Wild animals with sharp teeth and a taste for raw meat
are enjoying uncommon fame among Americans these days.
In two news events this week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service announced the removal of the gray wolf from the endangered species
list. And the New York Times published a lengthy feature story on the cougar’s
re-occupation of the eastern U.S.A.
In addition, the resurgence of grizzly bear numbers is
an ongoing news story in communities of the northern Rocky Mountain.
While griz angst tends to be local, lions in
metropolitan suburbs and wolves in the Oregon, Washington, and Minnesota
countryside are another matter entirely – a typical voter may actually have one
of these fearsome creatures intrude upon his or her status quo.
Once upon a time, people had no cause to fret about
their relationship with meat-eating wild animals. Predators were simply a fact
of agrarian life and could be summarily dispatched when they became troublesome
– or lived with when they didn’t.
After several generations of urban segregation from
nature, contemporary Americans seem unable to fathom the realities of sharing
their neighborhood with actual predators.
In the absence of real experience or culturally validated information we
employ imagination and conjecture to debate how to live with critters whose
lifestyle excites emotions running concurrently from delight to dread. Our
greatest terrors always are those of what might happen if . . . .
The wolf’s return to the northern Rockies has fueled a
20-year-long public hissy fit among those who imagine horrors of marauding
packs versus those who experience spiritual enlightenment at the sound of a
moonlit howling. The cougar excites the same conflicted values but the big cats
are more secretive, and scarcer than wolves, and they may have hired a better
public relations firm. Anyway, an
individual cougar may spark a local uproar but the idea of cougars in people’s
minds is much less inflammatory than the idea of a wolf.
Do not let massive rhetorical gas clouds befog one
fact, however. These animals are real, and their inaugural presence in the
lives of many more Americans will increase the intensity of conflict in coming
years.
Hopefully, we will arrive at a socially accepted relationship
with carnivorous wildlife just as we have with edible plant-eaters such as deer
and elk – a deal that allows continued existence of these animals with
sustainable numbers and adequate habitat.
But this is not a foregone outcome.
The same person who is exhilarated by TV video of
cougars lounging around Yellowstone Park will feel a different emotion entirely
when Ms. Cougar strolls through the back yard where the grandchildren play.
My experience as a state wildlife commissioner
included setting the first wolf hunting and trapping seasons for the gray wolf
in Montana. I quickly learned that
managing wolves in a human-dominated landscape is a solvable challenge. Give
professional wildlife biologists a few years to work out the methods and the wolf
will occupy an assigned niche in our homo-ecosystem.
Managing humans in a wolf-occupied landscape, on the
other hand, is several magnitudes of greater difficulty. I describe the whole
effort as a biological experiment in an anthropological petri dish.
The ‘socially accepted relationship’ I mentioned will
have a couple of measurable dimensions: how many animals and where. Decisive
un-measurables center on the willingness of people from different cultural
tribes to adapt to the values of neighboring tribes.
In his 2003 book, MONSTERS OF GOD, author David
Quammen describes the effects on people who must actually live with and bear
the burden of predators as neighbors.
“Proximity plus vulnerability equals jeopardy,” he advises. The light-hearted willingness of distant
urban nature-lovers to impose this burden in service to their self-actualized
ideals generates fuel for unending conflict.
The other conflictive fuel source is the unwillingness
of rural dwellers and recreational hunters to understand why making a
sustainable niche for viable predator populations is an urban political demand.
Thus they justify resistance.
Both fuel sources should remember that adaptation has
a better history of success than does resistance when it comes to surviving a
changing environment.
Of all tribes, the hunter has the more complex dilemma
to resolve. From at least the time of
naturalist/president Teddy Roosevelt, a duel vision has emerged among American
hunters dedicated to restoring wildlife populations. One vision is pragmatic: wildlife should be
restored in order to provide abundant game for the hunter. The other vision is altruistic: wildlife
should be restored because a healthy nature with all its creatures is vital to
human well-being in general.
To this day, hunters remain divided as to which vision
is the true purpose of our North American conservation system. The return of
the big meat-eaters may force the hunters’ hand toward a visionary decision.
~~ Ron Moody
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