Lessons from Aldo Leopold's historic wolf hunt

This fall, hunters have killed more than 193 wolves in Montana and Idaho, and the slaughter is not finished. The Idaho season has been extended to March 31 to allow hunters to reach the quota of 220 wolves approved for killing in the state by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The limit exists because wolves in the area were only recently removed from the endangered species list. In Alaska, where wolves are more plentiful and there is no such quota, hunters in airplanes have killed more than 1,000 wolves in recent years. Some of those hunters, if they follow in the path of one great American outdoorsman, may come to regret killing wolves. One hundred years ago this fall, Aldo Leopold made the most famous wolf hunt in American history. Leopold, now regarded as one of the nation's most important early conservationists, went to Arizona's Apache National Forest as a 22-year-old officer in the U.S. Forest Service. He had just graduated from Yale's School of Forestry and taken his first job as an assistant supervisor. After lunch one fall day, Leopold and his crew of surveyors opened fire on an old mother wolf and her six adolescent pups at the foot of a mountain. "In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf," Leopold later said. "I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no more wolves would mean a hunters' paradise." But after seeing the "fierce green fire" in the wolf's eyes die out, he wrote, "I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view." For the next 20 years, Leopold continued to advocate killing wolves, and in doing so he was very much in step with long-standing American tradition...read more