Go west, young wolf

Wolves are returning to their home in Oregon

Posted by Eric de Place (Guest Contributor) at 1:20 PM on 13 Sep 2006

It seems that wolves are returning home to Oregon.

A little more than a decade ago, Oregon was wolf-less, along with the rest of the American West, a legacy of government-sanctioned poisoning, trapping, and shooting to make the land safe for cows and sheep. (Here's a cool animated map depicting our shrunken wolf range.)

But then in the mid-1990s, federal biologists reintroduced a few dozen wolves back into their native habitat of Yellowstone National Park and the wilderness of central Idaho. And the wolf population grew faster and healthier than anyone had been expecting.

Barely 11 years later, the US Rockies are home to at least 850 gray wolves, and that number is growing every year. So robust is the wolf population that there's mounting evidence that wolves are now moving west -- back into their former home in the rugged mountains and canyons of northeast Oregon.

The wolf success story is a bright spot in restoring endangered species. Unlike some other species, restoring wolf populations is comparatively cheap and easy. In fact, all they really need is to be left alone.

It's not exactly rocket science (or salmon restoration, for that matter) to leave them alone and let them return to their former homes, as they appear to be doing in Oregon. Better yet, easy as it is, allowing wolves to recover in the west can yield outsize benefits to native ecosystems. So here's to doing absolutely nothing -- except maybe a little monitoring so that we know what's up.

For story: Go west, young wolf
2 Comments | Post a Comment

Cool

I have never seen a wolf in the wild. Maybe someday.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

by biodiversivist at 9:20 PM on 13 Sep 2006

Excellent news!

Thanks very much, Eric, for passing this along. Let us hope that the Oregon wolves will be able to rely on a fairly secure corridor across Idaho -- the area of greatest danger -- to the Rockies, where they seem to have established themselves pretty well.

Though they are not "out of the woods," so to speak, anywhere.

It is true that the extermination of wolves in the Lower 48 has always been speciously justified by the need of livestock owners to protect their animals. And no doubt that was, and is, the sincere motivation of many of them. Barry Lopez already articulated, around twenty-five years ago, how lycophobic hatred works, in many parts of the world, at many periods, in "Of Wolves and Men." More recently, Jon T. Coleman analysed that phenomenon as it showed itself at a few places in the US, in "Vicious: Wolves and Men in America."

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 7:44 AM on 14 Sep 2006

ADVERTISING POLICY

You are not logged in. Thus, you cannot post a comment. If you have an account, log in. If you don't have an account, well, by all means go make one! Meet you back here in five.