American Wolf

by Nate Blakeslee

  This interchange was considered critical for the long-term health of wolves in the region. Past research on other isolated populations of large mammals had shown that animals stranded in habitat “islands” might flourish for a short time but then began to suffer from the effects of inbreeding and lack of genetic diversity. Moreover, the absence of connectivity among populations might place the viability of any one segment at risk from sudden die-offs through disease or other unforeseen causes. It wasn’t enough that wolves were flourishing in Yellowstone or other pockets in the Rockies, Honnold had suggested in his brief for the judge. Projects like wolf recovery were about restoring ecosystems on a grand scale, not, as he now told the court, creating “postage stamp replicas of a world long gone.”

  It fell to Molly Knobler, the young Stanford Law student on Honnold’s team, to make the genetic connectivity argument in court. Though she knew the case well, she was visibly nervous as she stood to begin her remarks, more conscious than Honnold of the Montanans behind her in the gallery, quietly glowering in their Wrangler jeans and hunting jackets.

  Montana itself could be a little overwhelming for first-time visitors. Landing in Missoula was like stepping back in time, to the days of the Old West. This somewhat surreal sensation was exacerbated by the altitude, which often caused a light-headedness in flatlanders that could last for days. The town was surrounded by the kind of dense forest you seldom saw in the rest of the country, but it wasn’t just the thought of what was in the woods that made newcomers feel so unsettled. It was the people, too. You might see a teenager riding horseback down the side of the road, as casual as any kid on a skateboard in southern California, or come upon a Native American butchering an elk in the back of a pickup alongside the highway. Life here was different.

  “Can you hear me okay?” Knobler asked the judge, who assured her that he could. Even as the population of wolves in each of the core areas climbed steadily, she explained, biologists had been able to document very little interaction between them. The problem, in part, was the extremely rugged terrain around the borders of Greater Yellowstone. The Beartooth Mountains to the north of the national park, for example, hold some of the most expansive tundra in the Lower 48. Wolves ordinarily disperse in the winter, and the Beartooth, at ten to twelve thousand feet, was all but impassable once the heavy snows began to fall, even for an animal as hardy as a wolf. In twelve years of monitoring, Fish and Wildlife had been able to document only two wolves making the trek into Greater Yellowstone from outside the ecosystem. At one point the service had resorted to trucking in another pair, though as Knobler told the court, describing this as evidence of “connectivity” strained the definition of the word.

  As the plaintiffs had pointed out in a brief to Judge Molloy, the existence of densely populated habitat is what forces a dispersing wolf to travel long distances to find a territory of its own. If so few wolves made it from central Idaho or northwestern Montana to Yellowstone when some seventeen hundred wolves inhabited the Northern Rockies, how many would make it post-delisting, when federal protections were removed and the numbers presumably dropped? Fish and Wildlife’s own research suggested that a population of around a thousand wolves across the region was necessary to ensure that connectivity was maintained, yet they proposed to allow the states to manage for a fraction of that number.

  Even wolves that were inclined to make the journey would find it difficult now that their numbers were being hunted in Montana and Idaho. Under Wyoming’s contested state plan, meanwhile, at least some of the wolves dispersing from central Idaho to Yellowstone would likely have to cross the state’s free-fire “predator zone” before they made it to the sanctuary of the national park. If connectivity really was essential to recovery, then how could Fish and Wildlife sign off on such an arrangement?

  It was a powerful argument, but Honnold noticed that Knobler was having an increasingly difficult time delivering it. Five minutes into her presentation, she paused. “I’m sorry, Your Honor,” she said. “Do you mind if I get a drink of water?”

  “Are you feeling okay?” Molloy asked, but Knobler didn’t reply.

  She had fainted.

  —

  Honnold was a California native, but after almost two decades in Montana, he was long past culture shock. Still, he understood what pressure could do to a young attorney. He’d felt it, too; nothing compared to the vitriol he’d witnessed in the fight over wolves. Idaho’s official wolf-management plan—blessed by Fish and Wildlife prior to its 2009 delisting decision—contained the following declaration on the first page: “Idaho is on the record asking the federal government to remove wolves from the state.” Idaho’s first-term governor, C. L. “Butch” Otter, a sixty-eight-year-old former agribusiness executive, had campaigned in 2006 on a promise of drastically reducing Idaho’s wolf population as soon as federal protection was lifted. Though it never became law, the Wyoming state legislature approved a bill shortly before reintroduction that offered a thousand-dollar bounty to anyone who shot a wolf dispersing from Yellowstone, and directed the state to pay attorney’s fees for anyone charged with illegally killing a protected wolf.

  The fight had spilled far beyond the Rockies; everybody in the West had an opinion on wolves. Politicians as far away as Texas were taking on the issue. Even the National Rifle Association weighed in, though it had long before ceased to be a hunting rights organization in any real sense. Wolves had become one of those polarizing issues, like abortion or gun control or war in the Middle East, about which the country could not seem to reach a consensus.

  But the truth was that wolves were just the latest flashpoint in a fight that had been simmering in the West for decades. The real struggle was over public land—what it should be used for and who should have the right to decide. The federal government owned almost half of all the land in the West, in large part because nineteenth-century homesteaders found much of it too arid or too rugged to settle, unlike the more hospitable Midwest, which settlers had made into the nation’s breadbasket.

  The government instead adopted a pattern of selling access to the West’s rich resources—grazing rights, timber, precious metals, oil and gas—without actually selling the land itself. As a result, the residents of a place like Idaho, where fully two-thirds of the land is federally owned, don’t make decisions about how the resources in their own backyards should be used. Instead agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management call the shots from Washington, and people all over the country—even those who visit a place like Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon only once in their lifetimes—feel that they should have a say in how the West is managed, because it belongs to them just as much as anybody who actually lives there.

  As the environmental movement gained steam in the 1970s, rising resentment over conservation measures on federal land boiled over in the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, when western politicians pressured Congress to turn control over much of the land to the states or even to private owners. Timber companies resented bans on logging in national forests to protect owls and other endangered species. Exhaustive environmental reviews slowed new mining projects for years. For every environmentalist, like Honnold, who resented the fact that cattle were grazed on public lands, there was a rancher in the West who resented paying the fees and believed that the land ought to belong to the people who used it, the sort of common-law notion that underlay the very idea of homesteading that had brought people west to begin with.

  When the effort to wrest control of the West from the federal government failed, some of the frustrated anti-government fervor expressed itself in darker ways, like the white nationalist militia groups that cropped up, most notoriously in Montana. Overreaching federal judges, restrictions on gun ownership, job-killing bans on logging and mining—the list of grievances was long, and the return of the wolf was seen by many as just one more burden to bear. When politicians like Butch Otter gathered votes by vowing to wipe out wolves, they were tapping into that strain of conser
vative, anti-Washington populism.

  The anger was real, and from what Honnold had seen it was getting worse. As his list of victories grew, so did his list of enemies. Death threats had been sent to his office in Bozeman. The off-road vehicle suit Honnold had won had inspired someone—presumably a disgruntled ATV enthusiast—to leave an unlit gasoline bomb on the steps of the local ranger station. A note scrawled on the side read, “Bye, bye, fuckers, boom!” The West was caught up in a culture war, and for some people it was more than just a metaphor.

  And now, to Honnold’s dismay, the federal government was turning management of wolves over to state officials who had promised to kill as many of them as possible. But could Governor Otter and his fellow governors really undo what the feds had accomplished? Ed Bangs didn’t think so. He didn’t share the plaintiffs’ concerns over the number of wolves shot by hunters since federal protection had been removed the previous spring. Bangs believed that wolf numbers would rebound quickly; there were simply too many packs in the woods now, producing too many pups every spring, to eliminate them by hunting alone.

  It would take a return to the brutal methods of the nineteenth century—widespread poisoning, gassing of dens, government bounties, and the like—to significantly reduce their numbers. At most, sport hunting might slow the dispersal of wolves to new territories outside their current range—to areas in the West that were currently devoid of wolves, in other words—by reducing the population density that drove lone wolves farther afield.

  Privately, Bangs was skeptical that controlling wolves would boost the elk population, which had always been the main rationale for instituting a wolf-hunting season. If hunting wasn’t sufficient to significantly lower the wolf population in the Northern Rockies, then it followed that you couldn’t really reduce elk predation that way, either. You might be able to temporarily boost elk numbers in certain areas through a brief period of high-intensity hunting, but it wouldn’t last. Other wolves would simply move into the unoccupied territory and eat the same number of elk as before. The bottom line, following this reasoning, was that it didn’t do any harm—at least at a broad, population-wide level—to shoot wolves, but it didn’t do any good, either.

  Research in Yellowstone had strongly suggested, meanwhile, that unexploited wolf populations, left to their own devices, would eventually level off on their own, without culling of any kind. When their numbers began to outstrip the available habitat, more wolves would die from conflicts among packs, and breeding females would have smaller litters. Yellowstone’s own wolf population, which declined by 43 percent over a six-year period with no human intervention whatsoever, certainly seemed to support the conclusion that wolf populations were essentially self-regulating.

  Yet Bangs still thought wolf-hunting was a good idea. He was convinced that allowing the states to manage their own wolves was the only way to deescalate the long-simmering tensions over the issue, which would be good for the species in the long run. People wanted to shoot wolves, and that was reason enough for a wolf hunt.

  It might be good for the embattled Endangered Species Act as well, Bangs felt, proving that it could actually work the way it was designed to. His years of talking about wolves with elk-hunters and ranchers had given him some insight into how attitudes change. “What we normally mean by ‘education,’ ” he once told a crowd of wolf advocates, is, “I want someone else to know what I know so they will have my values.” In his experience, it didn’t work that way. If wolves were hunted like any other animal, then people would begin to think of them as they did any other species in the woods, rather than as objects of resentment.

  Honnold wasn’t so sure. Plenty of wolves were already being killed on behalf of ranchers, after all—more than most people realized. Beginning with a handful of problem wolves, the pace of the culling had increased as wolves spread and conflicts multiplied. Fish and Wildlife had begun compensating ranchers with confirmed wolf kills, but the money wasn’t enough; officials were under pressure to aggressively control depredating packs.

  It was not a practice that the federal government was keen to advertise, but taxpayers who knew about the program might have found the logic difficult to swallow: one federal agency was reintroducing predators on public land, a second was leasing adjacent land to ranchers, and a third was dispatching trappers or men in helicopters to kill those same predators when they inevitably crossed paths with livestock. But a deal was a deal, and Fish and Wildlife didn’t balk as the numbers killed in the name of livestock protection grew larger and larger. By 2010, more than twelve hundred wolves suspected of preying on livestock had been shot.

  Ranchers might have been appeased, but anti-wolf sentiment in general didn’t seem to be tapering off. During the previous fall’s hunting season, a handful of hunters had posted gory photos of dead wolves on social media, which had only stoked the controversy further. Honnold also believed that Bangs was wrong to underestimate the determination of state officials to drive down wolf numbers as low as possible, especially in Idaho, which had the region’s largest population of wolves. Hunters in Idaho had claimed the majority of the wolves shot during the first legal hunting season the previous fall. After the initial four-month season ended in December, Idaho game officials—in keeping with Governor Otter’s promise to kill as many wolves as possible—decided to extend the season until March 31.

  A seven-month hunting season is unusual for any species, as is a season that extends into a game animal’s breeding period; some of the wolves killed in March were likely pregnant, which depressed numbers even further. Montana’s packs didn’t fare much better: the combination of sport hunting and government culling on behalf of ranchers had destroyed more than a quarter of the state’s estimated wolf population in a single year. And it was all perfectly legal, now that Fish and Wildlife had ceded control to the states. There was even talk of adding a trapping season in Idaho in the near future.

  Emboldened by the success of efforts in Montana and Idaho, state officials in the Upper Midwest, meanwhile, were pressing for a return to wolf-hunting there as well. At the same time, Fish and Wildlife was moving forward with a plan to remove protection for gray wolves in the remainder of the country, including areas that currently had no wolves at all. The measure was being pushed by ranching and hunting interests in places like Oregon and Washington State, where dispersing wolves had established a growing presence, and in Colorado, as a kind of preemptive measure against their inevitable drift south toward the heart of the Rocky Mountains.

  Some of Honnold’s clients were opposed to any wolf being killed for any reason, though others were open to the idea of limited hunting. But it had to be done responsibly, and Honnold had seen no indication that the states could be trusted on that front. One thing was clear: fifteen years after reintroduction, the leading cause of death for wolves in the Northern Rockies was back to what it had been for much of the nineteenth century, and wolves had as many enemies as they did advocates.

  —

  Judge Molloy ordered the courtroom cleared so that paramedics could examine Knobler. She soon recovered and declined to be taken to the hospital. The judge directed the bailiff to bring everybody back in, and the proceedings continued after an hour’s delay.

  Deborah Sivas, the Stanford professor, wrapped up Knobler’s presentation, and then Mike Eitel, the Justice Department attorney, opened arguments for the defense. Eitel pointed out that while the original wolf recovery plan might have been twenty years old, as Honnold noted, Fish and Wildlife had vetted its decision to delist much more recently, in 2001 and 2002. As part of that process, the agency had consulted national experts on wolves, the majority of whom agreed that the wolf was recovered in the region and that populations would remain stable under the terms of the delisting rule.

  But Judge Molloy seemed less interested in the argument over the merits of the recovery goals set by Fish and Wildlife—or whether those goals had been achieved—than in the legal conundrum posed by leaving one of the three
states out of the delisting order. Under questioning from the judge, Eitel conceded that Fish and Wildlife had never before split a population along political lines in a delisting rule, though he argued that the Endangered Species Act might be construed to allow it, under a novel interpretation of certain key provisions.

  Molloy listened patiently, but he didn’t seem to be buying it. “I still don’t understand what the legal argument is that you can subdivide that?” he told Eitel. “I mean, I understand the practical argument. I understand the political argument. It’s very, very clear, those two things. The legal argument isn’t as clear to me, and so that’s what’s troubling me.”

  Molloy continued to prod Eitel with skeptical questions until the attorney found himself deep in the weeds, parsing the meaning of passages from the Congressional Record in an effort to establish what legislators had intended in making various amendments to the act over the years.

  He seemed relieved to hand the proceedings over to Idaho’s assistant attorney general Steven W. Strack, a veteran litigator who had argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and defended the State of Idaho in several high-profile suits brought by environmental groups. All the talk about minimum recovery levels, Strack suggested, was beside the point. Idaho’s game commission had created its own state management plan that called for maintaining a population of five hundred to seven hundred wolves. The plan wasn’t legally binding, and the state could manage for much lower levels if it so chose, but Strack knew the Endangered Species Act chapter and verse, and he knew that courts were bound to defer to the stated intentions of regulatory bodies. If Fish and Wildlife accepted the numbers in Idaho’s plan at face value, then the judge must do so as well.