Wolf Nation

by Brenda Peterson

  There is change and some signs of hope in America’s ever-shifting attitudes toward wolves. “Hey, there, Little Red Riding Hood,” a car commercial opens with the throaty pop song as a sleek red car zooms along a darkly wooded highway. Suddenly the driver stops. In the road stands a wild wolf. This is no deer caught in the headlights. True to centuries of our demonization, the wolf is growling, sharp teeth bared as if for attack.

  If this scene were happening in the Wyoming or Idaho woods or any of the states determined to again sanction lethal wolf control, the man could simply get out of his car and shoot the wolf on sight—because state law has declared open season on wolves. But the ad takes a surprising turn: the driver simply veers around the wolf and zooms away. Then the driver turns to the backseat, where we see his little daughter, clad in a red-hooded jacket.

  “What does the wolf say?” he asks her.

  “Ahhwhooooooooo!” his little girl howls back, speaking the universal language of wolf.

  part four

  WOLF NATION

  9. WOLVES AND THE NATIONAL COMMONS

  On my family’s first cross-continent drive from California to Boston we children restlessly endured Kansas. In the most maddeningly monotonous state of all, sibilant green and yellow corn rows and cud-chewing cows lasted forever. Every now and then, when a scarecrow flapped in his red plaid shirt, strewing straw from his crazy arms, we woke from our hallucinatory flatlands daze. There were no trees for our Forest Service facts-on-file father to make us name and memorize, no dazzling mountain lakes, no grizzlies or mountain lions, and, of course, no wolves. Only humans and boring farm animals.

  Our whining about the dull farmland allowed my father one of his famous lectures about how public lands—like national parks or forests—must be set aside for the future. There were hardly any wilderness areas in the Midwest, he explained. It had all been settled. Civilized.

  My father had no bias against farmers, having come from a farming family in the Ozarks. But his years in the US Forest Service had inspired in him a lifelong passion and protection for federally managed wilderness. In fact, in a few years he would be part of passing the landmark 1964 Wilderness Act—legislation that protected large areas, especially in the West. This landmark legislation, the first in the world, would be the model for many other countries, inspiring them to declare and set aside wild lands for future generations.

  On that cross-country drive my father continued his soliloquy to a captive audience of his children agitated by sugar and small bladders. But for once I was really tuning in. My father informed us that in the whole world, 99 percent of the people lived on just 1 percent of the land.

  It was easy to believe this shocking statistic while driving empty Kansas highways. But it also looked to me like 100 percent of Kansas was farmed. Every inch of the Midwest was a patchwork of cookie-cutter crops, irrigation ditches, battered barns, and occasional trim, almost always white farmhouses. For a forest-born child reared in the mysterious shadow of Mt. Shasta, the sameness of Kansas seemed the very visual definition of the verb domesticate. I was in third grade and had just learned this word. For my recent school essay decrying the cruel treatment of horses, I had looked in the dictionary and discovered that a synonym for domesticated was tamed or broken. That’s what this Kansas country looked like to me—broken into big squares, scarred through with dirt roads, and relentlessly tamed. Horses were broken, cows were, well, cowed. It was a farmer’s paradise, a rancher’s realm. Although there were endless horizons, there was no room for wilderness. No space for any animal who did not serve us.

  As an adult traveling through Europe I would again be dismayed at how developed and domesticated land in Italy or Germany was, except for their unbroken mountains. How spoken for and neatly disciplined the public lands were, arranged into gardens, parks, tidy forests. Europe was beautiful and green—but completely subdued. Managed. By the time European settlers sailed to the New World of North America, all of their old-growth forests had been cut down. I longed to return to America with what was left of our old-growth forests and wild animals. Though there are some very modest attempts to reintroduce wolves to Europe, especially in Spain, Italy, and Romania, they have lost most of what was once wild.

  Americans are now hotly debating whether we will go the domesticated way of Europe or preserve some wildness in our public lands, our characters, our souls. The Northeast and the South’s public lands are older, with fewer top predators, but the battle for wildness and predator recovery is being played out in the Northern Rockies and the West. The pro- and antiwolf struggle is a particularly American passion play and identity crisis.

  Are Americans lone cowboys out on the range with just sheep and cattle for company? Or are we urbanites who, having lost so much of what’s wild, call passionately for rewilding? Are we rugged rural individuals who prize our gun rights more than our own safety? Or are we part of a larger community that negotiates cultural change and can tolerate outsiders and even other top predators? The fault lines are clearly and often tensely drawn. Will wolf reintroduction survive the inevitable backlash, the aftershocks of change?

  Time and again the national polls tell us that a large majority of Americans want wolf recovery, especially on public lands—which belong to all of us, not just ranchers or farmers. In 2013, when the Obama administration proposed permanently stripping wolves of federal protection across most of the United States (except for the highly endangered Mexican gray wolf in Arizona and New Mexico), only one in three voters supported this delisting proposal. Many wildlife scientists vehemently decried the delisting plan. In a letter to Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell scientists argued that wolves “have only just begun to recover in some regions and not at all in others,” so federal protection must continue for the health of natural ecosystems. A New York Times op-ed by Jim and Jamie Dutcher, “Don’t Forsake the Gray Wolf,” noted that wolf management “continues to be hijacked by hunting and livestock interests” and concluded with the poignant question: “Have we brought wolves back for the sole purpose of hunting them down?”

  A story from the Alaska Wolf Summit still haunts me and typifies a fading Last Frontier mentality. One of the wildlife managers at that backroom bar meeting mused, “My granddaddy was an old-time trapper up north. Once he discovered this big wolf with a paw clamped shut in the metal teeth of his trap. ‘The wolf just stood there looking at me,’ Granddaddy said. ‘He just kept staring at me and wagging his doggone tail like that—until I finally shot him.’”

  I never got a chance to ask the wildlife manager, “Would you too have shot that trapped wolf?” I could intuit by his expression—at once proud and yet troubled—that he might have at least considered making a different choice. He was more than a little haunted by his grandfather’s story.

  AFTER 2012 wolf management was returned to the state wildlife commissions in Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana—where 97 percent of gray wolves in the lower forty-eight live—wolf trapping and hunting was again quickly declared legal. All manner of bounties, hunts, and trapping was allowed, and by 2014 fifteen hundred wolves were killed in the Great Lakes region. In Idaho, during the winter of 2016, a virulently antiwolf Governor Butch Otter and the state’s Department of Fish and Game gunned down twenty radio-collared wolves in a hunt that was kept secret from the public until it was over. This hunt was intended to boost the state’s elk population.

  By the end of 2015 a federal judge, Beryl Howell, reversed the feds’ earlier decision to remove the gray wolf population from the Endangered Species List. This was the fourth time a judge had overturned attempts to delist the gray wolf. Judge Howell noted that a court “must lean forward from the bench to let an agency know, in no uncertain terms, that enough is enough.” Judge Howell ordered wolves in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin restored to the Endangered Species List.

  Although scientists and conservationists welcomed this decision, a hostile Republican Congress immediately introduced legis
lation in the form of yet another political rider attached to the budget bill. This rider, like the successful one in 2012, would have again stripped wolves of Endangered status and reversed Judge Howell’s order. There was another caveat to this 2015 rider: if passed, the legislation would prevent any more judicial protection of wolves in the Great Lakes states. At the last minute in early 2016 the rider was dropped and the budget bill passed with wolves still under federal protection.

  In 2016 the federal delisting proposal for all wolves in the United States was still pending, and the seemingly endless backlash against wolves went on. Oklahoma Republican senator Jim Inhofe, who has also long claimed that climate change is a “hoax,” chaired the US Fish and Wildlife Service committees before the 2016 presidential election. He and other congressional Republicans were “plotting separate courses for how to dial back the Endangered Species Act,” which included removing protections for many endangered species. The GOP’s 2016 presidential convention’s platform targeted the gray wolf as one of three species to delist. “The main objection to species conservation,” noted National Geographic’s “Why These Rare Species Are Targeted by GOP,” was that wolf conservation limits jobs and property rights. “But much of the public is uncomfortable with the idea of killing iconic species just as soon as they make a recovery,” the article concludes. “Perhaps the GOP’s mention of these species in their platform has more to do with wider cultural wars than wildlife science.”

  Democrats, such as California’s Barbara Boxer, pledged to stop any weakening of the Endangered Species Act. “We will have hand-to-hand combat on the floor if these bills get that far,” she vowed. Between the federal delisting in 2012 and 2016 over four thousand wolves were killed in the United States, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. And even though in 2016 only five to six thousand wolves now occupy less than 10 percent of their original range in the lower forty-eight states, there was again legislation—ironically called “Bipartisan Sportsmen’s Act”—to “permanently end Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves in Wyoming and the western Great Lake states.”

  Who is really fighting in this war? For over two decades I’ve listened to these voices and been on the front lines of what some are calling “the forever war.” Because of a childhood raised not among wolves but among hunters and wildlife managers, I am very familiar with those who believe wolves must be lethally controlled. Because I’ve been covering wolves for so long, I receive many letters. People don’t hesitate to tell me their opinions. To give voice to these people, I’ve chosen several to profile here. These individuals stand out either because of their representative or their unique points of view. Each of them offers more perspective than a simple pro- or antiwolf position. Think of them as the gray areas in the gray wolf controversy.

  THE FIRST VOICE BELONGS to Mike, a smart, strapping man recently retired from the Seattle aerospace industry. With his unruly shock of sandy, graying hair, his face weathered by life writ large, mostly outdoors, Mike is a devoted fisherman. He and his brother have enjoyed many elk- or deer-hunting treks. A rugged and outspoken researcher, he respects science, even while pointing out that it is changeable and endlessly revised. Mike is deaf but can easily read lips and speaks out articulately about his very strong opinions. His baritone voice carries even in a crowd. A stickler for facts and not one to tolerate fools, Mike often drily notes that public opinion is rarely based on reality. I’ve often met with Mike and his wife, Mary, who expertly translates for him in sign language if that is needed to clarify our dialogues. Mike resists political labels and prides himself on voting for the person, not the party. Mike has much to say about wolves returning to our lands.

  We met for lunch at his home where his big motorboat, his pride and project, almost eclipsed the driveway. As a conversation appetizer Mike offered one of his favorite hunting stories.

  “I was hunting up in Alaska with my good buddies but somehow ended up alone on the ridge with a grizzly nearby and a pack of wolves just below me.” Mike paused to register my keen interest and then commented drolly, “Not the best position with night and bitter cold coming on. I tell you, I was afraid of those wolves, and one of them was acting kinda crazy, spinning around and howling. Maybe he was playing.”

  Mike had to risk hiking down to camp. Most of the pack moved behind him. “But I had to scoot right past that lone wolf”—he pauses with a smile and the punch line—“and when I got back to camp it was my buddies who were the real threat. They duct taped me in my sleeping bag—and then they threw me in the river.”

  Mike so reminded me of my father and his Forest Service friends with their hunting memories, told around a campfire or supper table. To a child these vivid and sometimes wry man-against-nature or wild animals stories were much better than fairy tales because they happened to be true. I enjoyed listening to Mike in the same way I was riveted to those stalwart hunters in my childhood.

  “There’s no real tradition in American history for wolf reintroduction,” Mike’s gruff voice took on a more serious tone as we met on his veranda that spring day. He adjusted his large glasses and fixed me with an intensity that perhaps came from often being misunderstood or dismissed because of his deafness. “Wolf recovery is all brand-spanking new to us! And before you judge hunters for resisting wolf recovery, I want to remind you that the press shouldn’t always lump hunters and ranchers together. Don’t you know that most hunting groups actually don’t like ranchers?”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Ranchers don’t like people shooting around their cows and sheep. That’s why.” Mike eyed me like a critical science teacher. “A huge amount of public land that is great for hunters and also habitat for bears and wolves is leased out for grazing to ranchers.” He sat back and winked. “Of course, shooting cows is frowned upon!”

  Mike told the story of a grizzly recovery project years ago. “A rancher was complaining to me about how he had to put up with bears threatening his herd on his land,” Mike gave a short, dismissive snort. “I pointed out that I agreed with him—he should move all his cows off the public land and forfeit his lease in favor of the bears.” Mike grinned and continued, “His comeback was to ask me, ‘What’s most important to you? The people making a living or the bears?’” Mike paused for greatest effect. “So what do you think I answered?”

  “Dunno. Tell me.”

  “Well, I told him, ‘The people are most important. Since the people own the land, it shouldn’t be used to profit just one rancher!’” Mike sat back on his lawn chair and surveyed his impeccably sculpted backyard, complete with garden, cupola, and even a fountain—all made with his own hands. He concluded with a satisfied nod, “Later that night the rancher threatened to beat me up. He said he’d shoot me if he ever caught me near his land.”

  When I asked Mike what his bottom-line opinion of wolf recovery was, he unhesitatingly informed me, “A lot of us hunters love wolves and want to see them restored where they belong. But we also believe wolves should always be controlled. And we don’t buy all that bullshit about wolves having rights. Like land or trees, wolves are property of the state.”

  We paused to enjoy a little lunch together and throw bits of food to Mike’s exceptionally well-trained black Labrador retriever. “You know, recently there was a coyote living in one of the gullies right near your apartment, wasn’t there?”

  I remembered the story of a female coyote in an old-growth Seattle park near where I live, blamed for killing several pet cats and getting into garbage cans. She was, indeed, killed by Animal Control.

  Mike pounced on the predator comparison with glee, “Your Seattle neighborhood won’t even tolerate a coyote in your backyards—so how do you think ranchers feel when wolves go after their sheep or cows? I also don’t want any wolves wandering around in my neighborhood and would shoot any wolf, dog, or person who harmed my own dog here.” He laid a protective large hand on his Labrador’s head. “The thing is, you have to understand these ranchers, w
hat they’re afraid of losing. They’re not the enemy. Just good, decent, and hard-working people trying to get along and make a living. And there really is no war against the wolf,” he fervently claimed. “Just regular people trying to figure out how to survive with wolves right in their own backyards.”

  I pointed out that most of the rancher’s livestock was already destined to be slaughtered. And that there were governmental and conservation groups like Defenders of Wildlife who had already paid out thousands of dollars to compensate ranchers for their losses to fairly minimal wolf predation over the last twenty years.

  Mike waved my arguments aside and insisted, “But that’s often a real hassle for ranchers to prove that it was actually a wolf that killed their cows. And ranchers are the ones who have wolves now as neighbors. They have to live with them.

  “Conservationists must win their support, or the recovery efforts is either doomed or will be so restricted as to be pointless,” he told me.

  “But how to do that?”

  “Keep talking,” Mike advised. “You might be surprised at how many ranchers are really tolerant of wolf recovery but just afraid to speak out publicly because of peer pressure.”

  I TOOK MIKE’S ADVICE that I talk with ranchers and farmers coexisting with predators when I met Elizabeth. She was visiting Seattle for a few months with her husband for his tech job. The couple and their three sons work a modest cattle farm in Virginia, where her grandmother’s family has farmed since the 1600s. A lean and wiry woman with an energetic smile and a grounded intelligence, Elizabeth is in her midforties. She’s passionate and well versed about sustainable farming.