Let me paint you a picture: Imagine you’re an ancient hunter surveying the icy tundra of what is now California’s Sierra Nevada. Covered in furs, armed only with the tools you’ve made by hand, and sporting a hefty mane of hair, you’re the picture-perfect human of the Pleistocene era. You’re also starving.
If you’re skeptical of your ability to survive so far, you should be. Even with your ability to start a fire, life in the wilderness isn’t likely to end well. Like something out of “Game of Thrones,” you’re facing steep competition from packs of Neanderthals, hyenas and other humans. There’s a very real possibility you won’t last long.
As you start a new hunt, wolves begin to emerge from the forests. They don’t always snatch away your kills, but they’re watching you as they move through the trees. They run past you, darting at the ankles of the mammoths you stalk as the immense animals thunder through the snow. You see how the wolves track prey and you even learn a skill or two from one another.
Before you know it, the wolf racing between snowbanks has become the wolf at your feet. You and your new friend share a pelt by the orange glow of a fire. Over time, you will gnaw on the same bones, rest in the same graves and, as you survive together, the Neanderthals and cave hyenas that hunted in company with you will either assimilate or die out.
Humans persist, and their canines have for centuries walked alongside them. But fast forward an epoch, and we’re trying to get rid of their ancestors: wolves.
Inside the Interior Appropriations Bill is Section 128, a rider put forth by Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee that would effectively eliminate gray wolves from the Endangered Species Act. This decision removes protections that keep wolf social structures intact. It also curiously blocks the courts from the decision.
This is important to note, because efforts to cull wolf populations like Section 128 haven’t been proven to accomplish their goals of managing healthy ecosystems or protecting livestock. The science even suggests that aggression makes wolf predation on livestock worse, by increasing the overall stress among wolf families that have been fractured by allotted killings. This stress then drives wolves to risk livestock predation more often as they become desperate for food.
Is this how we repay them for 10,000 years of cooperation?
Granted, it’s difficult to argue that the survival of our entire species was dependent on the domestication of wolves into dogs (that, for one, would be an insult to horses). But what scientists do know is that wolves are a large part of the human success story.
Many of us who advocate for wolves online haven’t been forced to make a fire to survive or fight wooly mammoths — and that’s fine. We’re not living in the Pleistocene era, and we don’t need to be. We need to tell stories. We’re also often blind to the harsh realities of the situation.
As Jack Dolan of the Los Angeles Times put it back in May, ranchers are begging local officials for the tools they need to manage the wolf populations that kill livestock. But what you don’t hear is how just 0.01% of all livestock deaths are actually due to wolf predation. Compare that to the 97% of livestock deaths due to all other causes combined, including disease, calf mortality, heat, and inclement weather. We ought to support ranchers out to make a living, hunters who act with integrity for the sport, and even the wolves themselves.
We need to hear stories like the Wood River Wolf Project, where sheep producers in south-central Idaho quickly and successfully adapted their operations to deter wolf predation by 90%. Not only did the project improve operations, but the increased wolf presence also discouraged persistent coyote predation. Meanwhile, in the Great Lakes states, as the wolf population increases, livestock losses have declined. Other states could use research like this to their benefit.
I’ll never forget the first time I saw a wolf in person. Back in 2002, the California Wolf Center was invited to give a presentation to my elementary school class in San Diego County. As I sat crisscross applesauce on the linoleum floor, a white wolf stalked by me, and her shoulders towered a foot above my head. I was in awe, and in love.
It would be another two decades before I learned wolves’ role as a keystone species, how their reintroduction into Yellowstone Park set off a trophic cascade: improving deer populations throughout the park and balancing the ecosystem.
Wolves didn’t teach me how to hunt. But they sparked in me a love for natural history. As a hobbyist, I urge professional storytellers to write impactful stories — ones that support both the realities of wildlife and the hard work of people.
Fracturing wolf families by removing EPA protections or denying ranchers the resources they need is not effective. Neither is pitting wolves and humans against one another, as it flies in the face of more than 10,000 years of our symbiotic relationship.
It’s clear storytelling from the 1800s about man versus nature is not enough to solve our modern problems. I won’t pretend wildlife management is easy. But wolves are our long-time allies, and one of our fiercest friends. The least we can do for ourselves is start acting like it.
Sarah O’Rourke is a digital professional from Southern California who writes about wolves.
The post Reimagining our relationship with wolves appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
