George Catlin painted “Buffalo Hunt, Under the Wolf Skin” in the 1830s.
I have this sneaking suspicion that a lot of wolf-haters deliberately say outrageous things solely in hopes of provoking reasonable people to anger, and therefore should be ignored.
That’s what the rational part of me says. But I find it hard to be rational when my blood’s boiling, as it was last week when I read about the Missoula “man,” as he was described in news stories, who bragged on Facebook about deliberately hitting two wolves with his van.
The Great Falls Tribune reported that Toby Bridges claimed on Facebook that he intentionally hit two wolf pups because they were chasing an elk cow and calf. “I was going save that calf,” he wrote.
Ed Kemmick
He went on to describe, with evident pleasure, how he killed one pup and broke a leg on the other, which he could hear howling in pain as it dragged itself away from the scene.
The story itself was bad enough. The comments that followed it were even worse. Comment sections under online newspaper stories have become the havens of some of the dumbest creatures in the animal kingdom, but as with this story, they still amaze me from time to time.
When I wrote about wolves in a Gazette column five years ago (unavailable in the archives, for some reason), I pointed out how wolf-haters sometimes compared wolves to Hitler or to Saddam Hussein.
Well, you can at least credit the wolf-haters for keeping up with the news. Under the Gazette’s version of the van-driving wolf-killer story, one commenter said wolves are “the ISIS of the animal kingdom.”
It’s hard to believe that someone so clueless has survived to adulthood. To believe that a wolf is capable not only of malevolence but of ideological fanaticism, as this person supposedly does, is mind-boggling. I’m surprised he didn’t accuse the wolves of being Muslims, too.
Wolves are simply animals, as are we. They are born to prey on other animals just as surely as kittens are born to appear on YouTube videos. A wolf survives by making full use of its physical and mental capacities. A human being who hates a wolf and assigns to it human attributes is not using the brain he was born with.
On the Great Falls Tribune website, one wolf-hater went so far as to say that wolves, left unchecked, would drive other species to extinction. Yes, and that’s why massive packs of wolves co-existed in North America with tens of millions of bison for tens of thousands of years. The bison were driven nearly to extinction in almost no time at all, but we all know what species took credit for that.
He pointed out why predators, no matter how big or fierce, have to subsist mostly on the weak and the young, if not on outright carrion. Say a wolf eats once a week. That means 52 times a year it has to find a sufficiently large meal without sustaining any injuries that would make the next meal more difficult or impossible to obtain.
One blow to the ribs from the iron hooves of a deer, elk or moose and a wolf could be done for. With such an injury a wolf might not even be able to take a calf or an old prey animal. The upshot, Colinvaux says, is that a deer or an elk would be vulnerable in childhood and old age, but live relatively free of danger (in a world without us) most of its life.
“The lives of big game animals are lived in a large measure of freedom from the awful world of tooth and claw that we can conjure up by a careless reading of Darwin,” he wrote. “Not only do these animals live in that peaceful coexistence with their neighbors … but they may also live with less fear of being killed than we had supposed, except as a sort of euthanasia.”
Anti-wolf activists also justify their hatred by claiming that wolves are indiscriminate killers, slaughtering animals for pleasure long after they’ve killed enough to eat.
I don’t suppose the wolf-haters will believe this, but Wolf-Moose Project researchers on Isle Royale in Lake Superior, site of “the longest continuous study of any predator-prey system in the world,” according to their website, came to this conclusion:
“Wolves are not wasteful gluttons; they exhibit a behavior that has been observed in just about every species an ecologist has taken time to observe, and that behavior appears to be an optimal feeding strategy shaped by natural selection.”
And when, for various reasons, wolves do leave food behind, it is quickly gobbled up by coyotes, foxes, eagles, ravens, smaller predators and even carrion beetles. The wolves rarely leave behind anything as tasty as the gut piles left by human hunters, but a meal’s a meal.
Prey animals have always had more to fear from human beings, even lightly armed ones, than they did from wolves, though our fairy tales tell a different story. In the fairy tales, a wolf disguises himself as a grandmother to devour a young girl.
In the real world, Native Americans got close to their bison prey by putting on the skin of a wolf.
