As the oldest grandson of a well known Colorado cattle man, people often ask me how I came to love wolves. I blame it on my mother. When I was about f
...our years old she read the following words to me: "my birthday, my birthday, my birthday!! a striped box with holes! I hope it's a wolf! And within the pages of Jan Wahl's amazing children's book called "A Wolf of My Own", wolves took ahold of my soul and in the 41 Years since I heard those words I have not been able to shake their grip. My mom should have known better than to read me a story where a kid got a wolf. Unlike the child in the book that actually got a puppy and only dreamed it was a wolf, I became obsessed with having a wolf of my own and then as i grew up, with seeing wolves restored to the wild landscape that has been theirs since long before man ever set foot upon this continent. It hasn't been an easy journey. Many of you have probably been called a "wolf lover" and it's likely that the person referring to you this way meant it as an insult. Today I'm proud to call myself a wolf lover, but to a cattleman, having a grandson that loved wolves was nearly as bad as having a grandson that was a vegetarian! When I was still a child, I'm sure my grandfather wondered what was wrong with me. How could a member of his family have a soft spot for something so awful. Today I wonder how anyone with a soul could knowingly and needlessly destroy something so beautiful, so essential and so rare as a wolf. I wonder how they could fail to see what I do; one of nature's greatest masterpieces, sculpted by sun and sky and rain and cold and by the animals with which they dance in a duet of life and death. I don't blame my grand-dad for his feelings towards wolves. The prevailing sentiment during his lifetime was that wolves were no good. They killed cattle, they killed sheep, they cost us money! By the time my grandfather was in the cattle business, people in this country had been waging war against the wolf for hundreds of years and for hundreds of years before that on the continent we came from. It was simply a way of life, part of our culture. When our forefathers arrived on these shores they brought with them their fear, hatred and misunderstanding of wolves, and so it was that we killed them and killed them and killed them, until there were virtually none left to kill. But since those days we've learned a great deal about nature and the interconnectedness of all living things. Thanks to visionaries like Aldo Leopold, we've learned that a world without wolves is not a deer-hunter's paradise, but a disaster for the hunter and the deer. We've learned that the indiscriminate killing of wolves and their close relatives, coyotes, doesn't improve nature but impoverishes it. We've found new ways to prevent predators from killing livestock and we've been able to prove that coexistence is not only possible, but profitable. It costs less to protect livestock from wolves then it does to keep killing them year after year. Sadly, we've been a lot less successful at changing the old ways of thinking, especially among ranchers and hunters. Ranchers still insist that wolves are a huge threat to their livelihoods while hunters claim that wolves are killing all the game -- two myths that refuse to die in spite of massive evidence that disproves them. While it is true that wolves sometimes kill livestock, ranchers grossly overestimate their impact. In fact wolves are near the bottom of the list when it comes to causes of mortality in sheep and cattle. Injury, disease, exposure and death during birthing all kill many times more livestock than wolves do. Even though much of these losses are preventable, they are considered acceptable, while any loss attributed to a wolf or coyote is grounds for a call to federal wildlife killers that come in and wipe out whatever predators happen to be in the area, whether or not they were actually responsible for the kill. It's also true that wolves kill elk, deer, moose, rabbit, musk oxen, mice, beaver and many other species. Of course they do! That's their role in nature. However the claims of certain wolf-hating hunters that wolves are killing all the game is so ridiculous it's laughable. The very existence of the wolf is predicated upon the fact that they exist in a dynamic balance with the animals they consume. If wolves were to wipe out the species they need to survive, what do these hunters think would happen to the wolf? In some states the anti-wolf rhetoric has gone to even greater extremes, with people saying they fear for their lives and for the safety of their children as they walk to school. And while it is true that on incredibly rare occasions a wolf may have hurt a human, the truth is that when wolves and humans collide wolves always lose. We've killed them by the hundreds of thousands. In fact little red riding hood has a lot more to fear from a hunter than a wolf! Over the years I've talked to many people about wolves and the one thing nearly every wolf hater has in common is that they've never actually met a wolf or taken the time to get to know them as anything other than something to kill. I've spent thousands of hours with wolves and high content wolfdogs and I think it's fair to say I do know them. They're not the monsters of my grandfather's fears, nor are they the cute and fuzzy stuffed animals I had as a child. They are, as former government wolf killer now turned wolf advocate Carter Niemeyer says, "neither as good as we hoped nor as bad as we feared. They're just wolves." In the more than four decades since that fateful day when my mom read me a very wolfy bedtime story, I've been lucky to actually share my life and sometimes even my bed with wolves. But also, and much more importantly, to have seen the incredible success story of our Endangered Species Act and its required and equally successful effort to let the howl of the wolf -- the true wild icon of our country -- echo across the mountains of the Northern Rockies, the peaks of New Mexico and Arizona and throughout the Great Lakes region. With the return of wolf to Yellowstone we have watched in wonder as an incomplete and damaged ecosystem has become healthier, more resilient and more wild. Where a complete suite of the animals that evolved there are once again interacting and shaping each other as evolution intended. It is proof in living form that our wild places need wolves as badly as wolves need a place in the wild. But amidst this triumph that is both uniquely American and a shining example of how evils caused by human hands can also be undone by them, we're about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Wolves are not a recovered species in any sense of the word. Today they occupy less than 5% of their prior range and at only a fraction of their former numbers. The very idea that wolves have recovered sufficiently to have their Endangered Species Act protections removed should make every one of us cringe. How can you say a species is recovered when so much of its former habitat is still missing the breathtaking and mournful howl of its undisputed apex predator? And why should politics take precedence over science in determining the fate of such an important part of the natural world? Over the past few months, many of us have watched in dismay and then horror as the Federal Government has moved forward with it's plan to strip all but the Mexican Gray Wolf of it's endangered species status. We've held our collective breath hoping a new Secretary of the Interior, a purported conservationist and a non-rancher, would reverse this disastrous course and allow the wolf to continue its path to long term survival. Instead we've been deeply disappointed to learn that at every turn politics has subverted science and even the great work of some of this country's foremost wolf researchers has been turned against the wolf even as the scientists themselves have taken a stand against the delisting. And it is for this reason that I've left my pack in the redwoods and traveled across our vast country to speak to you and to demand that wolves be restored to full federal protection and allowed to recolonize their former range. I demand it on behalf of the rivers and the streams, on behalf of the deer, the elk, the beaver and the bison. I demand it on behalf of the forests and the plains, I demand it on behalf of our children and our children's children. We all have a stake in this decision and we all have a right to be heard. And so too do the wolves that can't speak for themselves, but have every right to their own corner of this planet that none of us own but all of us share. In closing I'll let you hear what all of us should have the chance to hear at least once in the wild in our lifetime - the howl of the wolf.
[I had to post this - because I believe it is a speech that everyone that is in animal advocacy of any kind, should hear. Honest words from the son of a cattle rancher. People can change.]
--Susan Williams PWNW
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