Editorials: Doing wolves no favors
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 1995:
Experts estimate the world wolf population never exceeded 500,000. Humans
have had wolves outnumbered and on the run since Neanderthal times. Those who couldn’t
be killed were pushed into the most inhospitable corners of the globe––for if there’s one
thing a human hunter can’t stand, it’s the idea that something else might kill his game, his
livestock, perhaps even his family if he fails to “keep the wolf from the door.”
If there’s another thing hunters hate about wolves, it’s the reminder wolves con-
vey that predatory skills and a strict dominance hierarchy do not equate with fitness for sur-
vival in the human-made world. Most fears about wolves are unfounded––North American
wolves have never eaten people––but to your average hunter no other animal so symbolizes
male inadequacy. The men with guns are now more frightened than ever. In Alaska, gov-
ernor Tony Knowles on February 4 made permanent his December 3 suspension of prede-
cessor Walter Hickel’s campaign to kill wolves in order to make more moose and caribou
available to human hunters in the region southwest of Fairbanks. In Yellowstone, the like-
lihood that wolves will soon thin out an estimated 60,000 elk, 30,000 deer, and 4,000
bison, after a 60-year absence, deals a political blow to the hope of the hunting lobby that
they might open the National Parks to hunting––the only federal lands that now exclude
hunting, and therefore the last refuge of many beasts with trophy-sized horns.