Gray wolves have been brought back from the brink of extinction in the U.S. Is that a good thing?
How big is the U.S. wolf population?
The lower 48 states are now home to about 6,000 gray wolves, concentrated mostly in the northern Rocky Mountains and around the Great Lakes. It’s a remarkable comeback for an animal once almost wiped out by hunters—there were as few as 300 wolves in the contiguous U.S. in 1960, down from an estimated 2 million in North America in the 1600s. The species has also rebounded in Western Europe, where some 21,500 wolves now roam. But that revival hasn’t been welcomed by farmers and ranchers, who say the predators threaten their livestock and their livelihoods. As a result, clashes over wolves have erupted everywhere from Colorado—where voters in 2020 approved a ballot proposition to introduce 30 to 50 wolves over five years—to the European Parliament, where lawmakers last week voted to make it easier for farmers to shoot the canines. Wolf advocates say ranchers’ fears are overblown: In 2015, wolves in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho killed 148 cattle, 208 sheep, three dogs, and three horses. That’s a tiny percentage of the hundreds of thousands of animals lost each year to illness, weather, and other non-predator causes. But Colorado rancher Jeff Meyers says it’s easy for wolf reintroduction supporters to dismiss those losses, because few of them work the land. “It’s not your calves that are going to be killed,” he said. “It’s not your border collie.”
Why did wolf populations decline in the first place?
It was a product of “manifest destiny” and the westward expansion of the U.S. in the 1800s, which sought to “tame the land and its wild inhabitants,” said conservation biologist Mike Philips. The hunting of wolves was aided by historical cultural prejudices against the animals—think “Little Red Riding Hood”—and even President Theodore Roosevelt, a famed conservationist, considered the wolf a “beast of waste and desolation.” The federal government subsidized the shooting, trapping, and poisoning of wolves starting in 1915, and by the 1940s, the animals were extinct in the northern Rockies. Only a few hundred gray wolves remained in the U.S., mostly in the Upper Midwest.
How did wolves bounce back?
They were helped by the birth of the modern conservation movement, which adopted the wolf as a symbol of the nation’s disappearing wild heritage. “We have a psychological need for something big and bad that represents wildness,” said wildlife ecologist Jim Halfpenny. “Wolves fulfill that.” Wildlife experts also began to understand how the apex predators help manage an ecosystem, keeping in check deer populations that would otherwise strip vegetation bare. Thanks to the shift in public opinion, the wolf was among the first animals to gain federal protections under the 1973 Endangered Species Act. Their numbers steadily grew, aided by human intervention. From 1995 to 1997, 41 wolves from Canada and Montana were released in Yellowstone. The national park is now home to about 110 wolves dispersed among nine packs; park officials estimate that each wolf is worth about $1 million because of the visitors the wolves attract.
Have they helped ecosystems?
In Yellowstone, the wolves reduced the park’s booming and overgrazing elk population. Some experts say that led to a “trophic cascade”: a chain reaction set off in an ecosystem by the addition or removal of a top predator. Doug Smith, former head of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, said predatory wolves keep elk on the move, so they no longer linger by streams and gobble up new growth of willows—a crucial food source for beavers in winter. As a result, Smith said, the park’s beaver population has increased, and those beavers have in turn created dams and ponds that become habitats for birds and fish. Other experts doubt whether wolves are really an ecological silver bullet: Daniel Stahler, Yellowstone’s lead wolf biologist, said they at best have ushered in a “trophic trickle.” And residents in surrounding areas, where Yellowstone’s packs often roam, say they’ve paid too high a price for any ecological gains. Hunting guides say the drop in elk has hurt their businesses, and ranchers that prowling wolves kill and also stress their livestock, reducing their weight. Under pressure from voters, lawmakers have moved to reduce protections for wolves.
How have they done that?
Congress in 2011 removed wolves in the northern Rockies from the endangered species list, and wolves are now killed by the hundreds in annual hunting seasons in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. The Trump administration in 2020 removed gray wolves entirely from the Endangered Species Act, citing a successful recovery, and four months later Wisconsin authorized a wolf hunt in breeding season. Hunters killed 218 wolves in three days, far above their 119-kill limit, and soon state legislatures in the West began authorizing wolf hunting. That flurry of hunting legislation was “1850s stuff,” said Ed Bangs, a biologist who led wolf recovery in the northern Rockies for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “Let’s show how much we hate wolves and the people who like them, and let’s stick it to the feds.” In 2022, a federal judge restored wolves’ endangered species status outside the northern Rockies.
Can tensions over wolves be lowered?
Compensating farmers for livestock killed by wolves can help. But Colorado, where wolves were reintroduced in 2023, almost depleted its $350,000 annual compensation fund after a string of attacks in the first three months of this year. Federal grants and state compensation program funds have also been used in some states to pay for electric fencing and nonlethal deterrents at ranches targeted by wolves. Many experts say that transparency and communication between farmers, conservationists, and government officials are key to human and wolf coexistence—wolves can be tracked with GPS collars, for example, and ranchers told when they near their property. “Wolf recovery is all about people,” said wildlife biologist Diane Boyd, “and very little about wolves.”
More wolves, safer roads?
Researchers have observed an unexpected benefit of larger wolf populations: fewer cars crashing into deer. A 2021 study that examined 22 years’ worth of data from counties across Wisconsin found that collisions between deer and cars dropped by 24 percent after wolves colonized an area. That’s because wolves tend to follow clear paths through a landscape, such as streams or human-made corridors like roads and paths. By killing deer near roads, or simply by prowling alongside them, wolves seem to keep fearful deer away from passing cars. The drop in collisions saves Wisconsin $10.9 million a year, the study notes, about 63 times more than the state pays out in compensation for livestock or pets killed by wolves. “The icing on the cake,” said ecologist Liana Zanette, who wasn’t involved in the study, “is that wolves do this work all year long at their own expense.”
