When is there ever just the right number of wolves? Answer: never.
There are always too many wolves, even when there are too few wolves. In decades of conservation work in North America, I’ve never known there to be the right number of wolves in any community they inhabit. They have been eradicated in virtually all of Mexico and the contiguous U.S., the southern prairies, and much of the east in Canada. Entire, genetically and physiologically distinct subspecies, such as the Newfoundland wolf, the great plains wolf, the Florida wolf, and the Texas wolf, were all exterminated. Parts of the continent where they still exist include some parts of the Great Lakes region, where I live.
But, there are, in the eyes of some, still “too many” wolves, even where they are listed as being threatened or endangered under state, provincial, or federal legislation. The Trump administration wants to end any federal protection for wolves in the lower 48 states. In my opinion, the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) is the most powerful, and hence effective, such legislation on the continent, but while conservationists fervently hope the listing of species to be protected by the ESA is science-based, as is true of all laws political expediency and ideological whims exert influence. That influence too often derives from hubristic shortsightedness, ruthless disrespect for non-humans, and ignorance of our dependence on the health of the environment we share with others, triggering the greatest acceleration in wildlife extinction since great dinosaurs stomped about.
It has taken three billion years of infinitely improbable events, pairings, selection, survival, and chance to build any current species – a grand, great journey that is forever terminated by extinction. Such a journey has given our own kind greater power than wisdom as we lay waste to the very ability of the world to sustain us. We have the opposing ability to control ourselves, to protect species, as is the purpose of the ESA, and by stopping that which causes the problem we can, sometimes, reverse it.
In Canada, where I live, there are, as is true of Alaska, still an ability in some places for wolves to live. Some of those wolves have, protected by the ESA, trotted back into the U.S., while others were boldly picked up in Canada and physically placed in the U.S. where once their kind lived, a practice popularly called “re-wilding.” It works.
But, in 2011, Congress ended ESA protection for wolves in Idaho and Montana. In 2017, they ended ESA protection of wolves in Wyoming. These actions effectively ended recovery of the species in those states. While the usual assertion is that states just want local control, not eradication, never underestimate the combined economic and political powers of the livestock, sport hunting, and gun industries, not to mention the irrational fears that wolves have evoked since long before a fictional one ate Little Red Riding Hood’s equally fictional grandma. Being social animals, with structured pack affiliations and inter-dependencies, wolves are, unlike the smaller coyotes, easily extirpated.
While I could mount a science-based defense of apex predation and the need for bio-diversity, or a personal and subjective veneration of wildness, freedom, and the haunting chill of a wolf’s howl beneath a crystalline firmament deep into a boreal night at the forested edge of a frozen lake, to what avail? Neither would carry the day against the wilful inanity and egocentric greed that fuels our not-all-that-slow motion rush toward our own ultimate endangerment.
The center may yet hold. The courts have upheld the ESA in the past, restoring protection for the wolves in the Great Lakes region in 2014, declaring that trophy hunting and trapping had been restored in Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin “prematurely,” in 2011.
While there is no universal answer to the question of what is the “right” number of wolves, surely the correct answer must be more than “none.”
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry
