Crying wolf unnecessary
Bear hunters association hurts image with recent spot
Joe Knight
Leader-Telegram Staff
Wolf attacks are increasing, a public service announcement called ‘Little Red Riding Hood was Right’ tells us.
It goes on to explain that wolves are attacking dogs and livestock, but in case you miss the not-so-subtle implications, the spot goes on to advise people that they have the right to defend themselves against attacks by wolves. It ends with a wolf overlooking a playground where children are swinging and concludes: ‘The danger may be closer than you think.’
This is not a grainy, black and white piece from the 1940s, but a spot released last week by the Wisconsin Bear Hunter’s Association.
It’s a good example of how to shoot yourself in the foot in a public relations sense.
The bear hunters, at least those who hunt with hounds, have a legitimate complaint about wolves: Wolves kill hounds.
One problem with wolves is that they are too much like people.
They set up territories where they feel they have enough resources to get by, then they mark the boundaries and they defend them against other wolves. They also treat hounds as intruders. Some wolf packs are more benign. They’re willing to negotiate. Others are more like the old Soviet Union. If you infringed on their space, inadvertently or not, they shot first and asked questions later.
The Department of Natural Resources tries to identify where the more aggressive packs are, so hound hunters can avoid them while they are training their dogs or hunting.
Another complicating factor is that bear hunters start training their dogs during a vulnerable point in the lives of wolf pups where they aren’t very mobile yet, so the adult wolves leave them in a centralized location the biologists call a ‘rendezvous’ point and go off to hunt.
If the hounds pass near the pups it often elicits an aggressive response from the parents and other adult members of the pack. It’s basically the same response the Bear Hunters Association is trying to elicit with its ad.
But wolves don’t kill kids.
They do kill dogs. It almost makes you wonder if the bears know where the rendezvous points are and intentionally lead the hounds into an ambush. Are bears that smart?
Last year wolves killed 25 dogs, mostly hounds, according to the DNR’s count.
A recent victim was a beagle that was hunting snowshoe hares.
Hunters are compensated for dogs that wolves kill, but they clearly have a grievance against wolves, but citing ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ or other myths or fairy tales about wolves doesn’t improve the image of bear hunter or hunters in general.
When Europeans started arriving in the New World they brought with them some hostile attitudes towards wolves and wilderness.
About the time the story of Little Red Riding Hood was circulating in European countries, maybe a little earlier, there were werewolf trials. People were accused of turning into wolves and causing all kinds of mischief. One source I stumbled over on the Internet said in France alone there were about 30,000 werewolf trials around the 1500s. These were pretty much like witch trials. The accused would get a fair trial, then be burned at the stake.
These were some of the enlightened views, along with the fairy tales, that Europeans brought with them when they arrived in the new world.
The attitudes toward wilderness changed. It took us longer to change our attitudes toward predators, and especially wolves.
The U.S. was the first country to have a national park Yellowstone. We preserved this spot for posterity, but one of the first things we did was send in the cavalry to kill all the wolves. It took a while to get that balance of nature thing down.
It was the official state policy until about 60 years ago to kill all of the wolves. The state paid a wolf bounty.
The federal Endangered Species Act of the 1960s marked a major shift in public thinking. By then a good portion of the population and a majority of Congress were passing on the strictly utilitarian interpretation of nature, where wild creatures were divided into good animals we could use for meat or fur or which we thought were pretty to watch, and bad animals which might eat livestock or game animals.
Now Congress had decided that all native species had some value, even though that value may not be readily apparent to everyone.
Wisconsin followed with its own endangered species law.
Many hunters didn’t get the memo.
I’ve been told by many hunters that wolves once had their place in nature, but we no longer need them. We have human deer hunters.
But to most of the nonhunting public, wolves are being wolves, and human hunters are the ones that no longer are needed. Hunters were useful at one time, but then there was an industrial revolution and agricultural revolution. You can walk into a supermarket and find a variety of food.
Then we have people in Wisconsin chasing animals with dogs or sitting in trees with bows waiting for a deer to come by talk about an obsolete occupation.
As for the problem of wolves snatching children off of swing sets, we haven’t seen a lot of it.
There has never been a case of a wolf attacking a person in Wisconsin.
Every summer we have thousands of canoeists heading to northern Minnesota, where there are 3,000 wolves, but so far the wolves haven’t eaten any of them.
Bears are a bit more of a problem. They have ruined many camping trips by taking food and tearing up tents.
In Wisconsin bears cause more economic damage than wolves when you consider the bee hives and corn fields and bird feeders they ruin. Then there was the case a few years ago a little north of here where a bear grabbed a scout and dragged the scout and his tent into the woods. Other scouts and scout leaders drove off the bear with sticks and rocks or we might have lost a scout.
Does this mean we have to get rid of black bears in the state or maybe reduce them to 350 animals the population goal for wolves?
Wolves in the Midwest have been de-listed by the feds, and as of March 10, landowners and the DNR will be able to use more common sense methods of dealing with wolves that kill livestock, like shooting or trapping them.
Meanwhile, the bear hunters need a new public relations manager.
That story about Little Red Riding Hood had many different versions. In most interpretations the role represented a lecherous male trying to take advantage of a young female. At a certain point in French history prostitutes wore red capes.
The morale of most of the stories was don’t buy a load of hogwash from a stranger with a vested interest.
Maybe Little Red Riding Hood was right.