The Fragile Relationship Between Wolves and Humans In Western States Is Reaching a Boiling Point

Yellowstone wolf, ISTOCK

If you haven't already heard, a man in western Wyoming was recently fined $250 for illegal possession of a wild animal. When I first saw a headline for the story, this is how it was presented. Daniel, WY Man Fined After Capturing and Bringing Home Live Wolf. I joked aloud "If he could catch a wolf and wants to keep it as a pet, let him!" A few days later, I learned the actual details of the story.

This may seem like an unusual blog post for a dog boarding business. But dogs are descended from wolves, after all. And to care for the safety and wellbeing of dogs is to care for the safety and wellbeing of all wild creatures.

A man from Daniel, WY (just under 2 hours from my hometown) was able to run over a young wolf with his snowmobile. He then taped her muzzle shut and took her home. He beat and kicked her, causing internal organ damage. He proceeded to muzzle her, drag her to his local watering hole and parade her around. There's video footage of him laughing and grabbing her mouth, forcing a kiss on her as she snarls at him, but she's too hurt and exhausted to do anything. The details of everything can be found across numerous news sources online, if you care to read about it.

The problem is, this toxic mindset isn't new. It isn't just him, and it isn't just a few people. I had the displeasure of taking a Wildlife Management class in high school as an elective. While believing that we should be carefully managing the populations of elk and deer in Wyoming, all of my classmates believed in hunting the wolves back into extinction. "They're killing all our deer!" and "They wipe out whole herds just for fun!"

There are people being quoted in the news articles covering this story saying things like "We aren't all like that," and "They're giving people in Wyoming a bad name." I wish it were true. But I've seen too many Smoke a Pack a Day stickers to believe that the majority of people in Wyoming care for wildlife.

Since the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone in the 90s, locals in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana have fought tooth and nail to be able to kill all of the wolves. Not manage predators as needed, which is logical, but to go out and trophy hunt the wolves until there are none left, for some messed up sense of masculinity. They feel like they own the prey species in the area, and by hunting for survival, wolves are somehow stealing their deer and elk.

When wolves were finally delisted from the Endangered Species list in 2017, the people rejoiced. They could finally live out their dream of extinguishing the now thriving wolf population. The wolf population that has been helping carefully manage elk presence, which has in turn helped populations of beavers and other animals. Wolves are an important piece of the ecosystem in Wyoming, in and out of Yellowstone. But they're only viewed as a nuisance to the average citizen.

It was in the 1920s that the last wolves in the Greater Yellowstone Area were driven to extinction, and we're on the path to repeating that history in the 2020s if we can't learn from our past mistakes.