As a witness to the slaughter of bison, I had conflicted feelings about wolf reintroduction. I thought wolves should be restored because they were part of the natural ecology, and I regarded their elimination from the West by trapping, hunting, and poisoning as a despicable chapter in our history. In theory, I was all for reintroduction. But I also knew that soon their population would increase, and their range expand beyond Yellowstone, just like the bison’s. I was sure that the same demarcation line would be set for them and the same clash of attitudes would surface. When they became abundant enough to lose federal protection, the aggressively prohunting and proranching states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming would take control. We would have honored the right principles, but, in the end, the political power always shifted back to hunters and ranchers, and when it was all over they’d have their way. Wolves would be hunted and killed. Their packs and families would be destroyed. State officials would kill pups in their dens. In the end, I just didn’t think it would be a good outcome for wolves. But I stayed on the sidelines as the leaders of environmental groups and the Clinton administration charged ahead with the plan.
Wolves were meant for these lands. Mothers reproduced, and pups survived, and the population grew faster than even the experts had forecast. They had an immediate impact on the ecosystem, reducing elk numbers and allowing the forest’s undergrowth to be restored. It wasn’t long before competition inside the park caused pioneer animals to explore the areas beyond. As the number of packs increased, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, a former governor of Idaho, proposed removing wolves from the list of protected species in the northern Rockies. HSUS and a coalition of environmental groups held back their efforts in the federal courts, arguing that the states lacked plans to maintain sustainable wolf populations.
But that hardly settled the matter. In 2009, President Barack Obama’s interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, formerly a U.S. senator from Colorado, proposed delisting wolves again. And after more than a half-dozen wins by our legal team in court, a judge balked and then allowed a preliminary delisting in two of the three states. State officials did not waste a moment in opening up hunting seasons for the first time in decades. In 2009, Idaho sold ten thousand hunting licenses—putting the ratio of hunters to wolves at more than fifteen to one. Idaho governor Butch Otter had previously declared that he’d be “prepared to bid for that first ticket to shoot a wolf myself.” Montana followed suit, and hunters there killed nearly all the wolves from one of the most studied packs in Yellowstone, destroying its social structure and leaving orphans, a few other survivors, and not much else. Fortunately, the same federal judge issued a final decision some months later that rebuffed the administration, restored the endangered status of the wolves, and blocked the subsequent hunting season. Now U.S. senators from Idaho and Montana are seeking to enact legislation to delist wolves, trying to remake the law after repeatedly coming up short in the courts.
In this century, Yellowstone will again play a vital role in protecting wildlife. But the unhappy experience of wolves and bison reminds us that even the biggest of parks like Yellowstone are not big enough. The mere presence of wolves and bison and other wild animals in a single park is not sufficient, as long as they are hyper-managed and treated like walking museum pieces or as so many specimens needed only to fill out our postcard picture of the ideal park. They are not just populations to be managed, contained, controlled, or culled. They are individual creatures whose lives and travails matter for their own sake, especially when they are harassed or threatened by cruel and officious people. After all that these creatures have been through, they deserve much better than that.
To give them the chance to survive, or better still to flourish, we need a new model of wild lands protection—large, protected areas joined by corridors, allowing animals to freely roam as nature intended, to be where and what they were meant to be. The great goal would be a wilderness network of parks and corridors from northern Mexico, through the Rockies, and all the way up the spine of the mountains to the Yukon. Some of these pieces are already in place, with millions of acres set aside as parks and national forests. To complete this unified stretch of wilderness will require more public lands, more protection of wildlife on ranches and other private lands, and the same kind of vision and political will that gave us Yellowstone more than a century ago.
Killing and Longing: The Lessons of TR
IF YOU WANT TO see wildlife at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, your first stop must be the Kenneth E. Behring Family Hall of Mammals. It boasts specimens of more than 250 species, with the diorama beautifully designed and presented in an uncluttered way befitting one of America’s largest such collections.
Mr. Behring’s beneficence is proclaimed on a sign above the hall’s entrance. Left unexplained is the fact that Mr. Behring helped populate it—after traveling around the world to shoot these animals and have them stuffed.
Behring and the Smithsonian ran into trouble after an attempted collaboration to import the trophies of some of the rarest animals in the world and to display them at the museum. In 1997, Behring traveled to Kazakhstan to shoot two endangered Kara-Tau Argali bighorn sheep, of which there are fewer than one hundred in all the world. Mr. Behring, past owner of the Seattle Seahawks and a fixture on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans, paid Kazakh government officials a handsome licensing fee for the privilege.
It turns out that Behring paid for privilege on both ends. Just before the Smithsonian requested the imports of the sheep, it received a $20 million gift from Behring to create the Hall of Mammals. The Kara-Tau Argali is on the federal government’s list of endangered species, so Behring was forbidden from importing any into America. But because the law allows scientific institutions to seek import permits, provided they “enhance” the conservation of the species, there was a narrow loophole for the Smithsonian to seek permits for the Argali trophies.
I worked hard to draw press attention to the Behring-Smithsonian relationship and to argue that importing these endangered animals would not enhance their conservation—quite the opposite, in fact. In response to stories in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and later on ABC News, in 1999 the Smithsonian withdrew the import request. It didn’t help matters that, while all this was going on, other details of Behring’s hunting expeditions came to light. Using a helicopter, Behring and his hunting party (including two past presidents of Safari Club International) had shot three bull elephants in Mozambique in 1998, in addition to a lion, a leopard, and a buffalo. Mozambique had banned elephant hunting in 1990, after a wave of elephant slaughtering by poachers. And for all of Behring’s munificence toward local government officials, bestowed in hope of legitimizing his slaughter, the nation’s chief wildlife officer concluded that the elephant killing was, in fact, illegal. Behring had tried to get Mozambique to declare the slain creatures “problem elephants,” as if he had bravely performed some kind of public service. But money didn’t talk this time: the government concluded that Kenneth Behring himself was the problem and wanted him out of their country. He apparently got out just in time, as Interpol was looking into the case of the missing tusks, and in the end, he and his safari companions escaped punishment.
As a kid who loved natural history, I had always assumed that animals at museums had not been deliberately killed to put them on display, though the circumstances were always a bit murky. The specimens seemed a little too well preserved for animals who perished as roadkill or died from natural causes. As an adult, I realized that people like Ken Behring were responsible for many of the specimens, and the details were a closely held secret. For the hunters, donating the trophies wasn’t just a way to lend an air of charity to their avocation—there were also some very practical benefits. Behring and other well-to-do hunters have sometimes looked to museums as pathways to get their endangered animals into the country, just as with the Argali sheep. Most of their scams went unnoticed. Other trophy hunters have taken it a step f
urther, using a loophole in the tax code to confer nonprofit museum status on their living room or den. They would then “donate” the trophies to themselves, which allowed them to write off a good share of the costs of their last hunting excursion. That savings, in turn, would help finance the next big-game safari, in what one writer has described as a kind of “frequent slayer” program. At the urging of HSUS and Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) in August 2005, Congress put an end to this enrichment scheme for the trophy-hunting lobby and closed the loophole. Grassley, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said his aim was to take “the tax cheating out of taxidermy.”
Trophy hunters are an especially bizarre case of the contradictory impulses many people bring to the treatment of animals. The people who do it obviously have a fascination with the animals; otherwise, they would not go to such lengths to pursue them and to keep and display what they have killed. But there could hardly be a more frivolous reason to kill an animal, and they are constantly searching for high-sounding reasons to justify their pastime. In Behring’s case, his great wealth allowed him to pass off his bloodlust as a grand charitable enterprise. But strip away the pretenses, and all that’s left is a fascination with animals that’s been twisted into a desire to pursue, kill, and possess them.
Before taking full possession, of course, the trophy hunter must pay a call on his taxidermist—and not just any old practitioner of what in the hunting trade is considered a high, almost sacred art. Here, too, we find a distorted version of the human-animal bond, expressed in professions of high esteem for the animals who have just been so needlessly slain. “It takes dedication to the animal,” as one taxidermist explains. “You are trying to honor the animal as much as you can.” Meditations of this kind have even inspired a work of philosophy on the subject, Taxidermy and Longing, stuffed with every deep reason one could imagine for taking the life of an animal and then trying to make it as lifelike as possible.
Sometimes, old and new ways of viewing animals are gathered up in the character of one man. The best example of this is the figure who stands tallest in the founding history of the American conservation movement, Theodore Roosevelt—a big-game hunter fascinated by wildlife and bird watching; a cofounder, with other trophy hunters, of the Boone and Crockett Club; and, simultaneously, a staunch advocate of the bird protection movement. He berated market and pot hunters as a scourge, yet he shot and killed buffalo, bear, bighorn sheep, and other wild animals even then facing extinction in the United States. He railed against game butchery, but on his storied African safari he alone killed 269 animals, including nine lions, thirteen rhinos, eight elephants, seven hippos, and seven giraffes—principally for museum collections. He was a man with an extraordinary fascination and understanding of animals, but who nevertheless reveled in killing them. For these paradoxical reasons, his memory is honored by both hunters and conservationists.
Roosevelt fancied himself a naturalist in the tradition of John James Audubon, believing that shooting animals was a part of studying them and then putting them on display. He could not, or would not, readily transition to the “do no harm” form of nature study represented by John Muir, Enos Mills, and other contemporaries. Roosevelt sought to recast hunting, once a utilitarian and then a commercial pursuit, as a recreational pastime and a defining element of American masculinity and strength. For him, hunting was an ennobling pursuit that embodied the kind of Darwinian struggle that would keep the United States vigorous and forever free.
Many historians defend Roosevelt and his passion for hunting by saying that we should not judge him by modern standards. They overlook the fact that he had many prominent critics in his day, including Mark Twain and George Thorndike Angell, founder of the Massachusetts SPCA. John Muir told historian Robert Underwood Johnson that he had challenged the president on their well-publicized trip to Yosemite, asking, “Mr. Roosevelt, when are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing things? It seems to me it is all very well for a young fellow who has not formed his standards to rush out in the heat of youth and slaughter animals, but are you not getting far enough along to leave that off?” If Roosevelt’s reply was as Muir claimed—“I guess you are right”—then it must only have been to change the subject, because history records no change in TR’s attitude toward hunting,
Yet for all that, Roosevelt left an unparalleled and enduring wildlife protection legacy. Presidents before him dabbled in land preservation, but Roosevelt surpassed them all, even if you add up the collective efforts of his twenty-five predecessors. In an era when forest lands were largely depleted, farmlands were under severe strain, and extractive industries were flourishing without serious restriction or regulation, TR turned the federal government into an instrument of conservation. He viewed the conservation of America’s wild lands as an essential incubator of American character and wealth—one that would preserve and strengthen American democracy.
He created 150 national forests, quadrupling the forest reserves of the United States—from forty-three million acres to nearly two hundred million. He established fifty-one federal bird reservations in seventeen states and territories, mitigating the disastrous effects of the millinery trade. He was responsible for eighteen national monuments and four national game preserves. He doubled the number of national parks from five to ten, and he saved the Grand Canyon from zinc and copper mining interests with the stroke of a pen. He was responsible for the creation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and he shepherded to passage the Antiquities Act of 1906, which would be used by later presidents to protect some of the most beautiful expanses of the United States.
Altogether, Roosevelt placed 230 million acres of land under permanent public protection—that’s the equivalent of the landmass of the Atlantic coast states from Maine to Florida. Remarkably, Roosevelt accomplished most of this against a legion of opposition, including titans of industry, market hunters, and developers. The idea of national parks has also provided inspiration to the world, and now dozens of countries have established their own national park systems.
Today’s animal advocates find Roosevelt’s legacy challenging. He appears to have had a kind heart for domesticated animals, rescuing kittens, adopting stray dogs, and opposing the tail docking of horses. But his tenderness vanished when he was in the wild with a gun. Understanding his contradictions is no easier than trying to fathom how the nation’s constitutional framers demanded human liberty at the same time that they were personally involved in chattel slavery. My own view is to recognize good where you find it and, with serious reservations noted, to honor Theodore Roosevelt’s memory for the noble and farsighted things he achieved as president.
The Era of Rational Slaughter
THE INTERVENTION BY ROOSEVELT and others came at the right time—except where it came too late for some species. Contrast the America of 1900 with the state of the nation a century earlier. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, elk and bison roamed the forests of the Upper Midwest, as did wild cats, wolves, and grizzlies. Passenger pigeons numbered in the billions, with flocks often darkening the midday sky.
Farther west, tens of millions of bison pounded the rich topsoil of the Great Plains—from Sam Houston’s Texas all the way up to the prairie provinces of Canada. They commingled with elk and pronghorn and deer, and they were all on alert for plains wolves, grizzlies, and Indian tribes. The bison sidestepped prairie dog burrows as they grazed, converting tall grasses into sinew and muscle on their two-thousand-pound frames. The prairie dogs retreated underground when they spotted hawks, golden eagles, or swift foxes but had no refuge from black-footed ferrets who could navigate their carefully designed tunnels.
We know what happened to change that picture forever. Past the midpoint of the nineteenth century, and as the settlement of the West quickened with the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, few wild places were beyond the reach of our expanding republic. With the transcontinental railroad and a network of other railways linking the growing urban popu
lations to the resource-rich hinterlands, the technology and transportation systems were in place for a liquidation of natural resources on a vast scale.
With demand for wood surging to build homes, buildings, and fences, the timber industry stripped forests, including the great forests of the Upper Midwest. The denuding of these habitats delivered a blow to passenger pigeons and every other species that depended on forest lands. But just as deadly to the passenger pigeons were market hunters who killed the birds to sell their meat on the cheap to the growing class of urban poor. Market hunters also killed for the elites—shooting herons, egrets, and other birds with elaborate plumage for the millinery trade, so wealthy ladies could adorn their hats with ornate feathers.
With the advent of the repeating firearm, no animal was more vulnerable than the bison, who massed in herds in open fields and whose hides could fetch up to $50 at market. One professional hunter killed more than twenty thousand bison, and casual hunters and travelers even shot the animals from the open windows of trains. The U.S. Army joined in slaughter, calculating that eliminating the buffalo would doom the resistance of the Comanche and other Plains Indians. In just three decades, from 1850 to 1880, these forces practically shot the species into oblivion, with the evidence piled up on the plains in the form of rotting carcasses and bleached bones.
The American conservation movement was born in response to this catastrophic destruction of wildlife, just as the humane movement was created in the same era in reaction to the abuse of horses and other working animals in cities. Prominent Americans—including John Muir, the artist George Catlin, and the author George Perkins Marsh—sounded the alarm at the mass slaughter of wildlife and pleaded for restraint. They lobbied to create national parks, which were some of the earliest tangible policy efforts to preserve what was left. The Lacey Act of 1900, which made transporting meat and other wildlife parts not allowed under state law a federal crime, marked the first major national wildlife conservation law.
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