Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from testimony given by Renée Askins at a congressional hearing on the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park (©1995 by the Harper’s Magazine Foundation).

If I were a rancher I probably would not want wolves returned to the West. If I faced the conditions that ranchers face in the West—falling stock prices, rising taxes, prolonged drought, and a nation that is eating less beef and wearing more synthetics—I would not want to add wolves to my woes. I would want to blame something, to fight something.

The wolf is an ideal target: it is tangible, it is blamable, and it is real. Or is it? When ranchers talk about wolves they say, "You know, it’s not the wolves we’re worried about, it’s what the wolves represent; it’s not what they’ll do, it’s what they mean." Wolves mean changes. Wolves mean challenges to the old ways of doing things. Wolves mean loss of control.

Ranchers deserve our compassion and our concern. Whether the threat of wolves is imagined or actual, the ranchers’ fear and anger are real.

Ranchers claim that wolves will devastate the live stock industry in the West. Yet all the studies show that wolves kill far less than 1 percent of the livestock available to them. According to the Bozeman Chronicle, even if federal specialists have wildly underestimated the number of cows and sheep that wolves would kill in the Yellowstone and central Idaho areas, the actual total would be much smaller than the number that die each year in the state of Montana alone because of storms, dogs, and accidents.

In effect, the livestock industry has successfully transferred to the general public one of its most basic operational costs: prevention of predator losses. If you raise Christmas trees, part of the cost and risk of doing business is losing a few trees to gypsy moths and ice storms; inherent in the cost of ranching, particularly on public lands, should be the cost and risk of losing livestock to predators. Instead, every year 36 million tax dollars go to kill native predators on our public lands so that private industry can make a profit.

It is important to remember that wolves are missing from the Yellowstone region only because we eliminated them. They did not vanish from the area in response to loss of prey or lack of habitat; they did not die out as a result of disease or natural catastrophe. We systematically, intentionally, consciously killed every wolf we could find.

Opponents of wolf reintroduction assume that because there are no wolves, there should be no wolves. They have promoted the idea that the return of wolves is somehow radical or extreme, some sort of environmental luxury, some romantic nonsense that only urbanites and rich Easterners advocate at the expense of the poor, beleaguered Western livestock industry. (In fact, surveys show that Westerners support the reintroduction.) The industry’s cry of economic loss has eclipsed the costs to the general public of not having wolves. In the West we now live in a "wolf-free" environment. Or is it "wolf-deprived"? Who has gained and who has lost? How do we assign a value to the importance of a predator in the ecosystem? How do we determine the cost of removing one note from a Mozart symphony, one sentence from a Tolstoy novel, or one brush stroke from a Rembrandt? Having wolves in Yellowstone is not a luxury but a right. We should not have to pay for clean air or water, nor should we believe that they are somehow a luxury. Similarly, we have a right to a full complement of wildlife on our public lands.

Emotions, not facts, have controlled the wolf debate. Wolves have never been just wolves: the wolf is the devil’s keeper, the slayer of innocent children, the nurturer of abandoned babies, the sacred hunter, the ghostly creature of myth and legend. In short, wolves are symbolic; Yellowstone is symbolic; restoring wolves to Yellowstone is a deeply and profoundly symbolic act.

We are a culture of symbols. It is not surprising that ranchers and environmentalists use the symbolic force of wolves to debate painful changes. We use symbols to help us order and make sense of an increasingly complex world. The Yellowstone wolf-recovery debate is fundamentally an expression of a culture in transition; it is the struggle that accompanies old assumptions clashing against the new. The story of this conflict is the story of how we view ourselves in relation to animals, whether we can replace the assumption of "dominion" that has been so destructive to us and the natural world with a worldview that recognizes that we live in a state of reciprocity with the birds and the beasts—that we are not only the product of nature but also part of it.