Wolves and Ecological Balance

[Draggingtree]

American Thinker:

June 11, 2016

Wolves and Ecological Balance

By Marion DS Dreyfus

For years, as the young nation was getting on its feet, fighting a civil war, establishing homesteads and state borders, wolves were considered a nuisance. They crept up on livestock, whisking away and making costly meals of farmers’ hard-won cattle and sheep, making the fragile lives of the pioneers harder than they already were. The homesteaders, ranchers, and farmers set out to poison, hunt, and eliminate the gray wolf, whose range included the northern states, and whose pelts were thick and prized and fetched a pretty coin.

 

The result was that gray wolves came to the very brink of extinction, with no one to speak for them, no PETA crazies to throw paint on women wearing coats made of their skins, or government regs to slow the predation and wholesale slaughter.

 

By the mid-1970s, few wolves were left, though the nation’s zoologists and animal researchers and wildlife conservationists were by now sophisticated enough to realize the tragedy of the endangered animal with exquisite fur and alert and clever eyes that bespoke remarkable intelligence. No one had thought to champion the wolf,