Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  One morning in Montana I sat in the home of an old man named Raven Bear, a Crow. He had made a trip to Seattle a few years before to see his family. One day he took his grandson and drove to the Olympic peninsula where he had heard there was a commercial zoo with a number of wolves. He found the place, paid six dollars and went in. In a while he was ashamed he had brought his grandson there. The wolves were all in small pens, obese animals suffering from diseases, he thought. The people running the zoo told him the wolves were the last remnants of the Great Plains wolf, Canis lupus nubilis. “I wanted to tell the man he didn’t know what he was saying,” said Raven Bear, “but I didn’t know how to do that. I just took the boy and left.”

  It was late at night. Raven Bear was sitting on the top of a bunk bed with his stocking feet hanging over the edge. After a while he said, “It hurts like hell, you know, to see it finished.”

  Three

  THE BEAST OF WASTE AND DESOLATION

  Seven

  THE CLAMOR OF JUSTIFICATION

  IN THE COURSE OF writing this book I had a chance to talk with many people, and to come into contact with several different points of view about wolves. I enjoyed being in the field with biologists. I enjoyed the range and subtlety of Indian and Eskimo ideas. My only discomfort came when I talked with men who saw nothing wrong with killing wolves, who felt it was basically a good thing to be doing. For the most part, they were men who had matured in a different time and under different circumstances than I. We didn’t share the same feelings toward animals, but I could understand their positions. Some were professional trappers. Others had lost stock to wolves. There was a larger context.

  There were a few I spoke with, however, who were quite different. It was as though these men had broken down at some point in their lives and begun to fill with bile, and that bile had become an unreasoned hatred of many things. Of laws. Of governments. Of wolves. They hated wolves because—they would struggle to put it into words—because wolves seemed better off than they were. And that seemed perverse. They killed wolves habitually, with a trace of vengeance, with as little regret as a boy shooting rats at a dump.

  They were few in number but their voices, screaming for the wolf’s head, were often the loudest, the ones that set the tone at a grange meeting and precipitated the wolf’s extirpation in the lower forty-eight states.

  These men, and others, killed no one will ever know how many thousands of wolves in America, mostly to control predation against livestock. At the time, toward the close of the nineteenth century, it was a legitimate undertaking. Wolves, deprived of buffalo and other wild game, had turned to cattle and sheep; if you wanted to raise stock in America you had little choice but to kill wolves. But the killing was a complicated business, it was never as clearly reasoned as that. On the spur of the moment men offered ridiculous reasons—because the wolves loafed and didn’t have to work for their food, they would say.

  It is easy to condemn these men now, to look at what they did—destroy a national wildlife heritage—and feel a sense of loss. But they are, perhaps, too easily blamed. We forget how little, really, separates us from the times and circumstances in which we, too, would have killed wolves. Besides, blaming them for the loss is too simplistic. We are forced to a larger question: when a man cocked a rifle and aimed at a wolf’s head, what was he trying to kill? And other questions. Why didn’t we quit, why did we go on killing long after the need was gone? And when the craven and deranged tortured wolves, why did so many of us look the other way?

  In an historical sense, we are all to blame for the loss of wolves. In the nineteenth century when the Indians on the plains were telling us that the wolf was a brother, we were preaching another gospel. Manifest Destiny. What rankles us now, I think, is that an alternative gospel still remains largely unarticulated. You want to say there never should have been a killing, but you don’t know what to put in its place.

  Ever since man first began to wonder about wolves—to make dogs of their descendants, to admire them as hunters—he has made a regular business of killing them. At first glance the reasons are simple enough, and justifiable. Wolves are predators. When men come into a land to “tame” it, they replace wild game with domestic animals. The wolves prey on these creatures, the men kill them in turn, and reduce the wolf population generally, as a preventive measure to secure their economic investment. The two just can’t live side by side. A step removed from this, perhaps, in terms of its justification, is the action of Fish and Game departments that kill wolves to sustain or increase the yield of big game animals so human hunters can kill them. This kind of “predator control” has historically accommodated economic and political interests ahead of ecological interests. And it has acted occasionally from a basis of bar stool and barbershop biology, not wildlife science.

  Wolf killing goes much beyond predator control, of course. Bounty hunters kill wolves for money; trappers kill them for pelts; scientists kill them for data; big game hunters kill them for trophies. The arguments for killing here are harder to sustain, yet many people see nothing at all wrong with these activities. Indeed, this is the way we commonly treat all predators—bobcats, bears, and mountain lions included. But the wolf is fundamentally different because the history of killing wolves shows far less restraint and far more perversity. A lot of people didn’t just kill wolves; they tortured them. They set wolves on fire and tore their jaws out and cut their Achilles tendons and turned dogs loose on them. They poisoned them with strychnine, arsenic, and cyanide, on such a scale that millions of other animals—raccoons, black-footed ferrets, red foxes, ravens, red-tailed hawks, eagles, ground squirrels, wolverines—were killed incidentally in the process. In the thick of the wolf fever they even poisoned themselves, and burned down their own property torching the woods to get rid of wolf havens. In the United States in the period between 1865 and 1885 cattlemen killed wolves with almost pathological dedication. In the twentieth century people pulled up alongside wolves in airplanes and snowmobiles and blew them apart with shotguns for sport. In Minnesota in the 1970s people choked Eastern timber wolves to death in snares to show their contempt for the animal’s designation as an endangered species.

  This is not predator control, and it goes beyond the casual cruelty sociologists say manifests itself among people under stress, or where there is no perception of responsibility. It is the violent expression of a terrible assumption: that men have the right to kill other creatures not for what they do but for what we fear they may do. I almost wrote “or for no reason,” but there are always reasons. Killing wolves has to do with fear based on superstitions. It has to do with “duty.” It has to do with proving manhood (abstractly, perhaps, this is nothing more than wanting either to possess or to destroy the animal’s soul). And sometimes, I think, because the killing is so righteously pursued and yet so entirely without conscience, killing wolves has to do with murder.

  Historically, the most visible motive, and the one that best explains the excess of killing, is a type of fear: theriophobia. Fear of the beast. Fear of the beast as an irrational, violent, insatiable creature. Fear of the projected beast in oneself. The fear is composed of two parts: self-hatred; and anxiety over the human loss of inhibitions that are common to other animals who do not rape, murder, and pillage. At the heart of theriophobia is the fear of one’s own nature. In its headiest manifestations theriophobia is projected onto a single animal, the animal becomes a scapegoat, and it is annihilated. That is what happened to the wolf in America. The routes that led there, however, were complex.

  Those days are past. There is little to be gained now by condemning the aerial “sport” hunting of wolves (the activity is banned in the United States by federal law), or by railing against the cattle industry for the excesses of its founders. But there is something to be gained from learning where the fear and hatred originated, and where the one thing besides cruelty to the animal that sets wolf hunting apart from other kinds of hunting—the “righteousness” of it—comes fro
m.

  The hatred has religious roots: the wolf was the Devil in disguise. And it has secular roots: wolves killed stock and made men poor. At a more general level it had to do, historically, with feelings about wilderness. What men said about the one, they generally meant about the other. To celebrate wilderness was to celebrate the wolf; to want an end to wilderness and all it stood for was to want the wolf’s head.

  In setting down a base for our antipathy toward wilderness, the historian Roderick Nash has singled out religious and secular antecedents. In Beowulf, for example, there is an expression of the secular (i.e., non-religious) wilderness that is constituted of uninhabited forest—a region whose dank, cold depths, with its miasmic swamps and windswept crags, harbor foul creatures that prey on men. In the Bible, wilderness is defined as the place without God—a sere and barren desert. This twined sense of wilderness as a place innately dangerous and godless was something that attached itself, inevitably, to the wolf—the most feared denizen of gloomy wilderness. As civilized man matured and came to measure his own progress by his subjugation of the wilderness—both clearing trees for farms and clearing pagan minds for Christian ideas—the act of killing wolves became a symbolic act, a way to lash out at that enormous, inchoate obstacle: wilderness. Man demonstrated his own prodigious strength as well as his allegiance to God by killing wolves. I greatly oversimplify, but there is not much distinction in motive between the Christian missionaries who set fire to England’s woods to deprive Druids of a place to worship and the residents of Arkansas who set fire to thousands of acres of the Ouachita National Forest in 1928 to deprive wolves of hiding places.

  Predator-control program on the north slope of the Brooks Range, 1950s.

  In America in the eighteenth century Cotton Mather and other Puritan ministers preached against wilderness as an insult to the Lord, as a challenge to man to show the proof of his religious conviction by destroying it. Mather, and others, urged the colonists to make of the “howling wilderness” a “fruitful field.” In 1756 John Adams wrote that when the colonists arrived in America, “the whole continent was one continued dismal wilderness, the haunt of wolves and bears and more savage men. Now the forests are removed, the land covered with fields of corn, orchards bending with fruit and the magnificent habitations of rational and civilized people.” In Europe at the same time the subjugation and ordering of shabby wilderness had reached its exaggerated apotheosis in the excessive neatness of the Versailles gardens.

  The drive to tame wilderness in America never let up. The wagon-master of the 1840s “opened the road west”; he was followed by the farmer, who cleared the fields, and the logger, who “let daylight into the swamp.” One hundred years after Adams wrote of dismal wilderness, the railroad barons and cattle barons were speaking of Manifest Destiny and man’s right and obligation as God’s steward to “make something of the land.” And where they made it into towns, fields, and pastures, there was no place for the wolf. The wolf became the symbol of what you wanted to kill—memories of man’s primitive origins in the wilderness, the remnant of his bestial nature which was all that held him back in America from building the greatest empire on the face of the earth. The wolf represented “a fierce, bloodsucking persecutor” (as Roger Williams called him) of everything that was high-born in man. Theodore Roosevelt, his hand on the Bible, his eye riveting the attention of men of commerce, spoke gravely of wolf predation on his ranch in North Dakota, of the threat to progress represented by the wolf. He called him “the beast of waste and desolation.”

  The image of wilderness as a figurative chaos out of which man had to bring order was one firmly embedded in the Western mind; but it was closely linked with a contradictory idea: that of the wilderness as holy retreat, wilderness as towering grandeur, soul-stirring and majestic. In the Exodus experience man deliberately sought wilderness to escape sinful society. Those oppressed by city living sought communion with wildlife in the countryside. The celebration of nature by Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Shelley, the landscapes of Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt and the Hudson River School, Rousseau’s noble savage, and the later writings of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau were all in this tradition.

  It was inevitable that the idea of wild land and wolves as something worthy of preservation, and wild land and wolves as obstacles to the westward course of empire, would clash. They met head on in America in the twentieth century in places like Alaska, where residents wanted to wipe out wolves to increase game herds, which would in turn attract tourist hunters to supplement a state economy inebriated with the sudden riches of oil; and environmentalists, mostly from out of state, did not want to see the wolf and the wilderness for which he was a symbol disappear in Alaska the way they had in the lower forty-eight.

  The basis for conflict between these two groups becomes clearer if you recall that while people like Bierstadt and Karl Bodmer were exhibiting America’s primitive beauty in European salons, American pioneers were cursing that same wilderness as the symbol of their hardships—not to mention decrying the genteel men who praised it but lived for their part in the comfort of a European city. In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville wrote: “In Europe people talk a great deal of the wilds of America, but the Americans themselves never think about them; they are insensible to the wonders of inanimate nature. Their eyes are fired with another sight; they march across these wilds, clearing swamps, turning the course of rivers… .”

  The pioneer’s attitude toward wilderness was hostile and utilitarian. Roderick Nash writes: “In the morality play of westward expansion, wilderness was the villain, and the pioneer, as hero, relished its destruction. The transformation of wilderness into civilization was the reward for his sacrifices, the definition of his achievement and the source of his pride.”

  This inheritance explains in part why a resident of modern-day Alaska, even if he is a recent arrival in the city of Fairbanks, feels he can jeer at the opinions of outsiders. He is on the edge of wilderness; and he participates in a mentality that drove railroads west and thought anyone who liked wolves was “too soft” to survive in the outlands.

  It is easy to criticize Western man for his wholesale destruction of the wolf and to forget the milieu in which it was effected. The men I have met who killed wolves at one time or another for a living were not barbarians. Some were likable, even humble men; others were insecure, irresponsible. But the difference was this: the ones who did it for more than a few years had no illusions about the killing and some regret; the ones who tried it only briefly seemed all but possessed by the idea that they were battling something inimicable to man, doing something terribly right. In a 1955 Field and Stream article entitled “Strafing Arctic Killers,” an aerial hunter named Jay Hammond—later governor of Alaska—wrote that if he had not been on the scene with gun and plane in the early fifties, killing three hundred wolves a month, the local Eskimos would surely have starved. No matter that Eskimo, caribou, and wolf had got on for a thousand years before the coming of the airplane and the gun. Similarly, a trapper in northern Minnesota proudly showed me the illegal snares he used to kill Eastern timber wolves and said if he didn’t go on killing wolves his livestock would be wiped out. He saw himself as a man who knew more than the “overeducated” biologists, who had the courage to stand up to them when his neighbors wouldn’t. He said, “A man must stand to protect his land against the wolf when the law is wrong.” (The law had made it a federal crime to kill wolves.)

  A lot of people admired the forthrightness and spunk of this individual, but the sort of land ownership and stockraising and the kind of wolf threat he saw were the visions of a man a hundred years old, dreaming of a frontier farm in the wilderness of Minnesota—a time in the past.

  To clear wilderness. Out of this simple conviction was spawned a war against wolves that culminated in the United States in the late nineteenth century. But the story is older, the origins of the conviction more complex.

  Men first took the killing of wolves seriously
when they became husbandmen, but because wolves ate the human dead on battlefields and were most often seen in the eerie twilight of dawn and dusk, they were feared not just as predators of stock but as physical and metaphysical dangers. Folklore made of the wolf a creature possessed. There was a great mystery about the wolf and a fabulous theater of images developed around him. He was the Devil, red tongued, sulfur breathed, and yellow eyed; he was the werewolf, human cannibal; he was the lust, greed, and violence that men saw in themselves. And men went like Ahab after this white whale.

  Let me begin with something concrete—predation on domestic stock. Animals have been variously perceived in history: as objects for man’s amusement, as slaves to do his bidding, as objects of purely symbolic interest. We smile today at the thought of putting an animal on trial for murder, but the notion of trial and punishment for murders committed by animals should not be dismissed as unenlightened farce. This was serious business in the sixteenth century, and understanding why a pig was tried, convicted, and hung for murder lends understanding to why people should seek the same fate for a wolf. It stemmed from the principle of retribution.

  The scholastic mind of the time went to extreme lengths to observe principle strictly, and one of the oldest principles of justice was the law of retribution, lex talionis, the Judaic law of an eye for an eye. This was not simple vengeance; it preserved a cosmic order. No act of killing was to be left unexpiated. If such a serious transgression went unpunished, the sins of the father would fall on the son. To leave murder unpunished in the community, then, was to invite God’s wrath in the form of disease and famine.

  Although no longer regarded as expeditious, the law of retribution was once a powerful influence on legal thinking. And though animals were regarded by men like Thomas Aquinas as the unwitting tools of the Devil, the means by which God brought pain and anguish that would test men’s mettle, it made no difference; interfere with God’s plan and justice must be meted out. If a horse kicked a pestering child and the child died, the horse was to be tried and hung. Taken to its extreme, such thinking had the man who committed suicide with a knife tried, his hand cut off and punished separately, and the knife banished, thrown beyond the city walls.