dollar wolf bounty on his head the way a wolf’s dense wolf fur easily sheds falling snow.

  This majestic wolf scorned all his hunters. When Seton took his turn at trapping Lobo, all his inventions—scentless poisons, metal-fanged traps buried deep in the heads of dead cows—again failed. For months Seton hunted. But then Seton had an insight into Lobo’s true character, not just his habits or wily behaviors. Intuiting Lobo’s fatal flaw, Seton finally asked: What did Lobo care most about in this world? His family and, most of all, his mate, Blanca. How to manipulate that devotion into self-destruction?