I have been reluctant to think about this issue for obvious reasons. It’s time for me to get over it.
This photo caught my imagination lately. This is how we see wildlife these days, aside from weedy spirits like the white-tailed deer and possum and Canada goose: a hurried slip over the ridge when we come into view, a flicker in the peripheral vision. Such wildlife is a fire near-out, a few coals smouldering out of sight and going cold when we uncover them, and such sightings a rare privilege for most of us.
And some would greet that shade with gunfire.
I eat deer, and goose, and would sample possum if offered, and a few factory farmed animals besides. My ethic toward animals is not one of strict nonviolence. I snuff out bright, beady-eyed and whiskered sentience in our house far more often than I like, and I cannot rail against hunting.
But what sort of sharp-truncated, soulless man hunts wolves?
If someone were to find enjoyment in wandering the countryside and killing dogs, we would lock that person up. But grant that dog full citizenship in the wild, give her full dignity and freedom, and somehow the psychotic and sadistic murderer of pups becomes a sportsman.
What sort of man — and I use the word advisedly, and charitably — can see a wild wolf and not be stricken in awe? Cannot find himself suffused with gratitude and love? It is the superficiality of the sort one finds in those who faced with an austere desert landscape, millennia-old desert varnsh and shrubs that sprouted in the dung of ground sloths 12,000 years ago, who when finding themselves among the desert tortoises and Mojave ground squirrels and the delicate cryptogamic soil, find their first desire is to fire up their off-road bikes and haul their unlaboring asses up little rises for dull and fake thrill, and no matter that the desert is destroyed for their moment of fun.
The wolf hunters are like that, except that they replace the ORV-ers negligient faunacide with calculated, cold-blood murder.
And they have not even the excuse of ignorance. One wolf hunter, reformed, more than a half-century ago, learned and shared his learning with the world:
We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way. We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.
In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy; how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable side-rocks.
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
* * *
Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.
— Aldo Leopold, from A Sand County Almanac
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