Pick up the february 2007 issue of Outdoor Life magazine, and the first thing you’ll probably notice is a pretty scary-looking confrontation. The cover features an outdoorsy oil painting—think 1950s Boy Scouts manual—of two snarling wolves charging toward a hunter. “Wolf Attack,” reads the neon-orange cover line, pointing to a story about a hunter whose dogs were killed by wolves.

The story has conservationists fuming. “It makes it sound like the wolves are attacking these people and their dogs, but it doesn’t really explain what occurred,” says Suzanne Asha Stone, a spokesperson for the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife. “People went hunting with their dogs, and they released them near the wolves’ denning site. It’s unfortunate that this happened, but it’s not common.”

Neither the story nor Stone’s reaction is surprising; hunters and animal advocates have an acrimonious history together, to put it mildly. But there’s a backstory that makes the Outdoor Life article especially timely—and, if you ask Stone, especially worrisome.

Wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains are back from the brink of extinction. Before the westward expansion, wolves were plentiful in the Rockies, but by the early 1990s, only 66 remained. Then, in 1995 and 1996, 66 more were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho. Today, scientists estimate that there are more than 1,200 wolves in the Northern Rockies—so many that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is currently considering removing the region’s wolf population from the endangered species list.

For many, this is cause for celebration. But not everyone is happy about the return of the wolves. Ranchers and farmers say it’s difficult and expensive to protect livestock from them, and hunters point to several instances in which wolves have threatened people and killed dogs. Antiwolf sentiments are so rampant that conservationists fear that delisting will put the animals at risk again.

And they have reason to worry. In January 2007, Idaho governor C.L. “Butch” Otter spoke out in favor of an open hunt to reduce the state’s wolf population to 100, drawing national media attention when he said, “I’m prepared to bid for that first ticket to shoot a wolf myself.” In 2004, an Idaho man planted pesticide-laced meatballs in the state’s Salmon-Challis National Forest, hoping to poison wolves in the area. And at a rally this past March, Idaho Anti-Wolf Coalition leader Ron Gillett likened his group’s fight to eradicate all the wolves from the state to the American Revolution. “I hope we’ve got a lot of Patrick Henrys here tonight, because that is what it’s going to take to get it done,” he told reporters.

Evidence that Americans have wolves on the brain isn’t just in the Rockies; it’s everywhere. In 2004, Bush’s campaign included a TV ad suggesting that John Kerry’s budget cuts would leave America vulnerable to terrorists, represented as a pack of salivating wolves. And in an episode of the HBO series Big Love in 2006, Bill Henrickson, the show’s protagonist, confronts (and shoots) a snarling wolf in the woods. Later, he decides to take on the show’s real “wolf”—a controlling patriarch out to destroy his business.

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Posted on Jun 5, 2007 at 12:30 PM
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