Through Different Eyes: Shifting Values and the Return of the Real Wolf
by Thomas R. Peterson
Ten years ago, on a biting cold winter morning in the world's first national park, I witnessed the release of two wolves brought from Canada into a one-acre acclimation pen on the Blacktail Plateau, a "pre-release" that was the first phase of a wolf reintroduction plan for the 2.2 million acres of Yellowstone National Park. After skiing in to the acclimation site, our small group of journalists and observers saw the first cage brought into the pen and the cage door raised. Instantly a black-as-night wolf bolted out, long black tail low to the ground, and dashed around the perimeter of the pen, gulping snow and looking for an escape. There was an audible gasp from our small crowd. The second wolf, also deep black with grayish underbelly, followed suit, its long, lean legs with hand-size paws covering a lot of ground quickly. This close-up look at a powerful predator left us awed and speechless; we skied and snowshoed away in silence.
Today, ten years after these reintroductions into Yellowstone and the huge wilderness area of central Idaho, and over 25 years since Barry Lopez wrote his seminal book about attitudes towards wolves, Of Wolves and Men, I am still intrigued by a central question: Have we seen a shift in attitudes and perceptions, a shift in values toward wolves? If so, why? And maybe most importantly, what difference does it make to us or to those responsible for wolf management?
Some of the stories I've encountered reflect active shifts toward resolution; other stories still create strong tremors that shake our moral ground in all directions, like wolves being poisoned near Clayton, ID with Compound 1080, a poison with no known antidote that causes extended convulsions and suffering prior to death; or of wolves, like wolf #230, who was most likely shot illegally a couple of years ago near the Yaak Valley in Montana, its radio collar found—cut—in Yaak Falls. And then there are the stories of over 153,000 people to date—among countless millions of visitors—who have been lucky enough to have sighted wolves with their own eyes in Yellowstone.
In our attitudes towards wolves we perceive, seemingly, three different species: One wolf has devil horns on his head; another has a halo; and the third wolf, well, she's just a wolf—a breathing, howling, running, hunting, shitting wolf. How do we ask the necessary questions to determine which is the "real" wolf?
"The whole wolf issue has nothing to do with reality," says Ed Bangs, Rocky Mountain wolf coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), "It has everything to do with symbols. If you're a big cycle person and believe that everything works together, you tend to like wolves. If you believe people are on top of everything, you tend not to like wolves."
Attitude goes a long way in how one regards and responds to a keystone species like wolves. The symbols Bangs refers to, for example, may have been carried here from the Europe of the Middle Ages. "The medieval mind," writes Barry Lopez, "more than any other mind in history, was obsessed with images of wolves." Little Red Riding Hood, The Big Bad Wolf, and other fairy tales and mythologies helped spawn a broad cultural bias. And sayings like "a wolf in sheep's clothing," "wolves at the door," and "a real wolf with women," seem to reflect our culture's continuing antipathy for wolves.
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Also check out:
Wolf Country: Myths, Legends and Stories
We need a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of wolves. Man surveys the wolf through the glass of his knowledge, and sees a feather magnified, and the whole image is distorted. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therin we err. For no animal shall be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
Henry Beston, The Outermost House
... We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.
In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy; how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable side-rocks.
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
. . .
Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.
Excerpts from the Work of Aldo Leopold