On my week doing Wild Lands Restoration through Road Scholars at the Teton Science Schools in Jackson, Wyoming, wolves and wildness have been heavily on my mind. In Wyoming, the subject of wolves, as well as bears and other wildlife, is complicated and passionate.
I found a book in the library at the school that elucidates the whole issue of the troubled connection of humans to the animals that share human territory. “Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, A Woman, and the Wild” by Renee Askins puts the issue into a wider, deeper perspective. The author still lives in a small town called Wilson near Jackson and she eloquently describes why she fights on the side of the wolves. Wolves were once totally eradicated in very vicious ways.
“What hunger did torture satisfy that a bullet would not? What fear was soothed or vengeance realized by the suffering of these animals that a painless death could not have accomplished? What is it in ourselves that we had to kill in the wolf? The answer is, of course, wildness. And even though we killed the wolf, every last one of them in the West, we never extinguished the wild — we only became more deeply alienated from it. In the panic of our alienation, we attempted to control what we feared; when we couldn’t control it we tried to extinguish it. But the wild is not controllable, or even extinguishable, so inextricably is it bound to the force of life itself. It flickers on – without us, within us, and between us – its nature buried in the mystery of our origins.”
After great effort by conservationists, the decision was made to re-introduce wolves in certain areas like Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. But it’s a troubled, carefully watched, and perhaps temporary situation.
When humans and animals come into conflict, it is the animal that loses. Very recently in Yellowstone, two bears were intentionally killed by authorities; a grizzly who killed a hiker, and a female black bear who kept coming too close to humans in its search for food. The grizzly bear had awakened after being tranquilized and a collar put on it so it could be tracked. Would he have killed the hiker if a collar had not been put on him in the name of conservation research? Would the black bear have been killed if her territory hadn’t been invaded by campers and easy food?
Those of us who live far from the wild and wild animals form opinions about both in alienation from these animals and the wild. This week I have come closer to both and I feel a profound impact from the contact.