Truth & Other Howlers
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Letters to the editor of The Idaho Statesman range in tone from despairing to murderous. Most writers tend to favor keeping the wolves and getting rid of the hunters. The minority of writers who favor killing wolves tend to advocate killing all of them.
Nothing is going to happen anytime soon. Lawsuits are being prepared to stop the delisting of wolves even as the federal agencies are preparing to delist. Lawsuits are being prepared to stop the lawsuits. Lawsuits are no doubt being prepared to stop the stop-the-lawsuit lawsuits.
I thought I saw the big picture at the Missoula conference. I was wrong. I missed the overpowering financial reality behind wolf re-introduction, and I also missed the fact that many of the people I thought were telling their version of the truth were lying and knew they were lying.
Occasionally, I came close to seeing a truly bigger picture. One of the lawyers at the conference kept
the paws of a female wolf killed by Wildlife Services for preying on cattle near Livingston, Montana. Among the truest things John Rember learned at a
Missoula conference on wolf reintroduction was what he was told by a federal wildlife official who said that wolves would always be managed by killing them. “His statement didn’t make it into my article,” Rember writes, “but it should have.” Photo by Amanda Determan
asserting that litigation was constitutionally protected free speech. Another of the lawyers said that people who had been forced to move because of federal condemnation proceedings were saved “a few more payments on their trailer houses.” Yet another described the court-case-by-courtcase evolution of the Endangered Species Act.
I sensed that the wolf and the people surrounding it had been caught in a great legal net, and what mattered was not its presence as a member of an ecosystem but its suitability for the courtroom. My notes include the phrase, “odor of litigation in the air.” I was able to describe the wolf as a legal animal, but if I were writing the article now I might describe it as grist for a great and all-powerful legal mill, a machine set to grind and grind until it has processed into dog food every environmental controversy in the West. Wolves and people matter less to that legal machine than briefs and rulings. That we are a nation of laws, not men, takes on an Orwellian meaning in this particular big picture.
A certain amount of human damage was expected, saved trailer house payments notwithstanding. A wolf advocate I interviewed said, “We need to get rid of the ranchers.” My interview subject, knowing that I was reporting for Wildlife Conservation, had assumed that I was an Eastern journalist, one who saw—at a distance—wolf reintroduction as the rightful restoration of an ecosystem. After I asked a number of penetrating questions about what “get rid of” meant when applied to ranchers, that person stopped treating me like a gleeful co-conspirator. I had instead become a potential legal opponent.
Later that day, my editor received a telephone message insisting I be taken off the story.
She refused.