New Initiative Aims to Consider All Opinions About Wolf Management

I don’t know many people who have unsettled opinions about wolves. Most hunters I know, especially those in the Upper Midwest and West who live among the wild canines, would like permanent permission to hunt them. Animal-rights activists would like us to stop hunting everywhere and want to restore wolves into vacant habitats across the country. Many citizens who live far from the apex predators like the idea of more wolves on the landscape as symbols of a sort of fierce wildness that has been lost across much of America.

Those differing viewpoints have moved wolf management from one pole to the other over the last decade, as federal protections have been imposed, then removed, then reinstated, often by court order. The result has been seesaw management that has sowed uncertainty and mistrust into any discussion of wolf conservation. In its February announcement that wolves in the West and Rocky Mountain regions would not be returned to federal protection, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) pledged to develop—for the first time—a National Recovery Plan under the Endangered Species Act for gray wolves in the lower 48 states.

The plan, which is scheduled to be completed by December 2025, is designed to be a roadmap for durable and sustainable wolf management. It will include contributions from what the USFWS calls a “national dialogue around how communities can live with gray wolves to include conflict prevention, long-term stability, and community security.”

To facilitate that dialogue, the Interior Department last year hired mediator Francine Madden, founder of the Center for Conservation Peacebuilding, to convene a three-year process to essentially talk out all the tensions, frictions, mistrust and mythology that surround wolves and wolf management. The assignment is formally called “The People’s Process: A National Conversation about Thriving Communities, Tribes, Conservationists, Working Landscapes and Wolves.” It will be the first-of-its-kind attempt to interject concepts like “neighborliness” and “emotional security” into a process that has previously been defined by terms such as “litigant” and “lethal removal.”

It’s worth asking the question that’s probably on your mind: Is this just wishful thinking and fairy dust? Is it possible, in our polarized world, to bridge wildly divergent communities and world views to come up with a durable solution to manage what’s probably the most divisive wildlife species in America? A more pertinent question: Is it possible to bridge the divide by using old-fashioned tools such as dialogue, respectful listening and empathy?

And a personal question: Will you participate in the national conversation?

I hope you do, if only because the voices of what I’ll call us traditionalists—hunters, trappers and anglers who tend to read publications like this one—are an important counterbalance to the voices of those who would protect wolves at all costs. If those are the outer limits of the conversation, active management vs. preservation, then it’s important to represent “our” side to ensure that the final plan includes provisions for hunting, lethal removal of depredating wolves and limits on expansion of wolves into novel landscapes.

But I hope you participate for a far less transactional reason. Madden’s work may seem New-Age dreamy, with its emphasis on trust, engagement and “emotional honesty,” but stripped of the cynicism that has dogged those terms in recent years, they’re pretty old-fashioned. Those are the very qualities that defined relationships between our grandparents’ neighbors and that still characterize candid conversations between people who feel comfortable talking about things that matter.

I maintain that wolves do matter. In their ability to project far more than a single species, wolves represent in America everything from wildness to government overreach to an aspiration of what our own domesticated dogs might achieve without us, regular feeding and invisible fences. Plus, lots of courts, legislatures and wildlife managers will be looking at how we handle wolves to determine the future of grizzly bears, whose federal protections could be lifted in some ecosystems in the coming years.

It’s easy to be cynical about Madden’s work. By inviting input from all corners, including those citizens who have never seen a wolf or haven’t witnessed wolf predation or haven’t hunted the species that wolves prey upon, the “People’s Process” puts all Americans on even footing when it comes to their opinions. But that’s to be expected. Hunters and trappers and wildlife watchers might have closer contact with wolves and with natural processes, but that doesn’t give us exclusive or even special insights into wolf management.

If we want a durable, sustainable solution to that swinging pendulum of wolf management, then hunters and trappers have to accept input from all Americans who care enough to participate in the process. Maybe that’s Madden’s superpower: her ability to include so many diverse voices that the “national conversation” is truly representative of the cacophony around modern wolf management.

It won’t be complete without you and your opinions. Go to peoplesprocess.com for opportunities to participate. You can bet that other people, with possibly far different opinions about the future of wolves, will be lined up to contribute their perspectives.

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This article was featured in the September 2024 issue of Game & Fish magazine. Click to subscribe.

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