ABSTRACT
I recently stumbled across a book called The Last Stand of the Pack, written, I think, during the 1930s by Arthur A. Carhart and Stanley P. Young. Young was principal biologist at the US Biological Survey, which oversaw the government program to control predators such as the wolf. The following paragraph sums up the tenor of the book, which describes the hunting down of Colorado’s last wolves:
Man has won. The wilderness killers have lost. They have written their own death warrant in killing, torture, blood lust, almost fiendish cruelty. Civilization of the white man has almost covered the West. And with that nearly accomplished, there was no place left for the gray killers, the renegades of the range lands.
Prior to the European arrival five centuries ago, there may have been as many as 400,000 gray and red wolves in North America, but by the 1930s they had been exterminated almost everywhere in the lower 48 states apart from in Minnesota, where less than 1000 survived. The wolves were wiped out primarily because ranchers, and the authorities, saw them as a threat to the livestock industry: it was a question of us or them. Recently, however, there has been a great change in attitude towards predators, both among the public and within certain sectors of government, and over the past decade federally funded wolf reintroduction programs have enabled small populations to flourish and spread back into some of the habitats their ancestors once occupied.