Killing the wolves again

The gray wolves have come a long way from being the most reviled predator in the American West to being a beloved symbol of the region's wild heritage. Western settlers sought not only to make their land safe for cattle ranching but to eradicate wolves with a violence that bespoke a deeper antipathy. During westward expansion, hundreds of thousands of wolves were trapped, shot and poisoned. Others died more ghastly deaths, according to Renee Askins, a wildlife ecologist who spent 15 years working for the return of the carnivores to Yellowstone. Some wolves were doused with gasoline and set on fire, others had their legs tied to four horses and were quartered to death, while still others slowly died of starvation, after their jaws were cruelly wired shut. The extermination of the gray wolves represented not only the taming of the West but its conquest.

The wolves now living in the northern Rockies are a small fraction of the wolves that once populated the American West. Yet their storied return has been embraced by conservationists as that rare hopeful tale of how Homo sapiens can repair its past sins against the environment. After years of heated debates, in 1995 and 1996, some 66 wolves from Canada were reintroduced to the region. The wolves took to their new territory better than wildlife biologists had dared hope -- mating, forming new packs and expanding their territory.

Thirteen years and $30 million in federal funds later, 1,500 wolves now roam the northern Rockies. Wolves bring about $35 million annually to the region from tourists who come to catch a glimpse of the wolves, and spend on hotels, restaurants and even kitschy wolf-souvenir coffee mugs, according to a paper by John Duffield, a mathematician at the University of Montana at Missoula, and colleagues.

But the wolves have done more than give nature lovers the thrill of visiting a landscape with all the great predators it had when Lewis and Clark traveled there. Wildlife biologists have been fascinated to observe the effect that the wolves have had on the local ecology. Native vegetation, such as cottonwood and aspen, has rebounded, a phenomenon scientists attribute to an "ecology of fear": newly skittish elk now avoid browsing in some streamside areas frequented by wolves, allowing seedlings to once again take hold. The reintroduction of wolves has also reduced coyote populations by more than 30 percent in some areas. That hasn't been good for the coyotes, but it has been for pronghorn antelopes, as coyotes prey on pronghorn fawns while wolf packs rarely do.

As for humans, the reintroduction has unleashed the pent-up enmity of some Westerners who never wanted the wolves to be brought back in the first place. They include elk hunters who resent competing with the wolves for their prey, ranchers who don't like defending their livestock from wolves, and don't-tread-on-me types who resent the federal government telling the states what to do. No less an official than Gov. Butch Otter of Idaho wants to all but eradicate wolves from his state. He told a rally of cheering hunters in January 2007: "I'm prepared to bid for that first ticket to shoot a wolf myself."

Elk hunters and the livestock industry lobbied for Wyoming's lax wolf policies. In the past decade, hunters have blamed dramatic declines in elk populations on the wolves. But scientists argue that it's drought and elk hunters themselves who have caused the elks' decline. Nevertheless, the anger of the livestock industry and the hunters now has an outlet. "I think a lot of people didn't like reintroduction in the first place and now they're taking revenge," says Louisa Willcox, senior wildlife advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "They resent the federal intrusion."

Not so the public. Willcox stresses that of the 200,000 comments that the federal government received on wolf delisting, the overwhelming majority were opposed to it. "This is an administration catering to a minority of ranchers, a minority of interests in the states, who simply want to gun the wolves down," she says.

At the same time, many environmentalists concede that wolves that attack livestock should be killed. "I don't think that there is a wildlife person out there who wouldn't agree that if 253, or any wolf, was interfering with livestock, then you need to take him out," says wolf watcher Connolly. "Any rancher or farmer deserves to be able to do that." Before the delisting in March, and under federal protection, a rancher could get a permit to kill a wolf that preyed on livestock. Defenders of Wildlife also paid ranchers for the value of livestock lost to wolf predation.

What horrifies the wildlife watchers is killing a wolf just for being a wolf. "For anyone to just go out and shoot a wolf without any reason, [a wolf] which hasn't gotten into any trouble, is criminal," says Connolly. "It's dishonorable, disrespectful of nature, and it shows an extreme lack of understanding of how the natural world works."

Ted Kerasote, an author who writes about nature and wildlife from Kelly, Wyo., where he can hear wolves howling near his home at night, sees the battle over wolves taking place against the backdrop of changing land use patterns in the West. Throughout Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and Colorado, ranches are being sold off and subdivided for ranchettes, while natural gas development expands in Wyoming and Montana, decreasing and degrading wildlife habitat. It's really a debate about what the land is for, and where animals should be allowed to live.

"Many ranchers don't mind wolves as long as they stay in Yellowstone or Teton National Park," says Kerasote. "That says a lot about how we see nature now. In the same way that many of us look at museums in urban places, many of us also look at national parks as repositories for our wildlife heritage. The environmental community is trying to push out the boundaries of the parks, and the livestock community is trying to keep the boundaries as they are, saying, 'We have this nice museum, that's enough.'"

Wolves, though, have a way of straying out of the boundaries that humans draw for them. And when they do, they are, once again, caught in the crossfire.