WEBVTT - Ep. 23: Golden-Eyed Lightning Rod 0:00:01.480 --> 0:00:04.720 In the first half of the twentieth century, America came 0:00:04.960 --> 0:00:08.440 very close to destroying its wolves, which were saved by 0:00:08.480 --> 0:00:11.920 the insights of a new science that changed the country's 0:00:12.039 --> 0:00:16.159 understanding of predators. I'm Dan Flores and this is the 0:00:16.200 --> 0:00:21.160 American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where 0:00:21.160 --> 0:00:21.919 the hunt. 0:00:21.720 --> 0:00:22.600 Meets the harvest. 0:00:23.160 --> 0:00:26.680 A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters 0:00:26.680 --> 0:00:32.360 and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com. 0:00:32.520 --> 0:00:57.480 Enjoy responsible golden eyed lightning rod. In the nineteen twenties, 0:00:57.720 --> 0:01:01.920 as flappers and jazz and hollywod would captivate American cities, 0:01:02.240 --> 0:01:05.560 a man named Bill Kaywood is engaged in a different 0:01:05.680 --> 0:01:10.320 cultural project at fifty Kwood is a stocky stump of 0:01:10.360 --> 0:01:13.440 a man with a face like a granite cliff. He's 0:01:13.480 --> 0:01:17.600 a professional assassin of wolves, but says he loves the 0:01:17.720 --> 0:01:22.399 animals he watches die. He's a real fellow. The big 0:01:22.480 --> 0:01:26.360 Gray is lots of brains. I feel sorry every time 0:01:26.440 --> 0:01:29.319 I see one of those big fellows thrashing around in 0:01:29.360 --> 0:01:34.000 a trap, bellowing bloody murder. Kywood is the sort of 0:01:34.040 --> 0:01:38.200 American that writer D. H. Lawrence getting his first extended 0:01:38.240 --> 0:01:42.959 exposure to this country will describe as stoic a killer, 0:01:43.520 --> 0:01:46.840 and what he is doing is mop up work. Where 0:01:46.840 --> 0:01:50.200 the continent only three centuries before had easily held one 0:01:50.280 --> 0:01:53.600 hundred thousand wolf packs. By the nineteen twenties, few packs 0:01:53.600 --> 0:01:57.240 remain anywhere in the US outside Alaska, the Great Lakes 0:01:57.280 --> 0:02:02.080 Country and the Lower South Is After the last survivors. 0:02:02.080 --> 0:02:05.440 In the West, few enough animals that ranchers and government 0:02:05.520 --> 0:02:09.080 hunters hired on their behalf have started giving the animals 0:02:09.240 --> 0:02:14.560 individual names they called Two of these last gray wolves, Kywood, 0:02:14.600 --> 0:02:20.240 is tracking down Rags and Greenhorn, animals that had once 0:02:20.320 --> 0:02:24.000 lived in packs, once had mates and pups. Rags and 0:02:24.040 --> 0:02:29.200 Greenhorn are enduring lives of lonely desperation. Like a significant 0:02:29.200 --> 0:02:32.440 percentage of gray wolves who turn to livestock, they're too 0:02:32.560 --> 0:02:36.080 old and frail to bring down elk without. 0:02:35.800 --> 0:02:36.720 A pack's help. 0:02:37.360 --> 0:02:41.079 Younger wolves who ended up stock killers often had suffered 0:02:41.160 --> 0:02:45.840 crippling injuries, frequently by losing multiple toes. Are an entire 0:02:46.000 --> 0:02:49.960 foot escaping the serrated jaws of the new house four 0:02:50.000 --> 0:02:53.520 and a half steel trap. Rags had seen two of 0:02:53.560 --> 0:02:56.960 the mates he had had during his lifetime panicked and 0:02:57.080 --> 0:03:00.640 helpless in a trap. He learned from that and is 0:03:00.760 --> 0:03:06.760 himself unmaimed. Rags is an old wolf, the rachers say seventeen, 0:03:06.840 --> 0:03:10.200 but he's probably closer to ten or eleven, and now 0:03:10.280 --> 0:03:13.639 either travels alone or with two younger wolves who are 0:03:13.680 --> 0:03:18.520 far less crafty as for Greenhorn. This female wolf, named 0:03:18.560 --> 0:03:22.040 for a local mountain near Kywood's front range home, has 0:03:22.160 --> 0:03:26.280 teeth so worn she's been reduced to strangling her prey. 0:03:26.680 --> 0:03:29.800 In her past, she's escaped traps and spit out a 0:03:29.840 --> 0:03:33.440 strychnind bait before it could kill her. When Kwood goes 0:03:33.480 --> 0:03:37.040 after her in nineteen twenty three, the ranchers claim she's 0:03:37.200 --> 0:03:41.760 eighteen years old. Whatever her real age, she is slowly 0:03:42.000 --> 0:03:46.760 starving to death. These are wolves the federal agency Kwood 0:03:46.800 --> 0:03:51.440 works for should leave to die natural deaths, but Rags 0:03:51.440 --> 0:03:54.320 and Greenhorn live in a nation that cannot brook a 0:03:54.400 --> 0:04:00.920 single wolf remaining alive anywhere. It's Rags's turned first. Across 0:04:00.960 --> 0:04:04.840 weeks of time, Kwood sets his traps and Rags digs 0:04:04.840 --> 0:04:08.440 them up with a wolf that's smart. The former bounty 0:04:08.520 --> 0:04:11.800 hunter rigs a trap set designed to snare a wolf 0:04:12.080 --> 0:04:15.520 by a back leg as it digs up other traps 0:04:15.560 --> 0:04:16.560 with its front paws. 0:04:17.160 --> 0:04:19.040 It works with a. 0:04:19.000 --> 0:04:22.440 Trap biting into a rear leg, and a second trap 0:04:22.560 --> 0:04:26.320 sprung on the dragline of the first, bouncing after him 0:04:26.360 --> 0:04:29.640 on a three foot chain. The old wolf spends a 0:04:29.680 --> 0:04:34.919 final day in tortured flight. In the end, hemmed into 0:04:34.920 --> 0:04:38.320 a box canyon, he confronts a fate he's escaped for 0:04:38.360 --> 0:04:44.560 a decade. Purposefully, he limps straight towards Kwood, yellow eyes 0:04:44.600 --> 0:04:47.880 fixed and staring, as the metal clanks over. 0:04:47.720 --> 0:04:49.160 The rocks behind him. 0:04:49.640 --> 0:04:54.599 Kwood stoically shoots the equivalent of an octogenarian wolf in 0:04:54.640 --> 0:05:01.320 the head next Greenhorn. It's December, cold and snowing on 0:05:01.360 --> 0:05:04.680 the front range, and with her teeth mostly gone, the 0:05:04.760 --> 0:05:06.560 elderly wolf can't down a. 0:05:06.560 --> 0:05:10.240 Deer, let alone a cow. She's desperately hungry. 0:05:10.839 --> 0:05:14.440 She knows the sin of strychnine, but Kaywood has attracted 0:05:14.480 --> 0:05:18.080 her with a horse's head wired to a juniper, around 0:05:18.160 --> 0:05:21.760 which he's placed chunks of fat suet soaked in poisoned 0:05:22.480 --> 0:05:27.120 Greenhorn shies away from the smell again and again. She knows, 0:05:27.160 --> 0:05:30.479 from her own experience and from wolf culture, that this 0:05:30.800 --> 0:05:36.120 scent means tragic danger. She's witnessed the thrashing, vomiting endgame 0:05:36.240 --> 0:05:40.880 more than once, but she's starving to death. She circles back, 0:05:41.320 --> 0:05:45.239 picks up a chunk of suet, swallows it, then another, 0:05:45.640 --> 0:05:50.599 and one more. It's the Day after Christmas nineteen twenty three. 0:05:51.000 --> 0:05:55.599 Kaywood believes she's the last wild wolf born in the 0:05:55.640 --> 0:06:02.960 state of Colorado. By the early twentieth century, a new 0:06:03.160 --> 0:06:07.560 institutional player emerged to confront wolves and other predators in 0:06:07.600 --> 0:06:11.159 the United States. Before nineteen oh five, it seemed that 0:06:11.240 --> 0:06:15.640 Seehart Miriam's new Bureau of Biological Survey, created to map 0:06:15.680 --> 0:06:19.120 the wildlife that was left in post frontier America, was 0:06:19.120 --> 0:06:20.599 sitting pretty teddy. 0:06:20.680 --> 0:06:22.120 Roosevelt was president, and. 0:06:22.040 --> 0:06:25.359 The Bureau was dear to his heart, but Congress was 0:06:25.400 --> 0:06:29.919 growing testing about funding an agency interested in pure science. 0:06:30.720 --> 0:06:35.320 At Livestock Association meetings, Western ranchers were arguing that the 0:06:35.440 --> 0:06:39.440 vast western public lands Roosevelt had set aside from homesteading, 0:06:39.720 --> 0:06:44.039 were refuges for predators that attacked their stock. Since the 0:06:44.120 --> 0:06:48.240 FED had created this situation, the ranchers believed the FED 0:06:48.360 --> 0:06:52.320 ought to fix it, so in an act of self preservation, 0:06:52.720 --> 0:06:57.400 the Bureau of Biological Survey remade itself into the solution 0:06:57.640 --> 0:07:01.640 to the country so called predator problem. The claiming that 0:07:01.720 --> 0:07:06.200 America suffered from these are the Bureau's words, wolf infested 0:07:06.320 --> 0:07:11.120 National forests and the federal public domain. The Biological Survey 0:07:11.560 --> 0:07:16.160 engineered its own public support. Between nineteen oh seven and 0:07:16.240 --> 0:07:19.720 nineteen oh nine, it issued four reports on the so 0:07:19.800 --> 0:07:23.880 called predator big game livestock relationship in and around the 0:07:23.960 --> 0:07:30.760 new National Forests. A young, slightly educated Minnesotan named Vernon Bailey, 0:07:30.920 --> 0:07:34.480 who was a whiz at trapping animals, authored most of them. 0:07:35.160 --> 0:07:39.160 An agency like the Bureau, his reports claimed, could bring 0:07:39.400 --> 0:07:43.720 orderly and scientific control to wolf destruction by hiring train 0:07:44.000 --> 0:07:49.280 hunters and trappers men like Bill Kywood. Bailey held seminars 0:07:49.280 --> 0:07:52.640 for National Forest managers, teaching them how to find wolf 0:07:52.720 --> 0:07:56.640 dens and the best strategies for destroying pups and packs. 0:07:57.280 --> 0:08:01.400 Forest Service rangers proceeded to kill eighteen hundred wolves and 0:08:01.560 --> 0:08:06.119 twenty three thousand coyotes in the National Forest within a year. 0:08:06.920 --> 0:08:12.120 Teddy Roosevelt would hereafter refer to Bailey by a favorite nickname, 0:08:12.600 --> 0:08:18.080 Wolf Bailey. In twentieth century America, there was literally no 0:08:18.320 --> 0:08:24.440 opposition to this campaign of annihilation America's beloved nature writer 0:08:24.720 --> 0:08:29.880 John Burrows opined that predators certainly needed killing, since the. 0:08:29.960 --> 0:08:32.360 Fewer of these there are, the better for. 0:08:32.360 --> 0:08:36.840 The useful and beautiful game. As he wrote. Wildlife activist 0:08:37.040 --> 0:08:42.240 William Hornday insisted that firearms, dogs, traps, and Strycht nine 0:08:42.559 --> 0:08:47.599 are thoroughly legitimate weapons of destruction. No halfway measures suffice. 0:08:48.480 --> 0:08:52.120 Not even John Muir spoke out. Although Muir did worry 0:08:52.160 --> 0:08:56.160 that slaughtering wolves might induce what he called a penalty 0:08:56.240 --> 0:09:01.079 for interfering with the balance of nature, there was another 0:09:01.280 --> 0:09:06.160 constituency for the war on predators, too. Destroying wolves would 0:09:06.240 --> 0:09:10.240 produce all the deer and elk America's new sport hunters 0:09:10.280 --> 0:09:14.240 could ever want. No one asked whether sport hunters would 0:09:14.240 --> 0:09:17.000 focus on the same animals in an elk herd that 0:09:17.160 --> 0:09:20.600 wolves did, because no one knew anything about wolf prey 0:09:20.679 --> 0:09:26.599 relationships then. But advocating replacing predators with human hunters was 0:09:26.640 --> 0:09:30.800 a stroke of genius, bringing all manner of sportsmen's groups, 0:09:31.080 --> 0:09:35.240 firearms manufacturers, and state game and fish agencies to the 0:09:35.280 --> 0:09:40.240 cause of wiping out every wolf on the continent. So 0:09:40.320 --> 0:09:45.000 without conducting a single research project on the wolf's role, 0:09:45.160 --> 0:09:50.960 in nature. The Biological Survey engineered massive public support for 0:09:51.080 --> 0:09:55.679 wolf extermination, and in nineteen fourteen, Congress approved and appropriation 0:09:56.160 --> 0:09:58.480 of one hundred and twenty five thousand. 0:09:58.120 --> 0:10:00.520 Dollars for the Bureau to launch the war. 0:10:01.240 --> 0:10:05.800 Within two years, the Bureau had three hundred federal hunters 0:10:05.840 --> 0:10:10.640 in the field. Under Miriam's leadership, the Biological Survey was 0:10:10.760 --> 0:10:15.199 now a critical federal agency on behalf of a civilized 0:10:15.200 --> 0:10:19.280 America made in the image of European countries that had 0:10:19.400 --> 0:10:24.080 long ago destroyed their own predators. The one field of 0:10:24.200 --> 0:10:29.199 twentieth century wildlife science in which Americans became acknowledged global 0:10:29.320 --> 0:10:34.920 leaders was in fact the destruction of so called undesirable species. 0:10:37.440 --> 0:10:41.000 If your assignment was to mass kill wolves, the way 0:10:41.040 --> 0:10:45.680 to go was poisoning entire populations, and you did that 0:10:45.800 --> 0:10:50.960 by strewing poisoned baits by the thousands across the American landscape. 0:10:51.120 --> 0:10:54.800 As for the target animal, the campaign brooked no mercy 0:10:55.000 --> 0:10:59.320 or compassion. At one point, Vernon Bailey inquired of his 0:10:59.520 --> 0:11:03.120 boss about the proper dose of Strycht nine, so a 0:11:03.160 --> 0:11:08.400 poisoned wolf might die within a humane three minutes, knowing 0:11:08.480 --> 0:11:11.840 full well that any expression of mercy towards wolves was 0:11:11.880 --> 0:11:16.760 a political liability, Miriam shot back, You had better go 0:11:16.880 --> 0:11:20.720 at once to the hospital in Albuquerque. Inasmuch as no 0:11:21.000 --> 0:11:24.959 sane man could possibly make such an absurd and utterly 0:11:25.040 --> 0:11:28.880 preposterous statement as this, You are obviously in need of 0:11:28.960 --> 0:11:34.480 mental treatment, Miriam went on, We want the cattleman behind us. 0:11:34.880 --> 0:11:35.280 SABE. 0:11:37.040 --> 0:11:40.680 With its new funding, the Bureau was building a plant 0:11:40.720 --> 0:11:46.479 in Albuquerque to produce strict nine baits in volume. Chillingly, 0:11:46.640 --> 0:11:52.320 they called it the Eradication Methods Lab. By nineteen twenty one, 0:11:52.679 --> 0:11:56.280 this federal killing facility had moved to Denver, in which 0:11:56.320 --> 0:12:01.200 location it eventually perfected an amazing witches bred of ever 0:12:01.440 --> 0:12:06.080 deadlier pretocides. But for the next two decades, federal poisoners 0:12:06.080 --> 0:12:11.440 relied on strychnine. It was potent twisting wolves into a 0:12:11.600 --> 0:12:16.439 stryct nine signature. Their bodies wrenched and their tails shot 0:12:16.600 --> 0:12:19.079 straight out, as if they'd been struck by a bolt 0:12:19.080 --> 0:12:25.040 of lightning. Federal hunters quickly grasped the wolf's fatal flaw. 0:12:26.000 --> 0:12:30.959 The smaller American canids coyotes, had evolved an adaptation called 0:12:31.000 --> 0:12:35.240 fish and fusion, living in social groups when possible. Fusion 0:12:35.760 --> 0:12:40.679 but capable of scattering when ecological pressures called for it fishing, 0:12:41.640 --> 0:12:45.560 but wolves are so strongly family based that wolf killers 0:12:45.600 --> 0:12:48.880 realize that killing one animal and using it sent on 0:12:48.920 --> 0:12:51.960 your baits meant, as one bureau hunter put it, you 0:12:52.040 --> 0:12:56.280 could quickly kill all the members of whole families of wolves, 0:12:56.440 --> 0:13:00.280 with unmistakable evidence that the remaining members of the wolf 0:13:00.400 --> 0:13:06.360 family have been seeking the lost member. Neuroscience studies at 0:13:06.360 --> 0:13:10.760 this very moment are verifying the brain chemistry grief that 0:13:10.960 --> 0:13:15.920 while canids suffer from the loss of their mates, at 0:13:15.960 --> 0:13:20.000 this fikun moment, two new developments were about to alter 0:13:20.160 --> 0:13:25.000 the art of the country's wolf story though. In nineteen fifteen, 0:13:25.200 --> 0:13:30.719 scientific naturalists founded the Ecological Society of America, and at 0:13:30.720 --> 0:13:35.640 their first meeting in Philadelphia, the founding members, Frederick Clements 0:13:35.679 --> 0:13:40.400 and Edith Clements, Charles c Adams, and Victor Shelford, agreed 0:13:40.520 --> 0:13:44.319 on a focus for their new discipline. There was adaptation 0:13:44.480 --> 0:13:48.360 and natural selection, of course, along with investigating the flow 0:13:48.400 --> 0:13:52.360 of energy through nature and an analysis of serial stages 0:13:52.400 --> 0:13:57.439 and climax conditions. Shelford, who had just published his landmark 0:13:57.760 --> 0:14:01.920 Animal Communities in Temperate America, pushed his colleagues to work 0:14:01.960 --> 0:14:07.119 on biotic communities as well. In nineteen fifteen, the society 0:14:07.240 --> 0:14:11.400 counted three hundred and seven members. But it was an 0:14:11.480 --> 0:14:15.400 old fashioned topic, an idea Western culture had known since 0:14:15.440 --> 0:14:19.200 the time of Herodotus and Plato as the balance of 0:14:19.400 --> 0:14:24.160 nature that pushed ecology towards rethinking the role of predators. 0:14:25.120 --> 0:14:30.280 The biological surveys policies had assumed the European folk position 0:14:31.080 --> 0:14:36.480 predators were evil and disposable. Their eradication made for a 0:14:36.520 --> 0:14:42.400 civilized nation. The ecologists believed there might instead be dynamic 0:14:42.560 --> 0:14:46.880 equilibria at work in the natural world. That assumption would 0:14:46.920 --> 0:14:50.320 become the crux of a raging battle in American and 0:14:50.400 --> 0:14:54.880 Western science for the next half century. The other development 0:14:54.920 --> 0:14:58.240 of the moment was America's creation of a National Park 0:14:58.360 --> 0:15:03.480 Service in nineteen sixteen. Initially, Yellowstone, the world's first national park, 0:15:03.760 --> 0:15:06.480 had emerged as a symbol of just how far the 0:15:06.520 --> 0:15:11.160 wolf warriors intended to go. In nineteen fourteen, Yellowstone had 0:15:11.200 --> 0:15:14.720 invited Vernon Bailey to come and show its personnel the 0:15:14.760 --> 0:15:19.800 best techniques to exterminate wolves. Yellowstone's tally till the death 0:15:19.800 --> 0:15:22.320 of the last gray wolf in the park that happened 0:15:22.360 --> 0:15:25.080 in the year nineteen twenty six was one hundred and 0:15:25.080 --> 0:15:30.160 thirty six wolves, eighty of which were puppies. Between nineteen 0:15:30.320 --> 0:15:34.560 eighteen and nineteen thirty five, the world's first Great Wildlife 0:15:34.560 --> 0:15:38.440 part issued a death sentence to two thousand, nine hundred 0:15:38.480 --> 0:15:43.160 and sixty eight coyotes. All the while the Eradication Methods 0:15:43.240 --> 0:15:47.000 Lab was cranking out the strychnine until by the mid 0:15:47.120 --> 0:15:52.680 nineteen twenties, Bureau hunters had distributed an astounding three million, 0:15:52.960 --> 0:15:59.160 five hundred sixty seven thousand poison baits across the country. Yet, 0:15:59.200 --> 0:16:04.560 amid the endgame in America, evidence of Darwinian natural selection 0:16:04.880 --> 0:16:10.520 and an emergent wolf culture of survivability was emerging. Stanley Young, 0:16:10.760 --> 0:16:13.040 a hunter who had rise through the ranks at the Bureau, 0:16:13.480 --> 0:16:17.040 believed that these last animals that it is probable that 0:16:17.200 --> 0:16:22.000 never did more intelligent wolves exist. Like eighteenth century sperm 0:16:22.040 --> 0:16:25.720 whales that famously figured out how to avoid whaling boats 0:16:25.720 --> 0:16:29.760 and harpooners, wolves like Rags and Greenhorn, drew on the 0:16:29.840 --> 0:16:34.400 accumulated cultural learning of scores of wolf generations and taught 0:16:34.440 --> 0:16:39.000 their pups about rifles, traps, and poisons. No wonder the 0:16:39.160 --> 0:16:51.600 last ones were so smart. Ratchers and federal hunters named 0:16:51.800 --> 0:16:54.840 many of the last wolves in the West. Along with 0:16:55.120 --> 0:16:59.520 Rags and Greenhorn in Colorado, there was also Old Lefty, 0:16:59.760 --> 0:17:05.400 Old Old Whitey, Bigfoot, Phantom Wolf, and Oodahweep. In Oregon, 0:17:05.440 --> 0:17:09.440 there was a last wolf called Sycan, a King Lobo 0:17:09.640 --> 0:17:14.680 in New Mexico Snowdrift, and the prior Creek Wolf in Montana, 0:17:15.119 --> 0:17:19.359 Aguila in Arizona, and the Custer Wolf in South Dakotas. 0:17:20.320 --> 0:17:25.200 Three toes or clubfoot were common wolf names, referencing all 0:17:25.280 --> 0:17:30.480 the animals crippled by traps. There were red wolf renegades too, 0:17:30.600 --> 0:17:36.280 including Traveler in Arkansas, Black Devil in Oklahoma, and Crip 0:17:36.480 --> 0:17:41.560 in Texas, another maimed animal. Given the accounts federal hunters 0:17:41.640 --> 0:17:45.000 left of their protracted efforts to kill these wolves, there's 0:17:45.040 --> 0:17:50.280 little doubt these were indeed remarkably intelligent animals, and why not, 0:17:51.040 --> 0:17:54.800 as they were experiencing on all sides. Humans were engaged 0:17:54.840 --> 0:17:59.560 in a crusade to wipe out their kind entirely. But 0:17:59.680 --> 0:18:03.239 as the in nineteen twenties dawned, what seemed initially to 0:18:03.280 --> 0:18:07.480 be a natural ally mounted the first real challenge to 0:18:07.520 --> 0:18:12.320 the Bureau's scorched earth Wolf War. The American Society of 0:18:12.480 --> 0:18:16.399 Mammalogists met for the first time at the Smithsonian in 0:18:16.520 --> 0:18:22.200 nineteen nineteen. Bureau founder Seehart Miriam became its first president 0:18:22.520 --> 0:18:26.160 with Vernon Bailey, and Bureau made E. A. Goldman as 0:18:26.320 --> 0:18:31.320 charter members. Like Bailey, Goldman had field experience, but he 0:18:31.440 --> 0:18:36.360 lacked a college degree. Nonetheless, the Bureau tasked these two 0:18:36.480 --> 0:18:41.600 men to explain and defend the wolf War against university 0:18:41.680 --> 0:18:46.320 trained ecologists. Among that group was a young forester interested 0:18:46.359 --> 0:18:51.520 in wildlife, Aldo Leopold. There was also Joseph Grinnell, a 0:18:51.640 --> 0:18:56.840 cousin of the legendary conservation hero George Bird Grennell. Grennell 0:18:57.040 --> 0:19:01.680 was an original thinker whose ideas quick challenged the very 0:19:01.800 --> 0:19:06.560 premises on which the Bureau based its predator War. The 0:19:06.600 --> 0:19:10.399 first blow up happened at the mammalogists nineteen twenty four meeting. 0:19:11.160 --> 0:19:16.040 Grennell had just published a foundational piece on ecological niches, 0:19:16.400 --> 0:19:20.000 a fundamental insight into nature critical to appreciating what might 0:19:20.080 --> 0:19:21.920 happen if America. 0:19:21.480 --> 0:19:23.320 Destroyed its wolf population. 0:19:24.200 --> 0:19:28.840 Grennell and his graduate student E. Raymond Hall insisted from 0:19:28.960 --> 0:19:32.720 this work on niches that the Bureau was wiping out 0:19:32.920 --> 0:19:36.720 animals that were playing an essential role in the continence 0:19:36.960 --> 0:19:41.720 balance of nature. As it turned out, both the ecologists 0:19:41.800 --> 0:19:44.600 and the bureau men were unaware that the natural world 0:19:44.680 --> 0:19:48.159 in America was about to offer powerful examples of the 0:19:48.200 --> 0:19:53.920 implications of emptying predator niches. But Goldman and Bailey decide 0:19:54.000 --> 0:19:56.680 they had heard about the balance of nature a few 0:19:56.720 --> 0:20:00.960 times too many. If the US actually let predators live, 0:20:01.160 --> 0:20:05.000 they argued, there would soon be nothing but carnivores left. 0:20:06.080 --> 0:20:09.560 In a throwdown essay, The Predatory Mammal Problem and the 0:20:09.600 --> 0:20:13.160 Balance of Nature that he authored for the Journal of Mammalogy, 0:20:13.760 --> 0:20:18.080 Goldman insisted that the coming of civilized man meant that 0:20:18.240 --> 0:20:22.879 the balance of nature has been violently overturned, never to 0:20:23.040 --> 0:20:30.240 be re established. Thus, large predatory mammals, destructive to livestock 0:20:30.320 --> 0:20:33.760 and to game, no longer have a place in our 0:20:33.880 --> 0:20:39.440 advancing civilization. But Joseph Grenell had come up with another idea, 0:20:39.680 --> 0:20:43.360 and this one vexed the Bureau as much as niches 0:20:43.560 --> 0:20:46.760 and the balance of nature. Now there was a National 0:20:46.840 --> 0:20:51.399 Park Service with an Organic Act directive charging it with 0:20:51.680 --> 0:20:55.280 preserving nature for future generations. 0:20:55.920 --> 0:20:58.800 But how to do that and in what form? 0:21:00.200 --> 0:21:04.520 And zoologist Tracy storer had a suggestion they laid out 0:21:04.600 --> 0:21:08.720 in an article for the journal Science. In their opinion, 0:21:09.119 --> 0:21:14.359 preserving nature meant predaceous animals should be left unmolested and 0:21:14.480 --> 0:21:17.399 allowed to retain their primitive relation to the rest of 0:21:17.440 --> 0:21:19.919 the fauna, as tourists. 0:21:19.560 --> 0:21:20.720 Were already showing. 0:21:20.880 --> 0:21:25.639 They wrote, wolves, coyotes, and lions were exceedingly interesting to 0:21:25.720 --> 0:21:30.879 part visitors. Wasn't a complete nature? What preserving nature in 0:21:30.960 --> 0:21:38.080 the parks intended offering predators permanent refuge in America's national parks? 0:21:38.520 --> 0:21:45.880 Dumbfounded Bureau personnel. New Bureau Director Paul Reddington was incredulous 0:21:46.720 --> 0:21:51.199 we faced the opposition. He told his employees of those 0:21:51.359 --> 0:21:55.840 who want to see the mountain lion, the wolf, the coyote, 0:21:56.080 --> 0:22:01.560 and the bobcat actually perpetuated as part of the wildlife 0:22:01.600 --> 0:22:09.959 of the country. One of the scientists keenly interested in 0:22:10.000 --> 0:22:14.240 this debate had published an essay he called the Varmit Question, 0:22:14.800 --> 0:22:17.600 heaping praise on the Bureau when he was just out 0:22:17.600 --> 0:22:22.320 of Yale. So Aldo Leopold was not a vocal critic 0:22:22.480 --> 0:22:27.040 of the Bureau as the wolf debate Royal Science, but 0:22:27.160 --> 0:22:32.320 as conference chairman of the American Game Protection Association's meeting 0:22:32.440 --> 0:22:38.520 in nineteen twenty eight. Leopold's position about predators was obviously evolving. 0:22:39.400 --> 0:22:47.040 No public agencies should ever control predators without substantial scientific research. First, 0:22:47.320 --> 0:22:51.600 he wrote for the association, poisons should only be used 0:22:51.640 --> 0:22:57.840 in emergencies and no predatory species should be exterminated. 0:22:57.080 --> 0:22:58.440 Over large areas. 0:23:00.240 --> 0:23:04.960 Now, as professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin, 0:23:05.359 --> 0:23:10.480 Leopold dropped more deeply into ecology the field worried critics 0:23:10.520 --> 0:23:15.360 were already calling the subversive science. One of the issues 0:23:15.560 --> 0:23:20.160 he particularly studied was the response of nature to predator removal. 0:23:21.480 --> 0:23:24.960 The nineteen twenties witnessed the rise of a new meme 0:23:25.240 --> 0:23:30.600 to describe a new natural phenomenon. The meme word was eruption, 0:23:31.160 --> 0:23:35.679 and it referred to a sudden ungulate population explosion that 0:23:35.960 --> 0:23:41.160 caused herds to eat themselves out of forage and then crash. Spectacularly, 0:23:41.920 --> 0:23:47.800 the cause effect seemed straightforward. The famous Kaibab eruption on 0:23:47.880 --> 0:23:51.160 the north rim of the Grand Canyon was preceded by 0:23:51.240 --> 0:23:55.800 bureau hunters erasing thirty wolves, seven hundred and eighty one 0:23:55.920 --> 0:23:59.920 mountain lions, and five thousand coyotes from the north rim. 0:24:00.800 --> 0:24:05.680 The resident mule deer then exploded from four thousand animals 0:24:05.720 --> 0:24:10.160 to one hundred thousand, leading to a catastrophic die off. 0:24:11.040 --> 0:24:17.359 It made Kaibab a national story. Eruptions became a moral 0:24:17.560 --> 0:24:22.399 that wouldn't go away. With wolves vanishing, deer and ilk 0:24:22.600 --> 0:24:27.960 experienced crazy population oscillations somewhere in the country almost every year. 0:24:28.640 --> 0:24:32.439 Something in nature obviously was a miss. Leopold would go 0:24:32.520 --> 0:24:36.119 on to do a study of eruptions, finding reports of 0:24:36.200 --> 0:24:40.200 only two of them before nineteen hundred, but a whopping 0:24:40.480 --> 0:24:44.960 forty two between nineteen hundred and nineteen forty five, the 0:24:45.119 --> 0:24:51.080 number rising sharply after nineteen twenty. Eruptions seemed to supply 0:24:51.280 --> 0:24:57.720 evidence for the so called Latka Volterra equations, ecological models 0:24:57.760 --> 0:25:03.000 of how prey and their predators follow an oscillating algorithm 0:25:03.280 --> 0:25:07.240 of rising and falling populations in harmony with one another. 0:25:08.200 --> 0:25:11.000 But the inertia of the wolf war was now an 0:25:11.160 --> 0:25:16.120 unstoppable undertow in America. The Bureau's move was to go 0:25:16.200 --> 0:25:19.400 to the American public with a series of canned articles 0:25:19.560 --> 0:25:24.200 attend to those lauding the g men, hunting crime celebrities 0:25:24.240 --> 0:25:30.600 like Al Capone and John Dillinger, US agents stock desperadoes 0:25:30.800 --> 0:25:32.199 of the animal world. 0:25:32.680 --> 0:25:34.640 The headlines of those stories read. 0:25:37.680 --> 0:25:41.600 There still had been no science to study the larger 0:25:41.720 --> 0:25:45.800 role of wolves and predators in American nature, but by 0:25:45.800 --> 0:25:49.480 the nineteen forties that was finally about to change. The 0:25:49.560 --> 0:25:53.840 two Minnesota brothers O Loss and Adolph Murray were soon 0:25:53.880 --> 0:25:59.000 to become legendary figures in American conservation. Having done landmark 0:25:59.080 --> 0:26:02.800 studies on la in Jackson Hole and on the porcupine 0:26:02.880 --> 0:26:07.040 cariboo heard in Alaska, O Loss would conduct a game 0:26:07.200 --> 0:26:10.639 changing study of coyotes and Jackson Hole, which appeared in 0:26:10.680 --> 0:26:16.359 print in nineteen thirty five. Brother Adolph Mury's own ecology 0:26:16.440 --> 0:26:21.240 of the Coyote and the Yellowstone Saw print in nineteen forty. 0:26:21.400 --> 0:26:24.439 Both works concluded that far from being arch predators that 0:26:24.520 --> 0:26:28.600 deserved extermination, coyotes produced actions in the world that were 0:26:28.680 --> 0:26:33.960 virtually all either beneficial to humans or neutral. The Muri 0:26:34.000 --> 0:26:39.520 brothers would become famous as ethical researchers who followed their evidence. 0:26:40.240 --> 0:26:43.800 Unfortunately for the Bureau now renamed the US Fish and 0:26:43.800 --> 0:26:47.879 Wildlife Service, the Muri brothers work did not lead to 0:26:47.960 --> 0:26:53.280 the conclusions it hoped for wolves either. By nineteen forty, 0:26:53.640 --> 0:26:57.679 Mount McKinley in Alaska was the only American park that 0:26:57.840 --> 0:27:03.200 still had wolves. For centuries of unexamined wolf killing, perhaps 0:27:03.200 --> 0:27:06.359 it was time to figure out something about wolf ecology. 0:27:07.280 --> 0:27:11.040 So in nineteen thirty nine Muri went to Alaska and 0:27:11.200 --> 0:27:17.080 spent three years engaged in the unthinkable, actually studying wolves 0:27:17.080 --> 0:27:19.399 interacting among themselves and. 0:27:19.280 --> 0:27:20.040 With their prey. 0:27:21.000 --> 0:27:25.480 It was arduous, Murray said, he walked seventeen hundred miles 0:27:25.520 --> 0:27:29.359 the first year, but everyone who reads his classic The 0:27:29.480 --> 0:27:33.040 Wolves of Mount McKinley can't help but thrill to his 0:27:33.119 --> 0:27:38.280 excitement at studying the mythic animal Americans had reflexively tried 0:27:38.320 --> 0:27:43.919 to exterminate. After three years in Alaska, Muriy understood what 0:27:44.080 --> 0:27:48.640 the Bureau had been too arrogant or myopic to see. 0:27:48.880 --> 0:27:56.000 Wolf prey relationships clearly were ancient, predating Europeans by thousands 0:27:56.080 --> 0:28:00.399 or maybe millions of years. Natural selection had long sorted 0:28:00.440 --> 0:28:05.560 out the details. Yes, wolves and coyotes ate prong horned fawns, 0:28:05.960 --> 0:28:09.520 so prong horns had evolved a solution. They gave birth 0:28:09.560 --> 0:28:11.959 to twins, an air and a spare. 0:28:12.960 --> 0:28:13.200 Yes. 0:28:13.320 --> 0:28:17.000 Wolves preyed on doll sheep and cariboo, but they caught 0:28:17.080 --> 0:28:21.240 the very young and the very old. Wolves held sheep 0:28:21.320 --> 0:28:25.040 numbers in check and kept them from overgrazing their mountains, 0:28:25.520 --> 0:28:30.159 rather than destroying their prey. Wolf predation probably has a 0:28:30.240 --> 0:28:35.560 salutary effect on the sheep as a species. Muir wrote, 0:28:35.720 --> 0:28:39.840 wolves did kill Caribou calves, but as Muir studied the relationship, 0:28:39.920 --> 0:28:43.440 he realized that Cariboo herds are no doubt adjusted to 0:28:43.520 --> 0:28:45.400 the presence and pressure. 0:28:45.080 --> 0:28:45.680 Of the wolf. 0:28:46.280 --> 0:28:50.800 These things were ancient. They predated all humans in America. 0:28:52.000 --> 0:28:55.200 Muriy did one other thing readers of his book never forgot. 0:28:55.880 --> 0:29:02.000 He brought the wolves he studied to life as individuals. Dandy, Robber, Mask, 0:29:02.200 --> 0:29:08.760 and Grandpa had unique personalities. Pact members seemed affectionate and 0:29:08.920 --> 0:29:12.520 caring of one another. These were not the wolves old 0:29:12.560 --> 0:29:15.920 worlders feared from the animals they had brought ashore. They 0:29:15.920 --> 0:29:19.760 weren't the wolves the bureau's public relations articles implied were 0:29:19.840 --> 0:29:23.200 animal gangsters. They were the wolves that had been in 0:29:23.280 --> 0:29:29.000 North America all along. The Wolves of Mount McKinley was 0:29:29.080 --> 0:29:34.520 the country's first entree into a modern sensibility about wolves 0:29:34.560 --> 0:29:39.720 and predators built on science generally, and once the blindfold 0:29:39.840 --> 0:29:43.600 was off, it was hard for the scientifically literate, ever 0:29:43.680 --> 0:29:47.360 to put it on again. At almost the same time 0:29:47.480 --> 0:29:52.480 Yuri's book came out, Old Bureau veterans Stanley Young and E. A. 0:29:52.680 --> 0:29:58.080 Goldman finally published their two volume The Wolves of North America, 0:29:58.480 --> 0:30:02.400 a book that has manned the wolf section of every 0:30:02.520 --> 0:30:07.600 American library for almost a century now. They proudly pointed 0:30:07.640 --> 0:30:11.920