THE HIGH DESERT OF eastern Oregon ranged off under a bright crescent moon in long swells, like an inland ocean. I was driving home from Burns, a ranching town in Oregon’s dry plateau country, headed for the Cascade Mountains and a temperate rainforest on the far side of those volcanic peaks, where my house sits by a river. Twenty minutes or more would pass between one oncoming vehicle and the next. At the farthest reach of my truck lights, coyotes skipped the road. Twice I saw small herds of antelope silhouetted against the clear sky.
Despite the warm, insular confinement of the truck, the sound of its engine, and whir of tires on the two-lane blacktop and macadam, I felt included in the silent nightscape of chilled winter land I was moving through. It was fenced, to be sure, but the absence of any building and the moon’s pale light suggested, still, uncorralled nature.
The rolling uplands of scattered juniper, sage, and rabbit brush to either side of the road were likely as wolfless on this night as they had been before white settlement, one of the few, odd corners of North America to have virtually no history of wolves, according to wolf historian Stanley Young. A hundred miles away to the northeast, in the wide basins and wooded foothills of the Blue Mountains, however, wolves had turned up at least three times since 1999. They had swum the Snake River from Idaho, to make their appearance in a land where the last wolf had been trapped out more than fifty years before. Of the three, one was struck and killed by a vehicle on Interstate 84, south of Baker City in May 2000. A second, a radio-collared female, was captured by state, federal, and Nez Perce tribal biologists on the Middle Fork of the John Day River in February 1999 and returned to her home range in central Idaho. The third, a male, was shot in October 2000 north of Ukiah, Oregon, and some suggested, left to be found.
Each of these three wolves—and chances are good there were others, never seen or reported—was a descendant of animals introduced into Idaho’s Salmon River backcountry in 1995 and 1996 by the federal government. Their unanticipated appearance in eastern Oregon had instantly stirred mixed and powerful emotions across the state. Many people in the two largest urban areas, Portland and Eugene, initially saw these dispersing wolves as a favorable omen, a tenuous symbol of reconciliation between human and nonhuman worlds. Residents of predominantly rural eastern Oregon, however, were nearly unanimous in their demand that the state do something to keep such migrating wolves away. They viewed these creatures as a serious economic threat to livestock operations and to sport hunting, a major component of tourism in that part of Oregon. In the rising and acrimonious statewide debate, they charged that wolves would ruthlessly kill pets in the suburbs and argued that their presence would degrade the value of ranch land.
That winter night, driving across the desert, I was coming home from one of fourteen regional town hall meetings arranged by Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife, each meant to solicit public opinion about which approach the state might take to wolves wandering into Oregon from Idaho. The strident objections I’d heard to this animal’s establishing a presence in the state, raised by virtually all of the nearly one hundred people in attendance in Burns that night, were so vehement, so biologically naive, so seemingly beyond negotiation, I remember thinking the meeting could as easily have taken place in 1902 as 2002.
The consensus sentiment was: Kill them, or they will harm us.
It is difficult to summarize what we have learned about wolves in the twenty-five years since this book was written, partly because wolves are studied in a more politicized environment today. For example, recent genetic research suggests that the eastern timber wolf (at present Canis lupus lycaon, but tentatively Canis lycaon) may be a separate species from the gray wolf (Canis lupus), one more closely related to the red wolf (Canis rufus). This speculation has affected public debate about the reintroduction of wolves to their former habitat in the northeastern United States as well as debate about the intent of certain provisions in the Endangered Species Act. Such a contesting of scientific opinion likely would not have taken place twenty-five or thirty years ago.
The most striking—and uncontested—reassessment of our understanding of wolf ecology in recent years has been prompted by long-term studies of predator/prey relationships. The effect wolves have on the size of prey populations, we now know, is much more complicated than originally imagined. In short, wolves limit the size of prey populations but they do not regulate them. Grizzly bears, for example, where they are present, play a larger role in the population dynamics of moose and caribou than anyone previously suspected.
While wolf researchers continue to refine our conceptions of wolf biology, behavior, and ecology (looking, for instance, for the causes of infant mortality or speculating on the resolution of social tensions in a pack), we have arguably seen the most significant change in our understanding of the wolf in another area—wolf-human relations. This change has come about largely as a result of wolves’ increased contact with humans (1) in areas where large wolf populations are intact, protected, or well managed (Alaska, Canada, and Minnesota); (2) where smaller, naturally occurring wolf populations are recovering (Montana, Wisconsin, and Michigan); and (3) in areas where wolves have been reintroduced.
Red wolves, the first species of wolf to be successfully reintroduced, were released in North Carolina, mostly in and around Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, beginning in 1987. Gray wolves, after early attempts in various locales failed, were successfully reintroduced in 1995 and 1996, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service placed thirty-five wolves from British Columbia and Alberta in former wolf habitat in central Idaho and released another thirty-one in the Yellowstone country of Wyoming. These two populations have thrived, and wolves in Yellowstone National Park have provided researchers in the lower forty-eight states with extraordinary new opportunities for study. Gray wolves were also reintroduced in Arizona and New Mexico in 1998, and a federal plan for their release in northern New England and upstate New York was drawn up in 1992.
Increased human contact with wolves over the past three decades has led to a reconsideration of their reputedly always-benign response to the presence of human beings. The topic of much greater interest to most, however, and an area of intense scientific curiosity, has been wolf reintroduction. Whether the reintroduction of the wolf makes good all-around biological sense remains an open question; the successful reintroduction of these creatures in several regions, however, has signaled the appearance of something new—an active human desire now to share wild land with wolves, bears, and other large predators, perhaps not incidentally emerging in a country that historically has been this animal’s most systematic foe.
It is easy, I think, to underestimate the emotional impact wolf reintroduction has had on many Americans. For some, considering the near maniacal way in which the animal was once hunted down, it’s been like reconciliation with a bad dream. Scientists contend we will never be able to completely restore the ecosystems in which wolves once lived, but many now feel that we’ve been able at least to restore some sense of our own dignity by successfully implementing and managing wolf reintroduction programs.
The decades following the publication of Adolph Murie’s The Wolves of Mount McKinley (1944) and Stanley Young and Edward Goldman’s The Wolves of North America (1944) saw an enormous growth in our general understanding of the biology and ecology of wolves, and we developed a greatly expanded appreciation of the complexity of their behavior. This awakening pointed directly to a reassessment of our relationship with wolves and, I believe, led straight to considering the feasibility of reintroduction.
Today, along with the usual stream of data from field and laboratory studies, work that scientists have traditionally relied on, most professional researchers, with some notable exceptions, are willing to take seriously the amplifying views of indigenous people about wolves, building on the pioneering work of Robert O. Stephenson with Nunamiut Eskimos in Alaska’s Brooks Range. They are also more willing to consult with scholars in folklore, mythology, history, and human psychology on the development of wolf management and wolf reintroduction programs. The fieldwork of scientists in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia has further deepened our knowledge of the wolf’s ability to adapt successfully to human encroachment in previously wild environments.
Our awareness of wolves, as a result, has become quite complex. We better comprehend how our own behavior and preconceptions affect our understanding of what they do, and our overall relations with them are now more informed by ethical considerations.
You wouldn’t have guessed, of course, at the Harney County Senior Center in Burns that December night, that such a profound shift in awareness had occurred. (The anger and frustration directed against wolves at some of the other town hall meetings in Oregon, I later learned, was even greater.) But in fairness to many of those testifying in Burns, the wolf itself, Canis lupus, was not the focus of their fulminations but rather what the wolf’s protected status and its deliberate reintroduction symbolized for the majority of those who attended the meeting. Along with many other rural Americans, these Oregonians shared a sense that they were being financially compromised and socially marginalized by the recent development of ecologically based land-use policy decisions across the United States. They also felt, generally, that these policies were too environmentally restrictive and that they were developed mostly by “city people,” persons innocent of the day-to-day realities of rural life.
A second, closely allied group of Americans—if they can, indeed, be separated out as a second group—spoke that night about their conviction that they were being chronically thwarted and endlessly manipulated by the federal government because of their way of life. Some in this group were instantly hostile toward the suggestion of any kind of toleration of potential threats to their grazing privileges on public land, should that land be seen to have some other public use, such as water conservation or wildlife protection.
The modern controversy over wolf protection, wolf management, and wolf reintroduction, in other words, has stirred a discomfiting examination of both our romance with wild wolves and our nostalgia about the ranching life.
Looking back over the twenty-five years since this book was first published and wondering where we’ve gotten in our dealings with these animals, I feel compelled to offer only a couple of thoughts. At the opening of the twenty-first century, the wolf is a much less demonized animal than it was when Stanley Young was writing. This is largely due to the wide dissemination of a body of scientific research on wolves and on a growing sophistication among lay people about ecology in general. The wolf, however, continues to generate more adamant positions and to trigger more powerful emotions than any other large predator in the northern hemisphere, especially if the question is about where wolves might fit in a landscape shared closely with humans. Some folklore about wolves, both that which attributes nobility to them and that which seizes upon them as an embodiment of evil, is so deeply entrenched that its adherents completely shut out the emerging insights of field biologists, historians, religion scholars, and other researchers in the social sciences and humanities. In their rigid stances they are impervious even to reason. Why this is so remains one of the most interesting questions in wolf research, partly because it’s so representative of large-scale political forces at work today in American culture.
A second thought is that with the reintroduction of wolves, we’ve demonstrated that we’re more capable now of living in a give-and-take relationship with the natural world than we once were. This bodes well for all animals, ourselves included. It means we’re willing to consider biological information alongside economic data and human social needs in the development of public policy and management programs.
Finally, if one strain of wolf research in recent decades would seem to call for clarifying comment, it would be the study and promotion of dominance hierarchies in wolf packs. While a sometimes convenient tool of analysis, the notion of sex and age hierarchies has led too many people to make specious assumptions about wolf behavior. Interpreting wolf interactions too strictly along these lines, like placing too strong an emphasis on the significance of a predator’s “territory,” requires many large mammals to carry the freight of human constructs, including “ownership” and “authority,” baggage no animal should be asked to bear.
Many of us now seem to subscribe to the idea that wild animals are not mechanisms. They cannot be summed up, any more than Homo sapiens can be summed up. Wild animals are intricately fitted in the world, an intricacy that, many speculate, goes further and deeper than the catch nets of Homo sapiens’ neurological capacity to conceive.
Reality is a mystery, to put it another way, and bound to remain so. And it may be as good an idea to live within the mystery as it is to stand outside it, possessed of the notion that it can be explained.
We have been moving steadily in recent years toward another sort of reconciliation, that with our own ecology and biology. We wonder now whether our national and local politics should reflect, far better than they have, what we are learning about the kind of environment our bodies fundamentally require. The growth of much of this thinking, curiously, can be traced directly to the long-term, exacting, and thoughtful fieldwork being done by women and men studying animals in their natural habitats, a range of creatures, at some level, not so different from ourselves. Wild animals, living beyond fiscal economies, disinterested in the nation-state, requiring no technologies, no growth in their rates of consumption in order to abide and proliferate, yet able to experience emotional states somewhere in the realm of our own, remind us that we are rooted in an absolute need for good water, clean air, and unadulterated food. And, not incidentally, in a requirement for diversity. Diversity, many now suspect, is not merely a characteristic of life, either biological life or cultural life. It is a condition necessary for life.
It would not be inappropriate or sentimental in the context of this book, considering the scope of what has happened in wolf studies in recent years, to thank this enduring creature, Canis lupus, for standing by while we continue to pursue a complex and difficult aspiration, the implementation of a universal justice that would include all we see living around us.
Barry Lopez
McKenzie River, Oregon
2003