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By Erica Berry
Ms. Berry is the author of “Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear.”
For generations, America waged a war against the wolf; now with the animals repopulating the Mountain West, the wolf war has taken on a new shape: pitting neighbors against neighbors as they fight over how to manage wolves.
Environmentalists believe wolves not only deserve a place in the environment, but can also help fix it, while ranchers feel they are taking on too much responsibility to live next to an animal that city dwellers need only admire. Those disagreements have degenerated into political battles, especially recently in Colorado, where the interests of conservative ranchers fought over a narrowly passed measure to reintroduce wolves into the Rocky Mountains until mid-December, when 10 wolves were released into the wild.
But there’s another way to address the most recent bankruptcy in the history of the U. S. wolf population: In the West’s developing economy, citizens of all political persuasions are finding common ground as they adjust to life alongside the wolf. Even in incredibly polarized times, it’s conceivable to make hot-button issues less controversial.
The main narrative of the big bad wolf, which has its roots in biblical stories and northern European fairy tales, arrived with the colonization of the Americas. Government-funded extermination systems have encouraged the killing of wolves, largely as part of a Nature “civilization” project, an offshoot of Manifest Destiny. By the mid-20th century, wolves in the neighboring United States had been shot, poisoned, and trapped to extinction, with only a few stragglers in the Upper Midwest.
Public opinion began to change with the birth of the fashionable environmental movement, and in 1974, wolves were among the first animals to be granted coverage under the Endangered Species Act. But when wolves were reintroduced to the Rocky Mountains in the 1990s, the Wolves had a pawn in a proxy war over American values. Part of the country saw the possibility of atonement for desecrated nature and the promise of a restored ecosystem. Others – big game hunters and ranchers of farm animals – saw wolves as a risk to their lives. livelihoods. Protected by federal law, the wolf has the vehicle for his greatest resentment of government excesses.
In his memoir “Wolfer,” Carter Niemeyer, a trapper-turned-government wolf biologist, recounted seeing a sign from Idaho in the 1990s that said, “Kill all those damn wolves and the other people who put them here. “The more polarized the wolves became, the more their fate became caught up in barrages of partisan legislation. In 2020, the Trump administration took steps to remove wolves from the Endangered Species Act, and four months later, Wisconsin allowed wolf hunting during the breeding season. Within three days, 218 wolves had been killed, and soon after, conservative legislatures in Western states were allowing hunters to shoot and kill wolves with impunity. Ed Bangs, the biologist who led wolf recovery in the Northern Rockies for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In the U. S. , he told a reporter that the wolf hunting legislation was only meant to “make snowflakes cry. “
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