Bringing Back the Wolf

Ever since I read the book “Never Cry Wolf” by Farley Mowat, wolves have fascinated me. In this book, Mowat describes his work for the Canadian government on a project to determine the feeding habits of wolves in the wild. Caribou hunters had accused the wolves of decimating caribou herds, but Mowat found that in fact the wolves subsisted largely on small mammals, like mice. He tests the hypothesis that an animal the size of a wolf could exist solely on these rodents by limiting his own diet to mice, developing recipes like “Souris à la Crème”.

Wolves have always had a reputation as savage killers; chasing sleighs in rural Russia and eating the riders, for instance. The modern day equivalent of this drama is the attack by wolves on domestic livestock like sheep. After wolves had become an endangered species in the American west, largely because of loss of habitat and extermination measures, they were reintroduced in 1995, and sheep farmers have been up in arms ever since. Wolves are coming back naturally in Europe, and sheep farmers on this continent are similarly unhappy.

In a world in which wild and domestic animals generally inhabit separate territories, it is of course chilling to imagine one’s sheep herd as targeted prey to these wild animals. Why then reintroduce or encourage the wolf?

To answer this question one must consider the wolf’s effect on its environment in the wild. After its reintroduction in Yellowstone Park, the entire park ecosystem thrived. Greatly increased deer populations had decimated vegetation, and within a few years after reintroduction of the wolf, vegetation grew back again. This was, to be sure, partly the result of the wolves feeding on the deer, but was also a matter of the deer avoiding those parts of the park with the largest wolf populations.

With increased vegetation came flocks of birds, and beavers returned to build dams, thus benefitting both the groundwater supply and aquatic animals like waterfowl. Populations of rabbits, hawks, foxes and bald eagles grew. Because wolves are able to prey on large mammals, the increased supply of carcasses brought back scavengers such as the raven, the bear and the coyote. Herds of deer became healthier, as the wolves culled the weak and the sick. Within a few years, it was noted that because of the increased vegetation, riverbanks were less apt to erode and wash away.

The wolf is thus a keystone species, one defined as having a disproportionate impact on its environment relative to its abundance. This is, of course, small comfort to a sheep farmer who finds several dead animals in his flock, as wolves do leave the woods and venture into civilization. How then to reconcile the needs of an ecosystem such as a national park with the needs of livestock owners on private land?

Whereas ecosystem needs can be met using natural measures,

the needs of human beings and domestic animals often require ingenious human solutions. Trained dogs have been herding sheep since biblical times and are effective, but not ideal, wolf alarms. Dogs scare hikers, and recently it has been found that a hiker-friendlier animal, the llama, is a good guard animal for sheep. The llama is alert, good at herding animals and leading them away from predators, sounding an alarm when a wolf appears and chasing it away. Other solutions being tested are better fencing for the sheep and collars that sound a warning when a wolf appears.

There is no perfect answer. We see here a microcosm of the whole human situation, caught between cooperation and coexistence with the wild, on the one hand, and the satisfaction of the needs of civilization on the other. These needs include, however, the acquisition of knowledge and the use of imagination and ingenuity, all of which are most helpful in working out the problems of coexistence with our wilder fellow beings.