In 2012, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) removed the gray wolf from its list of endangered and threatened species. With the protections granted under the Endangered Species Act lifted, managing the wolf’s recovery became a matter for the states. That’s not to say that states with wolf populations weren’t engaged in management prior to 2012, they certainly were, but state DNRs lacked the authority to implement kill-policies without federal oversight. The Secretary of the Interior first announced that the gray wolf was out of danger in 2009, but legal battles on multiple fronts challenged and delayed that ruling. The controversy surrounding the decision was much like every aspect of wolf policy implemented before and after: difficult to overstate.
Last November, when I started working on Do We Need Wolves? I was planning to write a story about the different ways Great Lakes states (Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michican) with gray wolf breeding populations went about wolf management—counting packs, addressing livestock confrontations, and regulating the recently reinstated hunting and trapping seasons.
I knew very little about wolves except that I’d been living in rural Wisconsin for almost 4 years and had never seen one. What quickly became apparent was that, whether I’d seen one or not, the wolf wasn’t just a four-legged carnivore making a comeback in the lower 48—it was a code word for an emotional and political human debate. With no shortage of passion on all sides, the wolf seemed to target the raw nerve exposed whenever science and sentiment collide—a nerve the other 1,361 endangered plants and animals in the United States had apparently failed to agitate anywhere near as successfully. To figure out why, I started asking the question: Why is the wolf so controversial?
Regardless of who I talked to—wildlife biologist, rancher, trapper, wolf advocate—their answer started with a failed attempt to stifle some form of laughter, followed by a variation of the question: "How much time do you have?"
John Collins is the editor of Rural America In These Times.
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