TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/110689/p13

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.0 KB | 133 lines

                                                                                AMERICAN SCENE, Page 13

Yellowstone National Park

The Brawl of The Wild


A plan for reintroducing wolves touches off a howling argument

By John Skow


    Wolves roam through our racial memory, howling beyond the
fire light, scaring the hell out of us. But they no longer roam
in Yellowstone National Park, except as rare transients,
prowling south from Canada. The last resident wolves in the big
park were exterminated by Government hunters by the late 1920s.
That was a time when animals were thought to be good (elk and
bison, for instance) or bad. Wolves had been pursued in the West
as if they were not merely bad, but evil. Cattlemen lost entire
herds to harsh winters, then spent enormous, irrationally large
sums of money taking vengeance on wolves. Barry Lopez, in his
haunting book Of Wolves and Men, tells of wolves drenched with
gasoline and set afire, wolves pulled apart by horses. You can't
dismember an April blizzard.

   Should the gray wolf, today an endangered species in most of
the U.S., be re-established in Yellowstone? An old stockman at
a meeting at Laramie, Wyo., shakes with rage at the notion; the
idea is like reintroducing smallpox. But to wolf partisans, the
bedrock argument is a brooding, circular truth: without wolves,
there are no wolves. These complex, mysterious animals are their
own justification. Beyond that, biologists see predators as
balance wheels in ecosystems. No wolves mean too many elk, which
is what Yellowstone has now, starving by the thousands in winter
die-offs.

    Yellowstone can seem grand and wild, or it can resemble a
big, hokey theme park, an example of what happens when man
meddles too much with nature. Policies shift with political
winds, and under former National Park Service director William
Penn Mott, a wolf enthusiast, Yellowstone officials pushed hard
for the wolf's reintroduction. Now Mott has been replaced by
fence-sitter James Ridenour, and political pressure is reaching
Yellowstone. Two weeks ago, a traveling Park Service slide show
on wolf reintroduction was canceled. An elaborate study asked
for by Congress seems certain, when it is released at year's
end, to recommend the return of wolves, but political
maneuvering has blocked the drafting of the necessary
environmental-impact statement. The major national environmental
groups support wolf reintroduction, and one, the Defenders of
Wildlife, is raising $100,000 to reimburse stockmen in the
northern Rockies for livestock the wolves might kill. Last month
Defenders agreed to pay $1,700 to cattlemen for kills by a wolf
pack that had migrated from Canada into Montana.

    Natural migration probably cannot restock Yellowstone,
which is why the political jostling goes on. Big, burly Dave
Mech, widely accepted as the world's leading authority on
wolves, says Yellowstone is ideal for Canis lupus. Alston Chase,
the cantankerous philosopher who wrote Playing God in
Yellowstone, thinks the U.S. has a moral obligation to return
wolves to the park. But the wolves' most effective ally maybe
Renee Askins, 30, of Moose, Wyo., a wildlife ecologist who
stumps for an advocacy group she founded called the Wolf Fund.

    When Askins speaks, the setting can resemble an old-style
western movie, several scenes before the shoot-out. She has
blue eyes and long brown hair, and her manner is that of the
pretty, courageous schoolmarm standing up for truth and decency
in words the fearful townspeople would just as soon not hear.
Yes, she says, wolves get their living by killing. No, they are
not sweet and docile. Yes, stockmen are having a hard time
economically. "But if we can't preserve wildness in Yellowstone,
where can we preserve it?"

    Hunting outfitters and stockmen scuff their cowboy boots in
the dirt, unconvinced, as Askins talks. Some of them like to
draw a line between Eastern ecobabblers, who puff wolves as
gallant symbols of wildness, and true Westerners, who know them
as cruel and cowardly and who can be relied on to "shoot, shovel
and shut up," as the brag goes in the cowboy bars. But, Brad
Little, a stockman from Emmett, Idaho, concedes, "It's not so
much wolves we're afraid of, it's wolf managers." Exactly. The
wolves themselves, though they are sure to range beyond park
boundaries, are likely to be more an annoyance than a danger to
farmers. In northern Minnesota, where some 1,200 wolves forage
in a cattle-ranch and sheep-farm area, the highest annual payoff
by a Government program set up to compensate stockmen for wolf
kills has been a modest $21,000. (Problem wolves there are
killed by federal hunters, as would be true around Yellowstone.)
There have been no documented cases in modern times of wolves
attacking people in the U.S. But it is taken as a home truth
that wolves will bring federal wolf bureaucrats, whose
regulations will drive honest ranchers nuts. Carl Haywood,
legislative assistant to Idaho Republican Senator James McClure,
says voters fear that the wolf will be used as a surrogate by
environmental extremists, whose real agenda is "getting
ranchers, miners, loggers and motorized recreationists off
public lands."

    U.S. Representative Wayne Owens, a Utah Democrat, has 76
cosponsors for a bill calling for wolf reintroduction, but its
chances are dodgy unless lawmakers from the Yellowstone states
change their minds. This may happen; polls show that voters
favor the idea. Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson, once
an antiwolf diehard, talked like a moderate at a recent hearing
on Owens' bill and says only, "Let's take care of grizzlies
first." He means get the bears off the endangered species list
and out from under federal protection, so they can be shot
beyond park boundaries.

    The wolf's listing as an endangered species is the
important difference between a Park Service plan and one floated
by Idaho's Senator McClure. McClure has a problem, which is that
wolves have been sighted frequently in central Idaho. If packs
from Canada establish themselves in Idaho, as they have in
Montana's Glacier National Park, they will be protected as an
indigenous endangered species. Instead, McClure's plan would
de-list wolves immediately, and let state game laws treat them
as predators, outside designated havens in Idaho's
Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness and in Glacier and Yellowstone
parks. Environmental groups support the park strategy, which
would de-list wolves only after ten breeding pairs are
established in Yellowstone and Glacier parks and the Idaho
wilderness.

    When will Yellowstone hear wolves howl again? Later than
sooner, probably, but sooner than never. Askins, mean while,
weary of fighting and fund raising, insists that wolves will be
re-established not because of political wrangling but because
Westerners respect wild things. "And the wolf," she says, "is
one of the wildest of things. At its heart, the real is sue is
one of making room. There is still a little room in the West
for outfitters, for livestock, for wildness, for wolves."