Howling for Mercy: Wolves on the Western Landscape

Holly Haworth

       We do not know wolves. Wolves are elusive, mysterious. They speak a language unknown to us. "Howling may be to assemble the pack, to express alarm, loneliness, anxiety, camaraderie, [or] celebration" (Parsons 196). It is its howl that has been written about perhaps more than the wolf itself. Working on the Mexican gray Wolf reintroduction program in the Gila National Forest of southern New Mexico, after days of searching for signs of wolves, my partner Zak and I nestled into our sleeping bags only to be alarmed by the long howl of a wolf breaking through the chill night air. Edward Abbey said, "It is sometimes enough just to know the animal is out there" (129-30). 

    This wolf that was out there, we knew through its story, which was largely obtained by the signals of its radio collar.  Its name was AM114. It had depredated three cows, which means a death sentence in the reintroduction program. There was a warrant out for its "lethal control," which was to be accomplished by trapping and shooting. We had not seen the signs of this wolf on our long days in the Gila, but we had seen hundreds of cattle, overgrazed fields and riverbank destroyed by the hooves and waste of cows. Another thing we had seen was a rancher on an ATV, with a rifle strapped to his back. This interface of environmentalist vs. rancher vs. wolf highlights the ongoing, contentious conflict of public land use in the West. Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity thinks that "uncovering the political, social, and biological saga of wolves ... opens up a map to a little-explored West –a political topography of frontier-era institutions riding strong into the twenty-first century. It explains more fully than any other tale why the group for which wolf extermination was accomplished–the livestock industry–continues to dominate western national parks, forests and other public lands and still all too often determines the fate of their myriad wildlife" (2-3). 

    Before the Immutable Laws of Progress encouraged the ruination of the West's ecosystems, many species of megafauna thrived, including bison, elk, mule deer, bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelopes, grizzly bears, and wolves. When the first Anglo explorers came West, they began to shoot bison, and "By 1846... bison hunting was quickly becoming established as the primary reason... whites ventured onto the plains. ... Most of the animals were killed merely for adventure" (Robinson 11). Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, "killing bison seemed the chief pre-occupation of all who traveled west." (Robinson 15) Robinson says that although there were obvious economic reasons for the bison holocaust, even they do not "explain the magnitude of slaughter on the Great Plains. Other possible motivations abound. An underlying fear of the infinite-appearing wild landscape may have provoked the intensity of the killing. Perhaps the sheer magnitude of the plains appeared to diminish each man alone or in small entourages far from the comforts of home. ... The notion that a safe civilization would eventually replace such a lonely and frightening landscape provided an overarching impetus beyond the immediate profits to be made on animal skins," he says. (19) Implicit, of course, in the bison slaughter, was the idea that the American Indians would be extirpated along with their primary food source -- both the bison and the Indian being an expendable casualty in the sweeping and  immutable Laws of Progress. 

           A British investor William Blackmore, who claimed that he was dismayed by the disappearance of the bison, said, "...sad as the fate of the Red Man is ... we must not forget that, under what appears to be one of the immutable laws of progress, the savage is giving place to a higher and more civilised race. ...  We can people the [West] with a population of many tens of millions of prosperous and highly civilised whites. ... The countless herds of buffalo, which formerly ranged the plains, will be superseded by treble their number of improved American cattle; the sparse herds of the smooth-haired antelope will be replaced by countless flocks of woolly sheep..." Robinson says that, "Seen in that light, it was inevitable that the Indians and the buffalo would give way to white ranchers and their cattle." (16)

    And so the bison slaughter continued unimpeded, and with great zeal, without so much as a thoughtful suggestion from anyone as to whether the removal of one species would have unintended, and unforeseen, effects to the Plains as a whole.  Both the natural and societal-propelled ramifications that followed the bison slaughter comprise a culturally complex, elongated demonstration of what ecologists have pared down to a single maxim: You cannot do just one thing. Everything is interrelated, connected, in a cooperative life system. 

        An estimated seventy-five million bison were slaughtered between 1850 and 1880, mostly for sport, which meant that across the increasingly desolate West, innumerable bison carcasses lay scattered under the wide sky. Not surprisingly, wolves fed upon the carcasses for as long as the bison slaughter occurred, and in that time were able to increase their numbers exponentially due to the endless food supply that followed the white men on horses. So when the American cattle, a genetic modification of English and French bovine species, was brought to the West in large numbers, the wolves were great in number, atypical of what biologist R.T. Paine calls a Keystone Species, or, a top predator (Kingsolver 62-3). The last of the buffalo were killed from the very trains that were carrying in the "improved" American cattle; this is a great irony and symbol of the industrial expedience facilitated by the railroads. Changes to the landscape from then on could be accomplished rapidly-- and no part of the landscape bisected by the steel rails could be left untouched by those changes. The railroad served as the most important infrastructure that would enable the establishment of the cattle industry as the most powerful and ubiquitous industry in the West, and thus that would (indirectly) precipitate removal of the wolves. 

    As soon as wolves began to prey on "improved American cattle," they were hopelessly villainized. Before the wolves were seen as an economic factor in the West, they were mostly mentioned on the periphery of explorers' reports of the landscape -- nestled into a long list of fauna spotted by John James Audubon and his team, for example (Robinson 6). Or if they were written about, they were usually portrayed as shy, silent or other such benign adjectives. This is not to say that some Anglo explorers did not portray wolves as beastly and ravenous, for surely some carried their European mythical concepts of the wolf to the West with them. But until wolves were perceived as a threat to the cattle industry, they were given very little consideration of any kind. After they were fully villainized --and that was accomplished by propaganda promulgated by the cattle industry very efficiently and quickly -- they were described as "brutes," a "nuisance," "the beast of waste and desolation," (by Theodore Roosevelt) the "much dreaded scourge and devestator of the stock ranges," "destructive to game," "insatiable... a master of cunning and the acme of cruelty," "murderer," "predatory beasts," "killer... criminal," "outlaw... villain" (Robinson 39, 41, 43, 46, 64, 148, 153, 153, 159).  They "feasted," "glutted their thirst for blood," went after "poor defenseless steers," tore "off great pieces of flesh" (39, 40, 143, 162). 

    This rhetoric was relentlessly etched into the public's mind by ranchers and their "livestock associations," groups that wielded powerful influence over their local governments. In the still-nascent stages of ranching, they were able to convince most local governments throughout the West to enact bounty payments for wolf pelts, thus creating the bona fide occupation of wolf hunter. These wolf hunters were making a living as they could, like all pioneers that went West. They were regarded as heroic–sometimes ascending to legendary status, like "Big Bill" Caywood and Rattlesnake Jack–but their methods were cruel and irresponsible. Some used traps, which often resulted in wolves chewing off their toes or entire paws.The most common method was probably strychnine, which "attacks its victim's central nervous system ... causing severe cramps that intensify rapidly and culminate in violent muscle spasms throughout the entire body. Death results from asphyxiation as a result of continuous convulsions of the respiratory muscles" (Robinson 18). Wolfers would distribute the poison in animal carcasses, usually bison. Because there are so many scavengers in the ecosystem, because everything is connected, the poison would not only kill wolves but also "raccoons, skunks, bears, weasels, blackfooted ferrets, badgers, coyotes, foxes, magpies, crows, and eagles" (Robinson 19). So eliminating wolves entailed a widespread killing campaign, without discretion. Wolfers were unrelenting, for the more wolves they killed, the more they would be paid. However, for all the killing they did, due to lack of resources and organization, they could not accomplish a full-blown extermination of the wolves. This job would have to be left to two government agencies that were developing at the turn of the century– the Forest Service and the U.S. Biological Survey, both within the Department of Agriculture.¹  

   These two agencies bowed to the cattle industry at the outset. Because the cattle industry had by then gained complete political control of the West, these agencies could not carry out their work without the cooperation of the cattle industry. Those Anglos that had settled the West fought to apprehend any federal presence that had followed them there, including and especially the federal effort to set aside forest reserves and national parks, for these areas were seen as full of vital economic resources waiting to be tapped by the settlers. They felt that they had endured the hardships of settling an unforgiving landscape, and thus that they should not have to be governed by "eastern dilettantes and nature lovers who wanted to shut down all development, with no conception of the consequences on the pioneers' already arduous lives" (Robinson 51). 

    Thus there was from the outset a resistance to conservationists and environmentalists in the West that still persists today, especially in areas where ranching is the primary economic activity. So when a bill passed in 1891 to set aside forest reserves, the most liberal possibility of their function was utilitarian -- that is, as forests set aside for the public to utilize through logging, grazing, mining, and hunting, among other things. Gifford Pinchot, appointed the first head of the Forest Service by Theodore Roosevelt, advocated this kind of utilitarian use of national forests. Still, he maintained that graziers would purchase a permit to graze cattle, and that they had no right to the federal domain, but rather a privilege, paid for by the grazing fee. Because many ranchers violently opposed the fee and were resentful of the federal government, the government decided that in order to gain the stock men's cooperation it would, at their prodding, remove predatory animals from those lands. That predatory animal was the wolf. "So, in the first year of its existence, the fledgling Forest Service purchased leghold traps so its rangers could kill wolves on the reserves" (Robinson 55). Thus began the government's legacy of predator control.

    The Forest Service garnered enough funds from Congress (many of those in Congress were ranchers or ranch-owners) to enable a full-force killing campaign. The Service urged the cattle associations to do away with the bounty system, in order to eliminate that occupation and to obtain experienced hunters for employment with the survey, thus bringing most independent hunters into the fold of what Robinson calls "predatory bureaucracy." In order to grow into a full-fledged bureaucracy, the Forest Service had to obtain the support of western constituents; this it accomplished by guaranteeing extermination of pests, the wolf being the most prominent of many. In order to accomplish this extermination, it had to obtain the assistance of the Biological Survey, a government agency that began with a scientific endeavor to document the wildlife of the United States, mostly in the still-wild West. This agency that began with such an admirable mission quickly realized that in order to stay alive it would have to prove its necessity. And so it began publishing guides for the Forest Service on how to kill wolves and other pests. Next it began finding new pests. It launched massive killing campaigns against moles, ground squirrels and prairie dogs. The measure of success was the extent of extermination, no matter the pest or the reason for its elimination. But the wolf garnered the most public hatred, promulgated by the ranching industry; naturally, then, it would be the main focus of the U.S. Biological Survey, which eventually moved from simply helping the Forest Service kill pests to taking over the business of killing almost entirely.

    If independent wolf hunters had been respected, then the government wolf hunters came to be revered, a result of skillful rhetoric employed by the government's killing agencies. The rhetoric used against wolves in order to foster what ecocritic S.K. Robisch calls the "Malevolent Ghost" wolf concept was paralleled by the initial rhetoric used to describe the work of the government wolf hunters (17). The survey continuously used the words "destroy" and "kill," unconsciously aligning itself with the wolf as predator. But whereas the wolf would viciously go after "poor defenseless steers," which urges an empathy for the pain of cattle, when government hunters took on the predator role in poisoning and trapping wolves– both methods that resulted in prolonged and intense pain for the animals–the rhetoric was manipulated and those wolves miraculously experienced no pain, and thus the men predators were faultless heroes. One newspaper article says:     

                    Poisoning has been found the cheapest, the surest, the quickest, the kindest and hence the most efficient method of operation in eradicating animal pests. The creature does not know what is happening to him. It acts so quickly that death comes without preliminary suffering. When one remembers that nearly every creature of the wilds meets a tragic death, it seems almost that poisoning animals is a boon to them rather than a bane.

 (qtd. in Robinson 159)

                 The survey, then headed by Stanley P. Young² , employed this skewed logic in order to quell any possible protests from those concerned with humane practices, which didn't arise until several decades into the wolf-killing campaign.  Similar logic was employed in the justification of the genocide of Native Americans, in a 1922 article for The Farm Journal: "To students of anthropology it is a well-known fact that savages and illiterate men suffer less from pain than those with high-strung mental development" (qtd. in Robinson 160). "From that premise," says Robinson, "in sections of the article subtitled 'The Natives Suffer Little' and 'Reflex Action Mistaken for Pain' he argued that the 'lower forms of animal life' likewise feel little pain from injuries and that even mammals in traps do not suffer unduly" (160). 

               At the same time, the government wolf hunters wrote mystified accounts of the wolf's intelligence in averting their trap lines, propagating what S.K. Robisch calls the "Benevolent Ghost" wolf concept, akin to the noble-savage concept (18). Government wolf hunter "Big Bill" Caywood corresponded with a friend about his personal quest to kill a wolf named Rags.³  His friend said, "You've met your match. Rags is your equal, Bill. He's the headist wolf that ever roamed the White River country. He's outguessing you." Another friend told Caywood, "Didn't I tell you, Bill, that that ain't no common wolf? Rags has more sense than any wolf I ever took and that is quite a number to measure him up by" (Robinson 146). Caywood saw himself as aligned with the wolf spirit in some way and claimed that he could think like a wolf. This pattern of aligning themselves with wolves as predator while simultaneously seeking to outsmart and brutally kill wolves is revealed in many of the hunters' twisted psyches. It indicates a paradoxical, even confused wilderness ethic that reigned throughout the twentieth century and was particularly pronounced in the West. That ethic sees "predators as hindrances to the health of an ecosystem," without acknowledging that man⁴  himself, with his operant ethics, is a predator in that ecosystem, as if he were apart from, rather than a part of nature (Robisch 36). "Predation was a right best left to the human race, preferably the white race," says Robisch (179). The "romance that anticipated Roosevelt's western adventures..." was "a touristic fantasy that the wilderness was indeed a great place for those who were great marksmen" (172). It was a great place for the cowboy, also. 

                  The cowboy and the rancher were glamorized in the American consciousness. They were men who could tame the wildness that so daunted the early pioneers to the West. "Cowboys embody the frontier spirit that has so defined our culture, fusing rugged independence with entrepreneurial spirit," says Alexander Parsons, in his essay "Strip Mall Lobos" (193). The Denver Post described ranchers as "... frontiersmen, hard-bitten in the life of the frontier... men of their hands, sun-baked, hard-gripped, deep-bitten men, small ranch owners mostly, who thought for themselves and believe above everything in the individual freedom of individual Americans" (qtd in Robinson 72). Robinson keenly notes that the rancher and the cowboy became conflated in the American mind– but no matter; they were both American heroes. It was skillful, if obvious, then, to align wolf hunters with this cowboy/rancher image in order to secure their place of respect (and thus their jobs) in both the broader American context and among the ranching communities to whom they were pandering. A Rocky Mountain News article described government hunters as "Grim, sun-bronzed, taciturn fellows, many of them are with a great love of the silences of wood and hill, and a devotion to duty under every circumstance" (qtd in Robinson 159). This intended romanticism was successful in making predators themselves seem unpatriotic and those who hunted them as upstanding citizens. "To pursue something that threatens this way of life is to attack a cultural icon and attempt redefinition," says Parsons (193). 

             One person did attack this hunter/rancher/cowboy icon, and his name was Aldo Leopold. Throughout his life, Leopold had worked for the Forest Service developing methods of game management. He operated within the paradigm of his times, mostly as a hunter-conservationist who believed that the forest reserves should be managed in order to keep them stocked with game animals for hunters. It was his posthumous publication, A Sand County Almanac, that presented a more profound conclusion he had reached pertaining to conservation. He did not articulate this until near the end of his life, although he admits in the passage that he had known it ever since the incident, forty years before the book was published. 

    Said Leopold, "Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf. My own conviction on this score dates from the day I saw a wolf die" (129). Leopold describes how he and some coworkers had been eating lunch on a high rock when they spotted a mother and her wolf-pups. "In those days," he said, "we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack... When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks. We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes– something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view" (130). 

    Leopold, away from political pressure, finally vocalizes his appreciation of wolves' true function in a healthy ecosystem:  

"...I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. 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 saddlehorn. ...  So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain" (130-132). 

         The mountain represents the greater ecosystem, of which the wolf is a necessary part. Leopold is recognizing what happens to that ecosystem when a Keystone Species is removed. This "objective" listening to the howl of the wolf seems to be possible if we learn to think like a mountain– that is, to conceive of ourselves as part of a complex, interrelated ecosystem, rather than as conqueror. But we have conquered much. The several subspecies of wolf in the West were pushed largely into extinction before the U.S. Biological Survey was finished. "What should we expect," asks Robisch, "of a culture shaped by such ecologically uninterested individuals but torture, extirpation, and–at its best– post facto recognition followed by last-ditch restoration efforts?" (182). 

    These "last-ditch restoration efforts" have been taking place for years, thanks to the Endangered Species Act, most notably with the gray wolves in and around Yellowstone, but also with the red wolf in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Mexican gray wolf in southern Arizona and New Mexico. These reintroduction efforts are constantly under attack. The Mexican gray wolf reintroduction, specifically, has been highly contentious, as it is centered in the National Forest surrounding Catron County, historically a ranching stronghold. There are only about fifty Mexican gray wolves left in the wild. Recently, the gray wolf in Idaho and Montana was removed from protection, most say prematurely. Now Idaho is overtly attempting to reduce its recently recovering wolf population by half, seeking to kill 220 wolves in this year alone, in addition to the 150 wolves already killed in the state each year by lethal control methods approved even under the Endangered Species Act. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar approved the removal of the wolf from protection. He is a landowner, rancher, and member of the Cattlemen’s association. These modern-day political ties hearken us back to the idea that the wolf saga "opens up a map to a little-explored West-- a political topography of frontier-era institutions riding strong into the twenty-first century" (Robinson 2-3).