Though the history of America doesn’t boast fantastic kingdoms or glorious castles, it does offer the wild, wild story of what is now known as Westward Expansion.
In the mid 1800s, herds of Americans were flocking to the west, settling land out in the fields and panning for gold -- all the things you see in the movies. The recent TV show Westworld depicts the American west as this rural, lawless place, as it was.
Many settlers hunted bison and wildlife, but not for food. They hunted bison because bison for hide and horn, because bison were the primary source of food for Indians. The death of all these animals -- and the surplus of meat uneaten by westward settlers -- led to a rise in apex predators, namely, the wolf. In the seventies, this led to an unmonitored spree of wolf hunts: there was no legislation to protect wildlife in Yellowstone, much less anywhere else in the West, and wolves were seen as undesirable predators.
Eventually even the government condoned and encouraged the slaughter of wolves. For the wolves it was not for meat or hide or horn; for the wolves it was because they were predators and the prevailing biological theories at the time believed that humans could replace wolves as the top of the food chain, killing sheep and bison and other cattle-like animals, without repercussion.
In addition to this, many historians have speculated on the nature of the great wolf slaughter. There is a fear of the uncontrolled, in all people. This is why there are zoos and this is why people visit zoos instead of the wild to view animals. There was, at the time, an assumption of rights that placed us higher on the food chain than wolves.
Only recently have those beliefs been challenged. Research in the mid 1900s by Adolph Murie and others emphasized the importance of wolves in the food chain of Yellowstone.
And so in 1995, wolves from Canada were captured and brought to Yellowstone, put into acclimatizing pens in preparation for their release.
During my trip to Yellowstone, I had the opportunity to visit the holding pen in which Canadian wolves were reintroduced to the United States. Here is what I wrote inside the pen:
There once were wild wolves here from Canada, transported to a new world, aliens in this cage. It seems almost cruel to have them so close to nature and yet so far -- people come in with meat for meals to feed but at the same time, the trees and mountains wait beyond the chainlink fence. I am reminded of zoos and cages. How strange that we want to keep such wild things in tame places; we have this innate desire to control what is wild and what we don’t understand. We replicate the wild. It’s almost crueler to give them a taste but not a full meal. We want to keep the wild nature of things but also control them -- see the irony there? How cruel to be here, inside this cage, to be able with the keen senses of the wolves detect the sun and river and mountains but not be able to experience it all (is this how Tantalus must have felt?). I cannot feel the presence of the wolves here. I see a crumbling cage: the trees have fallen and collapsed, the weed and vegetation have overgrown. It’s hard for me to imagine them here.
After the wolves were reintroduced, the elk population in Yellowstone significantly decreased. This however led to the growth of beavers (beavers and elk both rely on willow) and the subsequent storage of water for fish and prevention of erosion. Though the wolves are still hopping on and off the Endangered Species list, their history has taught me much about historical views and emotional views.
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