When Yellowstone became America’s first national park in 1872, gray wolves — which had roamed and shaped North America’s landscape for millions of years — were being massacred nationwide in a government-led extermination campaign. The eradication of these predators, who were cast as livestock-threatening villains, began soon after the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth Bay. The colonists set bounties on wolves and the war escalated in the decades to follow. As our guest once documented, wolves and their pups were shot, trapped, hunted with dogs, poisoned, dragged from dens, baited with fish hooks, set on fire, and intentionally infected with mange. One community even paved a road with wolf carcasses. In Yellowstone, the job was completed in 1926 when the last two pups in the park were killed.
The loss, brutality, and profound ecological consequences of this atrocity slowly began to sink in. Seventy years after the last Yellowstone wolves were killed, the U.S. government took unprecedented measures to reclaim what it had destroyed. In 1995 and 1996, more than thirty wolves from multiple packs were brought to the park from Canada and released in a grand experiment that would become the most successful wildlife reintroduction effort in history. Within years, more than 100 wolves in 10 packs were thriving across the 2.2 million acre park and the ecosystem was rebounding spectacularly. The roughly 100 wolves that live in the park today — which awe, inspire, and fascinate millions of visitors each year — are their descendants.
Our podcast guest, the internationally renowned wolf expert Rick McIntyre, has dedicated his life to those wolves. As a ranger naturalist, he spent more than 40 years observing wolves in America’s national parks. For the past 26 of those years, he’s observed the wolves in Yellowstone nearly every day, accumulating more than 100,000 sightings — more than any other person in history. What Rick saw unfolding through his telescope is awe-inspiring: epic adventure stories of wolf family dynasties. He watched wolves perform acts of bravery and kindness, suffer crippling injuries, conquer enemies and then treat them with benevolence, wage war over territories, form lifelong partnerships with touching loyalty, and play exuberant games of king of the castle. His work leaves no doubt that wolves are individuals with unique personalities, emotions, and complex relationships like our own. His stories have shown millions of people that these still-persecuted animals deserve our respect and need our empathy.
Since retiring from the park service in 2018, Rick has published a magnificent series of biographies of some of Yellowstone’s most noteworthy wolves. These include The Rise of Wolf 8, The Reign of Wolf 21, and his latest book, The Redemption of Wolf 302. As the writer Nate Blakeslee aptly put it: “With this third installment of Rick McIntyre’s magnum opus, the scope and ambition of the project becomes clear: nothing less than a grand serialization of the first twenty years of wolves in Yellowstone, a kind of lupine Great Expectations.”
These stories are especially important right now. Wolves desperately need federal protection from extreme and cruel wolf-killing laws recently enacted in the states of Montana and Idaho. These laws could destroy the state’s wolf populations, undoing decades of progress. In this episode, McIntyre tells the extraordinary stories some of Yellowstone’s greatest wolves, describes the wolves’ unique personalities and the pack’s dynastic dramas, and explains why science-based federal action is needed to protect these wolves, who are at risk of being massacred once again due to draconian new state laws.
How listeners can help protect the wolves:
In fall 2021 in response to an emergency petition from environmental groups, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that wolves in the western United States may warrant reinstatement of federal protections under the Endangered Species Act. McIntyre urges everyone who is concerned about the wolves’ perilous fate as a result of draconian new state wolf-killing laws to submit a comment to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service here by the deadline of December 14, 2021, urging the agency to reinstate gray wolves’ protections under the Endangered Species Act.
Rick McIntyre’s book recommendations:
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Yellowstone Wolves: Science and Discovery in the World’s First National Park First Edition, edited by Douglas Smith, Daniel Stahler, and Daniel MacNulty
Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone by Douglas Smith and Gary Ferguson
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