The Truth & Other Howlers

In March 1990, I flew into Missoula, Montana to attend a public law conference on the reintroduction of wolves to the American West. The conference speakers included lawyers who had tried cases resulting from the Endangered Species Act, ranchers, wildlife managers, and wolf advocates.  Listening, I learned that the wolf was a child-eating predator, and I learned that no human being had ever been harmed by a wolf. I learned the wolf was a pack animal. I learned it was a solitary animal. I learned it was a prolific breeder and an animal whose numbers wouldn’t increase without help from human beings. The crumbling legal tablet that was my conference notebook contains the statement that, by some counts, there were 190 separate regulatory or advisory entities involved in wolf reintroduction, and under that statement is a scribbled question:  190 separate truths?

I was there as a reporter for Wildlife Conservation magazine, which is published by the New York Zoological Society, and I had been charged by my editor to present a balanced view of a complex and angry controversy.

I had interviewed people from all across the political spectrum in the weeks before the conference. But only in Missoula did I realize that the various factions opposing or supporting wolf reintroduction were not going to live comfortably on the same planet. Some of them, I decided, weren’t even on the same planet.

My article, “The Big Howl Over Wolves,” was published in the September/October 1990 issue of Wildlife Conservation. It concluded that wolf reintroduction in the West would succeed, but that the wolf could become a legal animal rather than a wild one.

The passage of time has vindicated my words, but a good part of my success as a prescient wildlife journalist came from my writing partner, Mr. Dumb Luck. In 1990, I saw myself as a writer who could ask penetrating questions and

startle interview subjects into revealing the truth. I prided myself on being able to see the big picture.

I was able to stand back as a journalist and say, near the end of the article, “If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then the animal I saw in Missoula was a wolf designed by a committee—which is to say that it wasn’t a wolf at all.” 

I should have said it was a beast of burden for the legal profession and the biological sciences.

Seventeen years later, I can look out the window of my home in Idaho’s Sawtooth Valley and see wolves. Sometimes I can see them chasing elk, which is interesting to watch but not something you’d want the kids to see if they’ve just finished watching Bambi on the minivan’s DVD player. Last spring I counted seven kills within a mile of the driveway, and my neighbor upriver counted more than thirty.

John Rember is a Writer-at-Large at Albertson College and on the faculty of Pacific University's Master of Fine Arts in Writing program. He received his MFA from the University of Montana in 1987. He has written for Travel and Leisure, Naturalist, and Skiing Magazine.