I lived in Seattle during the academic years of the early 1990s. Ramona and I had sold our half band of breeding ewes (A band of sheep is 1,000 animals.), but ran a few dozen horses on our winter range. A good neighbor fed and monitored the horses while another friend lived in the manager’s apartment, keeping an eye on the place.

Three packs of wolves had been re-introduced to Yellowstone in the winter of 1995, an act that caused great consternation among many rural people. Concern was well founded for a typical pack of six to eight will consume nearly 1,000 pounds of meat per month. That’s about two elk plus a deer, or a cow plus two sheep.

As we suggested in our 1990 book, The Yellowstone Primer, there were good ecological reasons to favor the wolf’s return. And we of course did, in various writings and a poster depicting two wolves, “Yellowstone Homecoming.” (FREE still has a few available.)

Naturally, this incensed many of our friends in the Montana Woolgrowers and Stockmen’s Associations, the Montana Farm Bureau Federation, and a few relatives who farmed or ranched in the Greater Yellowstone area. Probably most of our Gallatin Gateway neighbors disagreed, but we had been here a long while and were sufficiently active in the community to be immune to “outsider” accusations.

Ironically, our positions favoring wolves also infuriated many Greens. Why? Because I noted that some wolves would be and should be shot, trapped, or otherwise removed with prejudice. To these naïve souls, we were advocating a sacrilege.

These folks were detached from reality. Wolves are really quite good at two things, killing meat and making more wolves. However they can’t read signs demarking Park boundaries. Hence they stray and do bad things such as killing livestock, pets, and the wild game some people depend upon. At some point of success, wolves would have to be controlled.

And now they are. This past weekend Ms. Carly Flandro wrote an article in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, “Montana Wolf Hunt: Season Two.” Her piece documented the success of the wolves’ reestablishment, with one simple statistic; Montana Fish, Wildlife, & Parks has put a quota of 220 wolves on the second year’s hunt. “Anyone with a gun and clean shot could kill the animal on sight, be it for sport or for the pleasure of seeing one more threat to livestock and elk drop dead to the ground.” That pretty well sums it up.

I had gone to the University of Washington to create the Environmental Management MBA program. From September to May, I had a bi-weekly column in the Seattle Times, usually on an environmental topic. (My interns and RAs often helped me, always with attribution.) Below is a column I wrote after returning to Seattle from home.

While I don’t recall the details, talk of wolves surely prompted me to write the column. The announcement of Montana’s second wolf hunt led me to review this piece written nearly 14 years ago. Here it is without change.

In the Seattle Times, January 08, 1997:

A Place for Wild Wolves and a Reason to Kill Them

By John A. Baden, Ph.D.

The timber wolf is an icon of the changing West. It also offers a litmus test of the ability to think clearly. Emotional baggage is chained to the species like a # 4 Victor, the trapper’s tool of choice.

Ranchers I’ve known for 30 years have come untrained, loudly sputtering at me for defending the wolf’s place in the West. And I’ve brought environmentalists to tears when explaining that problem wolves should be, and will be, killed.

Here is the key to understanding. The wolf is programmed to kill large mammals but we want them to be selective. By all means spare cows, horses, and sheep.

There’s a place for the wolf. In Yellowstone Park elk and bison numbers are exploding. With numbers far exceeding carrying capacity, the ecology of Yellowstone is being dramatically simplified and degraded. The wolf can help restore nature’s dynamic balance where politics precludes responsible management by federal agencies.

The wolf has been successfully reintroduced but its return must be actively managed—and not from afar. Here’s why.

The wolf is, at base, a cautious, indeed cowardly killing machine. That is precisely why they are valuable additions to ecosystems like Yellowstone that are threatened by over browsing. But a wolf in the wild has a hard life. Most die before reaching five years of age.

Handling big animals is inherently dangerous. An injured cowboy or ferrier can usually make it to the ER. Killing large hoofed animals with one’s teeth, is much more risky. And a wolf with teeth kicked out, ribs broken, or shoulder dislocated can’t check into the vet clinic. Hence, the selective sieve of time has produced wolves that attack the young, the weak, the sick, and those bogged down in snow.

Brave wolves, those which attacked healthy animals on firm terrain, were less likely to survive and prosper then those more cautious. We know that today’s wolf descended from animals which avoided strong prey and sought out weakness. Evolution produced an optimal mix of cowardice and ferociousness.

How does the above square with the claims by wolf advocates that there’s no record wolves killing humans in the United States? Quite well indeed. The historical record indicates that wolf attacks on humans go down as weapons improve.

Barry Lopez’s respected book, Of Wolves and Men includes a conversation with an old Eskimo. The wolf used to sometimes kill Eskimo. “Now Nunamiut (an Eskimo) can reach out and kill Amaguk (the wolf) from a distance with a rifle. Now Amaguk leaves Nunamiut alone.” In 1972 Erwin A. Bauer, a defender of wolves, observed; “Wolves once had an unnerving habit of closing in around a man, under the right circumstances, often getting within a few yards or even a few feet. And if these animals have killed few or no humans on this continent (since 1920), they have scared many half to death.”

In a book dealing with guard dogs, Mitchell Jones notes that “as man has become more formidable, the wolf has responded by becoming more reluctant to attack him.” The old wolf is gone, exterminated. As Jones says, “The modern wolf is an animal with a radically different attitude toward man.”

So what happens when we “save the wolf?” Montana ranchers are finding out. They need a confirmed livestock kill before they can act. In the Big Hole country, rancher Wayne Turner used a radio monitor to track two transplanted wolves, B7 and B11. In one week he trailed them and found two carcasses of moose calves, a cow moose, a cow elk and a yearling heifer, the last a confirmed wolf kill by wildlife officials. The wolves were darted with tranquilizers and relocated to an enclosure in Yellowstone Park. Last week in the nearby Deer Lodge Valley, four wolves killed or maimed seven Angus cows. The wolves were shot by federal agents.

This is not a happy ending but rather a preview. Some conservation groups, specifically Defenders of Wildlife, understand the costs which necessarily follow reintroduction. Defenders established a program to compensate stockmen for wolf kills and thereby reduce opposition to recovery efforts.

Icons have different meanings to different people. Newcomers to the West and urbanites insulated from rural Western traditions see the wolves as displaced natives who must be returned to the ecosystem. Conversely, many native Westerners view wolf reintroduction as the imposition of an alien culture. To them, the wolf causes a whimsical waste of resources that threatens ranching and the traditional culture.

Wolves have evolved as careful killers. That’s why we want them returned to wild ecosystems. However, we want them to be discriminating in their preadation. This requires that we permit stockmen to shoot wolves that kill livestock. As wolf numbers increase, so will this problem. It is irresponsible to pretend otherwise.