Unfortunately, the interpretive approach is frequently ignored, misunderstood, or given short shrift in traditional schools of public policy. So too, many policy courses in animal studies, environmental studies, and the like are unaware of or insufficiently acquainted with interpretive approaches. This is doubly unfortunate. Interpretive and ‘analytic’ (e.g. positivist, quantitative, institutionalist, economist) approaches need not oppose one another, and can be usefully combined. And those making policy, whether in the public, private or non-profit sectors, are denied the benefits of both approaches triangulating on our best understanding of policy problems and their solutions.

The policy arena of wolf recovery is a case in point. Long regarded as a matter for the natural science, wolf recovery is as much or more a matter of cultural norms. With this in mind, I recently published an article entitled Discourse and Wolves: Science, Society and Ethics*. It intentionally tries to clarify some of the terms and methods of interpretive policy approaches by using the concept of discourse. I’ve included the methodology section in this post, and hope you will find it of some use in your own work. You can find the entire article in the journal Society and Animals.

It is ironic as well that the article also illustrates the troubles sometimes faced by those practicing interpretive policy studies. The manuscript for this article was originally invited as a book chapter for a book on wolves and society. It fell victim, however, to the empiricist presuppositions and personal politics of some of the book’s editors. But all is well that ends well. I’m very pleased the article found a perfect home in Society and Animals.

Cheers!

P.S. If you find this approach intriguing, I recommend Dvora Yanow’s Interpretive Policy Analysis (Sage, 1999) as a wonderful and insightful introduction.

* Lynn, William S. 2010. Discourse and Wolves: Science, Society and Ethics. Society & Animals 18 (1): 75-92.

Image: Tracy Brooks, 2003, Reflection.

~

Methodological Caveat

As you read this article, you will note it does not conform to the usual conventions of the scientific literature. One might expect this, as I do not pretend to be a scientist in the usual sense of the term. But there is more to it than that. The standard conventions of scientific articles – a statement of the research question justified by a literature review of findings to date, a description of the methods and measures used to test a hypothesis, and a discussion of the results followed by their significance and possible avenues for future exploration – are entirely appropriate to research questions amenable to quantitative methods. These conventions were developed in and for the natural sciences, work well within those domains, and overall there is no reason to diminish them (Chalmers 1999; Lindberg 1992; Lynn 2004).

When it comes to explaining human beings and their societies, there was a time when the human sciences sought to ape the natural sciences in theory, method and publishing conventions. This was a dismal failure, and while the struggle to shift gears continues, the positivist turn is long dead. The reason is that human beings do not conform to models of a determinism and/or predictivism that are the hallmark of the physical sciences. The sentience and sapience of people – their awareness and self-awareness – makes their thoughts and actions contingent and creative, transcending the boundary conditions for which the research practices and writing conventions of the natural sciences were devised (Bernstein 1991; Rorty 1979). Yes, there are still people who defend a ‘naturalistic model’ of the human sciences. Yet honestly, it is embarrassing to see an old-school positivist scholar chopped up by their peers because they have not kept up with the history and philosophy of science literature over the last fifty years. E. O. Wilson’s and his acolytes of consilience best represent this yearning for the old ways (Westley and Miller 2003; Wilson 1998). We can do much better than this now.

What is needed in such cases is a methodology adapted to the ‘human sciences’, something capable of causal explanation (the hallmark of science) without the pretense of determinism or predictivism [1]. Various social theories and qualitative methodologies have arisen to fill this need (Denzin and Lincoln 2000; Hesse-Biber and Leavy 2005; Schwandt 2007). So too have new conventions for publications, specifically around the idea of interpretation and narrative (Fischer and Forester 1996; Roe 1994; Yanow 1999). So for those with an interest in methodological affairs, what follows is an interpretation of several discourses that inform how we think about and act towards wolves. Intentionally broad in scale and scope, it looks for the resonance between our ideas, behaviour and social institutions, or to put the matter in social theoretical language, the interplay of human agency and social structure. The point is not to predict or determinatively explain what people and organizations do. That is not possible with human and some other beings. Rather, the purpose is to reveal the discursive dynamic that constitute, at least in part, our individual and collective stance towards wolves in the world [2].

Discourse

I approach discourse as a hermeneuticist. Hermeneutics is the study of understanding, one of the main perspectives in social theory [3]. The basic idea is that our personal and social lives can only be fully understood when we account for the meaning embedded in our actions and social relations, such as is found in our presuppositions and worldviews. To explain the human world, we therefore have to interpret what people mean when they say or do something, and what significance their words and actions have for the rest of the world.

Engaging in this kind of interpretation might seem trivial to some, as if picking out someone at random on the street and asking them about wolves is going to tell us the truth about wolf biology or ecology. But that would be missing the point. Hermeneuticists are interested in our individual and collective interpretations of wolves. These interpretations are highly significant, if, let us suppose, politically motivated wildlife professionals foster an approach to environmental policy that emphasizes agricultural production, ranching and sport hunting at the expense of predators, ecosystem function and biodiversity. So one cannot understand (as in describe, explain, evaluate or justify) why someone or some group acts as they do without first interpreting what they think and how it informs their actions. It is for this reason that hermeneutics is a keystone tradition of scholarship with respect to the theory and methodology of the human sciences (Bruns 1992; Gadamer 1993; Mueller-Vollmer 1989; Wachterhauser 1994).

To the hermeneuticist, discourse refers to the interconnections between ways of thinking and acting. It is not only a point-of-view that helps direct our actions in the world, it is also the meaning(s) embedded in our actions and social institutions. This approach extends the idea of discourse beyond the expression of an idea or perspective, whether in speech, writing or artistic creation. It focuses on the role of language in the formation of presuppositions, worldviews and ways of life. In this extended version, discourse traces the linguistic connections between several components — thought, action and social institutions. The argument from a discursive perspective is that language interweaves these components in such a manner that they are reciprocally constituted and/or mutually informing. That is to say, there is an inextricable linkage between how individual and collective agents think, speak, act and interact.

I use the term resonance (or resonances) to refer to the linkages between the components of discourse, as well as between different discourses themselves. I say resonance because these linkages are not uniform or static, but plural and shifting. They do not constitute a system of discreet inputs and outputs amenable to modeling and prediction. Rather they are a shifting configuration of meaning and social interaction that must be apprehended for their causal influences.

This contingency between meaning and social interaction arises from the way in which discourse connects intangible and tangible phenomena [4]. There is an ecology of intangible ideas, intentions, worldviews and culture, with more tangible actions, social institutions, and their outcomes (e.g. environmental and social policy). This ecology defies reductionism, and is better understood through a process of interpretation. Discourse is a powerful conceptual tool in the process of social and moral interpretation. It helps us identify and theorize a shifting field of resonances, and thereby understand the context, content and consequences of a discourse. With this in mind, we can better understand why and how an idea, social practice or institution exists, operates and perpetuates itself (Kelly 1990) [5].

Discourse may simultaneously exist at several levels. At one level are ideas, whether expressed in terms of reasons or emotions. At another level are actions. Here, reason and emotion become the motivating factors for acting in the world. At still another level are social institutions such as government agencies, economic and politically based interest groups, or non-profit advocacy organization. These institutions are also part of our discourses, patterns of thinking and acting that, over time, take on concrete and durable form (Ball 1988; Barnes and Duncan 1992; Wolf 2003b). When Stone expressed care for the well-being of abandoned wolf pups, her expression was at the discursive level of ideas. When she took to the field to find and save the pups from starvation, her behaviour was at the action level of discourse. When she went back to work at a NGO that is part of our social system, she was involved at the institutional level of discourse.

If we think of a discourse like a text, such as an essay or a policy statement, then we can ‘read’ these texts for their meaning(s). Like a written or spoken narrative, the meaning of a discourse can be interpreted for its good or ill intentions, content, implications and consequences (Ricoeur 1977; Ricoeur 1991; Ricoeur 1996). Thus when the state of Alaska justifies the aerial gunning of wolves through policy statements of dubious scientific value, we have a discourse we can read like a text and from which we can extract its meaning. So too, when gunners take to the air to kill wolves, we have an equally meaningful action on which to base our interpretations and from which to discern the values and worldviews that inform those actions. When the Alaska Board of Game continues to authorize lethal control measures against wolves, we see a social institution whose members, policies and practices are partaking of a broader anti-wolf discourse.

The interpretations of discourse are never perfect or unequivocal. There is always more to be learned, and multiple meanings are the norm. Nor are the intentions or consequences behind a statement or act always obvious or explicit. They can be concealed, poorly understood or unexpected (Hirsch 1967; Hirschman 1987). Because of this and other contingencies, hermeneuticists are humble about the power of any one interpretation and encourage dialogue to generate a broadly shared horizon of understanding. Moreover, they believe that reason and evidence, along with good will and a skeptical eye, can distinguish better from worse interpretations. In this way, we make progress in finding the truth. Finally, truth is not relative or absolute. In alignment with the best understanding of science, truth is always proximate. While veracity is the goal, verisimilitude is the reality. For hermeneuticists, understanding is always partial and fallible, and it is through dialogue with others that we reach a deeper and better understanding of the presuppositions and worldviews of ourselves and others [6].

Notes

1. The terms human science and natural science are commonly used in social theory, qualitative inquiry and the philosophy of science. The former refers to what others call the behavioural and social sciences, while the later refers to the physical, biological and life sciences. In addition to serving as a way to categorize different forms of scientific knowledge, it also implies a more historically and philosophically reflective posture over the theory, methods and role of science itself (see Ricoeur 1981).

2. Astute readers may recognize that a similar shift is occurring in the field of cognitive ethology. There is a recognition that many kinds of non-human animals think, feel, plan, play, act altruistically and selfishly, have a sense of guilt and wild justice, and transmit cultural traditions. The growth of this theoretical perspective has methodological implications, and represents a turning away from positivist models that frequently misunderstand animals. While using a different language, cognitive ethology is developing its own interpretive theory and qualitative methods. In this sense it is kin to hermeneutic traditions in the human sciences (for examples of such work, see Allen and Bekoff 2007; Bekoff et al. 2002; Bekoff 2005).

3. Hermeneutics is named after Hermes, the Greek god who handled communication between Olympus and the Ecumene — the habitable world of humanity, which for the Greeks was centred on the Mediterranean. Like the coyote, however, Hermes is a trickster, taking pleasure in parsing meaning that leads to misunderstanding. The background idea here is that language is not something we simply use to subjectively describe our feelings or objectively describe the world. Rather language is constitutive of how we experience and conceptualize the world around us.

4. For more on the ‘qualities’ and ‘phenomena’ that distinguish the human and natural sciences, as well as the implications this has for causal explanation, qualitative inquiry and moral reasoning, see (Lynn 2004).

5. When I speak of discourse, I often shift between the singular and plural. This is to denote the scale and specificity of my comments. Thus I may speak of discourse in general, discourses in particular, or a particular discourse in the singular.

6. There are other theories about discourse that emphasize the ideological nature of ‘totalizing’ discourse (e.g. structuralism), the partiality of all discourse (e.g. poststructuralism) and the distorting tendencies of all discourse (e.g. critical theory). The structuralists and poststructuralists tend to see people as subjects of discourse, as in subservient to the discourse(s) that constitute their worldview. Hermeneuticists and critical theorists think otherwise, believing people have agency, that is, they can be self-determining, and are not the pawns of larger social forces. Exercising this agency may not be easy (or possible) for everyone, but it is in the nature of human beings to be agents and interpreters of their own individual and collective lives (for examples of this literature, see Darier 1999; Gare 1995; Habermas 1993; Habermas 1998; Wolf 2003a).

References

Allen, Colin, and Marc Bekoff. 2007. Animal Minds, Cognitive Ethology and Ethics. The Journal of Ethics 11: 299-317.

Ball, Terence. 1988. Transforming Political Discourse: Political Theory and Critical Conceptual History. New York: Basil Blackwell.

Barnes, Trevor J, and James S Duncan, eds. 1992. Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. New York: Routledge.

Bekoff, Marc. 2005. Animal Passions and Beastly Virtues: Reflections on Redecorating Nature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Bekoff, Mark, Colin Allen, and Gordon Burghardt, eds. 2002. The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Bernstein, Richard J. 1991. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Bruns, Gerald L. 1992. Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Chalmers, Alan. 1999. What is This Thing Called Science? An Assessment of the Nature and Status of Science and its Methods. Third ed. London: Open University Press.

Darier, Eric. 1999. Discourses of the Environment. New York: Blackwell.

Denzin, Norman K, and Yvonna S Lincoln, eds. 2000. Handbook of Qualitative Research. Second ed. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage.

Fischer, Frank, and John Forester. 1996. The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1993. Truth and Method. Second, Revised ed. New York: Continuum.

Gare, Arran E. 1995. Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis. New York: Routledge.

Habermas, Jurgen. 1993. Justification and Application: Remarks On Discourse Ethics. Edited by Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: MIT Press.

———. 1998. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Hesse-Biber, Sharlene Nagy, and Patricia Leavy. 2005. The Practice of Qualitative Research: A Primer. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Hirsch, Edward D. 1967. Validity In Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Hirschman, Albert O. 1987. The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding. In Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look, eds. P. Rabinow, and William M Sullivan, 177-194. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kelly, Michael, ed. 1990. Hermeneutics and Critical Theory in Ethics and Politics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Lindberg, David C. 1992. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lynn, William S. 2004. The Quality of Ethics: Moral Causation in the Interdisciplinary Science of Geography. In Geographies and Moralities: International Perspectives on Justice, Development and Place, eds. Roger Lee, and David M Smith, 231-244. London: Routledge.

Mueller-Vollmer, K. 1989. The Hermeneutics Reader: Texts of the German Tradition from the Enlightenment to the Present. New York: Continuum.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1977. The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text. In Understanding Social Inquiry, eds. F. Dallmayr, and T A McCarthy, 316-344. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

———. 1981. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1991. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press.
———. 1996. The Hermeneutics of Action. Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Roe, Emory. 1994. Narrative Policy Analysis: Theory and Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Schwandt, Thomas A. 2007. Dictionary of Qualitative Inquiry. Third ed. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Wachterhauser, Brice R, ed. 1994. Hermeneutics and Truth. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Westley, Frances, and Philip Miller, eds. 2003. Experiments in Consilience: Integrating Social and Scientific Responses to Save Endangered Species. Washington D.C.: Island Press.

Wilson, Edward O. 1998. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Wolf, Cary. 2003a. Animal Rites: American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthuman Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wolf, Cary, ed. 2003b. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Yanow, Dvora. 1999. Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

For example, should we kill sea lions to save salmon, coyotes to protect sheep, wolves to safeguard cattle, or cats to preserve song-birds? These are the kinds of questions we addressed.

Hosted by Emily Harris and David Miller, ‘Playing God?’ was an episode of Think Out Loud, a fascinating programme of Oregon Public Broadcasting.

You can visit the ‘Playing God?‘ webpage to listen to the show, as well as add your comments to the interactive blog.

cheers, Bill

When we talk about the recovery of wolves, what do we really mean? By reading the literature and listening to people talk, I hear several distinct meanings. You may have heard others as well.

To my ear, the first meaning has to do with conservation, by which is meant the government regulating whether and how people hunt, trap and kill wolves. The background idea here is that wolves are an agricultural crop to be culled, or a pest to be exterminated. Natural recolonization is the second meaning. Here wolves recolonize an area of their former range by way of out-migration from the places they already inhabit. The idea here is that by successfully establishing themselves in new habitats, wolves demonstrate their fitness to inhabit those landscapes, and side-step political controversies over human intervention. Finally, there is restoration, a process where humans intervene to help a population of wolves take root and grow. This usually involves captive breeding, capture and release. In restoration the idea is to help wolves over geographic hurdles so they can return to an area that they would recolonize if human development were not in the way.

Opponents of wolves often talk in public of their commitment to wolf recovery, by which they really mean ‘conserving’ the least number of wolves in the smallest possible area for the shortest period of time. Proponents of wolf recovery tend to focus on the recolonization or restoration of wolves in areas outside their current haunts. Even so, both opponents and proponents often agree to restrict wolves within the borders of predefined recovery zones. These are not natural borders based on ecological criteria, but barriers to recovery imposed by partisan politics.

You can distinguish the various meanings of recovery by listening for the unarticulated moral sensibilities behind what advocates, scientists, bureaucrats and politicians are saying. If their sensibilities are hostile to wolves, then whatever the rhetoric, you can bet their idea of recovery has less to do with expanding the range of wolves, than it does with getting these canids within the range of a gun. If their ideas are benign, they often favour one kind of recovery over another depending on two factors – the prospects for recolonization and the degree of political opposition to wolves.

For instance, there are many places in North America where wolves would thrive. Geographic barriers and human depredation, however, prevent wolves from recolonizing on their own. Examples include the northern forests of New York and New England, and the Grand Canyon ecoregion in the southwest. Advocates, ethicists and scientists have proposed restoring wolves in these places. A vocal minority of residents, special interests and government officials have stymied such efforts.

Some of this opposition is rooted in a direct antipathy to wolves. The local bumper sticker ‘ Wolves – Government-Sponsored Terrorists’ encapsulates this view rather nicely. Other elements of the opposition are evasive. Special interests and politicians often ‘support’ recolonization but not restoration. This allows them to have their cake and eat it too. They can speak as if they support recovery, but in practice they undermine it.

There is sometimes a strange moral argument made by the opposition as well. It runs something like this. Extinction for natural reasons has always occurred throughout history. Humanity is simply another force of local or complete extinction. If wolves cannot survive in human-dominated landscapes by adapting their way of life to ours, then extinction is the natural result. We are under no moral obligation to help wolves, and further, it might even be immoral to help an evolutionarily ‘unfit’ species continue to survive.

This argument has two basic flaws. It assumes that humans are a ‘natural’ force of extinction, and fails to distinguish natural from anthropogenic sources of environmental change. Second, it justifies a moral claim with an uncritical appeal to humanity as a natural force of extinction. It is not an argument that holds water in the sense of corresponding to the facts, or making a reasoned claim. In this sense, it is really a set of ad hoc justifications for refusing to share the landscape with wolves.

Were we all to agree that recovery is a good idea in general, there are still a host of other questions to answer. Should we have wolves in our area? If so, where? Do wolves belong only in the most remote corners of a wilderness, or over that hill about half an hour’s walk from here? Should wolves be kept away from people, pets and farm animals? Or should we adapt to the presence of wolves in our everyday lives? How might the predation of wolves alter the landscape or impact local economies? Who will resolve the run of the mill conflicts between humans and wolves?

To answer these and other practical questions, we must address the ethical reasons, ecological impact and social aspects of wolf recovery. Others have discussed the ecological and social dimensions at some length. What they have to say generally boils down to a discussion of habitat suitability and human tolerance.

I want to address the ethical reasons by sharing five ideas to help guide our thinking. You can use these ideas to ferret out the moral assumptions behind the rhetoric of wolf recovery. You can also use them to evaluate whether current or proposed policies or management practices are justified. As you come across ethically problematic issues in wolf recovery, please do share them with us. If you have a question or concern, you can bet that someone else has something similar as well. And when we share these experience and thoughts, we deepen our collective understanding.

1. Ethics can help us heal our troubled world and our troubles with wolves.
Make no mistake about it, ours is a troubled world. A partial list of our troubles includes war, poverty, injustice, the neglect of children, and the abuse of animals. Globalization makes these problems increasingly complex. Terrorism – especially the prospect of bioterrorism – adds yet another illness to burden our social and environmental health. What some have called the ‘war against wolves’ is one symptom of this troubled world. What are we to do about all this?

One answer is to look to our deepest moral values, which is to say, the ethics that guide our individual and collective lives. In the words of Socrates, ethics envisions ‘how we ought to live’. Put into practice, ethics outlines moral principles to guide our thought and action. When used properly, ethics can help improve the well-being of ourselves and others – human and non-human. By clarifying what our world ought to be like, ethics helps us make better personal and social decisions, distinguish better from worse interpretations and actions, and reveal the values that are at stake — or should be at stake — in debates over nature and society, animals and people, wolves and humanity.

Using ethics to help us make better policy choices is at the heart of wolf recovery. The political hackles that talk of wolf recovery can raise are symptoms of a moral conflict over whether or not to coexist with large predators. And this is related to our coexistence with the natural world, and whether we see ourselves apart from or part of a wider fellowship of life.

This moral conflict is akin to humanity’s struggle for human rights and justice. Our societies have and continue to struggle with questions of race, class, gender and ethnicity in the political and social spheres. While we have made much progress, there remains much to be done. Yet the basic idea that there are morally right and wrong ways in which to treat people and their communities is beyond dispute. So too, we are struggling with questions of species, and what moral responsibilities we owe the non-human world.

The natural and social sciences cannot answer these questions for us, for moral conflicts cannot be understood or solved by gathering empirical data, or developing a better quantitative model, or practicing an innovative management technique. To solve our moral conflicts we need to face them for what they are – differences over ethical values and worldviews. Only then can we reveal the values at stake, and sort out better from worse ideas about wolf recovery.

2. Wolves have moral value.
When people say wolves have moral value, what does this mean? Generally it means that wolves have intrinsic value in and of themselves, and should have moral standing in our community. This does not mean that wolves are human beings. Rather it emphasizes that both people and wolves are creatures worthy of care and respect. We can see how this thinking works by using an analogy between people and wolves.

Human beings are intelligent and social creatures – we think, we feel, we relate. We are aware of ourselves, of others and our environment. This kind of awareness is why we are termed Homo sapiens, literally the ‘wise earthly ones’. Because of our self-awareness, we have an individual worth independent of the use anyone has for us. Ethicists term this ‘intrinsic value’. Intrinsic value is the core reason why we should treat people with care and respect. It is also why love and friendship and democracy and justice are so important. They are ethical principles, dispositions and practices that help us ‘do right’ by individuals and communities. Because of our intrinsic value, humans are therefore part of a moral community.

Wolves are intelligent and social creatures too. Like us, they think, feel and relate. Not in exactly the same manner as we, but in a way appropriate to their kind. So like human beings, wolves have a well-being of their own to care about. Such ideas about the moral value of wolves are part of a larger sensibility that animals are not simply property. Wolves and other animals have their own intrinsic value, quite apart from the instrumental purposes that humans may have for them. This does not mean that we treat people and wolves in the same way. For instance, wolves have no political right to vote – nor should they: they are not the kinds of creatures who can do so. But what it does mean is that we ought to take the welfare of wolves into account whether in the outback or in our backyard. Wolves are thus part of the moral community along with human beings.

3. Wolf management is an ethical concern.
If wolves have moral value, then our choices in wolf management are moral decisions.

Biologists have noted time and again that the recovery of wolves is not so much an ecological as it is a social issue. We have only to keep the human killers of wolves at bay, and wolves will thrive wherever there is sufficient prey and habitat. This is an insightful point. It becomes more powerful when we recall how ethical norms condition our willingness to live with wolves.

The vilification of wolves in Europe and North America are cases in point. Historically, anti-wolf sentiment took on the form of a moral argument against wolves. Wolves were considered villains, varmints and vermin. They were criminals preying on innocent victims like deer, cattle and sheep. They were the spawn of Satan – even Satan himself – despoiling the landscape. Today they are compared to terrorists threatening human communities. As a consequence of this reasoning, our societies killed wolves with a vengeance.

Over the last century, this caricature of wolves has been debunked. Ethicists have argued for the moral value of wolves. Scientists have demonstrated the importance of predation in the natural world. Environmentalists have mobilized broad public support for the conservation of biodiversity. These and other groups have upended the moral arguments against wolves.

In so doing, these groups have also cleared the way for a reevaluation of wolves. We are beginning to ask ethical questions that go beyond biological suitability or social carrying capacity. We are asking how we ‘ought’ to live with wolves, and what our responsibilities are to wolves themselves. Please do not miss the significance of this. The ethics of wolf recovery has been ignored in public deliberation for decades. This has impoverished our policy options regarding wolf recovery. Attending to the ethical questions promises a better approach to wolf recovery in Europe, North America and elsewhere.

4. A sound science requires a sound ethics.
In my travels and public speaking, I have said this time and again, but it bears repeating. A sound science requires a sound ethics.

When discussing predator management, we are likely to hear praises of ‘sound science’. Sound science is supposed to be the evidence-based, theory-rich baseline for managing wolves. Yet as previously noted, humanity’s trouble with wolves is really a moral conflict.

Science can provide us important information about our ethical and social choices, but it cannot make those choices for us. So what we need is a sound ethics to complement the science of wolf recovery, and guide our policy choices. What would this ethic look like? To my mind, it must meet three criteria.
o A sound ethics must recognize the moral value of wolves.
o A sound ethics must highlight the moral significance of wildlife advocacy, management and science.
o A sound ethics must emphasize the practical value of ethics in the recovery of wolves.

Human action has always had a real and frequently tragic impact on the well-being wolves. Whether intentional or not, wolf management is always laden with ethical motivations and consequences. Paying attention to the criteria above will help us identify the moral assumptions at work in diverse visions and practices of wolf recovery.

My sense is that wildlife professionals are beginning to appreciate the moral dimensions of their work. I have talked with hundreds of students, advocates, scientists, government officials and the like about the ethics of wolf recovery. Most of them care deeply about the well-being of people, animals and the places they inhabit. It is this caring that forms the foundation for their moral sensibilities, and their longing to bring ethical criteria into their work.

What I find tragic is how graduate education and professional training often beat these sensibilities into a submission to some illusory ‘value-free’ science. Equally heartbreaking is that many individuals are forbidden to express these moral sensibilities by the agencies, corporations or non-profits for which they work. I hope it is obvious by now that this silence must be broken.

5. The recovery of wolves will help restore our relationship to nature.
Wolf recovery is important to the well-being of wolves. Arguably that is moral reason enough for our participation in robust recovery efforts. But it may also be important to us as a step in restoring our broken relationship with nature.

Just as our world is deeply troubled, our relationship to nature is broken. The scale of human-induced environmental problems is too massive to deny, e.g. global warming, deforestation, desertification, extinction, invasive species, over-population, over-consumption and pollution. Yet there is still time to acknowledge our responsibilities, space to restore the natural world, and a place for a nature-friendly culture. Wolves can help us in this regard.

Humanity has a special history and relationship with wolves. Despite the differences, Canis lupus and Homo sapiens readily communicate, so much so, that wolves were the first large mammal to coevolve with humans. Some prehistoric peoples modeled their societies after wolf packs, and some wolves were domesticated to become the dogs of today. Indeed, wolves and dogs have been so important to the development of human culture that some scholars joke about reclassifying humanity as Homo lupus! This relationship is amongst the best places to redefine our place in the natural world.

The recovery of wolves across the world would be a major step forward. In the first place, it would require that we cultivate a respect for the intrinsic value and well-being of wolves and their habitats. This will have obvious benefits for other animals and natural communities. In the second place, it would promote the ecological health of the landscape. Wolves are top carnivores that help maintain biodiversity and ecological function with respect to everything from forest ground cover, to the incidence of song birds, to the control of deer populations, to the spread of Lyme’s disease. In the third place, a broad recovery of wolves would be evidence of our moral health. If our societies can learn to live alongside wolves, we are one step closer to living in sympathy and sustainably with the rest of the natural world.

Conclusion
I have no doubt we will face hard choices about wolf recovery. While human interests should not trump the welfare of wolves, the needs of wolves do not automatically override the well-being of people. Remember that both people and wolves have moral value. There must be a dynamic synthesis of the two. This synthesis is best reached through win-win solutions that protect ethical, ecological and social values. Sometimes, however, we are faced with situations on the ground that require choosing the well-being of one over the other. These are the hard cases of ethics and policy. We should not deny they exist, nor should we overstate their importance.

If we want free-roaming wolves to survive this millennium, we will have to make better policy choices about ‘how we ought to live’ with predators and other wild animals. We will have to accept our moral responsibilities to a mixed community that includes both humanity and wolves. And if we proactively act with ethical concern for the wolves that can recolonize or be restored across the landscapes of this planet, we may even cultivate a culture that honours and celebrates people, animals and the rest of nature.

Cheers, Bill

~

Bill Lynn is the founder and Senior Ethics Advisor of Practical Ethics (http://www.practicalethics.net/), and a professor at the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University (www.tufts.edu/vet/cfa).

Image: Tracy Brooks, 2003, Reflection.

I have the great pleasure of introducing Denise Taylor as an advisor with Practical Ethics, and a contributing author to this blog.

Denise Taylor is an entrepreneur and conservationist whose primary interests are in education and learning in wildlife conservation.

A life-long passion for wildlife led Denise into becoming a volunteer conservationist in the early 1990s. Denise initially worked with Wolf Watch UK before moving to the UK Wolf Conservation Trust to become the founding Editor of Wolf Print magazine, which now enjoys an international reputation and is supported by wolf biologists, conservationists and researchers throughout the world. Wolf Print synthesises the work of academics for a lay-audience, and the content is often about the human dimensions of wolf conservation and wolf population recovery with a particular focus on wolves in Europe. Denise later became a director of the Trust.

Denise was awarded her degree in Business Administration in 1995, and is currently in the final stages of writing up her doctoral thesis at the University of Nottingham, England. Her research interest is the efficacy of wolf conservation education programmes throughout the world, with a focus on hard to reach target groups who are, or perceived to be, resistant to the primary goals of wolf conservation and consequently to any education strategy which has this aim, taking into account the cultural, socio-economic and political issues involved. Although a wolf advocate, Denise has a pragmatic approach to wolf conservation and along with colleagues is keen to engage and work with the various stakeholders in the conservation of wolves.

As a result of her research and her work with the UKWCT, in 2003 Denise founded E4C (www.education4conservation.org) which provides resources for conservation educators throughout the world. E4C also acts as a partner organisation with other NGOs to maximise funding opportunities for the benefit of wildlife conservation, education strategy development, community capacity building and helping to alleviate conflict situations involving predators and livestock depredation. The most recent of these partner projects raised significant funding to help set up and equip a Large Carnivore Centre in the Pirin Mountains in Bulgaria.

In the UK, E4C takes a more hands-on approach to conservation education; planning and implementing nature-based workshops, activities and festivals. Using a combination of nature, the arts and technology, the Inspired by Nature programmes are values-based and achieve a dual impact aimed at fostering respect for wildlife and nature and at the same time providing different perspectives, and new knowledge and skills, particularly for socially disadvantaged young people.

For the past few years Denise has combined her business and academic interests. She strongly believes that her background in the corporate world gives her a pragmatic approach to conservation that helps to bridge the gaps between the different disciplines and complements the work of science-based colleagues.

Denise is also a member of the IUCN (The World Conservation Union) Canid Specialist Group; comprising a group of 100 international experts from around the world. (www.iucn.org).

If you would like to get in touch with Denise, her contact information is below.

Denise Taylor
Founder and Executive Director
Education 4 Conservation Ltd
Hillcrest, Pailton Fields
Pailton
Rugby
Warwickshire CV23 0QJ
England

Tel: +44 (0) 1788 833232
Denise.taylor@btinternet.com
www.education4conservation.org
www.ukwolf.org

The Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project (GCWRP) is a coalition of conservation organizations, zoos, universities, and individuals from throughout the southwest, who have come together to support wolf recovery in the Grand Canyon Ecoregion (GCE), because science tells us it is the last best place for wolves in Arizona.

The organizations involved with the coalition have a long history of success with predator issues. Coalition members, including Defenders of Wildlife, Sierra Club, and the Center for Biological Diversity were instrumental in returning the wolf to southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, through the Mexican Wolf Recovery Program. Many of the organizations are currently working together on the upcoming forest management plans to ensure that lowered road densities, recovery of other native species, and extirpation of non-native species, are a priority, creating safe havens and safe passages for wildlife and paving the way so that some day we may hear the sound of wolves howling across Arizona.

For more information about the project, contact:

Paula Lewis
Coordinator
Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project
P.O. Box 1594
Flagstaff, AZ 86002
(928) 202-1325
info@gcwolfrecovery.org

Camilla H. Fox
Director, Project Coyote
Wildlife Consultant
P.O. Box 5007
Larkspur, CA 94977
cfox@projectcoyote.org

www.ProjectCoyote.org
www.practicalethics.net/blog/camilla-fox

I have the pleasure of introducing yet another remarkable person, who is both a columnist on Ethos and an advisor to Practical Ethics.

For over 15 years, Camilla Fox has worked to protect wildlife and wildlands in the U.S. and internationally.  She has served in leadership positions with the Animal Protection Institute, Fur-Bearer Defenders, and Rainforest Action Network and has spearheaded campaigns aimed at protecting native carnivores and fostering humane and ecologically sound solutions to human-wildlife conflicts.

As the Founding Director of Project Coyote and a wildlife consultant, Camilla assists communities, agencies, wildlife managers, and non-governmental organizations in creating innovative solutions to help people and wildlife coexist. A frequent speaker on these issues, Camilla has authored more than 60 publications and is co-author of Coyotes in Our Midst: Coexisting with an Adaptable and Resilient Carnivore and co-editor and lead author of the book, Cull of the Wild: A Contemporary Analysis of Trapping in the United States. She is also the producer of the companion film, Cull of the Wild: The Truth Behind Trapping. Her work on behalf of wildlife has been featured in several national and international media outlets including the German documentary, Coyote: The Hunted Hunter, and two North American documentaries: American Coyote- Still Wild at Heart, and On Nature’s Terms, as well as the New York Times, the BBC, NPR, Orion, USA Today magazine, and Bay Nature magazine.

Camilla holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Studies with a focus in Wildlife Conservation, Policy, and Ecology from Prescott College and a Bachelor’s degree from Boston University where she graduated magna cum laude in 1991. She has served as an appointed member on the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture’s National Wildlife Services Advisory Committee and currently serves on several national and local advisory boards. In 2006, Camilla received the Humanitarian of the Year Award from the Marin Humane Society and the Christine Stevens Wildlife Award from the Animal Welfare Institute.

Selected publications:

Fox, C.H. and Bekoff, M. In press. Ethical Reflections on Wolf Recovery and Conservation: A Practical Approach for Making Room For Wolves. In M. Musiani, L. Boitani, P. Paquet (editors), The World of Wolves: New Perspectives on Ecology, Behaviour and Policy. University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta.

Fox, C.H. In press. Predator Control & Ethics. In M. Bekoff (editor). Encyclopedia of Animal Rights & Welfare (revised edition). Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut.

Fox, C.H. In press. Wildlife Trapping: Behavioral & Welfare Implications. In M. Bekoff (editor). Encyclopedia of Animal Rights & Welfare (revised edition). Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut.

Hadidian, J., C.H. Fox, and W.S. Lynn. In press. Ethics and Urban Wildlife. In M. Bekoff (editor). Encyclopedia of Animal Rights & Welfare (revised edition). Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut.

Fox, C.H. 2008. Analysis of The Marin County Strategic Plan for Protection of Livestock & Wildlife: An Alternative to Traditional Predator Control. Master’s thesis. Prescott College, Prescott, Arizona. 112 p.

Fox, C.H. 2007. Coyotes, Humans and Coexistence. Pp. 311-313 in: M. Bekoff (editor), Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships: A Global Exploration of Our Connections with Animals. Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut.

Fox, C.H. 2007. Trapping Animals. Pp. 984-989 in: M. Bekoff (editor), Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships: A Global Exploration of Our Connections with Animals. Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut.

Fox, C. H. 2006. Coyotes and humans: can we coexist? Pp. 287-293 in: R.M. Timm and J. H. O’Brien (eds.), Proceedings, 22nd Vertebrate Pest Conference. Publ. Univ. Calif.-Davis.

Hadidian, J., C.H. Fox, and W.S. Lynn. 2006. The ethics of wildlife control in humanized landscapes. Pp. 500-504 in: R.M. Timm and J. H. O’Brien (eds.), Proceedings, 22nd Vertebrate Pest Conference. Publ. Univ. Calif.-Davis.

Fox, C.H. 2006. Seeking Justice. Animal Issues 37:12-13.

Fox, C.H. 2006. Standardizing Cruelty: The International Trapping Debate. Animal Issues 37:18-21.

Fox, C.H. and C.M. Papouchis. 2005. Coyotes in Our Midst: Coexisting with an Adaptable and Resilient Carnivore. Animal Protection Institute, Sacramento, California

Fox, C.H. July, 2005. Close Encounters of the Coyote Kind. Wildlife Tracks. Humane Society of the United States, Washington, D.C. Available online at:
http://www.hsus.org/web-files/PDF/Tracks-fall-coyotes05.pdf (accessed January 10, 2008).

Fox, C.H. March 2005. Pet Peeved: You’re Working Like a Dog. But How is Your World Schedule Working Out for your Faithful Friend? Experience Life 7:78-80. Lifetime Fitness, Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Available online at: http://www.lifetimefitness.com/magazine/index.cfm?strWebAction=article_detail&intArticleId=355 (accessed January 10, 2008).

Fox, C.H. and C.M. Papouchis (eds.). 2004. Cull of the Wild: A Contemporary Analysis of Wildlife Trapping in the United States. Animal Protection Institute, Sacramento, California.

Fox, C.H. March-April 2004. God’s Dog: Learning to Co-Exist with Coyotes. Wild Mountain Times, Asheville, North Carolina.

Fox, C.H. 2004. Wildlife Trapping, Behavior, and Welfare. Pp. 1170-1176 in: M. Bekoff (ed.), Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior. Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport, Connecticut.

Fox, C.H. 2004. Close Encounters of the Coyote Kind. Animal Issues 35:14-17.

Fox, C.H. 2004. Cull of the Wild. Wild Earth 13(4):54-60. Richmond, Vermont: Wildlands Project.

Fox, C.H. 2004. Wildlife Control Out of Control. Animal Issues 35:15-18.

Fox, C.H. 2003. What About Fluffy & Fido? Pp. 52-56 In J. de Graaf (ed.), Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, California.

Fox, C.H. 2003. Predators, Politics, and Prejudice. Animal Issues 34:22-29.

Fox, C.H. 2002. National Wildlife Refuges: Sanctuaries or Killing Fields? in: K.W. Stallwood (ed.), A Primer on Animal Rights. Lantern Books, New York, New York.

Fox, C.H. 2001. Taxpayers say no to killing predators. Animal Issues 31:26-27.

Fox, C.H. 2000. Deadly Refuges. Earth Island Journal 15:27. Earth Island Institute, San Francisco, California.

]]> http://practicalethics.net/blog/camilla-fox/feed/ 0 http://practicalethics.net/blog/dogs-that-changed-the-world/ http://practicalethics.net/blog/dogs-that-changed-the-world/#comments Sun, 29 Apr 2007 22:53:40 +0000 William Lynn http://practicalethics.net/blog/?p=109

Those of you with an interest in wolves and human culture will find this series by the PBS show ‘Nature’ to be fascinating.

cheers, Bill

NATURE’s two-part special DOGS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD tells the epic story of the wolf’s evolution, how “man’s best friend” changed human society and we in turn have radically transformed dogs. Part one, “The Rise of the Dog,” premieres Sunday, April 22 at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS. Part two, “Dogs by Design,” premieres Sunday, April 29 at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings for both broadcasts).

From the tiniest Chihuahua to the powerful and massive English Mastiff, modern domesticated dogs come in a bewildering array of shapes and sizes, with an equally diverse range of temperaments and behaviors. And yet, according to genetics, all dogs evolved from the savage and wild wolf-in a transformation that occurred just 15,000 years ago.

In THE RISE OF THE DOG, you’ll learn about how the domestication of dogs might have taken place, including the theory of biologist Raymond Coppinger that it was the animals themselves-and human trash-that inspired the transformation. The genetic analysis of Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden has placed the origins of domesticated dogs-and those of the first dog-in East Asia. You’ll also discover 14 dog breeds that controversial genetic studies show are the most ancient-and the best living representatives of the ancestors to all living dogs.

Over 400 breeds of dog are recognized around the world, each unique for its personality, habits, and form. Most of these breeds exploded onto the scene over the past 150 years, spurred by the Victorian-era passion for the “dog fancy”-the selective breeding of dogs to enhance particular characteristics. By tinkering with its genetics, humans made the dog the most varied animal species on the planet-and also created a host of hereditary health problems.

Despite the plethora of new shapes and sizes, dogs have retained the instincts bred into their ancestors by thousands of years of work: the urge to herd or hunt, to dig and to guard. In DOGS BY DESIGN you’ll discover how these hard-wired behaviors help different types of dogs, from hounds to herders, excel at different tasks (and why it can sometimes be so difficult to train them to do otherwise). You’ll also learn how dogs’ finely tuned senses are serving humans and saving lives.

As a special bonus, the producers of NATURE have created an exclusive podcast for our online users. In this exclusive video, producer/director Corinna Faith discusses the challenges of filming dogs in remote locations around the world, including sled dogs in the Arctic, singing dogs in Papua New Guinea and sheepdogs in the Scottish fells.

Don’t miss this exclusive behind the scenes look at the film.

Click here to watch the podcast.

View the Production Credits for DOGS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD Part one, “The Rise of the Dog.”

View the Production Credits for DOGS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD Part two, “Dogs By Design.”

The North American Wolf Conference began 19 years ago in northwestern Montana as a small interagency wolf recovery meeting, hosted by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. As wolves were restored to Yellowstone and central Idaho, the meeting became an annual regional conference, co-sponsored by the Wolf Recovery Foundation. It continued to grow in scope as new participants attended from across North America, and often included guest presenters from Europe and Asia. In 1999, Defenders of Wildlife became an official co-sponsor and assumed much of the duties for organizing the event. Due to the conference’s origins, it has traditionally been held in the Northern Rockies. However, in order to promote the importance of the Mexican wolf recovery program, the 2007 conference is being held in Flagstaff, Arizona, not far from the Grand Canyon, one of America’s most awe-inspiring and magnificent national parks.

The North American Wolf Conference serves as a bridge to connect leading wolf biologists, conservationists, livestock owners, depredation specialists, educators and state, tribal and federal wolf managers to share information ranging from ecological and genetic research, non-lethal techniques to reduce livestock conflicts to economical and environmental impacts of wolf restoration. Former presenters include Ed Bangs, Lu Carbyn, Jamie Rappaport Clark, Steven Fritts, William Lynn, L. David Mech, Marco Musiani, Paul Paquet, Doug Smith, Robert Wayne and many more. The conference is sponsored by Defenders of Wildlife, the Wolf Recovery Foundation, and the Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project.

For registration and lodging information please visit www.defenders.org/wolf/conference or e-mail or call Laura Jones at ljones@defenders.org, or (541) 552-9653.

Silent Auction to Benefit Wolf Recovery Efforts

You can help wolf recovery efforts by donating to the silent auction that happens in conjunction with the conference. The silent auction raises critical funds for The Bailey Wildlife Foundation Proactive Carnivore Conservation Fund. Past donations helped fund night corrals for sheep bed grounds near Yellowstone National Park, alternative grazing for cattle pastured near the Buffalo Ridge pack in central Idaho and more! Defenders proactive work helps reduce conflicts between wolves and humans which helps raise tolerance amongst those living with wolves. To get more information regarding our proactive work, visit: www.defenders.org/wildlife/new/facts/pro.html

Past donations to the auction have included artwork, jewelry, camping/recreational gear, certificates for restaurants, adventure tours and much more!

A donation from you would not only help strengthen our programs, but also provide you with a wonderful advertising opportunity. If you would like to donate an item to this event, please e-mail Laura Jones at: ljones@defenders.org by April 10, 2007.

Friday Field Trip to the Grand Canyon

Join us for a field trip in the Grand Canyon Ecoregion. Spend the day exploring prime wolf habitat, learning about the area, and enjoying amazing views, including the majestic Grand Canyon.

We will travel a circuitous route to the Grand Canyon, with our first stop at Kendrick Park for a wildlife walk and view of the San Francisco Peaks. Our second stop will be Red Mountain Vista, where we will be able to track the life-zone transition from ponderosa pine forest into the low, gnarled branches of the pinion & juniper, as well as the vast grasslands of northern Arizona. From there , we will veer off the beaten path and onto Forest Service roads that lead through the Coconino Rim proposed wilderness.

Sack lunches will be provided, and we’ll enjoy them at Hull Cabin, which actually consists of four primitive cabins that lie in a meadow surrounded by old growth ponderosa pine. None of the buildings have electricity, plumbing or telephone service. The appearance of the site has changed little since its construction in 1888.

Finally, we will enjoy views of Grand Canyon from Grand View Point, where the ponderosa and aspen forest overlooks the canyon, then finish we’ll finish up with a stop at the South Rim Visitor Center. In April the Canyon hosts a wide diversity of native flora and fauna and is home to the newly restored California Condors. The proceeds from the field trip will also go the the Bailey Wildlife Foundation Proactive fund.

We hope you are able to come and enjoy the warmth and beauty of the Southwestern USA while learning more about wolves throughout North America.

Regards,

Amaroq Weiss and Laura Jones
Co-Moderators, PW-WIN
Defenders of Wildlife

In early July of 2006, Suzanne Stone and her daughter, Sierra, drove to the Sawtooth National Forest to search for an orphaned group of eight-week-old wolf pups. The Stone’s drove there after learning that an arm of the US federal government had killed the parents – a male and female from the Big Water Pack in the Soldier Mountains – and left the pups to die from starvation or predation. The agency responsible for this was Wildlife Services, formerly known as Animal Damage Control.

I have known Stone a long time, and she is neither stranger nor opponent of lethal ‘wolf control’. As the Northern Rockies representative of the non-profit organization Defenders of Wildlife, she works with citizens, scientists, the livestock industry, and government officials to manage the growing wolf populations of the western US. Part of her work involves administering two funds, one that compensates ranchers for livestock or working dogs lost to confirmed wolf depredation, and another that subsidizes proactive measures to avoid or mitigate conflicts between wolves and people. She is a sympathetic voice for ranchers and rural communities in wolf country, and realizes that killing wolves is at times an unfortunate necessity. I should note that I agree with her. And still, she was disturbed enough to search throughout the day and into the night for the pups. Stone never found the pups. Neither did Wildlife Services, which hoping to take the edge off a public relations disaster, also went looking.

An interesting contrast to Stone’s actions was the attitude of Steven Nadeau of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. He authorized the killing of this wolf pack because they were believed to have preyed on livestock. In comments to National Public Radio he said, ‘the regrettable loss of a few pups does not have any real biological impact on the recovery or long-term viability of this population [of wolves]‘.

Nadeau is almost certainly right about the biological effect from the loss of these pups. Pups have always been particularly vulnerable to disease and predation, and the reproductive cycle of wolves is adapted to high pup mortality. The loss of a few pups will have little if any impact on the population biology of wolves in Idaho. But I do not think this is why the story made the news. Rather it was the contrast between the admirable care on Stone’s part, and the apparent indifference on Nadeau’s that captured the attention of the public in the US and Canada.

At root, wolf management involves questions of how one monitors and intervenes in the lives of wolves whether for scientific research or for the administration of wildlife policies. And in the contrast between Stone and Nadeau’s approaches, there is much we can learn about the ethics of managing wolves.

Now in any discussion of predator management, you are likely to hear quite a bit about ‘sound science’. Sound science is supposed to be the evidentiary, theory-rich baseline for managing wildlife and making public policy. Yet when science is substituted for ethics, our moral compass fails and we are likely to be led astray. Wolf management provides a particularly powerful example of the moral controversies that can arise from a seemingly technical subject.

The techniques used to study and manage wolves are frequently intensive and intrusive. Wolves are radio-collared, monitored, tranquilized, assessed, captured, incarcerated and killed on a regular basis. We still have much to learn about wolves, and there are undoubtedly legitimate scientific reasons to study them using such techniques. Managing wolves in this way may also be required to meet certain goals of wolf recovery. It is, for instance, a necessity in the Red wolf recovery program, where monitoring and managing wolf pairings helps prevent hybridization with coyotes. Even so, the use of these techniques is not a sustainable model for long-term recovery. They are expensive propositions in terms of time and labour, and a burden on under-funded and under-staffed organizations, as well as an annoyance to individuals and communities. As noted before, with sufficient food and space, wolves will flourish. Over time, they will establish their own population levels and distribution in dynamic relationship to the habitat and other resources they need for survival.

There is another more insidious reason for conducting intensive wolf management, namely to appease vested human interests that oppose our coexistence with wolves. This kind of management is not undertaken for the benefit of science, much less for the well-being of wolves. Although sometimes justified as maintaining the ‘social carrying capacity’ of wolves, intensive management in this context involves killing or removing wolves with little attention to other proactive measures for mitigating human-wolf conflicts. This approach is also behind the artificially low population goals in some wolf management plans, the designation of certain wolf populations as expendable, and land-use planning that effectively creates wolf-free zones. Wolf recovery and conservation may be the stated goals. The reality of this type of management is quite different; it amounts to an institutionalized system of species cleansing that tries to exclude wolves from the vast majority of the landscape.

Vested interests that distort wolf management are ethically problematic in their own right. Equally disturbing is employing lethal and other blunt-force techniques with little apparent concern for the well-being of individual wolves or their packs. For wolves, the social disruption of intrusive management can be severe. Pups without parents starve or are preyed upon. The loss of adult members that teach younger wolves how to survive in the wild as well as around humans, can lead to heightened mortality and further conflict with people. Wolf packs that are exterminated are replaced by new packs, which may be even less familiar then its predecessor with how to avoid the danger of particular humans on the landscape. What we have here is the makings of a vicious cycle that, from an ethical point of view, we should try to break.

A growing number of voices are objecting to wolves being relegated to a gulag of isolated habitats, surrounded by exclusion and free-fire zones, and subjected to routine and invasive management. From an ethical perspective, managing wolves for the wrong reason and with little concern for their individual well-being is wrong. Those of you who care about the non-human world and raise your voice in defense of animals and the rest of nature are in the right. Keep it up.

Cheers, Bill

Portions of this column are excerpted from my ‘Wolf Recovery’ article in Marc Bekoff’s Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relations (Greenwood Press, 2007). For more information on this groundbreaking work, see www.practicalethics.net/blog/?p=100.

You can hear Elizabeth Shogren’s report, Orphaned Wolves Lost in Idaho, on National Public Radio, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5550973.

~

Bill Lynn is the founder and Senior Ethics Advisor of Practical Ethics (http://www.practicalethics.net/), and a professor at the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University (www.tufts.edu/vet/cfa).

Image: Tracy Brooks, 2003, Reflection.

Whenever I speak at conferences and other events, I am asked a series of questions about ethics and what it means for human-animal relations. These are actually two, quite different questions. The first asks what ethics is per se, and the second how ethics can be made practical in everyday life.

Perhaps the most common of the second, practical type of question concerns predation. ‘Is predation moral? Is it right for one creature to kill another? How should I think and feel about the wolf that kills the deer or elk or moose? These are the kind of predation-related questions that advocates, citizens, policy-makers and scientists have asked me over the years.

While I have heard this questions often enough, until recently I do not think I took it as seriously as I should. I did not fully appreciate the moral weight it has for people: how it makes some hearts heavy and leaves other minds ill-at-ease.

I felt the weight, however, during a conference session on the ethics of wolf-human relations. A member of the audience noted that as much as we care about the well-being of wolves, we should also care about the well-being of the prey (e.g. deer, elk) and competitors (e.g. coyotes, dogs) whom wolves kill. This person wondered what guidance ethics gives for thinking about wolves killing other creatures? Is it right, or wrong, or something else? Damn good questions, and the resonance they had with the rest of the audience alerted me that something bigger than I had realized was at stake here.

Shortly thereafter, I was reading about the ‘problem’ of predation by a theologian and philosopher, respectively. The likened predation to vampirism, and suggested that we take the wolf lying with the lamb (or was it the lion?) as a literal vision of how nature should work. You can read more about this imaginative interpretation in Andrew Linzey’s book, Animal Theology (1994). The philosopher said we had a duty to minimize pain and suffering. Thus we should work towards the day when all predators like wolves are removed from the wild. Species like deer and elk would then be given birth control to manage their populations. You can read more about this brilliant idea in Steven Saponitz, Morals, Reason and Animals (1987).

A common response to all this is taught in science and philosophy courses. It is that predation is a non-problem. Animals are biological machines, functional units of an ecological process. They behave according to instinct, and are not capable of thinking or acting with moral (or immoral) ends in mind. Nature is what it is, and ethics has nothing to do with it. There is a certain truth in this line of thinking. We should not impose human norms on the creatures of the non-human world.

And yet if we take science seriously, we easily see that our understanding of nature is growing more complex each day. Complex enough to recognize the roots and even manifestation of what we call ethical behaviour in a wide variety of species (see Mark Bekoff, Animal Passions and Beastly Virtues, 2006). It turns out that some primates have a sense of justice, and elephants have elaborate bonds of mutuality and solidarity. So maybe this question about ethics and predation is not so easy to dismiss after all.

Over the years, the best answer about the ethics of predation that I have found comes from Holmes Rolston III. He says predation is a ‘sad-good’ (Environmental Ethics, 1988). Instead of dismissing the subject of ethics and nature, Rolston peers into the natural world to see what lessons we may learn that will inform our ethical thinking. What he discovers is the value of predation in the natural world, something that does not detract from the respect we should have for individual animals.

For Rolston, predation is sad because it involves suffering and the taking of an individual’s life. The prey of wolves such as deer and elk evolved to be both aware and self-aware. They are not only members of a population or species, they are individuals in-and-of themselves. Their behaviour in the face of being stalked or attacked certainly says something about how they value their lives, if only in a deeply felt and embodied way. It’s a strange myopia of an outdated brand of science that would deny the sensibilities deer have about their own world. Thus when a wolf kills a fawn or runs down a straggler in a herd, a surplus animal has not been harvested (to use the agro-economic language of wildlife management). No, an individual life has been lost.

Even so, predation is good because it is a dynamic and indispensable part of nature. Predation is an evolved and ecologically necessary process, part of the trophic (feeding) structure of the biotic world, wherein plants, herbivours and carnivoures literally pass-on energy derived from the sun and material derived from the earth. This is what the poet Gary Snyder meant when he describes Earth as a ‘breathing planet in the sparkling whorls of living light’ (Turtle Island, 1969). Predation is necessary for the well-being of predators and prey, as well as the ecological communities of which they are a part. It is an irrelevant brand of ethics that is willing to say what is right and wrong in nature without paying attention to the real circumstances of the natural world.

To return to the theologian and philosopher, we can now see where they both went wrong. Even though they have distinct worldviews (i.e. Anglican theology, philosophical utilitarianism), both of them fail to appreciate the good that comes from predation. All they see is the sad, and from there quickly move to pronouncing it morally bad.

For our theologian, it is the very intent to kill (either on the animals part, or in Satan’s plan to disrupt Eden) that makes predation so wrong. If I believed the story of Eden was literal and not figurative, I might consider this argument. I cannot take it literally, however, for it flies in the face of everything we know about nature — its biochemical genesis and evolution through the ages – much less the positive value of predation identified by Rolston. For our philosopher, it is the consequence of predation, its associated pain and suffering, which is so morally wrong. And yet if nature can be one of our landmarks in ethics, a literal place in which to situate our thinking and remain practical, then something else comes to light. It is not pain and suffering per se that is wrong, but unnatural pain and suffering. By ignoring the lessons of nature, our philosopher has missed this point.

What weighs most heavily on my heart are the abundant examples of pain and suffering rooted in questionable human actions. Leg-hold traps that animals sometime chew off to escape. Competitions to kill the most coyotes in a single day. The poaching of gorillas and chimpanzees in the bush-meat trade. The capture and sometimes brutal ‘training’ of wild Asian elephants. The widespread practice of poisoning of wolves out of fear, greed or competition. This is pain and suffering with no natural analogue. And here too we find another connection between ethics and predation. It is not only what we can learn from nature about the how and why of predation. It is taking ethical responsibility for our own predatory actions towards animals and the natural world. When people ask about the ethics of predation, I suspect what weighs most heavily on their hearts is the lack of ethical regard people show towards humans and other animals.

Finally, a word of praise for the people who have asked me this question over the years. I think I understand it better now, and I am sorry if I misunderstood you in the past. Implicit in your questions was an appreciation for the well-being of wolves and their prey, both as individuals and as a species. Few of you arbitrarily chose the well-being of an animal over nature (or vis-a-versa). This exemplifies the search for a creative middle ground where the well-being of both might be preserved. Yours was a sensibility very close to Rolston’s insight about sad-goods, a rule-of-thumb to help us place our feet on the right patch of ground. And that is a fine example of your own practical ethics at work.

Cheers, Bill

~

Bill Lynn is the founder and Senior Ethics Advisor of Practical Ethics (http://www.practicalethics.net/), and a professor at the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University (www.tufts.edu/vet/cfa).

Image: Tracy Brooks, 2003, Reflection.

Wolf attacks on people are extraordinarily rare. Yet in early November 2005, the Canadian media reported that a pack of wolves killed a man in northern Saskatchewan. His name was Kenton Joel Carnegie, a 22-year-old student of geo-engineering from the University of Waterloo. Mr. Carnegie died on 08 November 2005 near Points North Landing. His mauled body was found on a lakeside trail, hours after he failed to return from a walk.

How should we respond to such news? As this unfortunate story unfolded, several thoughts came to mind.

My very first thought was that this is a tragedy for Mr. Carnegie’s family and friends. The grief and loss suffered by people in such circumstances is wrenching. On this point it is irrelevant whether one is for or against wolf recovery. As I read through the news reports, I felt sorrow at Mr. Carnegie’s untimely death, and before I say anything more, I want to extend my sincere condolences to the Carnegie family and his circle of friends.

My next thought came nipping at the heels of the first. When researching this column, I noticed something missing from pro-wolf positions statements about the alleged attack – there were few fulsome expressions of sorrow and empathy for the family and friends of Mr. Carnegie. The statements were generally factual and dispassionate. The overall message stressed learning to live with wildlife, avoiding the habituation of wolves to humans through direct or indirect feeding (e.g. pet food, unsecured garbage), and the infinitesimal risk wolves pose to human life in comparison to domestic dogs and other events (e.g. bee stings; lightening). The facts were right, the articles were informative, but the tone was wrong. It was a bloodless response that failed to connect at a human level with the pain of others.

There may be a few readers who are quick to minimize the pain and suffering of people in such circumstances. To them I want to say, ‘back up’. It is true that humanity as a whole has not done a good job of respecting other animals and the natural world. It is also true that wolves (like other animals) are ‘innocents’ in that they do not act with unethical intent. Young children are more ethically accountable than wolves. Even so, people are animals too. We evolved as creatures who establish deep social bonds and enduring emotional commitments. What we have done to the world does not justify hardening our hearts to the grief of others. Indeed, empathy is one of the tap-roots of ethics. Properly considered, the death of Mr. Carnegie should move us to open our hearts, and bear witness to the fears and loss and suffering of people whose lives are negatively affected by wolves and other predators. This does not mean disrespecting wolves. It means making manifest our respect and concern for other people.

I then noticed the poor handling of public communications by both the authorities and the news media. The initial reports were based on information from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and wildlife officials within Saskatchewan Environment. Both quickly linked the mauling of Mr. Carnegie with a pack of wolves that had been loitering in the area. As noted by RCMP spokesperson, Heather Russell, ‘There is no evidence to the contrary….All of the injuries [examined] at autopsy were consistent with animals [attacking]‘ (Jeff Mitchell, Wolf Attack Suspected in Oshawa Man’s Death, Durham Region News, 13 November 2005, http://www.durhamregion.com/).

What should be obvious to anyone who watches legal dramas on TV is this: the absence of contrary evidence is never enough to support an unfounded assumption. In this case the RCMP assumed that a dead body + canine tracks + bite marks = wolf attack. Now, that equation may be right, but then again, it may not. It could be a coincidence. There could be alternative explanations.

The news media did little better, endlessly reporting the ‘theory’ of a wolf attack as virtual fact, failing to question the authorities with rigour, and printing sensationalist statements to fan old fears. My favourite example comes from the CTV news website.

‘Bill Topping, who makes routine hauling trips to the hinterland regions south of the Northwest Territories border, told The StarPhoenix he had no doubt that wolves were responsible for the student’s death. “I’ve been up there three or four times in the past week, and I’ve had some close encounters with wolves. They’re everywhere,” he said. “A bear you can hear walking up and sniffing around. But wolves are sneaky. They’re smart, they’re fast and they’re deadly. They lay in wait” (Wolves suspected in Ontario Man’s Death, 11 November 2005, http://www.ctv.ca/, search under ‘wolf attack’).

Now to be fair, the presence of tracks and bite marks is suggestive evidence, and that might have bamboozled reporters. As for the acute observations of Mr. Topping, they do add human interest. Still, step back a moment and ask yourself what this evidence suggests? That a wolf pack killed Mr. Carnegie? Could it be that another animal or animals killed him? Were the canine tracks from wolves at all, or were they from the feral dogs who were also reported in the area? Might the wolves and/or dogs have found, then scavenged the body? Now ask yourself what else we need to know about the context of this tragedy? Were the creatures wolf-dog hybrids, and thus more aggressive towards people? Were they habituated to people because of unsecured food and garbage near human settlements? Had local communities and companies practiced appropriate waste management? Might someone have been feeding the wolves on purpose, and Mr. Carnegie simply was in the wrong place at the wrong time?

My larger point here is that local authorities and the news media should have raised these unsexy issues, and avoided lurid suggestions of wolves on the prowl. This is all the more important because poor communications and reporting has real consequences for the well-being of wolves and people. It paints wolves in a bad light, unreasonably frightens people, and in so doing, provides a veneer of legitimacy to ill-advised proposals for wolf control. One can easily envision a worse-case scenario where wolves are (again) framed according to outdated stereotypes of non-human predators. The belief that wolves are inherently dangerous, wreaking unacceptable destruction on innocent people, pets and property (e.g. livestock) has a long history in Euro-American cultures. It remains deeply entrenched in some groups. With such a lurid image in mind, no matter how demonstrably wrong scientifically or ethically, it is a short step to advocating the extirpation of wolves from the landscapes in which people live and work. Even in the Canadian north.

My final thought is this. As important as it is, the life and death of Mr. Carnegie is not the only moral value on the table here. There is the value of his relationships to other people, and the intrinsic value of those people themselves. In addition, there is the intrinsic value of wolves (as individuals, as social groups, as a species), as well as the indispensable role they play in the ecological health of the natural world. In their own way, wolves are intelligent, social and emotional creatures living in extended families we call packs. They have a value in-and-of themselves and to each other that is not dependent on how we view or use them.

We need to learn how to better express and act upon the moral values we share with people, other animals and the natural world. In terms of wolves, that means learning how to live responsibly in wolf country. In terms of people, it means treating them as well as we do wolves. And when conflict arises, it means finding practical and compassionate ways of sharing a common landscape. Nothing else is morally acceptable for either of our species.

Further information:
If you would like to find out more about this issue, there are several sources of information. On the popular side, the website of the International Wolf Center (http://www.wolf.org/) has extensive sections devoted to news and education. You can also find the latest news on wolf-human interactions at the Searching Wolf (http://www.searchingwolf.org/), a wonderful website that features the latest news and analysis. The most recent issue of Wolf Guardian (Spring 2006) from the Predator Conservation Alliance (http://www.predatorconservation.org/) has a number of articles cogently comparing the risk of wolf attacks to other hazards in rural landscapes.

On the academic side, there are several texts of note that are listed below.
* Linnell, John D. C. 2002. The Fear of Wolves: A Review of Wolf Attacks on Humans. Trondheim: Norsk Institute for Natureforskning.
* McNay, Mark. 2002. A Case History of Wolf-Human Encounters in Alaska and Canada (Wildlife Technical Bulletin 13). Juneau: Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
* Mech, David, and Luigi Boitani, eds. 2003. Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, Conservation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Of course, all these accounts should be read in light of humanity’s depredation on wolves. A few works that track this context include the following.
* Lopez, Barry Holstun. 1978. Of Wolves and Men. New York: Scribners.
* McIntyre, Rick, ed. 1996. War Against the Wolf: America’s Campaign to Exterminate the Wolf. Stillwater: Voyageur Press.
* Robinson, Michael. 2006. Predatory Bureacracy: The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

Finally, there is an extensive list of articles, books and web sites at Practical Ethics (http://www.practicalethics.net/).

Cheers, Bill

~

Bill Lynn is the founder and Senior Ethics Advisor of Practical Ethics (http://www.practicalethics.net/), and a professor at the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University (www.tufts.edu/vet/cfa).

Image: Tracy Brooks, 2003, Reflection.

I’ve started giving presentations on wolves and public policy for AVM. Why? Well, vets have much to offer people and wildlife in terms of health, conservation and policy. Their contributions in thought and practice are often overlooked or under-rated, and it is a pleasure to participate in a program to help change all that. In addition, wolves are cool! They draw people to the AVM program. And then there is the fun of speaking to a cross-section of the wider public that cares about the well-being of animals and the landscape.

In this spirit, you might enjoy the blog entries on AVM by one of the younger participants (especially what she has to say about wolves, AVM @ Tufts).

cheers, Bill

In 2000 the Bush Administration forced a political sleight-of-hand on the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Up to that point in time, the Gray Wolf (Canis lupus) was considered an endangered species in federal policy. But a new policy was soon announced. The administration wished to consider the wolf as ‘recovered’ (no longer endangered) throughout its range, when it was recovered in only a small part of its range. Management would then be turned over to the states, and federal protections would end. This policy was heedless of fragile population levels, inadequate recovery areas, the absence of landscape linkages, and increased poaching. It flatly ignored the availability of suitable habitat elsewhere, much less the mandate of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). It would achieve, however, the administration’s goal of undermining the ESA, play to the anti-environmental prejudice of the Republican Party, and off-load endangered species management to under-prepared state wildlife agencies.

So under the coercion of political appointees, the FWS gerrymandered maps of wolf recovery, declared the gray wolf recovered in a few places (e.g. the Rocky Mountains and Great Lakes), and proceeded to ‘down-list’ wolves as quickly as possible. The exceptions were the Red Wolf (Canis rufus) in the southeast, and the Mexican Gray Wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) in the southwest. Wolf recovery did not charge ahead for these critically endangered species either. The Red Wolf program has been isolated for years in one recovery area. In 2005, a back-room deal between ranching interests and the FWS resulted in a moratorium on further reintroductions for Mexican grays.

The response of animal protection, wildlife conservation and environmental groups was decisive. Defenders of Wildlife and other non-profit groups sued in federal court, and won a series of impressive verdicts. The courts held that the FWS had proceeded illegally, cloaking political motivation in the guise of science. The administration’s policy was reversed, wolves are again considered an endangered species, and new areas for wolf recovery (e.g. New York and New England) are mandated for consideration.

Now that the courts have spoken, we can rest easily, right? Hardly. The mere possibility of reintroduction does no make it so. There are legitimate scientific, social and ethical questions about where, when and how we should reintroduce wolves. The confusing genetics of wolves and other canids makes it difficult to identify the correct species or subspecies to restore. Of far greater importance is the political opposition from a cohort of agency, commercial and extremist ‘property rights’ interests collectively masquerading as proponents of ‘wise use’. Once all the ecological and ethical issues are solved (and they shall be), advocates for wolves must still organize sufficient political power to achieve their goals.

Moreover, while legal victories are important, they do little to challenge the underlying rationale used to justify the administrations policy in the first place, namely that once recovered, wolves should be managed like any other commodity via State-level game regulations. This is one reason wolves got into trouble in the first place. For example, none of the management plans adopted by western states do more than keep a bare minimum of wolves on the landscape. This is not recovery. It is the creation of outdoor museums, places where wolves are incarcerated in relic landscapes surrounded by what amounts to free-fire zones. If you want to understand the real intentions behind these plans, think of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, or the homelands of South Africa. What is envisioned here is a kind of species apartheid, where a few wolves would live in the back-country, while the remaining landscape is made ‘safe’ for over-hunting, over-grazing and over-development.

The dispute over wolf recovery in the US is a microcosm of parallel controversies across the globe. At its core is the question of how we ought to live with wolves. This kind of question is ethical in character, and demands a rethinking of our relationship with animals. It is also practical, as re-envisioning how humanity might live with wolves is the only means of securing short-term legal and policy victories, through long-term cultural and political change.

When discussing wolves, we hear familiar arguments for and against recovery. Most of these arguments rely on science, and invoke the role of predators in natural landscapes and the conservation of biodiversity. Some of these arguments are social, and focus on the (un)desirability of having wolves in humanized landscapes where they will come into conflict with livestock and companion animals. Few of these claims emphasize the moral reasons for wolf recovery. A few examples include the place of wolves in our stewardship of creation, the biological heritage that wolves contribute to our children and our culture, as well as the intrinsic value wolves have in and of themselves. You hear less of these ethical reasons, because wolf advocates, biologists and policy makers are not used to thinking about such matters. While people of good will and character, they have difficulty relating moral questions to issues of management, policy and politics.

I want to help end this relative silence on ethics and wolves. And I need your help to do so. In future columns I shall share the many ethical reasons I see for wolf recovery. I hope you will share your thoughts and experiences. Ethos is not a set of lectures masquerading as a column. I do enough lecturing in my day job! It is, rather, a conversation about ethics, culture and their effect on wolves and other living beings. Your thoughts need not be long, but they will help guide and enrich our dialogue. So do send your opinions by email or post, and the ensuing conversation will be all the better for it!

Cheers, Bill

~

Bill Lynn is the founder and Senior Ethics Advisor of Practical Ethics (http://www.practicalethics.net/), and a professor at the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University (www.tufts.edu/vet/cfa).

Image: Tracy Brooks, 2003, Reflection.

I’ve been waiting to weigh in on this subject until we know more about what happened. Unfortunately, some of the public commentary that has emerged in the meantime is rubbish. So I’m reposting an excellent commentary from Amaroq Weiss and Laura Jones, Co-Moderators of the Pacific West Wolf Information Network (PW-WIN). If you would like to learn more about the network, please visit the PW-WIN yahoo group.

cheers, Bill
~

PW-WIN Friends and Colleagues:

While we ordinarily confine postings on PW-WIN to wolf-related information in our region, occasionally something exterior to the Pacific west warrants our bringing it to your attention. Such is the case regarding a recent incident in Canada that is being investigated as a potential fatal wolf attack on a human.

Early investigations are reporting that the November 8th death of a 22 year-old man in northern Saskatchewan was caused by an apparent wolf attack. The reported incident occurred in an area of Saskatchewan where it is widely known that wolves have become highly habituated to people who have purposely fed them, sought encounters with them or left food attractants such as garbage unsecured. It is also an area where domestic dogs have been allowed to run wild and form feral packs. For a news story on the incident, see

http://english.epochtimes.com/news/5-11-17/34683.html

If, in fact, the individual’s death was caused by wolves, it is extremely unfortunate and signifies the danger that can be caused when wild animals become highly habituated to humans, an unsafe situation no matter the type of wildlife species. To prevent animals from being accustomed to humans, one should always be respectful, keep a safe distance from and take care not to habituate wild animals, especially large carnivores, to humans. As all losses of human life are tragic, we grieve for the victim and for his surviving family.

Such losses should also be kept in perspective as to their relative occurrence. Although there have been a handful of incidents involving aggression or attacks by wolves that had become food- habituated to humans or where a wolf injured a human who interfered with a wolf attack on a dog, there have been no recorded incidences of healthy wild wolves attacking human beings in North America for the last 100 years. Arguments regarding the dangerousness of wolves should be tempered by an understanding of their relative occurrence compared to attacks on or deaths of humans caused by other animals.

For instance, in the United States each year, an average of 17 people are killed by dogs, and approximately 1.2 million dog bites occur, 800,000 of which are serious enough to send people to the emergency room. Furthermore, U.S. Department of Labor data indicates that between 1992-1997, there were 142 work-related human fatalities caused by cattle and 95 caused by horses and mules, in which people were mauled, charged, rammed, gored or knocked down. In addition, each year in the U.S., an average of 200 people are killed in deer- car collisions, 30-120 die from bee or wasp stings, and an average of 30 die from fire ant stings.

While people should always maintain caution around and respect for large carnivores, such as wolves, bears and mountain lions, and should never feed wild animals or take other actions that cause wild animals to lose fear of humans, the fact remains that chances of a dangerous encounter with large carnivores in the wild are remarkably slim compared to the risks associated with simply driving our cars or associating with domestic animals, something most of us do repeatedly on a daily basis.

Regards to you all,

Amaroq Weiss and Laura Jones
Co-moderators, PW-WIN
Defenders of Wildlife

Posted to the PW-Win yahoo group on 23 December 2005.

Image: Frank Franzetta, Wolves, 1965.

Currently I’m in Colorado Springs at IWC 2005, a conference sponsored by the International Wolf Center in Ely, MN (www.wolf.org). This years conference theme is ‘Frontiers of Wolf Recovery’.

The southwest is a hotspot of wolf recovery. Hot because of its potential to improve landscape health, a huge region suitable for wolf recolonization and reintroduction (e.g. Blue Range, Sky Island Range, Southern Rockies), the collusion of federal, state and grazing interests to undercut Mexican Wolf recovery, and a violent anti-wolf campaign.

cheers, Bill

Information and weblinks about political interference at the program is available in previous posts. If you would like to view my comments on the five year review of the program go to the media downloads page of Practical Ethics. These comments were submitted before the backroom deal, but still speak to the issues at hand. Indeed, you might find the suggestion for an ethics component to the biological, socioeconomic and adminstrative portions of the program of some help. In light of recent actions, nothing could be more important.

cheers, Bill

Photo courtesy of J. Henry Fair (www.jhenryfair.com)

See today’s op-ed in the Albuquerque Tribune and the articles in the Albuquerque Journal and Silver City Sun-News, below, for more details.

Please call or email New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, thank him for his long-standing support for recovery of the Mexican gray wolf and urge him to use his influence to oppose the proposed wolf control protocol and moratorium. Please contact Governor Richardson even if you don’t live in New Mexico; he is interested in everyone’s opinions.

Governor Richardson’s office can be reached at (505) 476-2200 or http://www.governor.state.nm.us/email.php?mm=6&type=opinion.

[snips....]

Photo: Wolf 431 at the (California Wolf Center)

The best columns are a kind of conversation, between author and readers and responders, and most importantly, between the ideas that sprout up in a dialogue. So I paused a good long time before starting this essay, asking myself how to best start a conversation about ethics, and how it informs our outlook on people, animals and nature.

‘Ethics you say! Heaven help us’. Oh, it’s not so bad. Ethics is not about rigid rules or finger-wagging diatribes. It is really about the moral values that inform (or should inform) ‘how we ought to live’. So allow me to start with a subject that is surprisingly concrete — the ethics of wolf recovery.

Wolves speak to me like few other species. Wolves are indispensable ‘top carnivores’ that promote the health of ecosystems, as well as a ‘flagship species’ whose cache helps protect or restore other animals and plants that are not so charismatic. These are the usual reasons we hear for wolf recovery from advocates, educators and scientists. I don’t disagree, but taken alone these reasons seem rather bloodless. Wolves are more than a resource to nature and society. Rather, they are part of a rich tapestry of natural life and human culture, one we are only beginning to understand and value.

I seek a richer appreciation of wolves in part because of my life’s experience. I have keen childhood memories of wolves passing by our cabin in northern Ontario. They were welcomed visitors, who shared the landscape with us. My sister and I were taught to respect their beauty, their role in nature and their wild ferocity. So as a young man, I was astonished by the willful ignorance, vehement hatred and casual brutality towards wolves in Europe and North America. Wolves preyed on my intellectual curiosity as well, and in graduate school I became fascinated with their links to culture, science and policy. Over the years, I’ve come to believe that learning to live with wolves is a precondition (and example) for healing our troubled relationship with the planet.

Wolf recovery — their conservation, protection and restoration — is a controversial subject. To date, the controversy has been addressed through a policy process that sees wolves as a ‘natural resource’ available for ‘sustained harvest’ and requiring ‘rational’ wildlife management as driven by ‘science’. This is coded language. It implies that wolves are no different than any other agricultural commodity, or that they are simply functional units of ecosystems. To think otherwise is to be muddled, emotional and irrational. This set of coded ideas is nonsense. I’m all for clear-headed management and planning, but at root, our troubled relationship with wolves is not and never has been about science. No, the trouble with wolves is a moral conflict over whose well-being ‘counts’ in our personal and political deliberations, and to resolve this trouble, we need ethics.

Human beings have always existed in a mixed community of people and animals, both wild and domestic. Because our actions have consequences for the well-being of others, we have responsibilities to those in our care or affected by us. This is the essence of what it means to consider the ethical issue of ‘how we ought to live’. These responsibilities apply to both people and other animals. Moreover, wolves are not biological machines to do with as we will. They are feeling, thinking and social creatures, having an intrinsic moral value of their own. We use the same reasoning to recognize the moral value of people, and there is every ethological and ethical reason to do so for wolves. The notion that wolves are morally excluded from this consideration simply because they are not people is a prejudice aptly termed speciesism.

Because wolves are part of a more-than-human moral community, I support their recovery across the landscape. They should not be isolated in a gulag of isolated habitats, surround by exclusion and free-fire zones, and subject to routine and invasive management. They should be free to make their way and their living where appropriate. Obviously wolves don’t belong in downtown London or your chicken coop, but we know that wolves don’t require wilderness, and there are plenty of other spaces where they can survive apart from or along-side human settlements.

Still, the full recovery of wolves will entail adaptations in our way of life. For instance, wolves are attracted to easy meals, and this can lead to conflicts with domestic animals. Learning to live with wolves can be as simple as securing our garbage, not leaving food on the deck, bringing companion animals indoors at night, and using guard dogs to protect sheep and cattle in fenced or open fields. These are best practices we should employ anyway, and the effort involved is minor.

Wolves are not the only way to explore questions about humanity’s relationship to animals and nature. They have, nonetheless, a special resonance in many human cultures — as beasts of waste and desolation, as vital ecological agents, as creatures exemplifying the best of humanity, as wild beings we can respect in all their familiarity and strangeness. Wolves move people, pro and con, and this opens up possibilities for dialogue about human-animal relations. Wolves keep our feet on the ground, helping us to remember that the point of ethical dialogue is the well-being of people, animals and nature.

Finally, wolves are a cogent indicator of our own moral health. If we can learn to live with wolves, we will per force have taken significant steps towards living sustainably and healing our relationship with nature. This is a moral task worth embracing! If however we cannot learn to live with wolves, we will have failed to address one of the most pressing moral issues of our time. The choice, as with every ethical issue, is ours to make, individually and collectively. Let us hope we make the right one.

Cheers, Bill

Bill Lynn is the founder and Senior Ethics Advisor of Practical Ethics (http://www.practicalethics.net/), and a professor at the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University (www.tufts.edu/vet/cfa).

Image: Tracy Brooks, 2003, Reflection.

These documents contain serious ecological and ethical problems that deserve close attention. The socioeconomic study ignores questions of ethics. The SOPs create new restrictions on where wolves can be re-released after their capture, and gives preference to lethal over non-lethal modes of wolf management. The moratorium delays the introduction of genetic diversity at a critical biological juncture for Mexican wolves. All of this has been ‘approved’ by the overarching Adaptive Management Oversight Committee (AMOC).

More information, can be found at mexicanwolf.fws.gov/, including email and postal addresses for public comments.

cheers, Bill

As importantly, wolf recovery has never been a threat to people or their livelihoods. Alongside real misunderstandings and fears about predators like wolves, some politicians and others manipulate such concerns for their own partisan purposes. We can have a deep recovery of Mexican wolves throught the entire portion of their former range, while at the same time meeting the legitimate needs of people affected by this recovery. Restricting wolves within a gulag surrounded by zones of exclusion does not meet scientific or ethical standards for wolf recovery.

You can learn more about this turn of events, as well as contact relevant officials, by visiting the action page at the Center for Biological Diversity, www.actionnetwork.org/campaign/lobo99. You might like to read some of the recent articles and editorials in the Albuquerque Journal as well, http://www.abqjournal.com/. For the full text of the proposed policies, see mexicanwolf.fws.gov/. If you submit comments, please remember that there are many great wolf scientists and managers within the Mexican wolf program and elsewhere. So too there are more well-intentioned ranchers who are pro-wolf than not, but do have livestock and economic issues that require our attention and support. The comment period on these proposed policies ends 31 May 2005.

Practical Ethics will be contributing an ‘ethics brief’ on this issue, and will notify you through this blog when it is available.

cheers, Bill

I recently provided comments on the Five-Year Review of the Mexican Gray Wolf Recovery Program. In spite of significant obstacles, the Mexican Wolf Recovery Team achieved notable success in bringing wolves back to the American southwest.

While recommending that the reintroduction project continue, the comments suggest modifications to the ecological and ethical dimensions of the program. Modifications to the ecological dimension should allow wolves to establish territories outside the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area, modify the final rule so that wolves can be released in the Gila National Forest, reintroduce Mexican wolves into other areas in critical need of this top-level carnivore — e.g. Sky Island ecosystem, Grand Canyon, remove all artificial caps on population goals and geographic distribution, and allow wolves to naturally recolonize the entire area of their historic range.

To meet its ethical obligations, the program should also minimize the use of lethal controls and intensive interventions; maximize the use of proactive non-lethal measures of conflict management, support the ‘living with predators’ programs of wildlife and animal protection non-profits, and add an explicit ethics component to the program.

You can read the comments I sent to the OFWC below. I hope they may be of some help as you frame your own letters of support for wolf recovery.

You can find more information on Mexican wolf reintroduction at the Program website (mexicanwolf.fws.gov/). General information on Mexican wolves can be found at Defenders of Wildlife (www.defenders.org/wildlife/wolf/ellobo.html) and the Wolf Conservation Center (www.nywolf.org/). The Rewilding Institute has posted a detailed set of comments on the technical, administrative and socioeconomic aspects of the review (rewilding.org/graywolfreview.html). For more on the ethical dimensions of wolf recovery, visit the wolf section of Practical Ethics (www.practicalethics.net/).

cheers, Bill

~

US Fish and Wildlife Service New Mexico Ecological Services Office 2105 Osuna NE Albuquerque, NM 87113

15 March 2005

RE: Mexican Gray Wolf Reintroduction Program Five-Year Review

Dear Members of the Review Committees,

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the Five-Year Review of the Mexican Gray Wolf Reintroduction Program.

For the record I am Bill Lynn (William S. Lynn, Ph.D.), founder and Senior Ethics Advisor of Practical Ethics, an ethics practice committed to the well-being of people, animal and nature. For more information, please visit www.practicalethics.net.

Overall, I support the continuation of the program with modifications. I would also like to offer several suggestions to improve the ecological and ethical aspects of the program.

From the outset, I want to commend the Mexican Wolf Recovery Team for their work and success to date, especially in the face of significant barriers, limitation and resistance. Having said that, and without diminishing their hard work in any way, the program can and should be strengthened in terms of its ecological and ethical foundations.

Ecologically, the program should aim for a more robust vision of recovery. A deep recovery of wolves across the landscape should ensure greater genetic diversity, maximal distribution and interaction of distinct population segments within a region, and less intervention in wolf social structures. To do this, the program should:

• allow wolves to establish territories outside the Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area;
• modify the final rule so that wolves can be released in the Gila National Forest;
• quickly reintroduce Mexican wolves into other area within their historic range that are in critical need of this top-level carnivore, e.g. Sky Island ecosystem, Grand Canyon;
• remove all artificial caps on population goals and geographic distribution; and
• allow wolves to naturally recolonize the entire area of their historic range.

Ethically, both the program and its review are weak. I believe this is unintentional, and would be mitigated by a rigorous inquiry into the moral values that ought to guide the program and its implementation. It is true that the socioeconomic assessment will discuss economic and other quantifiable values, but these are a small segment of the range of values having significance in planning for and managing wolves. Moreover the ethical question is not what values are ‘out there’, but which values ought to guide our efforts at wolf recovery. To improve its ethical foundation, the program should:

• minimize the use of lethal controls and intensive interventions;
• maximize the use of proactive non-lethal measures of conflict management support the ‘living with predators’ programs of wildlife and animal protection non-profits; and
• add an ethics component to complement the technical, administrative and socioeconomic components of the program.

Please recall that we have ethical responsibilities to both people and the natural world, and this includes wolves whether considered as individuals or a species. We ought to seek a biologically rich world, not a gulag of isolated relic landscapes and species. We meet our responsibilities to wolves through their fulsome recovery across their original range. We fail when wolves are restricted by artificially low populations, boundaries beyond which recovery is forbidden or undermined, or management practices that are not firmly grounded in ethics.

The ethical reasons for wolf recovery are diverse and mutually supporting. For some, wolves are a biological heritage we ought to restore and conserve for our children, citizenry and the world. Future generations will condemn us for failing to take reasonable steps in this regard. Many see in wolves the hand of a Creator for whom the natural world, including wolves, is good. Humans are thereby the stewards of Creation, and wolf recovery is a sacred obligation. Others believe wolves are more than functional units of ecosystems, more than resources for humans to use. Rather, wolves are self-aware and social beings. This gives wolves, as it does people, a moral standing when it comes to human actions that, for better or worse, have consequences for individuals, packs, populations and species. In this worldview, wolf restoration is an act of restitution for past harms done to creatures with whom we share a common landscape and earthly fate. For still others, wolves are top predators contributing to the health and well-being of the larger community of life. Wolves generate a kind of ‘natural good’ that, while unintentional on their part, is indispensable to ethical adjudications of how we ought to live with the natural world.

Wolves are an indicator not only of the health of a natural landscape, but the moral health of our culture. A society that learns to live with wolves across a wide range of wild and humanized landscapes is a society that is making substantial progress towards respecting human needs, caring for other forms of life, and living sustainably with the natural world. The Mexican Gray Wolf Reintroduction Program should continue with modifications that envision and implement an ethically defensible, deep recovery of wolves across the entirety of their historic range.

Sincerely,

William S. Lynn, Ph.D.
Senior Ethics Advisor
Practical Ethics

~

Image: Tracy Brooks, 2003, Reflection.

Below is an unpublished letter to the New York Times on wolf recovery.

cheers, Bill

~

In his NY Times article (‘Wolf’s Future in Wyoming’, 05 Feb 2005′), reporter Kirk Johnson states there is ‘broad agreement’ that grey wolves should be taken off the Endangered Species List. This is a sadly misinformed statement for two reasons. First, a majority of people in public comments to various wolf plans continually demand stronger protections and a wider distribution of wolves throughout the United States. Second, a federal court ruled in early February 2005 that under the Bush administration, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) had illegally down-listed the protection of grey wolves. This was done by misinterpreting the Endangered Species Act (ESA) along with other questionable bureaucratic maneuvering having nothing to do with the science of wolf recovery. The suit was brought by Defenders of Wildlife and 18 other plaintiffs, and is quietly supported by many professionals within the FWS itself. This should come as no surprise, given that a recent questionaire by the Union of Concerned Scientists and PEER documents the persistent meddling of the Bush administration in the work and reports of FWS managers and scientists. Removing federal protections would hand wolf management over to state wildlife agencies. With a few exceptions, the state wolf management plans are weak at best, and focus more on killing wolves, than nurturing healthy wolf populations and natural ecologies. Wolves do thrive in the presence of appropriate prey, habitat, and the absence of human harassment. The restoration of wolves in Yellowstone National Park is a testament to this. Even so, wolves only occupy one fifth of their original range in the lower 48 states of the US. Wolves are an integral part of healthy ecosystems. There are many areas in the Pacific Northwest, Central Rockies and Northeast where grey wolves could and should thrive. There are other areas in northern Rockies and Midwest where their range should expand. Removing the protections of the ESA from wolves at this time and under these conditions is a malicious act of partisan politics, justified by neither science nor ethics.

The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission is nearing adoption of a wolf management plan for the state. The plan is being developed in conjunction with a variety of stakeholder groups. The Commission is the first in the nation to proactively plan for the recolonization of wolves in their former range. They should be congratulated for this foresight. You can find detailed information about this proposal at www.dfw.state.or.us/wolves/main.html.

Nonetheless, much can still be done to improve the plan’s goals and management strategies. This is particularly true with respect to the ethics of wolf recovery, which is entirely ignored in the plan. Correcting this and other oversights should be the Commission’s next task.

You can read the comments I sent to the OFWC below. I hope they may be of some help as you frame your own letters of support for wolf recovery.

Cheers, Bill

~

ODFW Information and Education Division
3406 Cherry Ave. NE
Salem, OR 97303

30 November 2004

RE: Oregon Wolf Conservation and Management Plan

Dear Members of the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission,

At the outset, I want to thank you for having the foresight to plan for the natural recolonization of wolves in Oregon. As we have seen in several states, the re-migration of wolves into their former range can result in unnecessary hysteria and ill conceived control actions. I believe this is the first time a state natural resource commission has had the courage to directly grapple with this issue up front. You are to be commended for this.

Overall, I support the Oregon Wolf Conservation and Management Plan. I know from direct experience that such plans involve multiple stakeholders, differing ideas on the role and purpose of wildlife management, and difficult compromises between the negotiating parties. This plan represents a good faith and defensible effort to proactively prepare for the recovery of wolves in Oregon. Having said all this, the plan could be strengthened in terms of both its ecological and ethical foundations.

For instance, the plan should adopt a more ecologically robust vision of wolf recovery. Seven breeding pairs is a minimum number of questionable adequacy. It risks genetic and other catastrophic injury to a recovering population. It ignores the more nuanced aspects of packs, since their social structure is not biologically limited to breeding pairs and pups. Finally, it is a tiny percentage of the potential population of wolves in light of the carrying capacity of Oregon’s landscape, as well as our contemporary knowledge of wolves in the Rocky Mountains and Midwest.

Please recall that the landscapes of the United States have been impoverished — at times crippled — by the extirpation of wolves. Wolves perform a critical role in promoting the diversity and function of ecosystems. The evidence for this is plain wherever wolves have been either eliminated or restored. The damage done to the Kaibab Plateau when wolves (and other predators) were extirpated is a case in point. Another is the cascading recovery of biodiversity in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem after the wolf’s return in the 1990s. Moreover, wolves improve the fitness of prey populations through natural ecological dynamics, and have little to no impact on seasonal hunting opportunities.

The Kaibab illustrates the futility of trying to manage wildlife as if we could engineer the natural world. Wildlife management is primarily about managing the human relationship to nature. So frankly, I would not invest too much time hand-wringing over the exact number of wolves in Oregon. Allow them to find their own balancing point in light of prey availability, weather conditions, disease and other factors. Focus your efforts on fostering human tolerance and mitigating negative wolf-human interactions.

One aspect of the plan disappoints me — the absence of an ethics section. There is a discussion of economic values, but these are a small segment of the range of values having ethical significance in planning for and managing wolves. And while it may be argued that ethical sensibilities are already embedded in the plan, the Commission and the public would have been better served (and better informed) by an explicit discussion of ethics.

Simply stated, we have ethical responsibilities to both people and the natural world, and this includes wolves whether considered as individuals or a species. We ought to seek a biologically rich world, not a gulag of isolated relic landscapes and species. We meet our responsibilities to wolves through their fulsome recovery across their original range. We fail when wolves are restricted by artificially low populations, boundaries beyond which recovery is forbidden or undermined, or management practices that are not firmly grounded in ethics.

The ethical reasons for wolf recovery are diverse and mutually supporting. For some, wolves are a biological heritage we ought to restore and conserve for our children, citizenry and the world. Future generations will condemn us for failing to take reasonable steps in this regard. Many see in wolves the hand of a Creator for whom the natural world, including wolves, is good. Humans are thereby the stewards of Creation, and wolf recovery is a sacred obligation. Others believe wolves are more than functional units of ecosystems, more than resources for humans use. Rather, wolves are self-aware and social beings. This gives wolves, as it does people, a moral standing when it comes to human actions that, for better or worse, have consequences for individuals, packs, populations and species. In this worldview, wolf restoration is an act of restitution for past harms done to creatures with whom we share a common landscape. For still others, wolves are top predators contributing to the health and well-being of the larger community of life. Wolves generate a kind of ‘natural good’ that, while unintentional on their part, is indispensable to ethical adjudications of how we ought to live with the natural world.

Wolves are an indicator not only of the health of a natural landscape, but the moral health of our culture. A society that learns to live with wolves across a wide range of wild and humanized landscapes is a society that is making substantial progress towards respecting human needs, caring for other forms of life, and living sustainably with the natural world. I congratulate you on your efforts to plan for the wolf’s return to Oregon. Yet I urge you to embrace a deeper vision of wolves fully restored throughout the Oregonian landscape, a vision based on ecological and ethical criteria.

Sincerely,

William S. Lynn, Ph.D.
Senior Ethics Advisor
Practical Ethics
~

Image: Tracey Brooks, 2003, Reflections.

Press Release
November 17, 2004
For Immediate Distribution
Contact: Michael DiNunzio, 518-561-6095
www.protectadks.org

FEDERAL PROPOSAL TO REMOVE WOLVES FROM THE PROTECTION OF THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT IN THE EASTERN U.S. IGNORES SOUND SCIENCE AND POPULAR SUPPORT

Niskayuna, NY — In a letter to Interior Secretary Gale Norton, the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks (AfPA) objected strenuously to what it called an “ill-founded proposal” by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to remove wolves in the Eastern U.S. from protections currently afforded them by the Endangered Species Act.

By 1900, habitat destruction and bounty hunting had eliminated the last remaining wolves in the Northeast. According to Michael DiNunzio, an ecologist who serves as the Association’s Director of Special Projects, “The landscape of the Northeastern United States has been ecologically crippled and made dysfunctional by the loss of its most important top predator, the wolf. Wolves help to restore the natural balance between wildlife and the environment that was the rule in our forests for thousands of years. Experience has shown that when wolves return to their natural range, populations of prey species such as deer and moose become more healthy, vegetation flourishes, and songbirds return to habitats previously decimated by herbivores.”

“The proposal to remove Eastern gray wolves from the federal list of threatened and endangered species (a process called ‘delisting’) lacks ecological, social, and ethical merit,” DiNunzio said. “It should be rejected and replaced by a proposal for the restoration of wolves in the region.”

In 1992, the FWS produced a Recovery Plan for the gray wolf in the Northeast, in which the Adirondack Park and portions of northern Maine and New Hampshire were identified as “areas with reestablishment possibilities.” Ignoring this recommendation, as well as the advice of scientific advisors and the general support of the public, the FWS now proposes to remove federal protection from wolves in a block of 21 so-called “eastern” states from the Dakotas to Kansas and from Maine to Pennsylvania. Contrary to the letter and spirit of the Endangered Species Act, the FWS contends that the successful restoration of wolves in three western Great Lakes states (Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin) constitutes recovery in the entire 21-state eastern region. -MORE-

In keeping with its long tradition of collaborative environmental advocacy, the AfPA teamed with William S. Lynn, Ph.D., Senior Ethics Advisor and founder of Practical Ethics (914-260-0344; www.practicalethics.net) to formulate a joint response to the proposal to delist the wolf. Lynn maintains that, “The Endangered Species Act envisions a biologically rich continent and world, not isolated, relic landscapes and species. We fail our responsibilities under the act when wolves are restricted by predetermined boundaries, beyond which recovery is forbidden or undermined.”

DiNunzio and Lynn concluded their letter to Secretary Norton and the FWS by stating that, “Wolves are an indicator not only of the health of a natural landscape, but of the moral health of our culture. We urge you to embrace this vision, face the ecological, social, and ethical challenges before you, and promote the recovery of wolves in the Northeast.”

The full letter to Secretary Norton and the FWS referred to above can be viewed on the AfPA web site: www.protectadks.org. The Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks is a non-profit, member-supported organization founded in 1901 to protect the Forest Preserve and defend the “forever wild” clause of the NYS Constitution. The Association is dedicated to sustaining the ecological integrity and mutual well being of the natural and human communities of the Adirondack Park. The Association promotes strategies to realize the potential of the Park as a world model of integrated conservation in wild and lived-in landscapes.