IN THE COURSE OF writing this book I had a chance to talk with many people, and to come into contact with several different points of view about wolves. I enjoyed being in the field with biologists. I enjoyed the range and subtlety of Indian and Eskimo ideas. My only discomfort came when I talked with men who saw nothing wrong with killing wolves, who felt it was basically a good thing to be doing. For the most part, they were men who had matured in a different time and under different circumstances than I. We didn’t share the same feelings toward animals, but I could understand their positions. Some were professional trappers. Others had lost stock to wolves. There was a larger context.
There were a few I spoke with, however, who were quite different. It was as though these men had broken down at some point in their lives and begun to fill with bile, and that bile had become an unreasoned hatred of many things. Of laws. Of governments. Of wolves. They hated wolves because—they would struggle to put it into words—because wolves seemed better off than they were. And that seemed perverse. They killed wolves habitually, with a trace of vengeance, with as little regret as a boy shooting rats at a dump.
They were few in number but their voices, screaming for the wolf’s head, were often the loudest, the ones that set the tone at a grange meeting and precipitated the wolf’s extirpation in the lower forty-eight states.
These men, and others, killed no one will ever know how many thousands of wolves in America, mostly to control predation against livestock. At the time, toward the close of the nineteenth century, it was a legitimate undertaking. Wolves, deprived of buffalo and other wild game, had turned to cattle and sheep; if you wanted to raise stock in America you had little choice but to kill wolves. But the killing was a complicated business, it was never as clearly reasoned as that. On the spur of the moment men offered ridiculous reasons—because the wolves loafed and didn’t have to work for their food, they would say.
It is easy to condemn these men now, to look at what they did—destroy a national wildlife heritage—and feel a sense of loss. But they are, perhaps, too easily blamed. We forget how little, really, separates us from the times and circumstances in which we, too, would have killed wolves. Besides, blaming them for the loss is too simplistic. We are forced to a larger question: when a man cocked a rifle and aimed at a wolf’s head, what was he trying to kill? And other questions. Why didn’t we quit, why did we go on killing long after the need was gone? And when the craven and deranged tortured wolves, why did so many of us look the other way?
In an historical sense, we are all to blame for the loss of wolves. In the nineteenth century when the Indians on the plains were telling us that the wolf was a brother, we were preaching another gospel. Manifest Destiny. What rankles us now, I think, is that an alternative gospel still remains largely unarticulated. You want to say there never should have been a killing, but you don’t know what to put in its place.
Ever since man first began to wonder about wolves—to make dogs of their descendants, to admire them as hunters—he has made a regular business of killing them. At first glance the reasons are simple enough, and justifiable. Wolves are predators. When men come into a land to “tame” it, they replace wild game with domestic animals. The wolves prey on these creatures, the men kill them in turn, and reduce the wolf population generally, as a preventive measure to secure their economic investment. The two just can’t live side by side. A step removed from this, perhaps, in terms of its justification, is the action of Fish and Game departments that kill wolves to sustain or increase the yield of big game animals so human hunters can kill them. This kind of “predator control” has historically accommodated economic and political interests ahead of ecological interests. And it has acted occasionally from a basis of bar stool and barbershop biology, not wildlife science.
Wolf killing goes much beyond predator control, of course. Bounty hunters kill wolves for money; trappers kill them for pelts; scientists kill them for data; big game hunters kill them for trophies. The arguments for killing here are harder to sustain, yet many people see nothing at all wrong with these activities. Indeed, this is the way we commonly treat all predators—bobcats, bears, and mountain lions included. But the wolf is fundamentally different because the history of killing wolves shows far less restraint and far more perversity. A lot of people didn’t just kill wolves; they tortured them. They set wolves on fire and tore their jaws out and cut their Achilles tendons and turned dogs loose on them. They poisoned them with strychnine, arsenic, and cyanide, on such a scale that millions of other animals—raccoons, black-footed ferrets, red foxes, ravens, red-tailed hawks, eagles, ground squirrels, wolverines—were killed incidentally in the process. In the thick of the wolf fever they even poisoned themselves, and burned down their own property torching the woods to get rid of wolf havens. In the United States in the period between 1865 and 1885 cattlemen killed wolves with almost pathological dedication. In the twentieth century people pulled up alongside wolves in airplanes and snowmobiles and blew them apart with shotguns for sport. In Minnesota in the 1970s people choked Eastern timber wolves to death in snares to show their contempt for the animal’s designation as an endangered species.
This is not predator control, and it goes beyond the casual cruelty sociologists say manifests itself among people under stress, or where there is no perception of responsibility. It is the violent expression of a terrible assumption: that men have the right to kill other creatures not for what they do but for what we fear they may do. I almost wrote “or for no reason,” but there are always reasons. Killing wolves has to do with fear based on superstitions. It has to do with “duty.” It has to do with proving manhood (abstractly, perhaps, this is nothing more than wanting either to possess or to destroy the animal’s soul). And sometimes, I think, because the killing is so righteously pursued and yet so entirely without conscience, killing wolves has to do with murder.
Historically, the most visible motive, and the one that best explains the excess of killing, is a type of fear: theriophobia. Fear of the beast. Fear of the beast as an irrational, violent, insatiable creature. Fear of the projected beast in oneself. The fear is composed of two parts: self-hatred; and anxiety over the human loss of inhibitions that are common to other animals who do not rape, murder, and pillage. At the heart of theriophobia is the fear of one’s own nature. In its headiest manifestations theriophobia is projected onto a single animal, the animal becomes a scapegoat, and it is annihilated. That is what happened to the wolf in America. The routes that led there, however, were complex.
Those days are past. There is little to be gained now by condemning the aerial “sport” hunting of wolves (the activity is banned in the United States by federal law), or by railing against the cattle industry for the excesses of its founders. But there is something to be gained from learning where the fear and hatred originated, and where the one thing besides cruelty to the animal that sets wolf hunting apart from other kinds of hunting—the “righteousness” of it—comes from.
The hatred has religious roots: the wolf was the Devil in disguise. And it has secular roots: wolves killed stock and made men poor. At a more general level it had to do, historically, with feelings about wilderness. What men said about the one, they generally meant about the other. To celebrate wilderness was to celebrate the wolf; to want an end to wilderness and all it stood for was to want the wolf’s head.
In setting down a base for our antipathy toward wilderness, the historian Roderick Nash has singled out religious and secular antecedents. In Beowulf, for example, there is an expression of the secular (i.e., non-religious) wilderness that is constituted of uninhabited forest—a region whose dank, cold depths, with its miasmic swamps and windswept crags, harbor foul creatures that prey on men. In the Bible, wilderness is defined as the place without God—a sere and barren desert. This twined sense of wilderness as a place innately dangerous and godless was something that attached itself, inevitably, to the wolf—the most feared denizen of gloomy wilderness. As civilized man matured and came to measure his own progress by his subjugation of the wilderness—both clearing trees for farms and clearing pagan minds for Christian ideas—the act of killing wolves became a symbolic act, a way to lash out at that enormous, inchoate obstacle: wilderness. Man demonstrated his own prodigious strength as well as his allegiance to God by killing wolves. I greatly oversimplify, but there is not much distinction in motive between the Christian missionaries who set fire to England’s woods to deprive Druids of a place to worship and the residents of Arkansas who set fire to thousands of acres of the Ouachita National Forest in 1928 to deprive wolves of hiding places.
Predator-control program on the north slope of the Brooks Range, 1950s.
In America in the eighteenth century Cotton Mather and other Puritan ministers preached against wilderness as an insult to the Lord, as a challenge to man to show the proof of his religious conviction by destroying it. Mather, and others, urged the colonists to make of the “howling wilderness” a “fruitful field.” In 1756 John Adams wrote that when the colonists arrived in America, “the whole continent was one continued dismal wilderness, the haunt of wolves and bears and more savage men. Now the forests are removed, the land covered with fields of corn, orchards bending with fruit and the magnificent habitations of rational and civilized people.” In Europe at the same time the subjugation and ordering of shabby wilderness had reached its exaggerated apotheosis in the excessive neatness of the Versailles gardens.
The drive to tame wilderness in America never let up. The wagon-master of the 1840s “opened the road west”; he was followed by the farmer, who cleared the fields, and the logger, who “let daylight into the swamp.” One hundred years after Adams wrote of dismal wilderness, the railroad barons and cattle barons were speaking of Manifest Destiny and man’s right and obligation as God’s steward to “make something of the land.” And where they made it into towns, fields, and pastures, there was no place for the wolf. The wolf became the symbol of what you wanted to kill—memories of man’s primitive origins in the wilderness, the remnant of his bestial nature which was all that held him back in America from building the greatest empire on the face of the earth. The wolf represented “a fierce, bloodsucking persecutor” (as Roger Williams called him) of everything that was high-born in man. Theodore Roosevelt, his hand on the Bible, his eye riveting the attention of men of commerce, spoke gravely of wolf predation on his ranch in North Dakota, of the threat to progress represented by the wolf. He called him “the beast of waste and desolation.”
The image of wilderness as a figurative chaos out of which man had to bring order was one firmly embedded in the Western mind; but it was closely linked with a contradictory idea: that of the wilderness as holy retreat, wilderness as towering grandeur, soul-stirring and majestic. In the Exodus experience man deliberately sought wilderness to escape sinful society. Those oppressed by city living sought communion with wildlife in the countryside. The celebration of nature by Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Shelley, the landscapes of Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt and the Hudson River School, Rousseau’s noble savage, and the later writings of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau were all in this tradition.
It was inevitable that the idea of wild land and wolves as something worthy of preservation, and wild land and wolves as obstacles to the westward course of empire, would clash. They met head on in America in the twentieth century in places like Alaska, where residents wanted to wipe out wolves to increase game herds, which would in turn attract tourist hunters to supplement a state economy inebriated with the sudden riches of oil; and environmentalists, mostly from out of state, did not want to see the wolf and the wilderness for which he was a symbol disappear in Alaska the way they had in the lower forty-eight.
The basis for conflict between these two groups becomes clearer if you recall that while people like Bierstadt and Karl Bodmer were exhibiting America’s primitive beauty in European salons, American pioneers were cursing that same wilderness as the symbol of their hardships—not to mention decrying the genteel men who praised it but lived for their part in the comfort of a European city. In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville wrote: “In Europe people talk a great deal of the wilds of America, but the Americans themselves never think about them; they are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature. Their eyes are fired with another sight; they march across these wilds, clearing swamps, turning the course of rivers… .”
The pioneer’s attitude toward wilderness was hostile and utilitarian. Roderick Nash writes: “In the morality play of westward expansion, wilderness was the villain, and the pioneer, as hero, relished its destruction. The transformation of wilderness into civilization was the reward for his sacrifices, the definition of his achievement and the source of his pride.”
This inheritance explains in part why a resident of modern-day Alaska, even if he is a recent arrival in the city of Fairbanks, feels he can jeer at the opinions of outsiders. He is on the edge of wilderness; and he participates in a mentality that drove railroads west and thought anyone who liked wolves was “too soft” to survive in the outlands.
It is easy to criticize Western man for his wholesale destruction of the wolf and to forget the milieu in which it was effected. The men I have met who killed wolves at one time or another for a living were not barbarians. Some were likable, even humble men; others were insecure, irresponsible. But the difference was this: the ones who did it for more than a few years had no illusions about the killing and some regret; the ones who tried it only briefly seemed all but possessed by the idea that they were battling something inimicable to man, doing something terribly right. In a 1955 Field and Stream article entitled “Strafing Arctic Killers,” an aerial hunter named Jay Hammond—later governor of Alaska—wrote that if he had not been on the scene with gun and plane in the early fifties, killing three hundred wolves a month, the local Eskimos would surely have starved. No matter that Eskimo, caribou, and wolf had got on for a thousand years before the coming of the airplane and the gun. Similarly, a trapper in northern Minnesota proudly showed me the illegal snares he used to kill Eastern timber wolves and said if he didn’t go on killing wolves his livestock would be wiped out. He saw himself as a man who knew more than the “overeducated” biologists, who had the courage to stand up to them when his neighbors wouldn’t. He said, “A man must stand to protect his land against the wolf when the law is wrong.” (The law had made it a federal crime to kill wolves.)
A lot of people admired the forthrightness and spunk of this individual, but the sort of land ownership and stockraising and the kind of wolf threat he saw were the visions of a man a hundred years old, dreaming of a frontier farm in the wilderness of Minnesota—a time in the past.
To clear wilderness. Out of this simple conviction was spawned a war against wolves that culminated in the United States in the late nineteenth century. But the story is older, the origins of the conviction more complex.
Men first took the killing of wolves seriously when they became husbandmen, but because wolves ate the human dead on battlefields and were most often seen in the eerie twilight of dawn and dusk, they were feared not just as predators of stock but as physical and metaphysical dangers. Folklore made of the wolf a creature possessed. There was a great mystery about the wolf and a fabulous theater of images developed around him. He was the Devil, red tongued, sulfur breathed, and yellow eyed; he was the werewolf, human cannibal; he was the lust, greed, and violence that men saw in themselves. And men went like Ahab after this white whale.
Let me begin with something concrete—predation on domestic stock. Animals have been variously perceived in history: as objects for man’s amusement, as slaves to do his bidding, as objects of purely symbolic interest. We smile today at the thought of putting an animal on trial for murder, but the notion of trial and punishment for murders committed by animals should not be dismissed as unenlightened farce. This was serious business in the sixteenth century, and understanding why a pig was tried, convicted, and hung for murder lends understanding to why people should seek the same fate for a wolf. It stemmed from the principle of retribution.
The scholastic mind of the time went to extreme lengths to observe principle strictly, and one of the oldest principles of justice was the law of retribution, lex talionis, the Judaic law of an eye for an eye. This was not simple vengeance; it preserved a cosmic order. No act of killing was to be left unexpiated. If such a serious transgression went unpunished, the sins of the father would fall on the son. To leave murder unpunished in the community, then, was to invite God’s wrath in the form of disease and famine.
Although no longer regarded as expeditious, the law of retribution was once a powerful influence on legal thinking. And though animals were regarded by men like Thomas Aquinas as the unwitting tools of the Devil, the means by which God brought pain and anguish that would test men’s mettle, it made no difference; interfere with God’s plan and justice must be meted out. If a horse kicked a pestering child and the child died, the horse was to be tried and hung. Taken to its extreme, such thinking had the man who committed suicide with a knife tried, his hand cut off and punished separately, and the knife banished, thrown beyond the city walls.
Even after such trials of animals ceased, the idea that human murder (whether committed by another human being, the family dog, or a falling tree) had to be expiated persisted. In recent times it was preserved in the English law of deodants. The wagon that struck a man down was sold and the profits went to the state which, in theory, had lost his services as a citizen. No such reasoning was really necessary to get men to go after a wolf suspected of killing a human being, but it is important to note that men felt a moral obligation, not simply that they had the right, to find the wolf and kill it. It made no difference whether wolves were sentient beings or the witless tools of Satan, whether they killed deliberately or accidentally or were only suspected of having killed someone. The spirit of the deceased had to be avenged by retributive action.
This retributive stance where the slaughter of livestock was concerned—nonhuman murder—came about for two reasons. First, there was an understanding of sheep and cattle as innocent creatures unable to avenge themselves and, as such, man’s wards—“Kill my sheep and you kill me.” Secondly, there was a belief that domestic animals were innately good and the wolf innately evil, even that the wolf was somehow cognizant of the nature of his act, a deliberate murderer. Eventually (in the late nineteenth century in America) this defensive stance to protect innocent livestock, the righteousness of it, became a central element in the rationale for setting up bounty laws and poisoning programs to wipe out the wolf, as crucial as the issue of economic loss.
Other ideas grew out of the Middle Ages and contributed to the sense that it was morally right to kill wolves. In the popular mind, a distinction was made between animals like the dog and the cow who served man, and the wolf and the weasel who caused him grief. A distinction was made between bestes dulces, or sweet beasts, and bestes puantes, or stenchy beasts. The contrast between wolf and doe and raven and dove sufficiently conveys the idea.
Another important perception was the belief that animals were put on earth to do man’s bidding, that “no life can be pleasing to God which is not useful to man.” Men considered that they had dominion over animals the way they had dominion over slaves, that they could do anything they wanted with them. To clear wolves out of the forest so man could raise cattle was perfectly all right. It was not only all right, it met with the approval of various religious denominations who admired such industry, and of the state, whose aim was a subdued, pastoral, and productive countryside. It was for this reason that King Edgar the Peaceful of England let men pay their taxes in the tenth century in wolf heads and their legal fines in wolves’ tongues.
One more idea born in Europe bears on the propriety of wolf killing, and that is to be found in the work of René Descartes. Descartes articulated the belief that not only were animals put on earth for man’s use but they were distinctly lowborn; they were without souls and therefore man incurred no moral guilt in killing them. This was a formal denial of a “pagan” idea abhorrent to the Roman Church at the time: that animals had spirits, that they should not be wantonly killed, and that they did not belong to men. The belief that man could kill without moral restraint, without responsibility, because the wolf was only an animal, would take on terrifying proportions during the strychnine campaigns in nineteenth-century America. The European wolf hunter of 1650 might kill twenty to thirty wolves in his lifetime; a single American wolfer of the late 1800s could kill four or five thousand in ten years.
Additional support for wolf killing was born in America, as ideas regarding private property and the need to defend one’s property against trespassers—claim jumpers, squatters, usurpers of water rights, purveyors of phony deeds—matured. It wasn’t only because one owned the cow that one had the right to kill the wolf that attacked it; it was because one owned the land the cow was on and had those rights as a basis on which to open fire on a wolf. “Really,” wrote one sheepman in 1892, “it is a stain, a foul stigma, on the civilization and enterprise of the people of Iowa that these wolves remain and are frequently seen crossing the best cultivated farms, and even near the best towns in our state.”
A second idea that matured in America was that the wolf was a natural coward, not the respected hunter of the Indian and Eskimo imagination. And a disdain for cowards was especially ingrained in the frontier attitude of the pioneer. The belief in the wolf’s cowardice must, I think, have grown out of several misconceptions. Once wolves had experienced gunfire they ran at the very sight of a gun, or, in the frontier mind, ran away like cowards. Another reason for calling the wolf a coward was that he killed “defenseless” prey like deer. Man saw himself as God’s agent correcting what was imperfect in nature; as he became more abstracted from his natural environment, he came to regard himself as the protector of the weak animals in nature against the designs of bullies like the wolf.
In hearings before the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry on S. 3483, a bill seeking a ten-year appropriation of not less than $10 million to control predatory animals, the following exchanges took place:
SEN. KENDRICK OF WYOMING. Our fight on the ranges over which I had supervision and management at the time began in the fall of 1893. The campaign was introduced through the work of two men on horseback with guns, poison, and traps, and within the short period of two or three months they had a record of 150 wolves that they had destroyed.… .
Recently I’ve received quite a few letters from university people insisting, as I recall, on moderate action in connection with the extermination of predatory animals, but I am unable to conceive of anyone making that plea who had a personal acquaintance with either the terrific disaster wrought upon herds and flocks by wolves… .or with the method employed by these animals in connection with the destruction of their prey. It is the most barbarous thing imaginable. No doubt the motives of these people are the best, but I believe they are uninformed… .
Bringing my brief statement to a close, all told on this one cattle ranch, covering territory of probably 30 or 35 miles square, we had a record when I left the ranch, and lost track of it, of about 500 gray wolves that we had killed. And the coyotes we threw in for good measure: they numbered hundreds but we had no disposition to either count them or keep track of them… .
SEN. THOMAS OF IDAHO. You may proceed with your statement, Mr. Wing.
MR. WING. Now, gentlemen of the committee, we look at this measure, a 10– year program of predatory animal control, as meaning a saving of $10 for every dollar spent in the way of benefits to chicken raisers, to hog raisers, to turkey raisers, to cattlemen and to wool growers.
We appreciate the difficulty that confronts this committee…in the matter of meeting the various necessary expenditures, but we can look on this particular measure as an economy measure. If we spend this increased amount of money now, and during the next ten years, thereafter the matter of control will be a relatively simple one, and we can greatly reduce expenditures and still take care of the work without very much danger.
SEN. KENDRICK. May I ask you a question right here?
MR. WING. Certainly.
SEN. KENDRICK. Reference has been made to those people, who with all good intentions, are protesting against the extermination of these animals. Is it not your opinion, Mr. Wing, that even with the most complete and efficient plan of extermination that may be employed by the Federal Government, the States, and the individuals interested, there will still be plenty of these animals left to breed?
MR. WING. There will always be.
SEN. KENDRICK. Now the question [of killing wolf pups in their dens] is one that may very well excite…the sympathy of anybody…who would not enjoy the punishment that the wolf undergoes in a trap. On the other hand, if anyone has ever observed the way that these wolves destroyed their game they would be inclined to look on it as one form of retribution… .The question is whether we would rather have the country overrun with these predatory animals, or whether we shall employ the country for higher purposes in the matter of producing meat–food animals. If you consider the question of whether we shall temporize with [wolves], you are again in deep water because the more you do that the more it will cost eventually to exterminate them.
SEN. WALCOTT. Might I inject this one thought into your talk, Sen. Kendrick, because I know you have been a consistent conservationist in all things affecting wild life—
SEN. KENDRICK (continuing). And I want to say in this connection, so that there may be no mistake about it at all: My record in the State of Wyoming along the line of conserving the wild game of that State is one that at least entitles me to consideration in passing on this question.
SEN. WALCOTT. There is no question at all about that.
—U.S. Senate, 71st Congress,2nd & 3rd sessions on S. 3483, May 8, 1930, and January 28–29, 1931. Bill signed into law by President Hoover March 31, 1931.
It was against a backdrop of these broad strokes—taming wilderness, the law of vengeance, protection of property, an inalienable right to decide the fate of all animals without incurring moral responsibility, and the strongly American conception of man as the protector of defenseless creatures—that the wolf became the enemy.
These themes will be picked up in the next chapter.
Wolves of course were killed directly and indirectly for a diversity of reasons. Great battues, or drives, were organized against wolves in Europe whenever anyone suspected someone had been bitten by a wolf. Hundreds of wolves were often killed in these drives, like the one in which the beasts of Gévaudan were hunted down. Another famous outlaw wolf, a bobtailed animal named Courtaud, appeared outside the walled city of Paris in the summer of 1447. Courtaud and a pack of ten or twelve other wolves attacked small flocks of domestic animals being driven to market through the bramble woods where they lived. They chased horses, upsetting carts and frightening children. In February 1450, they supposedly entered Paris through a breach in the walls and killed forty people. As the hard winter bore on and attempts to kill the wolves in their lairs failed, they were lured into the city proper with a bloody trail of butchered livestock. Trapped in the square in front of Notre Dame, they were stoned and lanced to death.
Some wolves who killed human beings were thought to be more than mere wolves. In 1685 a wolf preying on domestic stock and supposed to have killed women and children near Ansbach, Germany, was identified as the reincarnation of a local, hated burgomaster. Hunted down and killed, the wolf was dressed up in a suit of flesh-colored cloth and fitted with a chestnut brown wig and white beard. The wolf’s muzzle was cut off and a mask fashioned after the burgomaster’s face was strapped on. The animal was then hung in the town square.
A generally accepted practice in Europe was an almost ritualized purging of wolves from the countryside after wars. Preying on thousands of dead bodies on the battlefields and left unmolested by a population at war, the wolf population increased and took advantage of untended flocks. Members of a victorious army, returning home elated, immediately set about killing the wolves and regarded the activity simply as a continuation of the war. Similarly, American soldiers returning after World War II to the upper Midwest began to refer to all wolves as Nazis and to hunt them down with great intensity.
Wolves were also killed as the result of being blamed for the deaths of stock and wildlife when feral dogs were at fault. In Minnesota recently, more than 100 deer were killed in separate incidents in two state parks and left uneaten. Wolves were blamed and bitter reprisals threatened by antiwolf forces until the real culprits, two dogs in each case, were found and killed.
In antiwolf campaigns in North America, wolves were killed and thrown on the steps of the state legislature well into the 1970s to garner headlines and pressure lawmakers into instituting bounties. Other angry citizens, seduced by the inflammatory language of antiwolf pamphlets, set up their own poisoned meat stations to kill wolves.
In recent years wolves have increasingly been the victims of “recreational killings,” run down by snowmobiles, surprised on snowbound roads, and chased in pickup trucks, or just shot on impulse by the one in a thousand deer hunters who chanced to see one during hunting season. (In 1975 a three-year-old wolf was found during deer season at a northern Minnesota dump. He had died of internal hemorrhaging, the result of having been shot in the back with a .22. I dug old fragments of a .30-caliber bullet of undetermined age out of the same animal’s skull.)
Others responsible for the death of wolves are less visible. Tourists in the Yukon demanding a wolf pelt for a den wall and willing to pay $450 or more for one are directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of animals. In 1973 well-meaning people in New York and Los Angeles urged that the Eastern timber wolf should be classified an endangered species. The law was passed and the same people scoffed when Minnesota complained that it had too many Eastern timber wolves. Afforded full federal protection, the Minnesota wolf population grew larger and larger and without simultaneous control on the number of human deer hunters, the wolf’s primary food source declined and many wolves died of starvation.
Washington Park Zoo, Portland, Oregon.
Wolves kept in zoos die every year as a result of poor cage design, faulty capture systems, and harassment. The failure of research institutions to isolate sexually mature animals at the correct times produces litters that have to be killed every year. Wolf pups given away to people are often put to sleep because they’re more trouble to raise and keep than dogs. Lois Crisler, who wrote about her life with wolves in Alaska in a book called Arctic Wild, killed the wolves she raised from pups because she couldn’t stand what captivity had done to them. And her.
That has been the shape of history for the wolf. Even today, in spite of a generally widespread sympathy for animals that have been persecuted through the ages, no more substantive reasons are needed to kill a wolf than the fact that someone feels like doing it. On a Saturday afternoon in Texas a few years ago, three men on horseback rode down a female red wolf and threw a lasso over her neck. When she gripped the rope with her teeth to keep the noose from closing, they dragged her around the prairie until they’d broken her teeth out. Then while two of them stretched the animal between their horses with ropes, the third man beat her to death with a pair of fence pliers. The wolf was taken around to a few bars in a pickup and finally thrown in a roadside ditch.
It is relatively easy to produce reasons why such depravity exists—because people are bored, because some men feel powerless in modern society. But this incident is, in fact, a staggering act of self-indulgence. That it is condoned by silence and goes unpunished reveals a terrible meanness in the human spirit.