We need wolves, bears, and large cats on the North American landscape. They belong here, and neither the landscapes we call home nor our own cultures would be the same without them. It’s not only proper management practice to protect the place and role of predators in North America, it’s both a patriotic act and a moral responsibility.

I began this post some time ago, but just didn’t quite have a clear direction for it, so I shelved it until I had a real impetus to put it together. I found that impetus in a mixture of personal interest and the politics of managing large predators. First, I recently read environmental historian Dan Flores’s new book American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains.  Second, there have been a number of recent controversies about the conservation status of predators in various North American jurisdictions and the subsequent management actions proposed for those species.

In Ontario in particular, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF) recently implemented an immediate ban on hunting and trapping for a wolf species in selected townships throughout the province. I’m interested in exploring the sociocultural perspectives around both the idea and physical existence of predators, in particular between hunters and non-hunters – often the cultural line that seems to divide much of the binary thinking about predators.

A Place on the Landscape

Predators play an important ecological role on North American landscapes. Very little that exists in natural systems is ecologically irrelevant, without any kind of evolutionary or relational role. Predator-prey interactions are both complex and necessary for species on both sides of that relationship. Remember that North American species evolved on this continent alongside one another and the interspecific (between species) interactions were critical in their evolutionary histories. 

Predator-prey dynamics played an important role in shaping species’ behaviours and maintaining balance at various scales within a habitat. For instance, the threat of predation can impact the behaviour of certain species in ways that can be important for maintaining vegetation health or composition. In other cases, predator and prey populations are connected so closely that they literally need one another to keep populations within the carrying capacity of their habitat.

Framing of Predator Management

Despite this longer-term understanding of the ecological role of predators, our social values still paint a particular portrait of predators. I’ve heard Cameron Hanes and Joe Rogan comment that bears need to be managed because they impact moose populations. While this is certainly true, the repeated use of value-laden language about predators risks giving the impression that bears are somehow intentionally wiping out moose populations or that bears are inherently evil for the impacts of their predation. This is ridiculous, and we need to put this kind of loaded language to rest.

Bears and other predators do not “devastate” or “decimate” prey populations. The role of predators is to seek, kill, and eat their prey, and that is what they do. Both predators and prey are active participants in their ecosystems and their evolutions. There is nothing somehow immoral about these roles and we need to avoid anthropomorphizing predator-prey interactions.

Now, this does not mean that predator populations shouldn’t be managed. On the contrary, I am a strong advocate of harvest-based predator management; however, I think there is an important distinction between meaningfully managing predators and portraying this task as simply “predator control”. The ultimate goal of wildlife management is not simply to maintain low levels of predator species in the interest of protecting livestock or to maintain higher levels of desired prey species like deer.

Instead, we should apply the same management philosophy to predator species that we do with prey species. We should also emphasize the same language and framing toward predator management, appreciating the biological and cultural role of hunting within human communities and striving to maintain sustainable, healthy, and balanced populations and ecological communities. This might seem overly picky in terms of the language we use, but our choice of language reveals a great deal about our perspectives and impacts how we are perceived by others, so it is worth consideration.

Collective Values

The question is, how do we shift our collective perceptions around predators?

There are often groups who share common cultural perspectives about predators. Sometimes these groups are divided along a hunter/non-hunter line or an urban/rural line. The reality of people’s lives often means that identities are not easily categorized into binaries like this. However, we have seen dramatic increases in political polarization over the last number of years and this also leads to rampant finger-pointing across these cultural divides.

But poor predator management and cultural values based on misinformed perceptions of predators have contributed to damaging ecological consequences throughout history. Therefore, we all have a responsibility in this issue, and the nature of our responsibility depends on how we come into contact with predators.

To hunters, I would say that we need to put an end to the short-sighted and arrogant demonizing of predators. It is unethical and unpatriotic.

To non-hunters (and in particular, anti-hunters who are often determined to end predator hunting altogether), I would say to stop mobilizing emotion about the charismatic nature of predators and to understand that wildlife needs to be managed in integrated ways. Sometimes, this management includes sustainable hunting measures, and like it or not, this is sometimes the most effective way to manage predators.

Predators are far more than the characters of myths and fairy tales; they are important members of complex ecological communities, and the oversimplifications on both ends of the spectrum only serve to damage our own claims to righteousness and the health of ecosystems.

Wolves

We can contextualize this discussion by looking at wolves (Canis spp.) and the many species of Canids throughout North America. Our various sociocultural perceptions have shaped a shameful history with Canids. North Americans have intermittently embarked on campaigns to exterminate wolves, designed variously to protect livestock development, expand market hunting economic opportunities, and as a result of misguided perceptions of the physical threat of wolves. We’re fooling ourselves if we think that our history of wolf management on this continent has been defined by wisdom and forethought. We have both moral and political duties to change the trajectory of this history.

Wolves are truly a North American species. Wolves evolved exclusively on this continent before emigrating to the rest of the world. They are both a natural and historical part of the North American landscape, and as such, I would say that it’s actually unpatriotic to not give wolves the respect they deserve. It would be some kind of national ecological sin to deny wolves their rightful place here.

In tracing the evolutionary history of Canids, Dan Flores explains that all members of the family of animals that comprise wolves throughout the world originated from a common North American lineage that is 5 million years old. At some point in their history, ancestors of today’s gray wolf migrated to Asia and Europe, later returning to North America. Meanwhile, a separate wolf lineage remained in North America, later becoming the red wolf, Canis rufus, and the eastern wolf, Canis lycaon. Ancestors of today’s North American wolves have been part of this continent’s ecology for 20,000 years, hunting the giant animals of the Ice Age along with many other large predators that are now extinct.

Some organizations are working to encourage us to value ancient predator-prey relationships. In October 2016, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) released information on a campaign to protect Wood Buffalo National Park, which spans the border of Alberta and the Northwest Territories, from the effects of industrial development. In their press release, CPAWS cites as one of the reasons to protect the Park that it is “the only place in the world where a natural predatory relationship between wolves and bison has continued unbroken over time”. As North Americans, we have come to recognize the power of bison in this continent’s ecological and cultural history, and it is equally important to acknowledge the other side of the bison’s history, which is its interactions with predators.

Value of Predator Management

There are, however, important reasons to consider predator management for the purpose of mitigating their pressure on species such as white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus). Recent research has added to our understanding of the impacts of coyote predation on deer. While this research should certainly help inform management approaches, we need to be cautious not to allow emerging scientific understandings of predator-prey interactions to contribute to the polarization of predator values.

I worry about the influence of social values on wildlife management in the context of changes to wolf and coyote management in Ontario and some of the backlash I’ve seen to these decisions.

On June 15, 2016, the Ontario government reclassified Eastern wolves (Canis lycaon) as Threatened on the basis that “the estimated population of mature individuals is less than 1000”. Eastern wolves were also assessed as Threatened by COSEWIC, the national committee responsible for assessing the status of wildlife in Canada. Part of the reclassification process in Ontario included renaming the Eastern wolf the Algonquin wolf.

On September 15, 2016, the Ontario MNRF – the provincial department responsible for managing hunting based on the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act (FWCA) – announced a full hunting and trapping ban on wolves and coyotes in 40 townships throughout the province as a measure to protect Algonquin wolves.

The Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters (OFAH) issued a statement opposing the decision and in their official submission to the MNRF outlined a number of compelling reasons why a hunting/trapping ban is “scientifically indefensible”. In the wake of the MNRF’s announcement, hordes took to social media expressing their complete disdain for wolves and coyotes, voicing poorly informed opinions about the merits of even recognizing the species, and suggesting that people should just continue to kill wolves and hide the evidence. In a much more poignant response, the OFAH skillfully walked a fine line that recognized the importance of Algonquin wolf recovery and genetic protection while also explaining why a hunting/trapping ban amounts to a short-sighted and unwise management decision. The OFAH argues that the FWCA offers more effective options to achieve conservation objectives for Algonquin wolves than an all-out hunting/trapping ban.

For instance, the OFAH notes that for the last 14 years, there has been a wolf hunting ban in core areas of Algonquin wolf range surrounding Algonquin Provincial Park (APP). Speaking to the effects of this ban, the OFAH cites both the Ontario and Canadian species at risk assessment bodies (COSSARO and COSEWIC, respectively) in acknowledging that while “human-caused mortality is identified as a significant threat, a reduction in hunting and trapping mortality from 67% to 16% resulting from a ban in townships in and adjacent to Algonquin Park in 2001 was followed by a comparable increase in natural mortality rates”. This means that hunting amounted to what is known as “compensatory mortality”, or in other words, that the wolves killed by hunters each year would have died anyway and therefore that hunting was not having an additive effect on the population (incidentally, this is really the backbone of the concept of sustainable harvest). In addition, there is a concern with genetic introgression from coyotes (in other words, through interbreeding, coyotes are making Algonquin wolves more coyote), and the OFAH suggests that without managing the population of coyotes, there is concern that we will lose more Algonquin wolf genes over time.

Conclusions

Though it might seem counterintuitive, I tend to agree with the OFAH that changing the status of Algonquin wolves might actually do more harm than good because it restricts the available options for conservation measures. What troubles me most, however, is the nature of criticisms from the very community that should appreciate the need for ecosystems that contain healthy and balanced predator populations. As hunters, we pride ourselves on understanding ecology and being committed to conservation. This means promoting the maintenance of landscapes complete with the richness of species that have evolved here and that have been integral to the relationships within their habitats. I agree that hunters are the strongest voice for conservation, so we need to use that voice thoughtfully, intelligently, and then powerfully.

Lest I be dismissed as some predator bleeding heart, recall that our own evolution and adaptation on this continent would not be the same without the other species living here. Indeed, Dan Flores notes that, “with the exception of our primate cousins, wild canids have been intimately associated with us longer than any other large animals on the planet.”

There’s a value to wild life that is measured by some metric far beyond our socially constructed desires for growth, productivity, or predictability. We need to remember that the interactions and relationships between multiple species within ecosystems is what shaped our landscapes and what has made them the places we admire and rely on for food, recreation, and an important part of our culture.

As such, we owe it to ourselves and these landscapes to be thoughtful and comprehensive in our attitudes and decision-making with regards to predators. We need to give them the space they deserve in our cultural and ecological landscapes.