Not long after my wife and I moved to Alaska, we were returning home from an errand in town. It was early winter, and the sun was dropping below the horizon at the time, around 5:00 p.m. As we rounded a corner on the highway, we noticed a large, dark form standing on the side of the highway.
"Look," my wife said, "...somebody's dog is out and... Oh, that's not a dog!" It was a big, black dog (male) wolf, a magnificent creature, long-legged, heavy-jawed, with a thick ruff of fur around its neck. If you've seen one, you'll never mistake it for a dog. He was just standing, patiently waiting for us to pass so he could cross the highway and be on about his business.
We live with wolves here in Alaska. There is a local pack in our area, about seven animals. We hear them singing now and then, mostly in winter. They can be troublesome; they will pick up people's pet dogs and cats on occasion. But for the most part, wolves keep to the bush, mostly away from human habitations.
In Washington, the lower-48 state closest to us, it's a different story.
The Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife “lethally removed” an adult male wolf from the Togo pack territory in northeast Washington’s Ferry County this week.
WDFW approved the kill after three attacks on livestock on two different producer properties within a 14-day period earlier in July.
Kathy McKay of K-Diamond-K Guest Ranch told The Center Square the wolves have decimated her ranch’s animals over the last decade.
“I would say we've lost over 100 over the last 10 years of our pets. Our horses, donkeys, alpaca, pigs, our cart pony, my milk cow, eight horses, dozens of cattle, and baby calves. It's devastating,” she explained. “They're eating us alive, literally.”
Part of the problem here is how wolves kill. A mountain lion, when attacking a larger prey animal, will try to deliver a bite at the base of the skull, which, as you can imagine, results in a very quick kill indeed. But wolves are endurance hunters; when taking large game, a pack kills by running an animal to exhaustion, then by biting at the legs and abdomen, causing pain, shock, and bleeding until the animal can finally be dragged down.
This is no moral judgment on the wolves, by the way. They cannot help but be what they are. But, as I'm regularly pointing out, these are facts. This adds to the grief felt by livestock owners when they lose animals to wolves.
Of course, the wolves have their advocates:
Washington Wildlife First believes producers and ranchers locating in corners of the state where wolves are repopulating creates a no-win situation.
“So, continuing to allow that kind of use of public lands is basically only leading to the destruction of wolves and wolf packs. So, we really need an honest conversation about what coexistence requires in terms of sharing the landscape and where it is simply not feasible,” Santiago-Ávila said. “Producers care about their animals and owners care about their pets, but they certainly live in areas where there needs to be some recognition of the risk that they're facing living alongside these animals, right?"
The answer to this is "up to a point." And that point is where ranchers and other people are suffering repeated financial losses.
In the many years we lived in Colorado, it was almost a running joke: People would move up into the mountains from the city to be "close to nature," and then nature would pay them a call in the form of a mountain lion dropping into their backyard and snatching up little Fido in front of the horrified children. Yes, when you live out in the environment, the environment is going to extract a cost now and then.
But as big, beautiful, and charismatic as apex predators like wolves are, human interests have to come first. Human interests, human rights, don't matter as much to the people who are pushing wolf reintroductions, and the bad part is that in some places this notion is being pushed through ballot initiatives, in which largely urban liberals, many of whom have never seen the "environment" they claim to champion, vote for policies that cause harm to the people who do live out there, and who are trying to scratch a living from the land.
Read More: The Biological Nuts and Bolts of 'De-Extinction'
Malcolm's Memories: The True Story of an Unusual Wolf, a Pioneer in the Wild
We're fortunate here, in the Great Land, to have wolves in the area. Alaska, after all, isn't much of a ranching state; there are millions of square miles where there just aren't any people, and those lands belong to the wolves. Here in our Susitna Valley home, we see our little local pack rarely, although we see their tracks and hear them singing, back in the bush behind our neighborhood. I've stood outside, in -20 temps, in the crystal-edged darkness of an Alaska night, listening to them howl, and it entrances me every time.
But Washington is a different place, with a different economy, many, many more people per square mile, and a lot of those people keep stock. When the interests of wolves and people clash, the primary consideration should be protecting people's property. And bear in mind that when we remove the wolves that are more likely to come near human settlements, the wolves that avoid those settlements are the ones left to make more little wolves - and over a few generations, that may well help the problem, too.
