Cull of the wild

A story pitch
January 21, 2014
(See below for clips of stories I've done for GQ and other publications)

On a Friday night in a state with no wolves, 170 people signed up to speak. The hearing went 45 minutes longer than scheduled but they only got to, maybe, 70 speakers. This was partly because the room reacted to each one, despite being implored not to, either with applause for pro-wolf speakers or bitter derision for anti-wolf speakers. There were occasional shouts of "Liar!" from advocates for each side. One person yelled at a hunter who talked about shooting wolves, "We'll shoot you!" I noted tears twice, at 6:40 and 7:25 p.m...

This is a pitch for a story on people and wolves. 

Already having removed gray wolves' federal protection in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and other states with wolves in 2011, in 2013 the U.S. Forest Service proposed to do the same in Western states with few or no wolves at all: Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado and California. The proposal has added fuel to the long-raging fire over American wolves. 

Recently the first wild wolves in nearly a century wandered into Colorado and California. Neither stayed, but each sparked a great deal of excitement and worry among ecologists, nature lovers, ranchers and the cattle industry. Their visitations brought this de-listing proposal into focus and into question. Is it a simple, straightforward bureaucratic mandate, as the Feds claim? Is it a cynical bow to the powerful cattle lobby? Is it about an innate, seemingly intractable human fear of wolves? Are the federally re-introduced and federally protected wolves a surrogate for the mistrusted, hated government in Washington? (When ranchers and hunters look at the face of a wolf through their scopes, do they see the face of Barack Obama?) 

Or, on the other hand, is the economic burden wolves cause for ranchers profound enough to merit the antagonism I witnessed in late November, at a public hearing in Sacramento on the proposal. Parked outside the hearing, there was a U-Haul truck with a large banner reading "De-list killer wolves." There was a surprising amount of security. Also a sign on the door reading "No Weapons Allowed." Inside the crowded Marriott Courtyard Golden Ballroom there were people sitting on the floor and lined up along the walls. There were men in suits, men in cowboy hats, women in t-shirts that featured wolves howling at moons, and a kid with a toy-wolf hat on his head. On a Friday night in a state with no wolves, 170 people signed up to speak. The hearing went 45 minutes longer than scheduled but they only got to, maybe, 70 speakers. This was partly because the room reacted to each one, despite being implored not to, either with applause for pro-wolf speakers or bitter derision for anti-wolf speakers. There were occasional shouts of "Liar!" from advocates for each side. One person yelled at a hunter who talked about shooting wolves, "We'll shoot you!" I noted tears twice, at 6:40 and 7:25 p.m. 

So the room was overwhelmingly and vocally pro-wolf and I would say the actual speakers were about 75% pro-wolf. However, as one anti-wolf speaker said, if this meeting had been taking place in Montana or Wyoming, the make-up of the room would have been quite the opposite. Tourists may love them. In fact, they have been a windfall for the tourist industry in and around Yellowstone. But ranchers hate the wolves. And hunters dislike them greatly. Such is their dislike that the proposal has led to a truly remarkable philosophical and political trading of places, in which ranchers, hunters and their professional advocates in Washington, over and over again at the hearing and in their current literature, declare great trust in government science and its decision-making process. Not a thing you expect to hear from ranchers and hunters, at least in the west.

I had just returned from four days of wolf-tracking on the Northern Range of Yellowstone with wolf biologists Nathan Varley and Linda Thurston, a married couple who live in Gardiner, Montana, about a block outside the North entrance to the big park. At dinners in town after a day of tracking, I noticed that gentle and friendly Nathan, who grew up in Gardiner, would sometimes check the room and lower his already soft voice before getting too deep into the wolf talk. Linda, who, at 5' 5", maybe 140 pounds, has been known to trap, pin and sedate wild wolves for study single-handedly, was slightly less self-conscious. She has spent years working with wolf-hostile ranchers to find non-lethal ways to protect their herds.

It was wolf hunting season when I was there. Any wolf that stepped outside the imaginary boundaries of Yellowstone became game. Already at least 5 had been shot in Montana. Many more in Wyoming and Michigan, in Wisconsin, in Minnesota. More than 2000 have been killed since the government removed the gray wolf from the Endangered Species list in these particular states in 2011. Among the dead was the alpha female known internationally as "06," whose killing in November of 2012 still reverberates among the Yellowstone packs and their human watchers. Now comes the proposal to finish the de-listing job. Thus the hearing, the tears, the signs and the threats.  

I want to tell this story without anthropomorphizing the wolves, although I might have to anthropomorphize some of the people. Really, there is great passion and misguided craziness on both sides. It's fascinating to witness. My best stories have always entered such issues with great enthusiasm and empathy, given all the sides their say, and found people and stories to bring clarity and perspective. (Please see links below.) This is one of those stories. I've got a list of deeply-effected characters to draw, including the wolf biologist couple, a rancher who rides the range to protect her family's herds, the federal manager of re-introduced wolves, and possibly the very hunter who killed "06." There are real concerns of real people on both sides to explore, questions to put, economic and naturalist studies to parse and landscape to describe. 

There's a winter wolf-tracking program coming up in February back in Yellowstone with Varley and Thurston I was thinking of attending. I'm hoping I can spark someone's interest before then...

Clips: Hail Mary, USA - GQ
Get Confident, Stupid - GQ
No Escape, No Surrender - San Francisco Magazine
Also, had this Amazon Kindle Single published in 2013: Until You Bleed
Jim O'B - icecityalmanac@gmail.com