As apex predators, wolves and humans have shaped the American landscape together for millennia. However, the carnage of the 19th century bison massacres, the near eradication of wolves in the lower United States, and Wildlife Services’ ongoing campaign of slaughter are recent, colonial introductions.

In contrast, many Indigenous peoples of the Americas maintained a “kincentric,” or familial relationship with nature, in which animals were viewed as part of an extended ecological family sharing common ancestral origins. Wolves were often regarded as “teachers” of humans, alerting them to crucial information about their environments. Some Indigenous Americans even kept domesticated canids, though cultures differed in whether these were distinguished as “dogs” rather than simply wolves. These Indigenous stewards of America’s lands were relatively new arrivals, having crossed the Bering Strait from Asia perhaps as few as 30,000 years ago. They discovered a continent on which canines had long dominated as apex predators, having evolved there millions of years earlier.

Wolves were essential ecosystem managers in North America long before humans ever encountered the New World.

Wolves were essential ecosystem managers in North America long before humans ever encountered the New World. As predators of elk, moose, bison, and deer, they have helped to prevent uncontrolled growth of large herbivore populations. This is an incredibly important ecological niche, since other than bears, there is a shortage of carnivores able to reliably prey upon these species. Large carnivores like wolves are also important because they competitively suppress medium-sized predators, such as coyotes.

Despite their significance to humans and the ecosystems we rely on, not all cultures view wolves as kin, and people have sometimes held negative attitudes towards them throughout history. Wolves can be dangerous animals, with the potential to kill livestock, game animals, pets, and on rare occasions, humans. They are effective predators, pack animals able to endure bitterly cold weather, traverse long distances, and collaborate to take down prey many times their body size. As one Idaho hunter told New Yorker reporter Paige Williams, “They’re just too good at what they do.”

The risk of negative interactions with wolves increases as humans encroach into wolves’ territory. As game animals became depleted by colonists’ appetites and wild spaces were converted into agricultural pastures, American wolves’ historic hunting grounds and prey were replaced by farmland and relatively defenseless livestock.

There is also a cultural element to the fear and revulsion that wolves inspire among some. In myths, urban legends, and folk tales, wolves are typified as cunning deceivers, invaders in disguise who gobble up grandmas and little girls. For others, antipathy towards wolves is economic. Wolves occasionally consume animals intended for human consumption before they can be sold at market, and anti-predator measures to protect livestock from wolves cost farmers money. Political actors have often used wolves as a convenient scapegoat, attributing social ills to a predator species and then purporting to solve them through wolf extermination.

Due to a combination of these attitudes, American colonists nearly eradicated gray wolves from the lower 48 states by the mid-1900s. Much of this population decline began in the 19th century, driven by habitat loss related to urban, agricultural, and industrial development. Another significant portion of wolves were deliberately killed by private landowners. These wolves were trapped using spiked pits and other barbaric devices, shot in their dens, hunted with dogs, deliberately poisoned with tainted carcasses, tortured, and otherwise eradicated through any means with an often sadistic prejudice.

These wolves were trapped using spiked pits and other barbaric devices, shot in their dens, hunted with dogs, deliberately poisoned with tainted carcasses, tortured, and otherwise eradicated through any means with an often sadistic prejudice.

Wealthy livestock owners, particularly vociferous in promoting the cause of wolf extermination, succeeded in recruiting the government to their campaign. In 1906, the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey was given the go-ahead by President Theodore Roosevelt to destroy wolves in response to claims of depredation by cattle ranchers. Subsequently, the Bureau became a wolf-extermination unit that destroyed thousands of animals, almost completely eradicating the species in the lower 48 states by 1950.

The extermination of American wolves had major, unpredicted effects on the environment. Apex predators like wolves play a pivotal role in regulating their ecosystems. In Yellowstone, one of the best-studied American ecosystems, the disappearance of the wolf was associated with a trophic cascade of harmful systemic effects.

Wolves keep Yellowstone in balance. Photo by Earthjustice.

For instance, scavengers formerly gathered to feed on carcasses of animals hunted by wolves. As wolves declined and eventually disappeared in Yellowstone, ravens, eagles, bears, foxes, and other opportunists were left with fewer sources of food.

Elk populations exploded when their predator counterparts disappeared from Yellowstone’s landscape. Over 70,000 elk had to be removed from the northern herd between 1932 and 1968. When park managers stopped culling elk, populations would grow again until hundreds of elk were dying of starvation in the wintertime. These excess elk overgrazed the park and competed with other herbivores for dwindling forage.

The elk also depleted the park’s willow and aspen trees, which provided nesting habitat and kept erosion at bay. Bison, which were also being hunted to near extinction at the time, are believed to have been negatively affected by this change in their environment. Beavers, which used these trees for food and dam construction, nearly disappeared from sections of the park as a result. Without the dams, deep pools that supported pond ecosystems vanished in kind.

Meanwhile, coyotes—mid-sized canid predators that wolves normally keep in check—expanded to occupy the ecological void left behind by larger predators’ absence. Increasingly dominant coyotes overhunted their prey animals, such as pronghorn antelope and rodents like mice and voles, until their stocks became depleted. Foxes, birds of prey, weasels, and other animals that compete with coyotes for prey were subsequently reduced in the park.

Following an increased appreciation of the importance of keystone predators in maintaining healthy ecosystems, and in response to a public backlash against the pollution of natural resources, President Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act (ESA) into law in 1973. The gray wolf was added to the list as an endangered species in 1978 (except for the population of Minnesota, which was listed as threatened). As part of their ESA protections, hunting of wolves was prohibited under the Act’s expansive “take” prohibition, which makes it illegal “to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect” endangered species, “or to attempt to engage in any such conduct.”

The Endangered Species Act describes conservation as involving the restoration as well as protection of species, and in 1995, 41 wolves were released into the Yellowstone area in the hope of restoring the species to its previous role in the region’s ecosystem. The Yellowstone reintroduction has been a success, and there are at least 95 wolves in the park today. Around 6,000 gray wolves are estimated to live across the lower 48 states.

As wolves have been reintroduced to portions of their former territory, those areas have been sites of major ecosystem recovery. Yellowstone’s wolves have become highly sought after by sightseers and are estimated to generate over $35 million in tourism income for Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming annually. But they are also beloved by the birdwatchers of the park for helping to restore the park’s willows, which have provided habitat for a songbird renaissance. Indeed, elk populations have stopped their boom-and-bust cycle of unbridled population growth and mass starvation since wolf predation resumed, and overgrazing of streamside habitat used by songbirds, frogs, beavers, and other species has abated.

The era of coyote dominance in the park has also been brought to heel since wolves have reclaimed their stature as the ecosystem’s dominant predators. Wolves are bigger and stronger than coyotes and can overpower and kill them, preventing them from feeding on carcasses. Since reintroduction, coyote populations have declined by over 50% in some areas of Yellowstone, reversing the pattern of coyote expansion that began when wolves were removed.

The project of wolf restoration is nonetheless incomplete. Gray wolves occupy only a fraction of their historic range, and in the remainder, their absence continues to be felt. Coyotes have been dramatically expanding their geographic distribution across the United States since 1900, in large part due to the loss of competition from wolves. Effects like those seen in Yellowstone may yet be reproduced in areas where coyotes have become apex predators in wolves’ absence.

As wolves re-familiarize themselves with the American landscape (which their ancestors knew long before ours encountered it), peaceful coexistence between the two apex predator species is entirely feasible.

Wolf attacks on humans are exceptionally rare; for thousands of years, Indigenous peoples who shared the Americas with wolves were able to not only tolerate but appreciate and learn from their canine neighbors. And livestock managers today have a plethora of effective and nonlethal tools to prevent violent encounters with wolves as the species regain its footing. Furthermore, wolf predation constitutes only a negligible fraction—less than 0.3%—of cattle and sheep losses compared to health maladies and weather. Domestic dogs kill twice as many cattle and twenty times as many sheep as wolves; coyotes, which flourish in wolves’ absence, kill more than ten times as many cattle and almost ninety times as many sheep.

Data courtesy of USDA-APHIS. Cattle data from 2015; sheep data from 2014.

Despite their minimal impact on livestock, wolves have once again become the target of misplaced ire. Studies show that rural landowners in Minnesota cattle country tend to think that wolves are causing unacceptable levels of damage to the livestock industry with which they identify, and generally disagree that wolves should be allowed to exist in their community. Groups supporting big-game hunters such as Safari Club International and the National Rifle Association also oppose wolf protections on behalf of their members, who claim that wolves deplete elk, moose, and other prized sport hunting animals.

If ranchers feel as though they are being economically preyed upon, that’s because they are—and wolves are the least of their problems. Beef prices have soared since the pandemic hit, and large meatpacking conglomerates that buy, slaughter, process, and distribute farmed animals for human consumption have celebrated spectacular gains. Cattle ranchers, however, are seeing the cut they earn per cow shrink. Compared to past decades, when ranchers took home over 60% of the market price of beef, ranchers today see only 37 cents on the dollar, and meat processors, the middlemen between farmers and supermarkets, enrich themselves by increasing their share.

If ranchers feel as though they are being economically preyed upon, that’s because they are—and wolves are the least of their problems.

Processors use a variety of tools to stifle competition and keep an iron grip over the market. The meatpacking industry is extremely concentrated, with four processors—JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef Packing—controlling up to 85% of the market. Meatpackers spend millions lobbying the government—over $4 million per year since 2007. Much of this money goes towards fighting climate legislation and minimizing the link between emissions from animal agriculture and global climate change.

Meatpackers have also spent over $25 million in campaign contributions since 1990, 78% of which has gone to Republican political candidates. In exchange for their investments in government relations, meatpackers have enjoyed a number of benefits, including billions of dollars in subsidies for feed crops like soybeans every year. These subsidies artificially deflate the cost of feeding livestock, letting giant processors line their pocketbooks by buying farmed animals at a taxpayer-funded discount.

Ranchers who raise cattle are forced to choose between selling their stock at barrel-bottom prices in public auctions or entering private contracts with the processors themselves. At the auction house, JBS, Tyson, and other processors have sought to maximize profits for their shareholders by minimizing payments to cattle ranchers. Despite enjoying record profits since the pandemic, the few buyers that attend these auctions are pushing down the prices they’re willing to pay for cows, sometimes by as much as 10%.

As one auctioneer told New York Times reporter Peter Goodman, “There’s no competition. We have so much supply and so little capacity, that there’s no negotiation whatsoever.” Ranchers are increasingly pushed into private contracts with meatpackers that ensure guaranteed compensation, but these contracts have price structures that are still tied to the market price of cattle. Thus, processors win either way by using their monopoly power to create an uncompetitive market, squeezing ranchers at the auction house and in contract alike.

By cooperating to create an uncompetitive market, large corporations are the real predators eating away at ranchers’ take-home pay, but governments have responded to the livestock industry’s cries of wolf by declaring war on wildlife instead.

Now that wolves are once again convenient scapegoats for industry groups, the federal government has resumed its wolf extermination project. The deceptively named Wildlife Services, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), was created around the turn of the century, and over time was converted into the new home of the Bureau of Biological Survey’s wolf extermination program.

By cooperating to create an uncompetitive market, large corporations are the real predators eating away at ranchers’ take-home pay, but governments have responded to the livestock industry’s cries of wolf by declaring war on wildlife instead.

Since at least 1996, just one year after wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, Wildlife Services has taken up the mantle of gray wolf extermination in the lower 48 states. For the last several years, it has killed over 300 gray wolves a year in response to livestock industry demands. The agency drew particular ire in 2021 when it killed eight wolf pups in Idaho to “encourage adult wolves to relocate” in response to complaints of livestock predation. The Mexican wolf, a smaller and darker subspecies of the gray wolf, is listed separately as an endangered species, yet the records reveal that these rare wolves have been deliberately killed by the agency as well.

A Mexican wolf. Photo by Jim Clark, USFWS

Wildlife Services spends massive quantities of taxpayer funds on its wolf-killing operations. In Idaho, the agency spent over $27,000 per wolf on shooting the animals from helicopters, a commonly employed technique. This is part of a broader trend; between 2002 and 2011, the agency spent over $213 million killing birds, prairie dogs, beavers, bears, bobcats, foxes, coyotes, wolves, and other “nuisance” animals on behalf of agricultural operations. In 2013, taxpayers paid for over $57 million of this “animal damage management.”

State governments led by right-wing politicians have taken up the libertarian mantle of sportsmen and cattle groups, who insist that restrictions against wolf hunts are a symptom of an overly restrictive government. Montana governor Greg Gianforte made headlines for personally shooting one of the famed Yellowstone wolves. This is apparently a common problem. Wolves are protected from hunting inside the park, but according to Andrea Zaccardi, the Carnivore Conservation Legal Director at the Center for Biological Diversity, “They’re getting killed when they step out of the park boundary.” Much of this killing is likely never reported; “Shoot, shovel, and shut up” is one unofficial mantra of wolf opponents in the Northern Rockies.

Gianforte’s government passed laws in 2021 that would pay bounties to hunters and allow them to kill unlimited numbers of wolves, including those that wander out of Yellowstone’s boundaries. And in neighboring Idaho, recent legislation calls for hunters and private contractors to kill over 90% of that state’s wolves. In addition to over $500,000 already allocated to killing wolves that attack livestock, Idaho’s 2021 budget designated $300,000 more towards bounties for hunters who kill wolves that feed on elk—i.e., their natural prey.

“They’re getting killed when they step out of the park boundary.” Much of this killing is likely never reported; “Shoot, shovel, and shut up” is one unofficial mantra of wolf opponents in the Northern Rockies.

Wildlife Services and state governments claim that killing wolves is a solution to depredation of livestock animals. But even if wolf predation were a major source of economic loss to the livestock industry, killing wolves that target farm animals is almost certainly a bad way to stop it. In fact, peer-reviewed research shows that killing a few suspected wolves in response to livestock attacks causes livestock predation to increase in the following years. Even if killing wolves did protect cows, the presumption that the wolf is less valuable alive than the cow or sheep upon which it may occasionally prey is questionable at best, especially since APHIS has not finished preparing an environmental impact statement to assess the effects of its “predator damage management” (wolf killing) in Idaho.

The notion promulgated by big-game hunters and the Idaho legislature that wolves are somehow a threat to the survival of the elk—alongside whom wolves co-evolved over millions of years—is even more ludicrous. It is particularly ridiculous in light of the fact that, in Idaho, current elk numbers of 120,000 are 8,000 more than existed at the time of the wolf’s reintroduction, and only 5,000 short of the state’s all-time high.

Nonetheless, due to the erosion of wolves’ Endangered Species Act protections, state and federal agencies have been given the go-ahead to massacre the animals across wide swathes of their newly reestablished range. Over the last several decades, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been dividing gray wolves into several “distinct population segments” and attempting to delist wolves in those groups; these efforts have been the subject of considerable litigation.

Right now—only after a February 2022 court order vacated a 2020 rule eliminating ESA protections for the entire species (except for the Mexican subspecies)—gray wolves’ endangered species status has been temporarily restored except in Minnesota, where they are listed as threatened, and the Northern Rocky Mountain states (Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana), where they have no protections under the Act at all. These protections may not last, however. Astonishingly, the Biden administration has recently joined hunting groups and the state of Utah in appealing the court’s decision.

Corporations have been aggressive in pushing the government to further undermine what few wolf protections remain. The entities that damage wildlife the most have invested considerable time, labor, and money into influence campaigns opposing protections for the species they harm.

Litigation is one way in which corporations influence wolf policy. Livestock and big game interests poured their resources into a litigation and media campaign defending the Service’s decision to delist wolves nationwide in 2020.  Amicus curiae for the government in that lawsuit alone included the Oregon Farm Bureau, Oregon Cattlemen’s Association, Hunter Nation, Inc., the Sportsmen Conservation Coalition, and the Gray Wolf Agricultural Coalition. This “Gray Wolf Agricultural Coalition” is a pseudonym for several farm lobbying groups, particularly those with members involved in livestock grazing: The American Farm Bureau Federation, American Forest Resource Council, American Sheep Industry Association, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and Public Lands Council. Safari Club International and the National Rifle Association also intervened in the lawsuit to advocate for wolf delisting on behalf of hunters.

The revolving door between the government and the beef industry is another tool corporations use to control agencies that set wolf management policy. Officials at the USDA, which oversees Wildlife Services’ wolf killing program within APHIS, routinely make headlines for graduating into cozy careers at large meatpacking conglomerates or industry trade groups, where they lobby their former employers for the preferred policies of corporations. For instance, Albert Almanza, the former Administrator of the Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) at USDA, took a job in 2017 with Brazilian-based meatpacker JBS—the world’s largest meatpacker and beef exporter—just months after a major corruption scandal rocked the company. Dr. Mindy Brashears, the current Undersecretary of Food Safety at USDA, has extensive financial ties to the National Cattlemen’s Association and other agribusiness interests. Republican administrations have appointed representatives of the same cattle industry trade groups to political positions in the Department of Interior, which contains the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Livestock and big game interests poured their resources into a litigation and media campaign defending the Service’s decision to delist wolves nationwide in 2020.

In state governments, beef industry officials are often the decision makers directly in charge of setting wolf management policies. For instance, the Idaho Wolf Depredation Control Board, which is authorized to contract with Wildlife Services for “wolf depredation control” (killing wolves that are believed to have eaten livestock), is rife with current and former representatives of the beef industry. Board member Celia Gould, the Director of Idaho’s Department of Agriculture, is the current owner and operator of a premium cattle ranch.

Richard Savage, a former president of the Idaho Cattle Association, was appointed directly to the state’s Board to advocate for the interests of the livestock industry. Member Butch Suor has been appointed as a dedicated representative of sportsmen. Stephen McGrath is an agriculture law attorney in Idaho Falls. Astonishingly, four out of the five Depredation Board members appear to have vested interests in favor of the regulated livestock industry or against the wolves whose extermination the Board oversees. This is the board that is responsible for approving, among other wolf “removals,” “aerial control efforts,” or the shooting of wolves from helicopters. 40 such killings took place in Idaho in 2020. While the fifth board member, Idaho’s Director of Fish and Game Ed Schriever, seems like a more neutral party, one wonders why ranchers and sportsmen get advocates appointed directly to the Board while the wolves themselves do not.

Corporations have also revived the bounty system, which flourished during the first wolf extermination campaign. Foundation for Wildlife Management (F4WM), a non-profit corporation incorporated in Idaho, reimburses its members by up to $1,000 per wolf that they kill; a New Yorker investigation found that F4WM had paid over $1.2 million in bounties for approximately 1,500 wolf killings. Butch Suor, the Idaho Wolf Depredation Board member, is also a member of F4WM, and has leveraged his position on the Board to push the state to contract with private hunters for wolf elimination. F4WM receives annual grants from the Idaho Fish and Game Commission—by its own estimate, more than $100,000 over the past few years—to increase the size of its wolf bounties.

A trapper poses in front of a wolf caught in a leg hold trap and bleeding out onto the snow. Photo from the Missoulian.

Governments don’t just pay to have wolves trapped and killed on behalf of cattle ranchers; there are also compensation funds that reimburse these farmers for verified losses of livestock to predation. These payouts can be significant, and are growing. In 2020, one Montana farmer was awarded $340,000 for livestock killed by predators. This compensation is just as helpful to meatpackers as it is to ranchers. Rather than including the price of animals lost to depredation in the cost of beef cows brought to market, compensation schemes typically transfer ranchers’ predator-related costs onto the taxpayers, allowing dominant processors to continue paying dirt-cheap prices for cattle.

It isn’t hard to see why this kind of corporate influence in wildlife management policy might be undesirable. The Endangered Species Act attempts to proscribe such economic considerations by requiring that agencies, when deciding whether a species qualifies for protection, ask only whether it is in danger of extinction or at risk of becoming so “solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial information available.”

[C]ompensation schemes typically transfer ranchers’ predator-related costs onto the taxpayers, allowing dominant processors to continue paying dirt-cheap prices for cattle.

Nonetheless, a corporate influence campaign has been instrumental in whittling away wolves’ protections over the years. And where those protections have been allowed to lapse, corporations have co-opted government institutions and revived the age-old practice of wolf extermination, with predictably harmful effects on wolf populations and the ecosystems they regulate.

Today, the Fish and Wildlife Service has an opportunity to return wolves to a path of recovery. In response to advocacy by conservation organizations, members of Congress, tribal leaders, and scientists, the Fish and Wildlife Service is currently conducting a formal investigation into whether Northern Rockies wolves qualify for additional ESA protections. As the agency weighs the scientific and commercial evidence relating to the survival of gray wolves in the Northern Rockies and elsewhere, over 93,000 comments have flooded in. The overwhelming majority appear to be an outpouring of public support in favor of protecting this iconic American species. Until such protections are provided, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming are free to exterminate any wolves that roam outside the boundaries of national parks like Yellowstone.

This country has followed corporations down bloody trails of extermination before. When species have been driven out to satiate the demands of industry, life-sustaining networks and ecosystems that make up our irreplaceable wildlands have been thrown into disarray. Most frustratingly, this is particularly true of gray wolves. A quick study of recent history shows how beneficial predators are key to maintaining healthy herbivore populations, how they suppress mid-sized predators like coyotes that are even bigger agricultural pests, and how disruptions of these relationships can have acute downstream consequences.

At this inflection point, it is imperative that we empower administrative agencies to be the independent, objective, expert decision makers they were designed to be. To accomplish this aspirational goal, corporate capture and influence over government ought to be rooted out. One crucial tool in fighting this injustice is to reveal it for what it is. Corporations benefit when their levers of power are invisible to those whose lives they dictate. It is for this reason that major livestock lobbying groups felt the need to file their legal briefs under the palatable moniker of the “Gray Wolf Agricultural Coalition.”

To fight back against covert corporate power, supporters of the gray wolf should continue their efforts to expose it. If activists can make visible what corporations wish to conceal—that economic exploitation is the real source of aggrieved ranchers’ ills, and that meatpacking conglomerates steal the benefits of government assistance by controlling the market—they may be able to stave off yet another mass extermination of a noble and important animal.

From The Systemic Justice Journal:

• HLS Student, Of Humans, for Humans, and by Smithfield: How corporate law helps enable us to eat pigs comfortably.
• Fowl Play: Corporate Law and the Chicken Industry.
• Animal Testing, New Horizons: Corporate Legal Influence on the Testing of Products on Non-Human Animals.