The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  It was the dawning of a new era. Something dramatic was happening to our view of predators. In 1928, F. S. Bodenheimer, a German biologist studying insect populations, suggested that climate was almost wholly responsible for determining population densities, and that predation meant little to overall numbers. About the same time, the ecologist Charles Elton noted that, when populations grew large, individuals migrated, and the migrants were more susceptible to predators, because they were on unfamiliar ground and often harassed by those already in possession of the territory. In the 1930s, Paul Errington, studying the effects of mink on muskrat populations in Iowa, concluded, “Mink predation upon muskrats tends to be almost restricted to those individuals or parts of the muskrat population that may be properly referred to as pushovers.” He found that muskrats would produce a surplus of young every year, and that the young would go wandering in search of breeding territories, which were limited in number. Muskrats that were too small, too irresolute, too stupid, or too slow would weaken as they traveled. His studies showed that 70 percent of the muskrats that fell prey to mink were already victims of disease or freezing.

  The new view held that predators took nothing more than the expendable surplus, but it also argued the somewhat contradictory view that, without predators, prey populations would increase to such numbers that they would consume all their nutritional resources. Perhaps the most famous example came from Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau. The Kaibab had been made part of the Grand Canyon National Game Preserve in 1906, but by 1920 predator control had removed its wolves and mountain lions. In the 1920s, the deer population rose from perhaps four thousand to perhaps a hundred thousand. But public sentiment would not permit shooting the deer. Within a few years, 90 percent of the forage was gone, and the deer were starving everywhere. Aldo Leopold, the famous wildlife biologist and environmental philosopher, had urged the extermination of wolves early in this century. But by 1944, he looked back on the past with regret: “I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddle horn.… In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of dead sage.” Only the wolf, he concluded, could have kept this tragedy from happening.

  Durward Allen, who had studied predation in Michigan in the 1930s and 1940s, declared, “The natural function of predators is to keep big game range from being destroyed by the animals it supports.” Predators might even help to keep prey numbers from falling. Allen recounted that bighorn sheep had succumbed all around the West to diseases brought to them by domestic livestock, but that the ranchers, seeing wolves feeding on their carcasses, concluded predators were to blame and redoubled their efforts to eliminate them. Allen held that the wolves, if left alone, might have slowed the spread of disease through the sheep population by culling the weak animals before they infected others. “There are strong implications that this species needs the culling of its ancient enemies, the wolf and the cougar,” he declared.

  Increasingly, biologists were concluding that predators served a useful function, that they kept prey populations from destroying their own food resources and removed genetic mistakes from the population, thereby keeping the species strong. Wrote Allen, “The intensive weeding out process to which a prey may be subjected, if sustained through the ages as it undoubtedly has been, could hardly fail to render the stock more vigorous and more efficient in using the protective features of its environment.”

  Acting upon this new view that predators didn’t really limit prey posed problems. Wildlife management had developed upon human rather than biological needs. Its view of predators derived not from ecological studies, but from moralizing over the taking of game and livestock by nonhuman competitors. Allen observed that game management had evolved largely as the effort to produce harvestable animals, and that, “from the first, war on carnivores has been one with game production.” Antipathy to predators was further fueled by professional writers, who “learned long ago that the atrocities committed by gore-fed carnivores are among the most merchantable material for the magazine trade.” As a result, he wrote in Our Wildlife Legacy, “Many people think … the wolf doesn’t live in the forest; he infests it. You don’t just kill a predator; you execute him. You don’t just hunt him for sport; you track him down in a crusade for moral reform.”

  Paul Errington cautioned, “Man may call predators robber barons or cannibals and talk of honor or lack of honor” when they talked about the relationships between hunters and hunted. But, he declared, “the moral rightness or wrongness that man sees in these relationships, after all, is only man’s.”

  The new view of predators was based on studies of small birds and mammals. Could studies of mink and quail be generalized to larger creatures like wolves and moose? In 1939, Adolph Murie, a biologist who had already studied moose in Michigan, elk in Washington, and coyotes in Yellowstone National Park, was asked to undertake a study of the wolves of Mount McKinley National Park in Alaska. In the late 1920s, the Dall’s sheep of the park were abundant, and wolves, which had been scarce, were just beginning to increase. But in 1929 and 1932, snow was deep and crusted, and sheep died in large numbers. Sheep remained scarce through 1938, and wolves were blamed. The National Park Service was by then embarrassed about having eradicated wolves in Yellowstone National Park. Park officials were uncertain whether they should pursue wolf-control programs in Mount McKinley. They wanted to know more about the relationships between wolves and caribou, moose, and Dall’s sheep.

  Murie spent three years in the field, observing the wolves hunt, and watched the sheep spend long hours staring at the terrain before they would cross a flat area between mountain ranges. They didn’t pay much attention to wolves when the wolves were below them on a mountainside, but if a wolf were looking down on a sheep, and therefore blocking an easy escape upslope, the sheep would become nervous. Murie saw that the wolf and the sheep were locked in a single larger complex of design and behavior. At the least, the wolf caused the sheep to dwell in a rocky habitat.

  Murie wanted to know whether wolves limited the number of sheep. Examining the skulls of sheep he collected around wolf dens, he found that 95 percent of them came from very young and very old sheep, and concluded the wolves were taking the weakest sheep especially. He believed that, when the sheep increased in number, they spilled out onto the low hills, where they were vulnerable to wolves. The wolves then increased their numbers by taking these sheep, and gradually pushed sheep back to the rocky habitat. Over long cycles of time, sheep and wolf had evolved a kind of balance. The wolves probably served to check the numbers of caribou, too. He judged, “If this check were entirely removed, the caribou might increase in numbers to such an extent that vast areas of choice lichen range would be severely damaged. Those familiar with the overuse of many big game ranges in the states can readily appreciate the importance of this consideration.”

  Murie’s The Wolves of Mount McKinley was the first careful scientific study of wolf predation. Others would follow. Between 1943 and 1946, Ian McTaggart Cowan, of the University of British Columbia, studied wolves in five parks in British Columbia and Alberta. Unable to find any difference in the survival of young ungulates with or without wolves, he concluded that predators were less important than the presence or absence of suitable winter forage in determining the number of moose, caribou, or sheep. Milton Stenlund, of the Minnesota Department of Conservation, who studied wolves in the Superior National Forest from 1948 to 1952, concluded that they helped deer by reducing browsing pressure on an overburdened range.

  • • •

  The change in our view of predators does not seem to have been solely the result of biological observation. After World War II, people were revising their views of nature in general. In 1947, a young Canadian, shaken and made pessimistic by his experiences as a soldier in the war, decided he wanted to visit the great barrens of northern Canada. In those years
, one needed a permit to enter the northern territories, and the only way young Farley Mowat could do it was to accompany an elderly American ornithologist who was undertaking a study for the Arctic Institute and needed someone to look after him. “I looked after him,” says Mowat. “And I traveled.”

  The Keewatin area was abuzz with dire predictions of the collapse of the caribou herds, and wolves were being blamed. It was gospel in the country that wolves should be shot and poisoned. But Mowat held a contrary view. His boyhood home of Saskatoon was fiercely anti-predator. “Everybody was death on coyotes,” says Mowat. “Of course the wolves were all gone by then.” He was contrary even as a boy, and took a dislike to the persecution of any wild animal. At the age of fourteen, he wrote a series of pieces called “Birds of the Season” for the Saskatoon Phoenix. One of them defended hawks and owls, which were routinely shot by farmers and town residents. “Local fish-and-game people were furious” about the articles, he recalls.

  By the time Mowat returned from fighting in Europe, he was convinced something was wrong with the way humans perceived the world around them. It is a belief he carries to this day. “I don’t like saying this,” he said to me in a telephone interview, “but I think we’re a bad species, and the sooner we get off this planet, the better.”

  So, there in northern Manitoba, Mowat was bound to have a contrary perspective on the tales of wolves killing caribou. In 1948, an acquaintance, Frank Banfield, was contracted by the Dominion Wildlife Service, forerunner of the Canadian Wildlife Service, to study wolves and caribou. Mowat was allowed to go along as a student biologist. He simply made mischief for the project. “They were trying to kill wolves,” he says today. “I was on the side of the wolves.” So he went out on his own time and did his own study.

  He talked to native hunters and trappers. Though he saw few wolves—“just glimpses”—he spent hours observing a wolf den at Nueltin Lake. He compiled a report in which he declared that he saw the wolves “consistently engage in mouse hunting.” The report noted that caribou did not occur in the area for nearly half the year, and observed that when they did occur, “they probably constitute the major food item.” But he stated that while he was watching, “No wolves were seen to pull down caribou.”

  Mowat submitted his report to the Dominion Wildlife Service. He felt the study was too short. “There is insufficient evidence to make any estimate of the number of caribou killed by wolves,” he declared. “No attempt is made to draw any conclusion from the information amassed to date.… I shall be continuing with wolf studies for some time and when I have sufficient data to warrant a summing up of the study, I shall do so.”

  In his heart, though, Mowat had reached a conclusion. He was convinced that the hunting of caribou by natives to feed their dog teams was responsible for the caribou decline. Indeed, Banfield had already calculated that wolves were taking a relatively small share of the caribou, and that the native hunters were responsible for the decline. Nearly a half-century later, Mowat recalled for me his sense of outrage: “I was sitting on a hill in northern Manitoba, and people were slaughtering wolves all around, and I just got good goddamned mad. I decided I was going to write this book.” That year, he drafted Never Cry Wolf, a fictional account of a biologist sent by the government to the remote north to study wolves suspected of destroying the caribou herds. The biologist finds the wolves are intelligent, sociable, and confiding, and he sees them eat only lemmings and voles. He concludes that native hunters are killing the caribou to feed their dog teams, and that the wolf is blameless. “It was a deliberately contrived piece of propaganda,” he admits, but he stands by the wolf lore in the book, saying it all came from his own observation and from conversations with Indians and trappers. He concedes that the wolves in the book aren’t shown hunting caribou, despite his certain knowledge that they did. “I knew what they did, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to make much of that in a book that was in defense of the wolf. I was going to present a heavily loaded picture in defense of the wolf. I was deliberately nonscientific.”

  When the book was published in 1963, biologists—even those who agreed that wolves were not responsible for the decline of caribou—didn’t like it. University of Montana biologist Charles Jonkel, who was working for the Canadian Wildlife Service at the time, recalls, “We used to call him Hardly Knowit.” Paul Joslin, who was studying wolves with biologist Douglas Pimlott in Ontario at the time, recalls, “When Farley Mowat’s book came out, Doug Pimlott hit the roof.” Pimlott and others accused Mowat of plagiarizing Murie and Banfield, and of falsely implying that Canadian government scientists believed wolves, rather than humans, were the cause of the caribou decline. Pimlott said it was “at least deplorable” that the book’s publishers represented it as nonfiction. He and others felt it was no less an act of mythmaking than the stories in the hunting magazines. Banfield, in reviewing the book for Canadian Field Naturalist, concluded, “It is certain that not since Little Red Riding Hood has a story been written that will influence the attitudes of so many towards these animals. I hope that the readers of Never Cry Wolf will realize that both stories have about the same factual content.”

  Mowat didn’t care what scientists had to say, because he felt that most of them were sold on predator control anyway. Besides, he knew then that the redefinition of the wolf’s nature was as much the reflection of human psychological and spiritual need as it was the fruit of scientific investigation. “A very large part of it comes out of our needs,” he says today. “There’s a species-wide sense that we’re in trouble, that we’ve done something wrong, that we’re losing contact, that we’re drifting into space. This has come because we’ve lost consciousness of the rest of nature. There’s a desire to get back into contact with nature.” In 1963, Mowat was coming to see it as his mission in life to spur that desire. Now he says, “It’s our last best chance.”

  Never Cry Wolf became the most widely read book about wolves. Its translation into Russian led to a reversal of wolf-persecution policies in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. It is still widely read and quoted. A woman recently told me she had heard something about wolves saving an endangered species of rodent in Canada, and then, as we unsnarled the wool of thought about this in her mind, it became clear she was referring to the implication in Never Cry Wolf that wolves fed only on mice.

  Nearly a half-century after Mowat wrote the first draft of Never Cry Wolf, the wolf has been redefined in the mind of the public. Many people see it as a creature that kills nobly and innocently. Says Canadian biologist Tom Bergerud, who has long advocated the kinds of wolf controls that Mowat detested, “There are guys who love the wolf so much that they cannot bear to see a wolf killed. We’ve still got people saying we shouldn’t manage because we always screw up the system. It’s been the story of my life to go into a barber shop and say, ‘I’m a caribou biologist,’ and the guy says, ‘Have you ever read Never Cry Wolf? We’ll never get past Never Cry Wolf!”

  Says Joslin, who credits Mowat with unshackling the wolf from the old legend, “Farley Mowat did more than anyone else to change the public’s attitude. He brought the wolf out into the open, and we can never go back from there.”

  Do we simply invent the wolf? Mowat says, “Perhaps. Maybe I’m one of the inventors. But if we’re on the right side of the invention, on the side of giving life a chance and a degree of equality …” His voice trails off, as if he were going to say, “… who can argue with that?”

  If Mowat prepared the public to reinterpret the wolf, the field researchers provided the terms by which the new wolf would be defined. When Sigurd Olson judged in 1938, without much hard data, that wolves were taking the old and the weak, he was to some degree reflecting the ideas of Paul Errington. Errington had distinguished between “compensatory” and “additive” effects of predation. Predation was compensatory if the predators took individuals that would die anyway—of starvation, or winter freezing, or stress from repeated combat. Predation was “additive” if predators cau
sed additional mortality by killing prey that would not otherwise succumb to starvation, bad weather, disease, accident, or weak genes. Errington viewed predation as generally compensatory, and a number of studies seemed to confirm this view. In one California study, for example, coyotes were removed from an experimental range to control calf losses. When the coyotes were gone, the rabbit population didn’t increase; this suggested that coyotes had been taking only the exploitable surplus of rabbits. Durward Allen found that, just as Michigan hunters shot more young pheasants in the opening weeks of hunting season, the natural predators killed more young at that time of year. He wrote in 1954, “Animal populations are padded annually with a surplus that is inevitably eliminated.”