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3,500 wolf tags sold in Idaho in three hours yesterday (that's nearly 20 every second) after the Idaho Fish and Game Department began issuing permits. At $11.75 a pop, that tells volumes about what wolves are worth to the state. Are these people competing with Governor Butch Otter, who roughly two years ago, claimed he wanted to be the first in line to shoot a wolf? By next Tuesday, September 1st, when Idaho's hunt starts, how many more thousands of tags will be issued to kill 220 wolves in the state-sponsored hunt? (The Nez Perce Tribe has an additional 35 permits-and maybe many more-in a separate tribe-sponsored hunt in Idaho).
Why? How sporting is it to kill a wolf, which looks a lot like a malamute? And why now, since the Northern Rockies population is still just rebounding, after being wiped out (for all intents and purposes) from the landscape until 1995? After spending millions of taxpayer dollars on one of the most successful endangered species recovery efforts in the country, why do we need to kill them now-before they are fully recovered? What's the rush?
In his book Of Wolves and Men, Barry Lopez wrote:
[M]an has always sought to legitimize his hunting of wolves, even when it was at the ragged edges of decency ... There is something deep-seated in men that makes them want to "take on" the outdoors, as though it were something to be whipped, and to kill wolves because killing a wolf stands for real triumph. In view of the way most wolves are killed, it is hard to see how the image is sustained, but it is. Hunting is an ingrained male activity, especially in rural America, where few children grow up not wanting to hunt a wolf. I hunted as a boy and I remember very clearly the first time I thought there was something wrong with the men that I admired, something fundamentally backward about the kind of hunting that was held out to me as what men were supposed to do in the course of things. I was reading a book about big game animals in which Jack O'Connor, then the gun editor of Outdoor Life, described suddenly coming on seven wolves on a river bar in the Yukon. O'Connor dismounted and opened fire. 'With considerable expenditure of ammunition', he wrote, he killed four of them and then said he was sorry that he did it for two reasons. 'For one it was August and hides were worthless. For another my shooting spooked an enormous grizzly bear.' I couldn't get over that.
Lopez's book was written about 30 years ago. But what keeps this attitude alive today? The same machismo? The same urge to kill things to prove one's manhood? The same spirit of domination over nature that, in part, drove the settlement of the West, the killing of the Indians, the slaughter of the buffalo? What is this really about?
I got an interesting (partial) answer to this question a couple years ago at a wolf delisting hearing in Cody, Wyoming. After the hearing, several other conservationists and I went to the Irma Bar, a local watering hole where we were soon surrounded by a bunch of cowboy hats who wanted to "chat." The ringleader was an outfitter, a big hard-muscled guy, with a tank top that revealed an armful of tattoos. He had had a few beers and wanted a few words with me. I thought to myself: big mistake, Willcox, venturing into the Irma on this particular night-just after 600 angry ranchers and others had ranted about wolves a the Civic Center for 3 hours, some so disrupting the hearing that the officer threatened to shut the event down several times. There were about 25 pro-wolf spokespeople, some too intimidated to stand up and speak.
The conversation with this outfitter was one of the most revealing 45 minutes I've had on the question of wolf killing. He started by pointing to his gang-young guys in their twenties, looking cowboy. He said they worked in the big game outfitting business in the Absarokas, work he thought would not exist here in 30 years. He felt sorry for these kids, who didn't have much education and didn't see other options. He didn't actually dislike wolves, he said, and had worked for a time for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on wolf management.
But then came the complaints, seemingly unrelated, pouring out from him like a waterfall. Complaints not about wolves, but about trophy homes going up along the North Fork of the Shoshone, the fact that wages were not keeping up with the cost of living, the economic uncertainties facing the cattle industry, Canadian imports of beef out-competing the U.S. He talked about the "yuppification" of the places that he grew up in, the landscapes that he loved. He said, "we can't control a lot of aspects of our lives, but we can go out and kill a wolf."
Bingo. All the frustration, confusion, fear, and anxiety about the radical changes underway in communities like Cody, and what is wrong with how government and society operates, aimed now at the wolf, the new bullseye. As if killing wolves would somehow solve their problems, or make them feel better and more in control of their lives.
Aside from all the other baggage the wolf carries-the symbolic weight of the Endangered Species Act, the association with the federal government, the label of "Satan's dog"- wolves appear to have also become the voiceless, voteless scapegoats for the ills of society. And in a culture that identifies so much with guns (now even allowed in National Parks), it's a volatile mix. And, if all you have is a hammer, every problem can be treated as a nail.
And nailing wolves is just what will happen next week, unless Judge Molloy, who is holding a hearing next Monday in federal court in Missoula on a motion for preliminary injunction we and others filed to prevent the wolf hunts, stops it.
We at NRDC are not opposed to hunting, but wolves need to be fully recovered first. And we question the motivation behind this wolf hunting enterprise. Are wolves being hunted as some kind of displacement activity, when the real problems facing society today seem so uncontrollable?
Maybe we need to take a step back and think about more than hammers and guns. Maybe there are better tools that can be applied to address the real inequalities and challenges of society today, and the loss of civil discourse in our communities. Maybe the debate about wolf hunting is less about wolves and more about ourselves, our relationships to each other, and how to find meaning in this crazy world.
* * * This post originally appeared on NRDC's Switchboard.
Louisa Willcox is Senior Wildlife Advocate for The National Resources Defense Council, based in Livingston, Montana. She was previously project coordinator for Sierra Club’s program to recover the grizzly bear and program director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. She has a Masters Degree from Yale University’s School of Forestry and an undergraduate degree from Williams College. NRDC is a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the environment, people and animals. NRDC was founded in 1970 and is comprised of more than 300 lawyers, scientists and policy experts, with more than one million members and e-activists.
