The Killing of Wolf Number Ten. Thomas McNamee
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up together, by no means with the easy slump of puppies but nonetheless together, and asleep.
There is about this wolf a calm, a quiet, a confidence, something magisterial …
… the very definition of an alpha male.
No photograph does better justice to Nine’s sheer vitality than this one.
January 30, 1995
The idea of the acclimation pens is to hold the wolves in place while they become accustomed to the sights and, most importantly, the smells, of Yellowstone. The canine world is a universe of scent. The wolf’s olfactory acuity is something we can barely imagine. Scent marking is the wolf’s primary medium of communication. Wolves find their way with their noses, recognize one another by smell, and by scent know danger—they know the world by its aromas.
Surely, then, they haven’t been fooled into thinking that the Lamar River valley is anything like Alberta. To start with, their home smelled always of wolves: It was a quilt of occupied territories, one pack to each, each with a boundary constantly patrolled and scent-marked with little squirts of urine and rubbings of glandular secretions, here a tree, there a rock, each scent mark rich with meaning. The last time Yellowstone was quilted with wolf territories and its air dense with their scent was more than a century ago. What Nine, Ten, and Seven smell now is the absence of wolves.
Ten and Nine often circled the pen together.
Nine’s daughter, who accompanied her from Canada, Number Seven.
Seven shared her mother’s inexhaustible vitality.
Yet wolf presences are making themselves known a little more every day. The other two pens are not far away, and when the wind is right, surely all the wolves scent their co-detainees. In the right wind, or none, they hear one another’s howls. But they know they are not at home, and that is the Yellowstone wolf team’s great worry—that no matter how long they are confined, that no matter how well they come to understand the wealth of prey that awaits them in the Lamar, when at last the gates of the pens are opened, the wolves will go home.
Wolves have been known to run for hundreds of miles. They have an uncanny sense of direction. Domestic dogs—their descendants, and quite similar in their sensory apparatus—have found their way home innumerable times, across highways, railroads, golf courses, Walmart parking lots. The acclimation pens are an experiment. This has never been done before.
Number Nine’s coat sometimes looked black, but it was really multicolored.
Number Ten feeding on road-killed elk in the Rose Creek pen.
In January 1995, while Carter Niemeyer and his troops were trapping wolves in Alberta, a new United States Congress was taking its seat in Washington, D.C. Both houses are now controlled by Republicans. Newt Gingrich is Speaker of the House, and newly elected members from the far right are joining long-established opponents of the wolf reintroduction in crafting legislation to end it. New lawsuits are brewing as well.
Mike Phillips, Doug Smith, and all their web of support—not only the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service and the deeply engaged Secretary of the Interior but also wolf biologists, wolf devotees, ecologists, and thousands of conservationists around the world—are watching Yellowstone with riveted attention. This is the moment when the whole thing really could collapse.
Here is the dilemma the decision makers are facing. On one hand, you want to keep the wolves in the pens as long as possible, for acclimation’s sake. On the other hand, that also means that in the event of either a legislative or a court victory by the anti-wolf forces, the argument that the Justice Department employed to try to help the wolves can now be turned against them: In a one-acre-pen, it’s easy to dart a wolf. With no export option, euthanasia would be the next step. The End.
Here is why the return of the wolf to Yellowstone matters so much. Besides being the world’s first and most famous national park, Yellowstone is also the heart of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—the largest remaining essentially intact ecosystem in the temperate zones of the earth. And the single element missing from the ecosystem’s completeness is its top predator. The loss of top predators worldwide has been one of conservation’s saddest failures. Without their top predators, ecosystems begin to unravel.
The whole history of conservation has been—the very word says it—about saving things. Here is an opportunity to show, on a heroic scale, that humankind can begin to heal the damage it has inflicted on the earth, not just to rescue something nearly lost but to restore something altogether lost. This experiment, if it should succeed, will be one of the greatest conservation victories in history. It is already the most dramatic event in Yellowstone’s history.
Nine and her daughter Seven in the Rose Creek Pen.
The wolf team can’t stop talking.
“I say we open the gates now, we take the chance. Sure, they may head north toward home, and that’ll be failure of the experiment. It doesn’t mean we can’t try again.”
“Are you kidding? This is our one shot.”
“And maybe they’ll stay. Maybe the acclimation has worked.”
“Yeah, and let’s say then the court orders us to round them up. What then?”
“After what they’ve been through?”
“Exactly. They’d be almost impossible to trap.”
“They could shoot them from the air.”
“They could. But not with my help.”
“Mine neither.”
“They could get one of Carter’s old buddies. They’ll kill anything.”
“But think about this. By the time they got through the appeals and all, the collars’ batteries would all be dead.”
“I’ll drink to that.”
“So we’re agreed?”
“Hell yes.”
“Open ’em up!”
Now word comes that one Idaho wolf has done all the others one big non-favor. He has killed a newborn calf. Much has been made by wolf advocates of how unlikely it will be that wolves will kill livestock in areas of abundant wild prey. This calf lived (and died) in a virtual sea of elk and deer. The wolf biologists have known all along that this was bound to happen, the environmentalists knew it too, they all just sort of played it down—and hoped it might happen not quite so soon.
Mike Phillips insists the Fish and Wildlife Service investigators are pretty sure that the calf died of