Where the Wild Things Were

by William Stolzenburg

  It is a maxim among carnivore biologists that the main reason big predators now die is because people kill them. People run them over with speeding cars, they shoot them, trap them, gas them, poison them, and torture them. Laws notwithstanding, they kill them out of sheer spite, then bury the evidence—a practice so routine it has become a barstool commandment in certain rural cultures: Shoot, shovel, and shut up.

  The corollary to the man-as-death maxim suggests humanity also serving as last-minute savior. It is a comforting salve for the guilty conscience. We got them in trouble, we can get them out. More than twenty years ago the eminent biologist Edward O. Wilson identified an inherent trait in all of us, an “innate emotional attachment to other living things—a love of life—biophilia.” Biophilia, unleashed, could ostensibly come to the rescue of those forsaken beasts now cowering in the far corners. But with one big catch: Biophilia, it seems, requires care and feeding. One must engage the world of living things, the sooner in life the better, for the dormant seeds of the biophiliac to germinate.

  And if there is a biophiliac revolution in the making, it does not appear the next generation is training well for the task. The average American child today spends all of thirty minutes each week playing and exploring outdoors. The same child spends more than ten times that amount wandering the wilderness of the World Wide Web. Add to that the whole suite of electronic media—the home and theater movies, the video games—and the screening hours nearly double. Patricia Zaradic and Oliver Pergams, two particularly concerned conservation biologists, have a name for this emerging “human tendency to focus on sedentary activities involving electronic media.” They call it videophilia. Zaradic and Pergams have been wondering just what videophilia offers the future of nature. If the time spent in family outings is any indication, videophilia is a stultifying, eye-glazing disaster. Since 1987, after decades of steadily increasing popularity, U.S. national park attendance has withered 25 percent—a drop uncannily mirroring the rise of the Internet and video revolution.

  “The greatest threat to conservation and to the environmental legacy represented by the U.S. national park system may be more subtle than bulldozers and chainsaws,” the two write. “If we are indeed seeing a fundamental decline in people’s appreciation of (and attachment to) natural areas, the authors feel this does not bode well for the future of biodiversity conservation.”

  There are others who would like to believe whatever role the bygone carnivores may have played in the rise of creations over the eons is now being nobly filled by their omnipotent, last-minute substitute, the human hunter. That, at any rate, is an argument made familiar by a certain class of sportsmen and their game agencies. Leave the killing to us, goes the mantra, and we will balance the herds. Given the possibilities that the rifle-armed hunter may one day soon remain the last predator in the woods, it is a postulate worth examining: Are humans now functionally equivalent to large mammalian carnivores?

  We certainly know our weaponry is of a different plane of killing power. We now have hunting bows propelling arrows at three hundred feet per second. Modern hunting rifles fire bullets at three times the speed of sound. With those kinds of ballistics and a high-powered scope, a rifleman needs stalk no closer than a quarter mile to bag a 750-pound elk that never knew what hit it. For that matter, a hunter armed with pitfall traps and cable snares can kill elephants in his sleep.

  Examinations of big-game hunters in Africa and North America come to similar and unastounding conclusions. Sport hunters tend to go heavily for trophies, selecting the biggest, handsomest, fittest bulls and bucks—skimming the cream of the genetic crop. Working carnivores, on the other paw, tend to take the young, the old, the lame, and the weak, with efficiency of effort and immediate survival foremost in mind. Sport hunters tend to concentrate their kill in a few weeks of the regulated season, which means an elk in wolfless Colorado has ten or eleven months between hunting seasons to make a clear-cut or wallow of whatever streamside grove they care to lounge in. It means scavengers like grizzlies—if there were any left in Colorado—would be more hard-pressed to feed their young in spring if the only carcasses were to be found in the wake of rifle hunters in the fall.

  Wolves, it has also been found, do not build roads into wilderness areas, chase animals to exhaustion on ATVs, howl at ninety decibels for hours on end, compact and erode soils, cave in stream banks, tear up meadows, crush plants, or foul the air and water with hydrocarbons.

  With pardons for whatever sarcasm may appear to have seeped into this discussion, these are in fact distinctions listed in serious, straight-faced studies, including one by mammalogist Joel Berger. The goal of managed hunting, concludes Berger, remains founded on human profit, not the preservation and stability of biological diversity. And Berger is not holding out great hopes for some miraculous resurgence of biophilia to save the day. “Perhaps the best we can do is recognize differences imposed by our own human culture and our hunting, and attempt to maintain places that are good for our souls.”

  Those most soulful places are going fast. Berger’s home range in the heavenly regarded high country of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is one of the handier examples. Sprawl—and its attendant roads, fences, four-wheelers, pets, diseases, weeds, and other associates of ecological decay—has taken huge bites out of the predators’ Greater Yellowstone sanctuary. From 1970 to 1999, the ecosystem’s human population bulged by nearly 60 percent. Wealthy young professionals and retirees with their luxury ranchettes swarmed upon Yellowstone’s riversides, hillsides, and mountain-tops. The acreage of rural land under development nearly quadrupled.

  Yellowstone, with respect to sprawl, is hardly exceptional. The prime habitat of the New West has become a château with million-dollar panoramas bordering a national park. At a time when large carnivores might be looking to regain lost ground, the former wildlands of the West are rapidly becoming far less friendly neighborhoods.

  Cynics argue that Yellowstone has become a zoo, and the large carnivores its captives. If one considers the cultural climate for predators just outside the gates, the cynics have a strong argument. A roaming wolf pack runs afoul of a cattle rancher, and soon there is a government gunner in the air taking every last pack member out. A grizzly bear gets accustomed to finding free meat following the report of an elk hunter’s rifle, and eventually the bear gets a bullet of its own.

  These days there are planes and helicopters aloft over North America, gunning for the predators by the tens of thousands. There is also a corps of dedicated agents on the ground, legally sanctioned and otherwise, setting traps and broadcasting poisons. Their sponsors are largely U.S. taxpayers (many of them unwitting), their strategists of the opinion they are sparing hoofed game for sportsmen, hoofed livestock for open-range ranchers, and peace of mind for humanity. Though researchers have for decades been panning such scattershot practices as monumental wastes of life and money—recommending instead nonlethal alternatives and more selective targeting of true culprits—the rangelands remain mined and the skies continue raining bullets. In the particular case of the coyote, the most conservative body counts consistently run to more than seventy thousand per year.

  Among those of the antipredator persuasion, neither rarity nor science nor popular vote count for much in deciding the predators’ fates. In 2007, twelve years after gray wolves were reintroduced with majority endorsement to the backcountry of central Idaho, the governor of the state, Butch Otter, publicly declared his desire to see all but the minimum number of one hundred wolves killed, adding he’d like “to bid for that first ticket to shoot a wolf myself.” Wyoming, for its part, has proposed reclassifying its wolves as predators, so its citizens could shoot them on sight. In Oregon, commissioners from Jackson County hired a houndsman to spend half his year killing mountain lions—supposedly for the safety of the people in a state that had no record of attacks nor sound evidence to suspect any forthcoming.

  Not to single out the United States—the loathing encircles the globe
. Killing predators, common or rare, is still practiced wherever the predators can still be found. Cheetahs in Namibia, snow leopards in India, wild dogs in South Africa, jaguars in Mexico, pumas in Patagonia, are all under the gun. In Kenya, young Masai warriors, who once proved their manhood by killing lions with a spear, these days more often leave the job to poison. Remember the good news about wolves and lynx and bears coming home to their historic haunts in the Alps? Several years ago in Europe, during part of that same repatriation, a celebrated brown bear crossed from the Italian Alps to become the first wild bruin in Germany since 1835. Bruno, as he was named, became a popular but mischievous bear, with an inclination to lounge in public places and an unfortunate taste for sheep. When the authorities grew weary of Bruno dodging their attempts to humanely trap him, they shot him dead.

  There is a tendency to read in the comeback headlines a sense of mission accomplished. The first wolves here in so many years, the first bears there, mountain lions in the backyard—primal nature on the mend! And that is one of the dangerous fallacies the discoveries of carnivore ecology has exposed. It is no longer enough to parade a few token predators in a landscape that needs hundreds to work their magic. A single pack of well-placed wolves in Yellowstone could probably thrill the same gathering crowds on the Lamar Valley hillsides, but those few wolves would be far beneath the task of policing every corner of the park against the inevitable lootings of too many elk. When bureaucrats boast about success of the Endangered Species Act, and therewith yank the Yellowstone wolf and grizzly off the list, they are merely reopening the door for the slaughters of old, as the recent dispatches from Idaho and Wyoming confirm. More vitally, they are expressing a blind ignorance on the emerging science of the predator’s irreplaceable ecological place. Even a park full of wolves, huddled in the protected confines of Yellowstone, leaves the other nine tenths of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem untended from the top down. It leaves a bleaker semblance of the wildness it is falsely lauded to be. Says Michael Soulé, who wrote the book on the crisis discipline of conservation biology, “I strongly believe unless we do get our large carnivores back into our ecosystems, that they are going to continue to be degraded over time, no matter what we do with connectivity and protected areas.”

  Before believing either the cheering applause or the doomsday protests over all the wolves and grizzlies supposedly storming the streets of America, it is instructive to mull a less sexy fact or two: Neither species has yet regained 5 percent of its historical range in the United States, which is, for all but a few pushpins on the map, a nation increasingly overrun by people and prey species.

  Enough already. This was never intended to become an elegy. This was to have been a celebration of discovery, an awakening to the long forgotten and yet unknown powers of the great predators. And so, beyond the grayness that inevitably pervades a story of missing limbs and phantom pains, here are yet a few patches of blue sky worth admiring while they last.

  At one of the largest sheep ranges in Idaho, more than eight thousand of the planet’s most helpless and inviting prey animals are grazing amid a land thick with dangerous predators, and living to tell about it (so to speak). After a deadly run-in one night with a pack of wolves that took twenty-five of his sheep, Mike Stevens, president of Lava Lake Land and Livestock, now has his sheep sleeping safely in portable corrals ringed by solar-powered electric fences, and further fortified by massive Great Pyrenees sheep dogs. Stevens’s human shepherds carry receivers that tell them when any of Idaho’s radio-collared wolves may be roaming the area. “I basically told our foreman that I would fire anybody that shot a wolf,” said Stevens. When wolves are caught snooping, they’re sent running with shotgun cracker shells and rubber bullets. They are taught a jarring but bloodless lesson that sheep are disagreeable game.

  “Our vision is that we are co-owners and operators in one of America’s great wilderness areas,” said Stevens. Lava Lake’s business is lamb and wool and landscape-scale conservation, and so far, it seems to be working—wolves, sheep, coyotes, shepherds, and all.

  Some of the money for Lava Lake’s high-tech, deep-ecology approach to ranching comes from the nonprofit organization Defenders of Wildlife. The Defenders, for their part, back their pro-carnivore agenda with hard cash, by compensating those who work in predator country. Since the wolves began roaming the Rockies of Wyoming and Idaho, the Defenders have paid out a million dollars to help ranchers keep their livestock safe without killing predators (as in Lava Lake’s case) or recoup the losses that sporadically crop up.

  Here is another feel-good story from a little town on the prairie, east of Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front. The town is Choteau, an extraordinary place in space and time, because this is where the grizzlies, which once roamed the plains when Lewis and Clark came through two centuries ago, are returning.

  The grizzly is coming home. And here is the kicker: This time nobody is shooting them. Here is a place where the bears are being treated with the same tough love as the Lava Lake wolves, with rubber bullets and barking dogs and the message that they may pass but not linger. Here’s a place where cattlemen are having their old dead cows hauled off to the backcountry, so the bears don’t get used to looking for food and finding trouble in their corrals. Here’s a place where they don’t send out for the National Guard when a young bear happens to wander into town while grade school is in session; they postpone recess until the bears are escorted away.

  This is still very much a rural community that forty years ago would have shot those grizzlies. In Choteau, people and bears are coming to a mutual understanding that, with a respectful distance, both can go about their lives in peace.

  The great predators are great barometers of our maturity as a species. If we can live with an animal that could just as soon eat us as an apple, if we can make room for an animal that traverses entire states looking for a mate, how better to define the art of compassion?

  There are yet more courageous displays of coexistence found in the few places where big dangerous carnivores and people still play the deadly game of Africa’s ancient Eden. In Tanzania there are farmers who, while sleeping in fields to guard their crops from destruction by bushpigs, are sometimes dragged out of bed and eaten by lions. Yet even in this land where the worst nightmares of humankind sometimes come true, there are those still thankful for the lions for helping keep the bushpigs from their fields.

  In tiger-menaced mangroves of Bangladesh, fishermen and woodcutters have taken to wearing a mask on the backs of their head to thwart the tigers’ instinctive preference for surprise attacks. Instead of sending in the hit-squads, they have constructed mannequins armed with an electric charge that jolts the tigers into thinking twice before attacking the human life-form again.

  It might be fair to mention here that some among the conservation community would begrudge the attention given the charismatic megafauna, for the precious few attentions they might steal away from the wee and inconspicuous of the natural world. It is a criticism that’s well intended but ultimately off target, in that nearly all wild species are given short shrift in the ever humanized landscape. The larger dilemma remains: Nearly none of Earth’s troubled plants or animals are getting what they need. In the 2007 iteration of the World Conservation Union’s red list of threatened species, covering blue whales to wolves to woolly-stalked begonias, only 1 out of 16,306 species listed made significant progress, however dubiously: The Mauritius echo parakeet was downlisted from critically endangered to merely endangered. (The woolly-stalked begonia, for those curious, was declared extinct.)

  There are also some who might have hoped for equal time in these pages for the little things that also run the world—and with all sympathies here extended. Creatures that one could pinch between two fingers collectively wield their own inordinate powers. But more to the point—let’s bring it back to us—those little things account for so many of the everyday pleasantries of life as many of us know it. Butterflies, bees, bats, and the vast array of
fellow pollinators are the artisans and laborers behind one of every three mouthfuls of food humanity eats. And that’s not including the microfaunal service of decomposing and recycling the world’s wastes, and their vicious warfare upon our crop pests. A world removed of smallness would soon have the human race nose-deep in waste, eating dirt in desperation. “If invertebrates were to disappear,” declared E. O. Wilson—and the little things have never had a greater champion—“I doubt that the human species could last more than a few months.”

  There has also been no mention so far about the changing climate—that oncoming Armageddon of greenhouse gas that scientists have been warning of (and oil and automobile executives and their PR professionals covering up) for more than twenty years. The thickening atmosphere produced by the combustion-based lifestyle promises all sorts of surprises for every form of life, predator and prey. Unprecedented heat waves, bottomless drought, super storms, melting glaciers, biblical floods—in such forecasts of chaos, all bets are off on sparing the few lonely predators stranded at the top of the endangered heap. One might imagine a warmer world actually benefiting certain wolves, pressed as most of them now are into the most inhospitable ends of the frozen north. The grizzly bears of Yellowstone probably won’t be so fortunate. If the warming were to bring plague to the whitebark pine, or otherwise push the tree out of the park, there would also go the whitebark pine nut, one of the grizzly’s essential foods. The polar bear is another bad conservation bet in a greenhouse future. With its sea ice domain melting ever sooner and farther by the season, there are predictions that the polar bear’s home may be nearly gone within fifty years.