After the Grizzly. Peter S. Alagona
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coalesced in the 1920s and 1930s, combining features of forestry, ecology, natural history, and fish and game conservation and often focusing on the vast new public lands created by the New Deal. The first generation of wildlife managers believed that public officials should administer natural resources for the common good, but they held diverse opinions on what this meant in practice. Academic scientists, government officials, recreational hunters, conservation activists, and landowners and users, including farmers and ranchers, thus waged a series of struggles over the meaning and purpose of wildlife management that shaped the young profession and created a context for future conflicts about endangered species and habitat conservation. The most important of these battles was over predator control.
PREDATOR CONTROL
In the early twentieth century, most people viewed predators as varmints. This included animal welfare activists concerned about the plight of prey species, hunters worried about the loss of game, and ranchers anxious about the security of their livestock. It also included many scientists and government officials. In 1925 Edward A. Goldman, a prominent scientist from the Smithsonian Institution and the Bureau of Biological Survey, expressed a common sentiment when he wrote that “large predatory mammals, destructive to livestock and to game, no longer have a place in our advancing civilization.” Other prominent authors, such as Ernest Thompson Seton, expressed regret that large carnivores, such as the wolf and the grizzly, were disappearing from the North American landscape, but even Seton agreed that such extinctions were the inevitable price of progress.16
Beginning in the 1880s, the Bureau of Biological Survey, under the direction of C. Hart Merriam, published a series of reports on the economic effects of predators. Its early work took a relatively positive position compared to that of its later work, which focused on the damage that predators caused. Merriam, Albert K. Fisher, and other bureau officials emphasized the services predators provided, such as culling sick animals, consuming carrion, and devouring rodent pests. They even took positions on public policy. As early as 1886, Merriam publicly criticized a law passed the previous year in Pennsylvania, dubbed the Scalp Act, that issued a bounty of fifty cents on hawks, owls, weasels, and minks. Using a simple cost-benefit analysis, he calculated that in its first year the program had operated at a loss of more than $3.8 million. The same could be said, he believed, of similar programs in states throughout the country.17
Merriam’s moderate view was an exception to the rule. Predator control remained a ubiquitous practice throughout the United States into the 1920s. Federal agencies, state fish and game departments, university extension programs, county animal control boards, livestock organizations, and private landowners all pursued their own programs. Control efforts in California grew along with its farming and ranching industries. Between 1919 and 1947, the state employed two full-time mountain-lion hunters, Jay Bruce and C.W. Ledshaw. In his autobiography, Cougar Killer, Bruce claimed to have bagged 669 of the animals. According to a study published in 1931 by Jean Linsdale, another of Joseph Grinnell’s students, poisoning programs aimed at predators and rodent pests were under way on more than a third of California’s land, at a cost of $812,478. Grinnell calculated that these programs were killing more than fifty million animals per year, including members of many “non-target” species, some which were in danger of extinction.18
Early in his career, Grinnell seemed conflicted about how to deal with predators. He supported the control of rattlesnakes and mountain lions, advocated the sustainable harvest of fur-bearing mammals, proposed experiments in game farming, and accepted that scientific management would require some limited local culling of problem species. But he thought it was wrong to poison animals or subject them to unnecessary suffering, and programs that sought to eradicate rather than control predators horrified him. Over time, he became convinced that most control programs were wasteful, destructive, and unsupported by scientific evidence, and he called for an end to indiscriminate shooting, trapping, and poisoning. By 1930 Grinnell had emerged as the country’s foremost opponent of predator control policies and practices.19
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