Wolf Detractors Bark Up Wrong Tree Pro-Wolves: Big, Bad Huffing And Puffing Lacks Substance

Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? Ranchers and hunters, apparently.

Seems they’ve bought into the fairy tales and scare tactics promulgated over the years to justify the eradication of the gray wolf from the Western United States.

They’d like us to believe them, too.

But most Americans are smarter than that. And more compassionate. Public opinion appears strongly in the corner of the wolves and their reintroduction to the wild in the Rocky Mountain West.

That’s amazing, considering the government’s 50-year campaign to systematically demonize and eliminate the wolf on behalf of ranchers. Up to $1 million a year was paid in the early 20th Century in bounties for dead wolves. By the 1930s, not a single one could be found in all the West.

The result is a marked upset in Western ecosystems. Yellowstone, with nearly 60,000 elk and 4,000 bison, is in desperate need of natural predators. Areas open to hunters are also seeing an increase in animal population.

But hunters, quite simply, don’t want the competition. And ranchers, whose lawyers sued to stop the relocation plan, worry that wolves will opt for cows and sheep instead of their natural prey.

That’s absurd. Studies in Minnesota, where nearly 2,000 wolves live among dairy farms, show very few domestic animals are killed by wolves. In Montana, dogs kill more sheep than any wild predator.

A federal judge said opponents offered only “fear and speculation” to the discussion. Fact is, biologists estimated merely 20 cattle and 110 sheep a year might be killed by wolves. But ranchers are snubbing an unusual offer from an environmental group which raised $100,000 for livestock reimbursement.

And ranchers are quiet about the 1982 provision that allows them to kill or harass wolves that are threatening their livestock.

So where’s the beef? It comes down to a symbolic stand-off. Ranchers, desperate as they watch the popularity of their product dive, are grasping at any argument to deny an animal its natural habitat, even if that means letting go of the dream of making Yellowstone the only area in the United States inhabited by every mammal it had at the time whites first came to the continent.

It doesn’t matter, they say. Wolves are killers.

But they can’t scare us. We’re not afraid of wolves, or threats of higher beef prices. Fatty beef has killed more people than wolves ever will.

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