I went looking for wolves recently. It wasn’t a random search. I tagged along with a team that spends much of the early summer trapping wolves.
Early summer is prime time for wolf trapping. Packs have pups and pups mean dens, or at least some sort of grounded location. Later in the year as pups grow and are able to keep up, packs resume their more mobile existence. That makes trapping much harder.
Trapping is key to wolf management. Non-lethal leg hold traps are used. They hold the leg securely, without causing undue harm. The sets are armed with transmitters that broadcast a signal indicating when they have been disturbed. Crews work the sets twice a day to make sure a captured animal spends as little time restrained as possible.
I say undue harm because surely, even if the wolf is released with little more than a sore paw, the experience of being trapped has to be emotionally stressful. If you saw the quirky film “The Gods Must Be Crazy” in the ’80s, you may remember the scene where the bushman — on a quest to return the magical Coke bottle that fell from the sky and wreaked havoc on his tribe — finds himself in jail for killing a farmer’s goat. Unable to fathom concepts of time and incarceration, the bushman sits in his cell staring at the small, barred window that lets in sunlight, but is too high for him to peer out of.
I’ve got to imagine that for a wild wolf being caught in a non-lethal trap is an existential crisis similar to what that bushman experienced. That can’t be pleasant.
Not pleasant, but necessary. Getting a handle on northwest Montana’s exploding wolf population requires at a minimum knowing what’s out there. That means getting radio collars on a member or two of every pack. That’s why crews are living out in the woods running trap lines near suspected den sites.
Unfortunately the old reporter’s curse fouled things up on the morning I joined the team and we didn’t capture any wolves. I didn’t get a chance to see a wild wolf up close, or watch the team process an animal. I’d probably need to camp out for a week to guarantee that, and as appealing as that sounds, life won’t allow it.
There’s more than 600 wolves in Montana today. When the animals first began migrating down from Canada into Northwest Montana and reoccupying habitat in Montana (while others were relocated to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho) I never would have imagined their numbers would grow so large. It’s a testament, I suppose, to the capacity of undeveloped lands (mostly public) for large-mammal restoration.
It’s also fair to say that we have enough wolves, too many really, even for a wolf fan such as myself. Maybe not in a biological sense, but too many in the social/political construct that influences biological decision making. So once the team gets collars on animals, these Judas wolves may later lead teams to kill an entire pack if they develop bad habits such as eating livestock.
The Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission also recently approved more liberal wolf hunting regulations for the fall, and also lethal trapping for the first time in the reintroduction era. While I’m personally not inclined to participate in either activity, I’m hopeful others will be successful and make a dent in Montana’s thriving wolf population.
Are lethal traps and wolf hunting cruel? Maybe, though not any more so than whacking an elk with a 30.06 or humanely slaughtering a steer.
It’s a simple fact of life that we kill animals, even animals aware of their own existence, to survive. Does that make our species cruel? Inhumane? Or are we just another animal prowling the woods looking for our next meal? I’m inclined toward the latter.
But are we special? Probably so in ways both good and bad. I can say this much in our defense: There’s no other critter roaming the woods that has reintroduced a direct competitor, just to make things right.
That counts as special in my book.