The Wolves of Yellowstone

Perhaps no other large predator is more deeply embedded in our psyche than the wolf. Vilified throughout history in both legend and literature, humans had effectively eradicated wolves from Europe by 1850. In the United States, the government declared a war of extermination against gray wolves (Canis lupus) beginning in the early 1800s. Hunters, ranchers, and farmers eagerly enlisted, using lethal traps and meat laced with strychnine and ground glass as weapons. But it was government bounties that spelled the end of Canis lupus. Between 1883 and 1914 bounty hunters killed 81,000 wolves in Montana alone. By the 1930s, only a few hundred of the original population of 2-3 million wolves remained in the United States. Over the next few decades, a growing number of studies repeatedly showed that wolves were not responsible for the decimation of game species, and in fact kept populations of deer, elk, and moose at healthy levels. Nor did wolves cause any significant damage to livestock as had been universally assumed. Despite intensive research, biologists were also unable to document a single instance of wolves causing the death of a human being anywhere in the world. Still the slaughter went on. Not until the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973 did the killing of wolves become a crime punishable by a $50,000 fine and up to a year in jail. But by then wolf populations, which had once inhabited an area stretching from Alaska to Mexico, were largely extinct in the lower United States save for small populations in Minnesota and Michigan. The Endangered Species Act not only offered protection to species threatened with extinction, it also provided for their reintroduction into former habitats. In 1987 the Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Recovery Plan recommended that