To Kill a Wolf
As brushes with wolves rise, wildlife experts weigh whether the best way to preserve wolves could include hunting them.
By Erik Ness
Middle Ground
David Mladenoff ponders the math. “Five hundred wolves? A million deer? We can have a lot more wolves,” he says. “But that’s unfortunately not what’s going to happen. I think we’re seeing that change in attitude already. And the irony is that we can actually probably have more wolves in the state if we’re able to have some kind of active management.”
Wydeven wants to wait and see. He’s hopeful that allowing property owners to remove problem wolves, an option that was briefly in force, may become available again if the wolf is taken off the endangered list. If that happens, he says, “it’s possible that we might start seeing the population stabilize at a level that’s reasonable for the landscape, that there may not be a need for a public harvest.”
But people need to change some habits, as well. Bear hunters need to think twice about where and when they run their dogs. And farmers may need to change some husbandry practices to protect young livestock. Those who live near wolves need to appreciate and accept that wolves have changed their definition of home.
Mladenoff remembers giving a talk, perhaps a decade ago, where he laid out how we would eventually reach this point in our relationship with wolves. A student approached afterward, very frustrated. “Why can’t we just leave the wolves alone?” she asked. “I really feel the same thing,” he answered. “But there is no place on the planet that is unmanaged, if you use ‘managed’ in a sense of either intentional or unintentional human impacts. No place. And this is how we affect this part of the planet.”
Then he wound around to a message that feels even more apt today. “If we want to have some of these components of natural systems around,” he told the student, “we just have to be more creative about our attitude toward this wild/non-wild dichotomy. We have to have a different attitude.”
For most of our history, that attitude has been to vilify and kill wolves however we could. Then we swung wildly to the other extreme, adopting them as sacred icons of untamed wilderness. And as Naughton warns, “neither is going to be an appropriate model for living with wolves. Ultimately, to learn to live with wolves, we have to figure out how to make fair rules and live with each other-meaning people who have very different values about wolves and nature.”
Tags: Conservation, Human-wildlife interactions, Wildlife ecology
Posted in Environment, Featured, Main feature, On The Cover, Spring 2009 | 6 Comments »