Speaker 1: In the first half of the twentieth century, America came
Speaker 1: very close to destroying its wolves, which were saved by
Speaker 1: the insights of a new science that changed the country's
Speaker 1: understanding of predators. I'm Dan Flores and this is the
Speaker 1: American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where
Speaker 1: the hunt.
Speaker 2: Meets the harvest.
Speaker 1: A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters
Speaker 1: and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com.
Speaker 1: Enjoy responsible golden eyed lightning rod. In the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: as flappers and jazz and hollywod would captivate American cities,
Speaker 1: a man named Bill Kaywood is engaged in a different
Speaker 1: cultural project at fifty Kwood is a stocky stump of
Speaker 1: a man with a face like a granite cliff. He's
Speaker 1: a professional assassin of wolves, but says he loves the
Speaker 1: animals he watches die. He's a real fellow. The big
Speaker 1: Gray is lots of brains. I feel sorry every time
Speaker 1: I see one of those big fellows thrashing around in
Speaker 1: a trap, bellowing bloody murder. Kywood is the sort of
Speaker 1: American that writer D. H. Lawrence getting his first extended
Speaker 1: exposure to this country will describe as stoic a killer,
Speaker 1: and what he is doing is mop up work. Where
Speaker 1: the continent only three centuries before had easily held one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand wolf packs. By the nineteen twenties, few packs
Speaker 1: remain anywhere in the US outside Alaska, the Great Lakes
Speaker 1: Country and the Lower South Is After the last survivors.
Speaker 1: In the West, few enough animals that ranchers and government
Speaker 1: hunters hired on their behalf have started giving the animals
Speaker 1: individual names they called Two of these last gray wolves, Kywood,
Speaker 1: is tracking down Rags and Greenhorn, animals that had once
Speaker 1: lived in packs, once had mates and pups. Rags and
Speaker 1: Greenhorn are enduring lives of lonely desperation. Like a significant
Speaker 1: percentage of gray wolves who turn to livestock, they're too
Speaker 1: old and frail to bring down elk without.
Speaker 2: A pack's help.
Speaker 1: Younger wolves who ended up stock killers often had suffered
Speaker 1: crippling injuries, frequently by losing multiple toes. Are an entire
Speaker 1: foot escaping the serrated jaws of the new house four
Speaker 1: and a half steel trap. Rags had seen two of
Speaker 1: the mates he had had during his lifetime panicked and
Speaker 1: helpless in a trap. He learned from that and is
Speaker 1: himself unmaimed. Rags is an old wolf, the rachers say seventeen,
Speaker 1: but he's probably closer to ten or eleven, and now
Speaker 1: either travels alone or with two younger wolves who are
Speaker 1: far less crafty as for Greenhorn. This female wolf, named
Speaker 1: for a local mountain near Kywood's front range home, has
Speaker 1: teeth so worn she's been reduced to strangling her prey.
Speaker 1: In her past, she's escaped traps and spit out a
Speaker 1: strychnind bait before it could kill her. When Kwood goes
Speaker 1: after her in nineteen twenty three, the ranchers claim she's
Speaker 1: eighteen years old. Whatever her real age, she is slowly
Speaker 1: starving to death. These are wolves the federal agency Kwood
Speaker 1: works for should leave to die natural deaths, but Rags
Speaker 1: and Greenhorn live in a nation that cannot brook a
Speaker 1: single wolf remaining alive anywhere. It's Rags's turned first. Across
Speaker 1: weeks of time, Kwood sets his traps and Rags digs
Speaker 1: them up with a wolf that's smart. The former bounty
Speaker 1: hunter rigs a trap set designed to snare a wolf
Speaker 1: by a back leg as it digs up other traps
Speaker 1: with its front paws.
Speaker 2: It works with a.
Speaker 1: Trap biting into a rear leg, and a second trap
Speaker 1: sprung on the dragline of the first, bouncing after him
Speaker 1: on a three foot chain. The old wolf spends a
Speaker 1: final day in tortured flight. In the end, hemmed into
Speaker 1: a box canyon, he confronts a fate he's escaped for
Speaker 1: a decade. Purposefully, he limps straight towards Kwood, yellow eyes
Speaker 1: fixed and staring, as the metal clanks over.
Speaker 2: The rocks behind him.
Speaker 1: Kwood stoically shoots the equivalent of an octogenarian wolf in
Speaker 1: the head next Greenhorn. It's December, cold and snowing on
Speaker 1: the front range, and with her teeth mostly gone, the
Speaker 1: elderly wolf can't down a.
Speaker 2: Deer, let alone a cow. She's desperately hungry.
Speaker 1: She knows the sin of strychnine, but Kaywood has attracted
Speaker 1: her with a horse's head wired to a juniper, around
Speaker 1: which he's placed chunks of fat suet soaked in poisoned
Speaker 1: Greenhorn shies away from the smell again and again. She knows,
Speaker 1: from her own experience and from wolf culture, that this
Speaker 1: scent means tragic danger. She's witnessed the thrashing, vomiting endgame
Speaker 1: more than once, but she's starving to death. She circles back,
Speaker 1: picks up a chunk of suet, swallows it, then another,
Speaker 1: and one more. It's the Day after Christmas nineteen twenty three.
Speaker 1: Kaywood believes she's the last wild wolf born in the
Speaker 1: state of Colorado. By the early twentieth century, a new
Speaker 1: institutional player emerged to confront wolves and other predators in
Speaker 1: the United States. Before nineteen oh five, it seemed that
Speaker 1: Seehart Miriam's new Bureau of Biological Survey, created to map
Speaker 1: the wildlife that was left in post frontier America, was
Speaker 1: sitting pretty teddy.
Speaker 2: Roosevelt was president, and.
Speaker 1: The Bureau was dear to his heart, but Congress was
Speaker 1: growing testing about funding an agency interested in pure science.
Speaker 1: At Livestock Association meetings, Western ranchers were arguing that the
Speaker 1: vast western public lands Roosevelt had set aside from homesteading,
Speaker 1: were refuges for predators that attacked their stock. Since the
Speaker 1: FED had created this situation, the ranchers believed the FED
Speaker 1: ought to fix it, so in an act of self preservation,
Speaker 1: the Bureau of Biological Survey remade itself into the solution
Speaker 1: to the country so called predator problem. The claiming that
Speaker 1: America suffered from these are the Bureau's words, wolf infested
Speaker 1: National forests and the federal public domain. The Biological Survey
Speaker 1: engineered its own public support. Between nineteen oh seven and
Speaker 1: nineteen oh nine, it issued four reports on the so
Speaker 1: called predator big game livestock relationship in and around the
Speaker 1: new National Forests. A young, slightly educated Minnesotan named Vernon Bailey,
Speaker 1: who was a whiz at trapping animals, authored most of them.
Speaker 1: An agency like the Bureau, his reports claimed, could bring
Speaker 1: orderly and scientific control to wolf destruction by hiring train
Speaker 1: hunters and trappers men like Bill Kywood. Bailey held seminars
Speaker 1: for National Forest managers, teaching them how to find wolf
Speaker 1: dens and the best strategies for destroying pups and packs.
Speaker 1: Forest Service rangers proceeded to kill eighteen hundred wolves and
Speaker 1: twenty three thousand coyotes in the National Forest within a year.
Speaker 1: Teddy Roosevelt would hereafter refer to Bailey by a favorite nickname,
Speaker 1: Wolf Bailey. In twentieth century America, there was literally no
Speaker 1: opposition to this campaign of annihilation America's beloved nature writer
Speaker 1: John Burrows opined that predators certainly needed killing, since the.
Speaker 2: Fewer of these there are, the better for.
Speaker 1: The useful and beautiful game. As he wrote. Wildlife activist
Speaker 1: William Hornday insisted that firearms, dogs, traps, and Strycht nine
Speaker 1: are thoroughly legitimate weapons of destruction. No halfway measures suffice.
Speaker 1: Not even John Muir spoke out. Although Muir did worry
Speaker 1: that slaughtering wolves might induce what he called a penalty
Speaker 1: for interfering with the balance of nature, there was another
Speaker 1: constituency for the war on predators, too. Destroying wolves would
Speaker 1: produce all the deer and elk America's new sport hunters
Speaker 1: could ever want. No one asked whether sport hunters would
Speaker 1: focus on the same animals in an elk herd that
Speaker 1: wolves did, because no one knew anything about wolf prey
Speaker 1: relationships then. But advocating replacing predators with human hunters was
Speaker 1: a stroke of genius, bringing all manner of sportsmen's groups,
Speaker 1: firearms manufacturers, and state game and fish agencies to the
Speaker 1: cause of wiping out every wolf on the continent. So
Speaker 1: without conducting a single research project on the wolf's role,
Speaker 1: in nature. The Biological Survey engineered massive public support for
Speaker 1: wolf extermination, and in nineteen fourteen, Congress approved and appropriation
Speaker 1: of one hundred and twenty five thousand.
Speaker 2: Dollars for the Bureau to launch the war.
Speaker 1: Within two years, the Bureau had three hundred federal hunters
Speaker 1: in the field. Under Miriam's leadership, the Biological Survey was
Speaker 1: now a critical federal agency on behalf of a civilized
Speaker 1: America made in the image of European countries that had
Speaker 1: long ago destroyed their own predators. The one field of
Speaker 1: twentieth century wildlife science in which Americans became acknowledged global
Speaker 1: leaders was in fact the destruction of so called undesirable species.
Speaker 1: If your assignment was to mass kill wolves, the way
Speaker 1: to go was poisoning entire populations, and you did that
Speaker 1: by strewing poisoned baits by the thousands across the American landscape.
Speaker 1: As for the target animal, the campaign brooked no mercy
Speaker 1: or compassion. At one point, Vernon Bailey inquired of his
Speaker 1: boss about the proper dose of Strycht nine, so a
Speaker 1: poisoned wolf might die within a humane three minutes, knowing
Speaker 1: full well that any expression of mercy towards wolves was
Speaker 1: a political liability, Miriam shot back, You had better go
Speaker 1: at once to the hospital in Albuquerque. Inasmuch as no
Speaker 1: sane man could possibly make such an absurd and utterly
Speaker 1: preposterous statement as this, You are obviously in need of
Speaker 1: mental treatment, Miriam went on, We want the cattleman behind us.
Speaker 2: SABE.
Speaker 1: With its new funding, the Bureau was building a plant
Speaker 1: in Albuquerque to produce strict nine baits in volume. Chillingly,
Speaker 1: they called it the Eradication Methods Lab. By nineteen twenty one,
Speaker 1: this federal killing facility had moved to Denver, in which
Speaker 1: location it eventually perfected an amazing witches bred of ever
Speaker 1: deadlier pretocides. But for the next two decades, federal poisoners
Speaker 1: relied on strychnine. It was potent twisting wolves into a
Speaker 1: stryct nine signature. Their bodies wrenched and their tails shot
Speaker 1: straight out, as if they'd been struck by a bolt
Speaker 1: of lightning. Federal hunters quickly grasped the wolf's fatal flaw.
Speaker 1: The smaller American canids coyotes, had evolved an adaptation called
Speaker 1: fish and fusion, living in social groups when possible. Fusion
Speaker 1: but capable of scattering when ecological pressures called for it fishing,
Speaker 1: but wolves are so strongly family based that wolf killers
Speaker 1: realize that killing one animal and using it sent on
Speaker 1: your baits meant, as one bureau hunter put it, you
Speaker 1: could quickly kill all the members of whole families of wolves,
Speaker 1: with unmistakable evidence that the remaining members of the wolf
Speaker 1: family have been seeking the lost member. Neuroscience studies at
Speaker 1: this very moment are verifying the brain chemistry grief that
Speaker 1: while canids suffer from the loss of their mates, at
Speaker 1: this fikun moment, two new developments were about to alter
Speaker 1: the art of the country's wolf story though. In nineteen fifteen,
Speaker 1: scientific naturalists founded the Ecological Society of America, and at
Speaker 1: their first meeting in Philadelphia, the founding members, Frederick Clements
Speaker 1: and Edith Clements, Charles c Adams, and Victor Shelford, agreed
Speaker 1: on a focus for their new discipline. There was adaptation
Speaker 1: and natural selection, of course, along with investigating the flow
Speaker 1: of energy through nature and an analysis of serial stages
Speaker 1: and climax conditions. Shelford, who had just published his landmark
Speaker 1: Animal Communities in Temperate America, pushed his colleagues to work
Speaker 1: on biotic communities as well. In nineteen fifteen, the society
Speaker 1: counted three hundred and seven members. But it was an
Speaker 1: old fashioned topic, an idea Western culture had known since
Speaker 1: the time of Herodotus and Plato as the balance of
Speaker 1: nature that pushed ecology towards rethinking the role of predators.
Speaker 1: The biological surveys policies had assumed the European folk position
Speaker 1: predators were evil and disposable. Their eradication made for a
Speaker 1: civilized nation. The ecologists believed there might instead be dynamic
Speaker 1: equilibria at work in the natural world. That assumption would
Speaker 1: become the crux of a raging battle in American and
Speaker 1: Western science for the next half century. The other development
Speaker 1: of the moment was America's creation of a National Park
Speaker 1: Service in nineteen sixteen. Initially, Yellowstone, the world's first national park,
Speaker 1: had emerged as a symbol of just how far the
Speaker 1: wolf warriors intended to go. In nineteen fourteen, Yellowstone had
Speaker 1: invited Vernon Bailey to come and show its personnel the
Speaker 1: best techniques to exterminate wolves. Yellowstone's tally till the death
Speaker 1: of the last gray wolf in the park that happened
Speaker 1: in the year nineteen twenty six was one hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty six wolves, eighty of which were puppies. Between nineteen
Speaker 1: eighteen and nineteen thirty five, the world's first Great Wildlife
Speaker 1: part issued a death sentence to two thousand, nine hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty eight coyotes. All the while the Eradication Methods
Speaker 1: Lab was cranking out the strychnine until by the mid
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties, Bureau hunters had distributed an astounding three million,
Speaker 1: five hundred sixty seven thousand poison baits across the country. Yet,
Speaker 1: amid the endgame in America, evidence of Darwinian natural selection
Speaker 1: and an emergent wolf culture of survivability was emerging. Stanley Young,
Speaker 1: a hunter who had rise through the ranks at the Bureau,
Speaker 1: believed that these last animals that it is probable that
Speaker 1: never did more intelligent wolves exist. Like eighteenth century sperm
Speaker 1: whales that famously figured out how to avoid whaling boats
Speaker 1: and harpooners, wolves like Rags and Greenhorn, drew on the
Speaker 1: accumulated cultural learning of scores of wolf generations and taught
Speaker 1: their pups about rifles, traps, and poisons. No wonder the
Speaker 1: last ones were so smart. Ratchers and federal hunters named
Speaker 1: many of the last wolves in the West. Along with
Speaker 1: Rags and Greenhorn in Colorado, there was also Old Lefty,
Speaker 1: Old Old Whitey, Bigfoot, Phantom Wolf, and Oodahweep. In Oregon,
Speaker 1: there was a last wolf called Sycan, a King Lobo
Speaker 1: in New Mexico Snowdrift, and the prior Creek Wolf in Montana,
Speaker 1: Aguila in Arizona, and the Custer Wolf in South Dakotas.
Speaker 1: Three toes or clubfoot were common wolf names, referencing all
Speaker 1: the animals crippled by traps. There were red wolf renegades too,
Speaker 1: including Traveler in Arkansas, Black Devil in Oklahoma, and Crip
Speaker 1: in Texas, another maimed animal. Given the accounts federal hunters
Speaker 1: left of their protracted efforts to kill these wolves, there's
Speaker 1: little doubt these were indeed remarkably intelligent animals, and why not,
Speaker 1: as they were experiencing on all sides. Humans were engaged
Speaker 1: in a crusade to wipe out their kind entirely. But
Speaker 1: as the in nineteen twenties dawned, what seemed initially to
Speaker 1: be a natural ally mounted the first real challenge to
Speaker 1: the Bureau's scorched earth Wolf War. The American Society of
Speaker 1: Mammalogists met for the first time at the Smithsonian in
Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen. Bureau founder Seehart Miriam became its first president
Speaker 1: with Vernon Bailey, and Bureau made E. A. Goldman as
Speaker 1: charter members. Like Bailey, Goldman had field experience, but he
Speaker 1: lacked a college degree. Nonetheless, the Bureau tasked these two
Speaker 1: men to explain and defend the wolf War against university
Speaker 1: trained ecologists. Among that group was a young forester interested
Speaker 1: in wildlife, Aldo Leopold. There was also Joseph Grinnell, a
Speaker 1: cousin of the legendary conservation hero George Bird Grennell. Grennell
Speaker 1: was an original thinker whose ideas quick challenged the very
Speaker 1: premises on which the Bureau based its predator War. The
Speaker 1: first blow up happened at the mammalogists nineteen twenty four meeting.
Speaker 1: Grennell had just published a foundational piece on ecological niches,
Speaker 1: a fundamental insight into nature critical to appreciating what might
Speaker 1: happen if America.
Speaker 2: Destroyed its wolf population.
Speaker 1: Grennell and his graduate student E. Raymond Hall insisted from
Speaker 1: this work on niches that the Bureau was wiping out
Speaker 1: animals that were playing an essential role in the continence
Speaker 1: balance of nature. As it turned out, both the ecologists
Speaker 1: and the bureau men were unaware that the natural world
Speaker 1: in America was about to offer powerful examples of the
Speaker 1: implications of emptying predator niches. But Goldman and Bailey decide
Speaker 1: they had heard about the balance of nature a few
Speaker 1: times too many. If the US actually let predators live,
Speaker 1: they argued, there would soon be nothing but carnivores left.
Speaker 1: In a throwdown essay, The Predatory Mammal Problem and the
Speaker 1: Balance of Nature that he authored for the Journal of Mammalogy,
Speaker 1: Goldman insisted that the coming of civilized man meant that
Speaker 1: the balance of nature has been violently overturned, never to
Speaker 1: be re established. Thus, large predatory mammals, destructive to livestock
Speaker 1: and to game, no longer have a place in our
Speaker 1: advancing civilization. But Joseph Grenell had come up with another idea,
Speaker 1: and this one vexed the Bureau as much as niches
Speaker 1: and the balance of nature. Now there was a National
Speaker 1: Park Service with an Organic Act directive charging it with
Speaker 1: preserving nature for future generations.
Speaker 2: But how to do that and in what form?
Speaker 1: And zoologist Tracy storer had a suggestion they laid out
Speaker 1: in an article for the journal Science. In their opinion,
Speaker 1: preserving nature meant predaceous animals should be left unmolested and
Speaker 1: allowed to retain their primitive relation to the rest of
Speaker 1: the fauna, as tourists.
Speaker 2: Were already showing.
Speaker 1: They wrote, wolves, coyotes, and lions were exceedingly interesting to
Speaker 1: part visitors. Wasn't a complete nature? What preserving nature in
Speaker 1: the parks intended offering predators permanent refuge in America's national parks?
Speaker 1: Dumbfounded Bureau personnel. New Bureau Director Paul Reddington was incredulous
Speaker 1: we faced the opposition. He told his employees of those
Speaker 1: who want to see the mountain lion, the wolf, the coyote,
Speaker 1: and the bobcat actually perpetuated as part of the wildlife
Speaker 1: of the country. One of the scientists keenly interested in
Speaker 1: this debate had published an essay he called the Varmit Question,
Speaker 1: heaping praise on the Bureau when he was just out
Speaker 1: of Yale. So Aldo Leopold was not a vocal critic
Speaker 1: of the Bureau as the wolf debate Royal Science, but
Speaker 1: as conference chairman of the American Game Protection Association's meeting
Speaker 1: in nineteen twenty eight. Leopold's position about predators was obviously evolving.
Speaker 1: No public agencies should ever control predators without substantial scientific research. First,
Speaker 1: he wrote for the association, poisons should only be used
Speaker 1: in emergencies and no predatory species should be exterminated.
Speaker 2: Over large areas.
Speaker 1: Now, as professor of game management at the University of Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: Leopold dropped more deeply into ecology the field worried critics
Speaker 1: were already calling the subversive science. One of the issues
Speaker 1: he particularly studied was the response of nature to predator removal.
Speaker 1: The nineteen twenties witnessed the rise of a new meme
Speaker 1: to describe a new natural phenomenon. The meme word was eruption,
Speaker 1: and it referred to a sudden ungulate population explosion that
Speaker 1: caused herds to eat themselves out of forage and then crash. Spectacularly,
Speaker 1: the cause effect seemed straightforward. The famous Kaibab eruption on
Speaker 1: the north rim of the Grand Canyon was preceded by
Speaker 1: bureau hunters erasing thirty wolves, seven hundred and eighty one
Speaker 1: mountain lions, and five thousand coyotes from the north rim.
Speaker 1: The resident mule deer then exploded from four thousand animals
Speaker 1: to one hundred thousand, leading to a catastrophic die off.
Speaker 1: It made Kaibab a national story. Eruptions became a moral
Speaker 1: that wouldn't go away. With wolves vanishing, deer and ilk
Speaker 1: experienced crazy population oscillations somewhere in the country almost every year.
Speaker 1: Something in nature obviously was a miss. Leopold would go
Speaker 1: on to do a study of eruptions, finding reports of
Speaker 1: only two of them before nineteen hundred, but a whopping
Speaker 1: forty two between nineteen hundred and nineteen forty five, the
Speaker 1: number rising sharply after nineteen twenty. Eruptions seemed to supply
Speaker 1: evidence for the so called Latka Volterra equations, ecological models
Speaker 1: of how prey and their predators follow an oscillating algorithm
Speaker 1: of rising and falling populations in harmony with one another.
Speaker 1: But the inertia of the wolf war was now an
Speaker 1: unstoppable undertow in America. The Bureau's move was to go
Speaker 1: to the American public with a series of canned articles
Speaker 1: attend to those lauding the g men, hunting crime celebrities
Speaker 1: like Al Capone and John Dillinger, US agents stock desperadoes
Speaker 1: of the animal world.
Speaker 2: The headlines of those stories read.
Speaker 1: There still had been no science to study the larger
Speaker 1: role of wolves and predators in American nature, but by
Speaker 1: the nineteen forties that was finally about to change. The
Speaker 1: two Minnesota brothers O Loss and Adolph Murray were soon
Speaker 1: to become legendary figures in American conservation. Having done landmark
Speaker 1: studies on la in Jackson Hole and on the porcupine
Speaker 1: cariboo heard in Alaska, O Loss would conduct a game
Speaker 1: changing study of coyotes and Jackson Hole, which appeared in
Speaker 1: print in nineteen thirty five. Brother Adolph Mury's own ecology
Speaker 1: of the Coyote and the Yellowstone Saw print in nineteen forty.
Speaker 1: Both works concluded that far from being arch predators that
Speaker 1: deserved extermination, coyotes produced actions in the world that were
Speaker 1: virtually all either beneficial to humans or neutral. The Muri
Speaker 1: brothers would become famous as ethical researchers who followed their evidence.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately for the Bureau now renamed the US Fish and
Speaker 1: Wildlife Service, the Muri brothers work did not lead to
Speaker 1: the conclusions it hoped for wolves either. By nineteen forty,
Speaker 1: Mount McKinley in Alaska was the only American park that
Speaker 1: still had wolves. For centuries of unexamined wolf killing, perhaps
Speaker 1: it was time to figure out something about wolf ecology.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen thirty nine Muri went to Alaska and
Speaker 1: spent three years engaged in the unthinkable, actually studying wolves
Speaker 1: interacting among themselves and.
Speaker 2: With their prey.
Speaker 1: It was arduous, Murray said, he walked seventeen hundred miles
Speaker 1: the first year, but everyone who reads his classic The
Speaker 1: Wolves of Mount McKinley can't help but thrill to his
Speaker 1: excitement at studying the mythic animal Americans had reflexively tried
Speaker 1: to exterminate. After three years in Alaska, Muriy understood what
Speaker 1: the Bureau had been too arrogant or myopic to see.
Speaker 1: Wolf prey relationships clearly were ancient, predating Europeans by thousands
Speaker 1: or maybe millions of years. Natural selection had long sorted
Speaker 1: out the details. Yes, wolves and coyotes ate prong horned fawns,
Speaker 1: so prong horns had evolved a solution. They gave birth
Speaker 1: to twins, an air and a spare.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Wolves preyed on doll sheep and cariboo, but they caught
Speaker 1: the very young and the very old. Wolves held sheep
Speaker 1: numbers in check and kept them from overgrazing their mountains,
Speaker 1: rather than destroying their prey. Wolf predation probably has a
Speaker 1: salutary effect on the sheep as a species. Muir wrote,
Speaker 1: wolves did kill Caribou calves, but as Muir studied the relationship,
Speaker 1: he realized that Cariboo herds are no doubt adjusted to
Speaker 1: the presence and pressure.
Speaker 2: Of the wolf.
Speaker 1: These things were ancient. They predated all humans in America.
Speaker 1: Muriy did one other thing readers of his book never forgot.
Speaker 1: He brought the wolves he studied to life as individuals. Dandy, Robber, Mask,
Speaker 1: and Grandpa had unique personalities. Pact members seemed affectionate and
Speaker 1: caring of one another. These were not the wolves old
Speaker 1: worlders feared from the animals they had brought ashore. They
Speaker 1: weren't the wolves the bureau's public relations articles implied were
Speaker 1: animal gangsters. They were the wolves that had been in
Speaker 1: North America all along. The Wolves of Mount McKinley was
Speaker 1: the country's first entree into a modern sensibility about wolves
Speaker 1: and predators built on science generally, and once the blindfold
Speaker 1: was off, it was hard for the scientifically literate, ever
Speaker 1: to put it on again. At almost the same time
Speaker 1: Yuri's book came out, Old Bureau veterans Stanley Young and E. A.
Speaker 1: Goldman finally published their two volume The Wolves of North America,
Speaker 1: a book that has manned the wolf section of every
Speaker 1: American library for almost a century now. They proudly pointed
Speaker 1: out that by the nineteen forties, from New England to Virginia,
Speaker 1: wolves were now entirely gone. The Rocky Mountain States, with
Speaker 1: all their public lands, barely held.
Speaker 2: One hundred wolves.
Speaker 1: California's last wolves are down to fewer than fifty. There
Speaker 1: were only sixty Mexican wolves left in the Southwest.
Speaker 2: As World War two ended.
Speaker 1: The only places in the lower forty eighth that still
Speaker 1: had sizable populations were the Upper Great Lakes Country with
Speaker 1: fourteen hundred wolves and the mid South with some four
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty red wolves. Young and Goldman were unrepentant
Speaker 1: wolf assassins. They laid out their book like it was
Speaker 1: a military campaign against Germany or Japan, full of accounts
Speaker 1: of wolf depredations, photos of wolfkilt. Stock claims that game
Speaker 1: was disappear because of wolves. They events dismayed that stock
Speaker 1: raising Hispanic settlers in the Southwest in California had never
Speaker 1: attempted predator control, since the authors claimed wolves had slowed
Speaker 1: Anglo American settlement of the continent by decades. The one
Speaker 1: atrocity they couldn't level against America's wolves were attacks on humans.
Speaker 1: Not that they didn't look hard for some example, but
Speaker 1: they simply couldn't find one. In a case of future meat.
Speaker 1: Past Aldo Leopold reviewed The Wolves of North America in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty five. How could it be, he wondered, that
Speaker 1: Young and Goldman didn't acknowledge the deep history of their subject.
Speaker 1: If wolves were as destructive of force as they implied
Speaker 1: in their book, how had the continent's wolves failed to
Speaker 1: wipe out its own mammalian food supply before Europeans ever
Speaker 1: arrived last Leopold had visited Europe and studied its wildlife policies,
Speaker 1: so he knew the bureau men never questioned the Old
Speaker 1: World model. But European countries had nothing comparable to the
Speaker 1: vast wild public lands Americans had set aside, and their
Speaker 1: model was based on folk tradition established long before ecology
Speaker 1: was born that simply was not as Leopold said scientific
Speaker 1: the new Wolf book reflected the naturalists of the past
Speaker 1: rather than the wildlife ecologists of today. Leopold wrote ouch.
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty nine, America's star biologists finally published the
Speaker 1: book of his that would set the country on its
Speaker 1: modern path.
Speaker 2: Of wolf recovery and restoration.
Speaker 1: Leopold's A Sand County Almanac became both a bestseller and
Speaker 1: a philosophical foundation for the ecology movement sweeping America as
Speaker 1: part of the sixties cultural revolution. Where damn lucky he
Speaker 1: got it out. He died of a heart attack battling
Speaker 1: a grass fire that very year. Because A Sand County
Speaker 1: Almanac changed the world In vivid, poetic passages, Leopold's book
Speaker 1: introduced us to the insights of a mind that attract
Speaker 1: every breakthrough in ecology. By then, he had concluded that
Speaker 1: the old balance of nature idea actually lacked the flexibility
Speaker 1: to account for a natural world that was endlessly changing.
Speaker 1: He was now thinking of natural settings as interlink communities
Speaker 1: of species.
Speaker 2: With predators at the top.
Speaker 1: We know those communities today as ecosystems. Leopold's ideas were
Speaker 1: epiphanies for many For one, he laid out an ecological
Speaker 1: philosophy for living he called the land ethic that included
Speaker 1: his Golden rule of ecology. A thing is right when
Speaker 1: it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of
Speaker 1: the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Speaker 1: The genius that built the United States had always been
Speaker 1: self interest. Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill had hit
Speaker 1: on a trade fundamental to our evolution, But Leopold did
Speaker 1: not say an act was right when it preserved humanity
Speaker 1: or economics. Instead, he called on readers to think of
Speaker 1: the innate rights, among them the simple right to exist
Speaker 1: of other species in an earthly community that included us.
Speaker 1: Leopold's admirers called his new idea biocentrism. A San County
Speaker 1: Almanac's most unforgettable scene was Leopold's own myth of personal redemption.
Speaker 1: The chapter titled Thinking Like a Mountain was not merely
Speaker 1: a poetic rendering of his view that the United States
Speaker 1: had an opportunity to create a distinctively American policy towards
Speaker 1: nature for readers soon to be immersed in painful soul
Speaker 1: searching about so many unexamined assumptions in American life. Leopold's
Speaker 1: story of shooting a wolf, watching the green fire die
Speaker 1: in its eyes, and realizing what a miscalculation he had
Speaker 1: made about the ancient centrality of predators in the biotic community,
Speaker 1: offered America a whole new trajectory.
Speaker 2: We were wrong, I was wrong, history said, but it's
Speaker 2: not too late.
Speaker 1: Ever since a Sand County Almanac fell into the hands
Speaker 1: of readers, there has been a quiet murmur of disbelief
Speaker 1: from some about whether its most stirring scene really happened.
Speaker 1: Did Leopold actually shoot a wolf and experience an ecological
Speaker 1: epiphany as he watched it die? Some fifteen years ago,
Speaker 1: a group of committed fans that included respected Leopold biographer
Speaker 1: Susan Flater determined that indeed the wolf story was factual.
Speaker 1: In nineteen oh nine, early in his career as a
Speaker 1: forester in the Southwest, Leopold was surveying the boundaries of
Speaker 1: the Apache National Forest along Arizona's Black River today right
Speaker 1: in the heart of the recovery area for endangered Mexican wolves.
Speaker 1: From a casual mention of the incident in a letter
Speaker 1: to his mother, it seems that one morning he and
Speaker 1: a companion shot a pair of animals Leopold called timberwolves.
Speaker 2: So that part of his story at least now stands
Speaker 2: confirmed as historical fact.
Speaker 1: Whether Leopold's troubled reaction to watching a wolf die and
Speaker 1: grasping the implications happened in nineteen oh nine or far
Speaker 1: later in his life is the part that we can't know.
Speaker 2: But maybe it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: We do know that Aldo Leopold didn't get to see
Speaker 1: his America began to think like a mountain in his.
Speaker 2: Memorable phrase, but he had pointed us.
Speaker 1: Towards a new understanding and a new destination in our history,
Speaker 1: and in that destination the wolf will return to its ancient,
Speaker 1: rightful place.
Speaker 3: On the comment, So, Dan, in this.
Speaker 4: This episode about wolves, you make the point that ecology,
Speaker 4: you can think of it as a subversive science and
Speaker 4: sort of all the broader implications about thinking thing of
Speaker 4: the natural orial in terms of connections and dependency and
Speaker 4: all that stuff. I wonder if you can kind of
Speaker 4: just begin by explaining ecology and what it meant to
Speaker 4: people at the moment that it sort of had this
Speaker 4: almost like ground shaking effect.
Speaker 1: Yeah, The Ecological Society of America dates in nineteen fifteen
Speaker 1: and it. Ecology obviously comes out of the Darwinian Revolution.
Speaker 1: In fact, within about three or four years of the
Speaker 1: publication of On the Origin of Species in eighteen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: a German scientist was calling for a new science that
Speaker 1: applied the insights of Darwin's on the Origin of Species,
Speaker 1: and he called it. He used a Greek term that
Speaker 1: refers in fact to communities, and he called it ecology.
Speaker 1: The United States, as I said, we don't get an
Speaker 1: ecological society of ecologists until nineteen fifteen, although there are
Speaker 1: already in that first Meetia three hundred and seven of them.
Speaker 1: So they are already three hundred practicing ecologists in the
Speaker 1: United States by that time. And the reason this is
Speaker 1: important in this discussion of wolves, and this is the
Speaker 1: story of wolves. I mean, I talked a few episodes
Speaker 1: ago about wolves in the West in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: and this is the story essentially of how we came
Speaker 1: to understand the role of wolves in American ecological life.
Speaker 1: And so if you're trying to figure out, for an instance,
Speaker 1: why there is in the modern West this movement to
Speaker 1: restore wolves to Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico, now Colorado, obviously,
Speaker 1: and California has wolves now, and so do the Pacific
Speaker 1: Northwest States. The reason this has become a thing in
Speaker 1: our time is because of these developments in science that
Speaker 1: I try to describe in this particular episode. This is
Speaker 1: how and why it happens that in our time we're
Speaker 1: making the attempt to recover wolves. The problem, of course,
Speaker 1: was that during the time when science is discovering the
Speaker 1: ancient and extremely important role wolves have always played in
Speaker 1: North American history, we are still employing the old folk
Speaker 1: tradition out of the old world, which had been telling
Speaker 1: us for hundreds of years, you're supposed to kill every
Speaker 1: predator that exists. Predators are evil, predators may even be satanic.
Speaker 1: This is what Adam and Eve confront when they had
Speaker 1: to leave the Garden of Eden. They had to confront predators.
Speaker 1: So we need to cleanse the world of predators. And
Speaker 1: this kind of thinking was imported to the United States, obviously,
Speaker 1: without any kind of scientific background whatsoever. And so we're
Speaker 1: still as a country and a government agency that I
Speaker 1: talk about here, the Bureau of Biological Survey, is committed
Speaker 1: to it. On behalf of particularly the livestock industry, we're
Speaker 1: still trying to wipe out every wolf that roams across
Speaker 1: North America. And this is happening at the same time
Speaker 1: that the science of ecology, the subversive science, is beginning
Speaker 1: to describe for us the role that these animals have
Speaker 1: been playing in North American history for time immemorial. And
Speaker 1: so that puts at odds these two really powerful forces
Speaker 1: science on the one hand and this old folk tradition
Speaker 1: on the other, and they battle it out for most
Speaker 1: of the first half of the twentieth century about what's
Speaker 1: going to happen to wolves. And I will say that
Speaker 1: for the most part, for the early part of this story,
Speaker 1: it's the old folk tradition of killing every wolf you
Speaker 1: can kill that prevails. But by the end of the
Speaker 1: period that this script goes to, basically by nineteen fifty,
Speaker 1: we have begun to realize that this is probably a mistake.
Speaker 1: We've made a mistake with this because we haven't known
Speaker 1: enough about how the world has worked.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you tell the story of wolves in the
Speaker 4: twentieth century. One that we just sort of touched on
Speaker 4: is the history of science and changes in scientific thought.
Speaker 4: But then there's another lens that's the history of the
Speaker 4: growing bureaucratic state or administrative state, and thinking about institutions
Speaker 4: and institutional missions and the frogatives for getting funding and
Speaker 4: all these sorts of things like that very much shapes
Speaker 4: the reality on the ground in the West in terms
Speaker 4: of what animals live in places like Montana. And so
Speaker 4: you mentioned earlier in this agency, the Bureau of Biological Survey,
Speaker 4: and I wonder if you can just sort of drill
Speaker 4: down on what it is that the Bureau of Biological
Speaker 4: Survey is up to when it takes on this mission.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In my book Well in the World, I spent some
Speaker 1: time talking about the origins of this particular agency and
Speaker 1: what it really is is a government agency founded in
Speaker 1: the eighteen nineties to try to take stock of what
Speaker 1: wildlife is left in America after the destruction of the
Speaker 1: frontier period, and is founded by an ivy leaguer a
Speaker 1: Yale named sa Hart Miriam, and he early on has
Speaker 1: the idea that what he's going to do is to
Speaker 1: send people out his personal appointees, to sort of do
Speaker 1: surveys about what is left. And so it's kind of
Speaker 1: a pure science approach that by the early twentieth century
Speaker 1: is resulting in the biological survey not being able to
Speaker 1: make a good case to Congress for appropriating money for them,
Speaker 1: because Congress is sort of reluctant to appropriate money for
Speaker 1: an agency that's just doing pure science.
Speaker 2: And so what.
Speaker 1: Miriam understands by about nineteen five and he immediately moves
Speaker 1: in the direction of this. Once he gets a good
Speaker 1: grasp of how he's going to have to act to
Speaker 1: make his agency survive, he realizes he's got to find
Speaker 1: a mission that Congress will appropriate money for. And since
Speaker 1: the public lands have left many people in the livestock
Speaker 1: associations in the West convinced that one of the things
Speaker 1: that public lands are doing is to providing a kind
Speaker 1: of breeding They're providing a breeding ground for predators, for
Speaker 1: bears and mountain lions and wolves and coyotes. The livestock associations,
Speaker 1: which have been using bounties for a long time to
Speaker 1: try to control these animals, turn to the government and say,
Speaker 1: you guys should do something about this thing that you've
Speaker 1: screwed up. And Miriam realizes, Okay, this is our new mission.
Speaker 1: We need to make ourselves the solution to the predator problem.
Speaker 1: And that's basically what he does, and at that point
Speaker 1: Congress begins to appropriate an enormous amount of money, I mean,
Speaker 1: to the point where, by the early nineteen thirties they
Speaker 1: give the Biological Survey ten million dollars to try to
Speaker 1: wipe out predators.
Speaker 2: And so this agency.
Speaker 1: That started as a kind of little pure science agency
Speaker 1: to try to figure out what was left at the
Speaker 1: end of the frontier, has now become a major federal
Speaker 1: bureau designed to eliminate as many predators in America as
Speaker 1: they can.
Speaker 4: And once an agency hitches its wagon to an interest
Speaker 4: group like that, with a mission like that, it's very
Speaker 4: hard to reconsider their actions in light of new science.
Speaker 2: It is very hard.
Speaker 1: And so that's where this big conflict emerges, because as
Speaker 1: the ecologists began to discuss this war on predators, that
Speaker 1: the Biological Survey is mounting I mean, and they're carrying
Speaker 1: it out at every level. Vernon Bailey, who is Wolf Bailey,
Speaker 1: as Teddy Roosevelt calls him, who's the expert on how
Speaker 1: to kill wolves, how to find their dans, how to
Speaker 1: kill puppies, I mean, even goes to Yellowstone and Glacier
Speaker 1: and teaches the managers there, here's how you.
Speaker 2: Get rid of your wolves.
Speaker 1: So that that's why in the nineteen twenties we basically
Speaker 1: eradicate all the wolves in Yellowstone National Park, all the
Speaker 1: wolves that are in Glacier, I mean, one place after
Speaker 1: another we are figuring out, and of course the way
Speaker 1: they're doing it primarily is poisoning them with strychnine, because
Speaker 1: these wolf killers have realized that the way to get
Speaker 1: rid of mass numbers of wolves is to poison them,
Speaker 1: because wolves in particular have an Achilles heel, and it's
Speaker 1: their emotional attachment to their families, their pups, and their mates.
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the things I mentioned in this
Speaker 1: particular script is as I did earlier, is that we've
Speaker 1: got right now in the recent nineteen twenty five or
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five neuroscience meeting, studies being done on the
Speaker 1: chemical expressions of grief in wild canids from losing their mates.
Speaker 1: And that's what these hunters realize, just by experience in
Speaker 1: the teens and twenties. If you can kill one animal
Speaker 1: out of a wolf pack and then bait your sets,
Speaker 1: your poison sets with the sin of that animal, you
Speaker 1: can kill every single animal in the pack, one after
Speaker 1: the other. And that's why wolves turn out to be
Speaker 1: relatively easy to get rid of with poison. It's because
Speaker 1: of their particular binding affection to their mates and to
Speaker 1: their pubs. So, I mean, by the middle nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: the Bureau Biological Survey has put out three and a
Speaker 1: half million poison baits across mostly the West, but other
Speaker 1: parts of the country too, with the goal of wiping
Speaker 1: wolves completely out.
Speaker 4: And when you're describing this conflict, there's sort of one
Speaker 4: individual who embodies it, you know, personally, and that's Aldo Leopold, right,
Speaker 4: who I think is underappreciated as a as a thinker
Speaker 4: about the natural environment, right, And I mean he's really
Speaker 4: sort of an intellect. He has profound intellectual influence on
Speaker 4: how we view the natural world today. But you know,
Speaker 4: he starts out as a guy in public service and
Speaker 4: he's a boots on the ground, you know, public land manager,
Speaker 4: and he's an ecologist, and he undergoes this sort of.
Speaker 2: Conversion. Yeah, as it were.
Speaker 4: That that I think is like it's easy to understand
Speaker 4: the bigger story when you sort of look at it
Speaker 4: through Louipold's eyes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's a good way to look at Elder Leopold,
Speaker 1: because Aldo Leopold in his lifetime goes from expressing the
Speaker 1: sort of folk sentiment of the more wolves, the more
Speaker 1: predators you killed, the better it is for game, for
Speaker 1: livestock herders to becoming the person who, by the middle
Speaker 1: of the twentieth century sets up what happens in the
Speaker 1: last half of the century, where after the Endangered Species
Speaker 1: Act has passed, we not only proclaim various species of
Speaker 1: wolves to be endangered, but under the recovery provisions of
Speaker 1: that act, we start recovering them. So as Aldo Leopold,
Speaker 1: that's a good way of thinking of him. He starts,
Speaker 1: I mean, he writes an article when he's a young
Speaker 1: man called the Varmit Question, where he praises the Bureau
Speaker 1: of Biological Survey and their wolf war. But by the
Speaker 1: nineteen teens and twenties you can begin to track the
Speaker 1: changes in his attitudes. He becomes a professor of ecology
Speaker 1: at the University of Wisconsin, a very famous public intellectual.
Speaker 1: Even by the nineteen thirties, but you can see that
Speaker 1: his opinions are changing, and one of the things that
Speaker 1: changes them is that he does this study of these
Speaker 1: ungulate eruptions that are taking place in early twentieth century America.
Speaker 1: And I mean I talked about this in the script,
Speaker 1: so I'll just be brief about it. But what was
Speaker 1: happening was that as predators are being removed across the
Speaker 1: American landscape, we were starting to get and this happened
Speaker 1: all over the country. I mean, it didn't happen just
Speaker 1: in the West. It happened in places like Pennsylvania, South Carolina.
Speaker 1: You were getting these huge eruptions, the huge growth in
Speaker 1: populations of mule, deer, whitetailed deer, elk, moose, and then
Speaker 1: they would outstrip their food supply and there would be
Speaker 1: this tremendous population crash where thousands of animals would die
Speaker 1: in the winters for lack of food. They had browsed
Speaker 1: the brows line too high to be able to reach.
Speaker 1: And Leopold decided he was going to do a historical
Speaker 1: study of this. So you want to know how many
Speaker 1: of these eruptions had happened in the nineteenth century. He
Speaker 1: was able to find two, but he found forty five
Speaker 1: of them that it happened after nineteen hundred, when we
Speaker 1: began to have success in removing predators, and so it
Speaker 1: made him, it gave him an understanding of what the
Speaker 1: relationship was between predators and their prey. And then he
Speaker 1: goes the full distance, of course, and sort of not
Speaker 1: only coming to realize how important wolves are in America,
Speaker 1: to encouraging us to begin to restore them.
Speaker 4: Well, Dan, I'm sure there's more to say about wolves,
Speaker 4: probably more than can be said, but we'll leave it there.
Speaker 1: There'll be more wolves to come, at least one more reapon. Indeed,
Speaker 1: U