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Since I already made some people mad yesterday talking about wolves, I might as well go ahead and say the rest of it. I support farmers and ranchers having the right to kill wolves that are attacking their livestock. I feel the same way about coyotes, stray dogs, or any other predator. Cattle are prey animals, and as a farmer, one of my jobs is to protect the animals in my care.
I thankfully don’t live in an area with wolves, so I’ve never had to deal with that firsthand. But I have had cattle attacked by a pack of stray dogs, and I’ve had a calf killed and eaten by coyotes. We kill coyotes when necessary to protect our cattle, and I still love animals. Those things aren’t contradictory. Nature isn’t a Disney movie. Spend five minutes on Nature Is Metal if you think it is.
And yes, you can love animals and still kill an animal when necessary. I value human life too, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t use lethal force to protect someone I love if their life were in danger. Valuing life and believing you have a responsibility to protect life are not contradictory.
I also remember visiting a store near Jackson, Wyoming, where they had a bulletin board showing pets that had been killed by wolves. It’s easy to have an absolute opinion about predators when the consequences belong to somebody else. I wonder how many people would feel exactly the same way if it was their dog they found ripped apart.
You see wolves romanticized in documentaries about their return to Yellowstone, and I understand why. Inside Yellowstone, you’re looking at millions of protected acres with large populations of wild prey and no livestock operations scattered throughout the park. It’s probably about as close as we can get to watching part of that old ecosystem function again.
But Yellowstone isn’t the world outside the park. Tens of millions of bison used to roam North America, along with huge populations of elk, deer, moose, and other wild prey. There were enormous stretches of land without towns, highways, subdivisions, farms, and fences. Our government helped destroy that world. It encouraged the destruction of the bison, including as a way to starve Plains tribes and force Native people off their land, and then we developed, fenced, and completely changed what was left.
We changed how people live too. Most people are now completely removed from producing their own food, while we expect a relatively small number of farmers and ranchers to feed an entire nation. It’s easy to live in a city and have opinions about how livestock should be raised, or predators should be managed when you’ll never have to deal with the consequences firsthand. If you’ve never raised livestock or had to protect animals from predators, I’m going to take your opinion about how ranchers should handle it with a grain of salt.
Then the government gets the brilliant idea, “Hey, let’s put wolves back,” heavily protects them, and expects those same farmers and ranchers not to protect the livestock we’re all depending on them to raise. What works inside a protected national park doesn’t automatically work when a wolf leaves the park and enters a landscape where people live, raise livestock, and have pets. You can’t completely change a landscape and a way of life, put one piece of the old ecosystem back generations later, and expect everything to work like it used to. Did nobody watch Jurassic Park?
I’m not saying wolves shouldn’t exist or should be indiscriminately killed. I’m saying they have to be managed in the world that exists today, and farmers and ranchers should have the right to protect the animals in their care. If we expect them to be responsible for the livestock they raise, we also have to allow them to protect those animals when a predator threatens them.
