Of Wolves and Men

by Barry Lopez

  Even after such trials of animals ceased, the idea that human murder (whether committed by another human being, the family dog, or a falling tree) had to be expiated persisted. In recent times it was preserved in the English law of deodants. The wagon that struck a man down was sold and the profits went to the state which, in theory, had lost his services as a citizen. No such reasoning was really necessary to get men to go after a wolf suspected of killing a human being, but it is important to note that men felt a moral obligation, not simply that they had the right, to find the wolf and kill it. It made no difference whether wolves were sentient beings or the witless tools of Satan, whether they killed deliberately or accidentally or were only suspected of having killed someone. The spirit of the deceased had to be avenged by retributive action.

  This retributive stance where the slaughter of livestock was concerned—nonhuman murder—came about for two reasons. First, there was an understanding of sheep and cattle as innocent creatures unable to avenge themselves and, as such, man’s wards—“Kill my sheep and you kill me.” Secondly, there was a belief that domestic animals were innately good and the wolf innately evil, even that the wolf was somehow cognizant of the nature of his act, a deliberate murderer. Eventually (in the late nineteenth century in America) this defensive stance to protect innocent livestock, the righteousness of it, became a central element in the rationale for setting up bounty laws and poisoning programs to wipe out the wolf, as crucial as the issue of economic loss.

  Other ideas grew out of the Middle Ages and contributed to the sense that it was morally right to kill wolves. In the popular mind, a distinction was made between animals like the dog and the cow who served man, and the wolf and the weasel who caused him grief. A distinction was made between bestes dulces, or sweet beasts, and bestes puantes, or stenchy beasts. The contrast between wolf and doe and raven and dove sufficiently conveys the idea.

  Another important perception was the belief that animals were put on earth to do man’s bidding, that “no life can be pleasing to God which is not useful to man.” Men considered that they had dominion over animals the way they had dominion over slaves, that they could do anything they wanted with them. To clear wolves out of the forest so man could raise cattle was perfectly all right. It was not only all right, it met with the approval of various religious denominations who admired such industry, and of the state, whose aim was a subdued, pastoral, and productive countryside. It was for this reason that King Edgar the Peaceful of England let men pay their taxes in the tenth century in wolf heads and their legal fines in wolves’ tongues.

  One more idea born in Europe bears on the propriety of wolf killing, and that is to be found in the work of René Descartes. Descartes articulated the belief that not only were animals put on earth for man’s use but they were distinctly lowborn; they were without souls and therefore man incurred no moral guilt in killing them. This was a formal denial of a “pagan” idea abhorrent to the Roman Church at the time: that animals had spirits, that they should not be wantonly killed, and that they did not belong to men. The belief that man could kill without moral restraint, without responsibility, because the wolf was only an animal, would take on terrifying proportions during the strychnine campaigns in nineteenth-century America. The European wolf hunter of 1650 might kill twenty to thirty wolves in his lifetime; a single American wolfer of the late 1800s could kill four or five thousand in ten years.

  Additional support for wolf killing was born in America, as ideas regarding private property and the need to defend one’s property against trespassers—claim jumpers, squatters, usurpers of water rights, purveyors of phony deeds—matured. It wasn’t only because one owned the cow that one had the right to kill the wolf that attacked it; it was because one owned the land the cow was on and had those rights as a basis on which to open fire on a wolf. “Really,” wrote one sheepman in 1892, “it is a stain, a foul stigma, on the civilization and enterprise of the people of Iowa that these wolves remain and are frequently seen crossing the best cultivated farms, and even near the best towns in our state.”

  A second idea that matured in America was that the wolf was a natural coward, not the respected hunter of the Indian and Eskimo imagination. And a disdain for cowards was especially ingrained in the frontier attitude of the pioneer. The belief in the wolf’s cowardice must, I think, have grown out of several misconceptions. Once wolves had experienced gunfire they ran at the very sight of a gun, or, in the frontier mind, ran away like cowards. Another reason for calling the wolf a coward was that he killed “defenseless” prey like deer. Man saw himself as God’s agent correcting what was imperfect in nature; as he became more abstracted from his natural environment, he came to regard himself as the protector of the weak animals in nature against the designs of bullies like the wolf.

  In hearings before the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry on S. 3483, a bill seeking a ten-year appropriation of not less than $10 million to control predatory animals, the following exchanges took place:

  SEN. KENDRICK OF WYOMING. Our fight on the ranges over which I had supervision and management at the time began in the fall of 1893. The campaign was introduced through the work of two men on horseback with guns, poison, and traps, and within the short period of two or three months they had a record of 150 wolves that they had destroyed.… .

  Recently I’ve received quite a few letters from university people insisting, as I recall, on moderate action in connection with the extermination of predatory animals, but I am unable to conceive of anyone making that plea who had a personal acquaintance with either the terrific disaster wrought upon herds and flocks by wolves… .or with the method employed by these animals in connection with the destruction of their prey. It is the most barbarous thing imaginable. No doubt the motives of these people are the best, but I believe they are uninformed… .

  Bringing my brief statement to a close, all told on this one cattle ranch, covering territory of probably 30 or 35 miles square, we had a record when I left the ranch, and lost track of it, of about 500 gray wolves that we had killed. And the coyotes we threw in for good measure: they numbered hundreds but we had no disposition to either count them or keep track of them… .

  SEN. THOMAS OF IDAHO. You may proceed with your statement, Mr. Wing.

  MR. WING. Now, gentlemen of the committee, we look at this measure, a 10– year program of predatory animal control, as meaning a saving of $10 for every dollar spent in the way of benefits to chicken raisers, to hog raisers, to turkey raisers, to cattlemen and to wool growers.

  We appreciate the difficulty that confronts this committee…in the matter of meeting the various necessary expenditures, but we can look on this particular measure as an economy measure. If we spend this increased amount of money now, and during the next ten years, thereafter the matter of control will be a relatively simple one, and we can greatly reduce expenditures and still take care of the work without very much danger.

  SEN. KENDRICK. May I ask you a question right here?

  MR. WING. Certainly.

  SEN. KENDRICK. Reference has been made to those people, who with all good intentions, are protesting against the extermination of these animals. Is it not your opinion, Mr. Wing, that even with the most complete and efficient plan of extermination that may be employed by the Federal Government, the States, and the individuals interested, there will still be plenty of these animals left to breed?

  MR. WING. There will always be.

  SEN. KENDRICK. Now the question [of killing wolf pups in their dens] is one that may very well excite…the sympathy of anybody…who would not enjoy the punishment that the wolf undergoes in a trap. On the other hand, if anyone has ever observed the way that these wolves destroyed their game they would be inclined to look on it as one form of retribution… .The question is whether we would rather have the country overrun with these predatory animals, or whether we shall employ the country for higher purposes in the matter of producing meat–food animals. If you consider the que
stion of whether we shall temporize with [wolves], you are again in deep water because the more you do that the more it will cost eventually to exterminate them.

  SEN. WALCOTT. Might I inject this one thought into your talk, Sen. Kendrick, because I know you have been a consistent conservationist in all things affecting wild life—

  SEN. KENDRICK (continuing). And I want to say in this connection, so that there may be no mistake about it at all: My record in the State of Wyoming along the line of conserving the wild game of that State is one that at least entitles me to consideration in passing on this question.

  SEN. WALCOTT. There is no question at all about that.

  —U.S. Senate, 71st Congress,2nd & 3rd sessions on S. 3483, May 8, 1930, and January 28–29, 1931. Bill signed into law by President Hoover March 31, 1931.

  It was against a backdrop of these broad strokes—taming wilderness, the law of vengeance, protection of property, an inalienable right to decide the fate of all animals without incurring moral responsibility, and the strongly American conception of man as the protector of defenseless creatures—that the wolf became the enemy.

  These themes will be picked up in the next chapter.

  Wolves of course were killed directly and indirectly for a diversity of reasons. Great battues, or drives, were organized against wolves in Europe whenever anyone suspected someone had been bitten by a wolf. Hundreds of wolves were often killed in these drives, like the one in which the beasts of Gévaudan were hunted down. Another famous outlaw wolf, a bobtailed animal named Courtaud, appeared outside the walled city of Paris in the summer of 1447. Courtaud and a pack of ten or twelve other wolves attacked small flocks of domestic animals being driven to market through the bramble woods where they lived. They chased horses, upsetting carts and frightening children. In February 1450, they supposedly entered Paris through a breach in the walls and killed forty people. As the hard winter bore on and attempts to kill the wolves in their lairs failed, they were lured into the city proper with a bloody trail of butchered livestock. Trapped in the square in front of Notre Dame, they were stoned and lanced to death.

  Some wolves who killed human beings were thought to be more than mere wolves. In 1685 a wolf preying on domestic stock and supposed to have killed women and children near Ansbach, Germany, was identified as the reincarnation of a local, hated burgomaster. Hunted down and killed, the wolf was dressed up in a suit of flesh-colored cloth and fitted with a chestnut brown wig and white beard. The wolf’s muzzle was cut off and a mask fashioned after the burgomaster’s face was strapped on. The animal was then hung in the town square.

  A generally accepted practice in Europe was an almost ritualized purging of wolves from the countryside after wars. Preying on thousands of dead bodies on the battlefields and left unmolested by a population at war, the wolf population increased and took advantage of untended flocks. Members of a victorious army, returning home elated, immediately set about killing the wolves and regarded the activity simply as a continuation of the war. Similarly, American soldiers returning after World War II to the upper Midwest began to refer to all wolves as Nazis and to hunt them down with great intensity.

  Wolves were also killed as the result of being blamed for the deaths of stock and wildlife when feral dogs were at fault. In Minnesota recently, more than 100 deer were killed in separate incidents in two state parks and left uneaten. Wolves were blamed and bitter reprisals threatened by antiwolf forces until the real culprits, two dogs in each case, were found and killed.

  In antiwolf campaigns in North America, wolves were killed and thrown on the steps of the state legislature well into the 1970s to garner headlines and pressure lawmakers into instituting bounties. Other angry citizens, seduced by the inflammatory language of antiwolf pamphlets, set up their own poisoned meat stations to kill wolves.

  In recent years wolves have increasingly been the victims of “recreational killings,” run down by snowmobiles, surprised on snowbound roads, and chased in pickup trucks, or just shot on impulse by the one in a thousand deer hunters who chanced to see one during hunting season. (In 1975 a three-year-old wolf was found during deer season at a northern Minnesota dump. He had died of internal hemorrhaging, the result of having been shot in the back with a .22. I dug old fragments of a .30-caliber bullet of undetermined age out of the same animal’s skull.)

  Others responsible for the death of wolves are less visible. Tourists in the Yukon demanding a wolf pelt for a den wall and willing to pay $450 or more for one are directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of animals. In 1973 well-meaning people in New York and Los Angeles urged that the Eastern timber wolf should be classified an endangered species. The law was passed and the same people scoffed when Minnesota complained that it had too many Eastern timber wolves. Afforded full federal protection, the Minnesota wolf population grew larger and larger and without simultaneous control on the number of human deer hunters, the wolf’s primary food source declined and many wolves died of starvation.

  Washington Park Zoo, Portland, Oregon.

  Wolves kept in zoos die every year as a result of poor cage design, faulty capture systems, and harassment. The failure of research institutions to isolate sexually mature animals at the correct times produces litters that have to be killed every year. Wolf pups given away to people are often put to sleep because they’re more trouble to raise and keep than dogs. Lois Crisler, who wrote about her life with wolves in Alaska in a book called Arctic Wild, killed the wolves she raised from pups because she couldn’t stand what captivity had done to them. And her.

  That has been the shape of history for the wolf. Even today, in spite of a generally widespread sympathy for animals that have been persecuted through the ages, no more substantive reasons are needed to kill a wolf than the fact that someone feels like doing it. On a Saturday afternoon in Texas a few years ago, three men on horseback rode down a female red wolf and threw a lasso over her neck. When she gripped the rope with her teeth to keep the noose from closing, they dragged her around the prairie until they’d broken her teeth out. Then while two of them stretched the animal between their horses with ropes, the third man beat her to death with a pair of fence pliers. The wolf was taken around to a few bars in a pickup and finally thrown in a roadside ditch.

  It is relatively easy to produce reasons why such depravity exists—because people are bored, because some men feel powerless in modern society. But this incident is, in fact, a staggering act of self-indulgence. That it is condoned by silence and goes unpunished reveals a terrible meanness in the human spirit.

  Eight

  WOLFING FOR SPORT

  MAN HAS ALWAYS SOUGHT to legitimize his hunting of wolves, even when it was at the ragged edges of decency. One of the defenses he offered was that it was simply “good sport” to hunt wolves—the wolf was taken for the admired enemy. Even though many of these men bore the wolf no overt hatred, their methods could not always be called sporting, however.

  Theodore Roosevelt hunted wolves in Russia and North America with dogs, sometimes on a grand scale, and he made no apology for it. (He once set off with seventy fox hounds, sixty-seven greyhounds, sixty saddle and packhorses, and forty-four hunters, beaters, wranglers, and journalists, all in a private train of twenty-two cars.) In Russia there was a veneer of upper-class respectability to such hunts; in America there was rarely legitimate claim to sport in coursing, though that was often its guise. Roosevelt was quite clear on this point. Writing of an acquaintance who hunted wolves with dogs in North Dakota, he said: “The only two requisites were that the dogs be fast and fight gamely; and in consequence they formed as wicked a hard-biting crew as ever throttled a wolf. They were usually taken out ten at a time, and by their aid Massinggale killed over two hundred wolves, including pups. Of course there was no pretense of giving them fair play. The wolves were killed for vermin, not sport… .”

  Wolf hunting in Europe and Russia with hounds was an aristocratic amusement, popular around the turn of the century. While
nobility and its guests dined and relaxed in the hunting lodge, the head huntsman and his helpers scoured the countryside for wolf sign or learned from local peasants where the wolves were. On the day of the hunt the gentlemen arrayed themselves in a line at the edge of a promising wood and the head huntsman tried to howl up a wolf. If an answering howl was heard—“commingling the lament of a dying dog with the wailing of an Irish Banshee”—the dogs began driving the woods from the far side. A beater might have as many as six dogs on leashes as he moved through the woods. Deerhounds, staghounds, and Siberian wolfhounds, the slender white borzoi, as well as smaller greyhounds and foxhounds. When he saw a wolf, he would shout: “Loup! Loup! Loup!” and slip the dogs. The idea was to trap the wolf between pursuing dogs and the hunters sitting astride their horses at the edge of the wood. Bursting from cover, the wolf would either be shot or pinned by the dogs and then speared or clubbed. Sometimes the dogs, especially the larger mastiff crossbreeds and hounds, would kill the wolf.

  Wolves were also coursed, or chased, by dogs and horsemen through open prairie country where they were worried by the hounds until lassoed or shot. George Armstrong Custer was a devotee of coursing and usually traveled with a retinue of dogs. He was partial to larger greyhounds and staghounds and took two of the latter, large, white, shaggy dogs, with him into the Sioux’s sacred Black Hills where he turned them loose on deer and wolves. The southern Cheyenne, who hated Custer, killed one of his favorite staghounds, Blucher, at the Battle of the Washita in Oklahoma in 1868.