Wolf Nation

by Brenda Peterson

  “It has its own work to do,” the woman stepped away, refusing to take the necklace from my outstretched hands. She added with a meaningful look. “Maybe you will need the protection.”

  part two

  WOLF WARS

  3. WOLF TEETH ON AN AIRPLANE WING

  Arriving at the Anchorage airport for a 1993 Wolf Summit, I was startled by a towering stuffed polar bear, fangs forever frozen in greeting. The Alaska Board of Game had passed a plan that winter to return to aerial shooting of wolves—a practice that had been banned for years. This would reverse the Airborne Hunting Act of 1971 that prohibited any shooting or harassing an animal from aircraft. Alaska’s Governor Walter Hickel proposed to exploit a loophole in the act to allow airborne hunting to “protect wildlife.” His Board of Game had just voted to return to lethal wolf control that winter when the snow was deep so the wolves would easily be sighted and shot. However, the international outcry against this aerial wolf hunt prompted Governor Hickel to call media, wildlife managers, hunters, and wolf advocates to a February Wolf Summit in the hope of forestalling a threatened tourism boycott that would cost the state $85 million.

  Hundreds of men in camouflage arrived at the airport as if dressed for hunting and winter kill, not a Wolf Summit. These men in bright orange-clad vests also donned wolf-skin hats, gloves, and pelts—trophies of their wolf hunts. In this snow-draped land of the midnight sunshine, the sun did not rise and set in any semblance of what I recognized as daytime and night. On the shuttle to Fairbanks I noticed that bullet holes riddled every road sign. We passed a bull moose roadkill being efficiently flensed by a passerby. The sight wasn’t troubling, as I’d watched my father and his hunting buddies efficiently strip the skin off a deer. Yet as the days passed I noticed that everyone in Alaska seemed so well prepared to kill—expectant, even anticipatory. This culture of killing would overshadow the Wolf Summit.

  After retiring from eight years as chief of the US Forest Service, my father would also be attending the summit in his new job as executive vice president of the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. In this position he often advocated before Congress for stronger wildlife preservation and habitat, stressing that “more than 90% of the funds that states have for wildlife comes directly from anglers and hunters, which means that less than 10% of state fish and wildlife agency funding is for the conservation of 86% of our nation’s non-game wildlife species.”

  It is still a mystery to me why my father had invited me to accompany him at this raucous official showdown between hunters and environmentalists arguing over aerial wolf control. No doubt he invited me because of my article “Primal Howls—Wolves, Wild Women, and Wild Men—If That Wild Animal Dies Out, So Will the Wild in Humans,” written as a commentary on Governor Hickel’s proposed aerial wolf control and published in the Seattle Times that fall of 1992.

  I was attending the Wolf Summit as a journalist, deeply troubled by the fact that Hickel had recently declared, “You can’t just let nature run wild!” Alaska and Minnesota were the only states in America where wolves were not endangered, with the Alaska wolf population estimated at seven thousand. But Alaska’s Board of Game was determined to resume aerial wolf hunting to increase caribou populations for hunters, both subsistence and sportsmen. Several of my friends, who were also hunters, fervently believed that wildlife managers should never again take up the practice of shooting radio-collared wolves from airplanes, nor should recreational hunters be licensed to hunt from helicopters, chasing wolves down until they were utterly exhausted, then land and shoot them—they did not see this as an ethical hunt.

  At about that time Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes was urging women not to be tame but to claim the wild in their inner lives. “The word wild here is not used in its modern pejorative sense,” Pinkola Estes notes, “meaning out of control, but in its original sense, which means to live a natural life, one in which the criatura, creature, has innate integrity and healthy boundaries.”

  In my article I had pointed out that her book didn’t go far enough to help the wolves as much as it did women. At a publishing convention I’d seen women proudly don the book’s swag—baseball caps that proclaimed, “Not Tame!”—and was troubled that we were claiming the wolf only as an archetype, a story to tell ourselves, while taking no real action to help the real animal survive. This disconnect between our worship of the wild wolf and our lack of protection for them in our shared habitat has always disturbed me. If we reclaim the wild wolf in our collective psyche without taking action to preserve the actual wolf in our wilderness areas, we will miss an opportunity to mend the broken treaties between our species. It’s another example of how we often use animals only for our own psychological needs.

  THE INTENSE COLD was not as deep as the frosty stares following us as we traipsed through the snow banks to the ice rink where the Wolf Summit was held. Picketers with red-splashed signs proclaimed, “Eco-Nazis Go Home!” and “Iraq—Want Some Wolves?” A man with an entire wolf pelt draped around his shoulders held a homemade poster: “Environmentalists Kiss My Alaskan Ass!” Boos and hisses were the soundtrack for those of us summit attendees plodding through the snow. There were a few cheers and opposing signs: “Wolf Hunt Is Bad Science” and “Dead Wolves Kill Tourism.” But the majority of the protesters outside—and inside on the bleachers encircling the rink—were packed with antiwolf voices. Thundering boots on the bleachers completely drowned out anyone who spoke for the wolf.

  “It’s a circus, not a summit!” one of the Game Board members commented as we all took our assigned seats. The board member was a veterinarian, fervently in favor of wolf hunts.

  There were 120 participating biologists, wildlife managers, and journalists attending this Summit—and 1,000 observers. Often I had to stomp my own hiking boots because the press tables were pitched directly on the ice rink, which was covered by a thin tarp. We joked that they’d put the press “on ice” in the hope we might leave off covering the summit to seek warmth for frozen feet.

  The mood at the Wolf Summit was surly, the deck already stacked. A burly fellow dressed in a wolf-skin parka and buckskin pants told me that the state had already bought many more wolf traps. “This summit is just the governor’s shill game… a publicity stunt for media folks like you who believe you have any say in what Alaskans want for Alaskans.”

  Every year Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game oversaw the killing of one thousand wolves, most of it by legal trapping, hunting, and snares. Although more than 80 percent of Alaskans weren’t licensed hunters and although wildlife viewers contributed one and a half times more to the state’s economy than hunters and trappers, their voices are most often drowned out by antiwolf advocates. In 1993 66 percent of Alaskans were actually opposed to aerial shooting of wolves.

  At the Wolf Summit catcalls and baritone boos from encircling bleachers of the ice rink rang louder than voices from Defenders of Wildlife, Greenpeace, the National Audubon Society, or Alaska Wildlife Alliance—those who spoke up for the value of the wolf in wilderness. Standing ovations and cheers rose up whenever anyone vilified the wolf as no more than “vermin” or “nuisance animals” or “rats in a dump.” Hunters’ groups had already applauded the Board of Game’s controversial decision to return to aerial wolf hunts. The director of the Alaska Outdoor Council, Randy Smith, said that it would take too long to build up moose and caribou game populations if wolves weren’t killed. “These animals are being managed for the benefit of man,” he declared. “And that’s the way it should be.”

  Enthusiastically echoing this hunter agenda, the director of the Alaska Division of Wildlife Conservation, David Kelleyhouse, told the New York Times that the state had already outfitted 25 wolves with radio collars, so aerial hunters could easily track and shoot as many as 475 other wolves from helicopters. Kellyhouse promised that this would be a significant boon for game hunters in reducing the wolf population by 80 percent. He predicted that aerial shooting wou
ld kill 300 to 400 wolves each year for the next five years. This wolf hunt would “create a wildlife spectacle on a par with the major migrations in East Africa.” The spectacle he predicted was massive herds of caribou and moose, Dall sheep and grizzlies, all stampeding across or grazing along the Alaskan tundra—a hunter’s paradise.

  Every time a speaker, whether scientist or wolf advocate, presented any case against aerial wolf hunting, the bleachers erupted with boos and hisses. I glanced around the ice rink, feeling as skittish as a deer. These hunters were not what I was used to—those whose wry jokes, acceptance, and sharing their wild game nourished me. At the Wolf Summit it was a hunter’s eye that considered the wolf—and that eye was trained on wolves as if through a rifle’s scope.

  There were a few hunters at the summit who actually spoke out against aerial wolf hunting. Local Fairbanks trapper Sean McGuire said he’d lived in the bush and witnessed the land-and-shoot hunters firsthand. “I’ve voted to stop them,” he said. “They’d come in the spring, when the days were sixteen to eighteen hours long. I’d be working trap lines, and hunters in planes would be chasing the wolves until the pack dropped in exhaustion. Then the planes would land, and the guys would get out and blow the wolves away. I’m not opposed to hunting,” he concluded. “But I am opposed to that.”

  On the Wolf Summit program there were only four women out of the thirty invited speakers. I counted that men outnumbered women by nine to one. Even at sporting events like football games the gender ratio would have been more balanced. There were a few more women at the press table but almost no female wildlife managers. A woman who worked for the state handed me a packet of clippings on recent studies on wolf predation in Alaska.

  “Wolves are not the determining factor in stabilizing ungulate populations here,” she said sotto voce. “Humans are. We have overfished, overhunted, and overkilled. The scary thing is that we really don’t know what we’re doing. Now we’re trying to fix our dwindling game populations by killing other top predators like wolves.”

  This courageous woman would continue to send me clippings as I wrote my articles about the Wolf Summit. She raised important issues: the only reason wolves still existed in Alaska, she said, was their “inaccessibility.” Once officials trapped and placed radio collars on wolves, that inaccessibility was removed. Collared and tracked, wolves were already being controlled and managed, even in the most remote wild areas.

  Another speaker at the Wolf Summit who was troubled by radio collars already on wolves in many wilderness areas was wildlife biologist Renee Askins of the Wolf Fund. Often called the “Jane Goodall of wolves,” Askins had been working for over a decade to reintroduce wild wolves to Yellowstone National Park.

  Askins had the courage to call out Alaska on its “holocaust” against the wild wolf. “Here in Alaska,” Askins declared, raising her voice above the considerable din, “the wolves are making their last stand.” The bleachers exploded in furious protests as Askins added, “The wolf is a signal that, although embattled, wilderness still exists… it is vital to us all.”

  In a later interview for her book, Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, Wilderness, and a Woman, Askins would question the continued use of telemetry collars on wolves in terms of our “addiction to controlling our environment. Once you start controlling something,” she said, “you lose the gift of reciprocity.”

  Askins would show the same bravery while giving testimony before Congress three years later as she worked tirelessly to help return wild wolves to Yellowstone. She told the House Committee on Resources that emotions, not facts, had controlled the wolf debate. Wolf recovery was “fundamentally an expression of a culture in transition,” she said. “The story of this conflict is the story of how we view ourselves in relation to animals, whether we can replace the assumption of ‘dominion’ that has been so destructive to us and the natural world with a worldview that recognizes that we live in a state of reciprocity with the birds and the beasts—that we are not only the product of nature but also part of it.”

  After her speech at the Wolf Summit I interviewed Askins out of sight, under the bleachers. Not quite hidden, we were still surrounded by the milling and outraged orange antiwolf crowd. I took notes as we talked but did not dare hold a tape recorder up to Askins.

  In the chaos of the Wolf Summit I was fighting off real fear. I recalled the Defenders of Wildlife speaker telling a riotous crowd: “What makes the deer so fast? The wolf’s tooth.” I remembered that the deer’s spine has evolved its delicate notches to exactly fit the wolf’s fangs. Deer don’t survive being knocked unconscious. As prey animals, they’ve learned how to die quickly.

  “Ever feel like a prey animal?” I joked with Askins.

  Askins glanced around and said softly, “Remember, these hunters are terrified of us—that’s why they’re so angry. We wolf advocates are a real threat to their way of life, their dominion.”

  Looking around the ice rink at the multitude of fur-clad men, I knew Askins was right. This was just one state, albeit a vast territory. But below us there was a lower-forty-eight intent on wolf recovery and on having their say on public lands.

  “Maybe this summit is a last stand for hunters,” I said.

  This Alaskan Wolf Summit was a collision—a violent clash of cultures. Each side was in each other’s crosshairs. I actually expected a gunshot to ring out when controversial Denali Park wolf researcher Dr. Gordon Haber took the podium. Haber’s field work with wolves was extensive; he’d been studying wolves in Alaska since 1966. No one in Alaska had more field experience with wolves than Haber. He was an old-fashioned, live-in-the-field scientist who preferred direct experience with his study animal. A believer in hard data, he never anthropomorphized wolves; he simply knew them from decades of close observation. He followed the wolves by snowshoe, sometimes sitting in a blind, watching their complex social dynamics for days at a time. In his book, Among Wolves, one of the most riveting images is a black-and-white photo: the shadow of Haber’s small bush plane hovers over the Toklat wolf family as they travel single-file through the snow. Over his forty-three-year career Haber studied generations of wolf families; his long-term research was vital for wolf recovery.

  Haber’s research would reveal that wolves play on the average of every thirty minutes. Their communication skills, like howling, are profound and practical. Haber documented that “wolf family social ties are unsurpassed, even among humans” and that “wolves have traveled hundreds of miles to return to their families… that each individual has its own personality, and their ability to express emotions becomes obvious after one watches the same individuals for even a short time.” Monogamous, loyal to their families, wolves have many adaptive behaviors and traditions passed on through generations. Haber concluded that wolves “can be considered a culture.”

  The year before the Wolf Summit Haber had told Alaska magazine that a wolf was never just one animal but always an extended family “all acting as one to survive.” He pointed out that most wolf biologists used a “superficial, numbers-based” view when figuring out a healthy wolf population. That was how they could justify killing 30 to 40 percent of the wolf population every year and expecting the wolves to thrive. Haber vehemently disagreed. “The problem is,” he explained, “wolves have complex societies. It takes a long time, at least several generations, for a family group to reach its societal cruising speed.”

  What Haber understood in 1992 about the complexities of wolf families has since been repeatedly proven by other wolf biologists. But at the 1993 Wolf Summit Haber’s data was dismissed. Haber often compared wolf groups to human families. He did not like the term “pack” because it was pejorative and a false caricature of the wolf as a vicious killing machine. The close parallels Haber drew between human and wolf families did not make him friends with state or federal wildlife officials. At the summit Haber met Friends of the Animals director Priscilla Feral, who funded some of his later wolf research. This association with an international an
imal rights group made Alaska wildlife managers suspicious that outsiders were controlling Haber. Haber was described as “brash, unconventional, and extremely confrontational.” It’s ironic that Haber was also called a “lone wolf” himself, as his long career was devoted to the close social family bonds in wolves.

  Alaskan filmmaker Joel Bennet, who served over a decade on the Board of Game, was one of Gordon Haber’s friends. He portrayed Haber as “dedicated. He doesn’t let up.” Bennet noted that Haber was tireless in his campaigns to protect the Denali wolves from trapping and hunting. The Game Board “knew he was a credible scientist who could show up at these conferences around the world and cause trouble for them.”

  Soon after the Wolf Summit Haber would cause huge international trouble for Alaska’s Board of Game when he went into the field with an Anchorage newspaper photographer and reporter. They discovered several wolves trapped in snares the Department of Fish and Game had set out. One of the wolves had chewed off his own leg. State officials rarely showed graphic photographs of all the wolves killed or skinned. This video of the Department of Fish and Game employee’s botched trapping of the wolf aired on national television and sparked such furor that Alaska quickly—and temporarily—suspended its wolf-control programs. A new democratic governor, Tony Knowles, would advocate for only nonlethal management of wolves.

  When I met Gordon Haber at the Wolf Summit I was impressed with his no-nonsense approach to the wolf debate. What others perceived as a brusque manner I felt was due to his sense of urgency and frustration. He made several quips about the summit as the governor’s publicity stunt before Alaska would probably revert to its wolf-hunting ways. Haber seemed both bemused and disgusted with the event. His weathered face showed his decades of living outdoors. His deep-set eyes, encircled by dark rings, grooves of concentration in his forehead, and his perpetual frown revealed the toll the endless wolf politics took on him. In typical impatient style, Haber told the New York Times that Alaska’s decision to return to aerial wolf hunting was “bad biology all around, almost insulting from a scientific standpoint. They are making a very dumb mistake.”