Let Them Come Back

“I don’t want the wolf near me.” The comment of Wyoming cattleman Jack Turnell sums up the controversy over a modest proposal to reintroduce the wolf into the wilderness of Yellowstone National Park. Talk wolves to a rancher and be prepared for a spirited discussion about the slaughter of cattle and sheep. If nothing else, the wolf triggers emotions in people.

But the Endangered Species Act requires the federal government to draft programs for the protection of threatened or endangered wildlife and the restoration of species where they once thrived. The Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf once roamed over a broad area of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming until it was systematically shot, poisoned and trapped. Now, a handful survive, but none in Yellowstone.

The proposal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as reported Monday by The Times’ Ronald B. Taylor, is to import 30 breeding pairs of wolves into Rocky Mountain wilderness areas, including 10 in the 2.2-million-acre Yellowstone. The plan has the support of William Penn Mott, director of the National Park Service, but now is opposed by Director Frank H. Dunkle of the Fish and Wildlife Service, after early support, and the area congressional delegations. The dispute between the two Interior Department agencies presumably will be settled by Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel. Hodel should approve the plan.

Fear of wolves is legendary and often irrational. There is no record, for instance, of wolves attacking humans in North America. Wolves and farmers coexist in Minnesota, where there is a program of compensation for the limited live-stock losses. The same would be true in the Rockies, where ranches are far less numerous and more remote from the proposed transplant areas.

The absence of the wolf has allowed the population of the Yellowstone elk herd to mushroom out of control. The limited wolf population would feed primarily on elk and other wildlife. Those rogues or strays that wandered scores of miles to the nearest ranches to prey on livestock would, and should, be killed.

Along with the grizzly bear, the wolf is the American symbol of wildness.

Wilderness is not just vast mountain ranges and stretches of timber, but an unspoiled ecosystem inhabited by its natural species of wildlife living in balance with each other. It is visited by humans who come quietly and unobtrusively to experience and learn; to look and listen in awe, mindful of Henry David Thoreau’s admonishment, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

Without the wolf, that Yellowstone wildness is incomplete.