Chances with Wolves: Renaturing Western History

The last grey wolf in Yellowstone National Park was killed in the 1930s, leaving the entire park system of the lower 48 states cleansed of Canis lupus. With the zeal of a Wyatt Earp wiping out a nest of bandits, park rangers pursued the eradication of the wolf during the 1920s and 1930s as vigorously as federal agents hounded them outside the park on behalf of woolgrowing and livestock interests. They succeeded in making the West safe for tourists, deer and sheep. Outside Alaska, the wolf survives only in the northern reaches of Minnesota, Michigan and Montana (where most are Canadian immigrants). Organizations like Defenders of Wildlife, supported by the park service and a majority of park visitors want them reintroduced into Yellowstone. A key scientific consideration is the wolfs role in checking populations of elk, deer and buffalo. Before their mutual demise, wolves took around a third of the annual buffalo increase and contemporary estimates suggest that wolves will reduce the Yellowstone herd by 5 to ao percent. For the average preservationist, however, the wolfs supreme value resides in how it symbolizes a prelapsarian wilderness that was once the entire continent. The wolfs metamorphosis in the Euro-American mind from the most hated and feared of all wild beasts into a valuable and upright member of the natural community is one of the most radical shifts in status undergone by any animal. Yet old ways of thinking die hard among ranchers and in the wolfs residual homeland of Alaska, where state authorities want to reduce numbers to levels likely to benefit prey species like moose and caribou that are prized by sports and subsistence hunters. The howl of protest from the wolfless lower 48 states has been massive but the governor of Alaska, Walter Hickel, retorted at a wolf summit in early 1993: "You just can't let nature run wild."

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