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chapter 4 Stalking Wildlife Management Herbert Stoddard’s struggle with foresters over the use of fire demanded much of his attention before and after publishing The Bobwhite Quail, but his principal interest during these years was to carve out a niche for wildlife management as a professional field. He was much more interested in sorting out the complex interactions of wildlife, plant life, and human land use than getting caught up in the convoluted world of forestry policy. And no area in wildlife management needed more work than predator-prey relations . In contrast to fire, however, Stoddard did not consider the local perspective on predators a good place to start. He thought of local—and even regional and national—attitudes toward predator control as a mixed bag of uninformed myth and indiscriminate killing that had little to do with ecological reality. Stoddard was far from the first to enter the fray on the issue of predators and prey. As many environmental historians have shown, national debates between predator eradicationists and protectionists raged in the decades leading up to the quail study. Sportsman groups and livestock interests multiplied rapidly in the early twentieth century and put a hard press on the federal government to protect their interests from the threat of predators large and small. As early as 1905, the Biological Survey participated with the Forest Service to trap wolves on public land throughout the West, and within a few years developed effective poison formulas and distributed them to cattle ranchers. Congress ponied up more funds in the early 1900s, but the demand for help quickly outpaced funding, leading the survey to enter into cooperative agreements with the cattle industry. From these agreements came a steady stream of funding and the establishment of the Biological Survey’s Division of Predatory Animal and Rodent Control in the mid-1920s. According to Thomas Dunlap, “Scientific studies and the conservation of wildlife stalking wildlife management 117 became less important [to predator specialists] than return on money spent and a high kill of ‘varmints.’”1 Opposing such control measures was a growing group of scientists and naturalists who were concerned about the ecological and moral implications of predator eradication, as well as the loss to science that such programs meant. The American Society of Mammalogists openly criticized the Biological Survey in 1924 for exterminating local wolf and coyote populations in the West before conducting any substantial scientific research. Within the survey, a handful of scientists, such as Waldo McAtee and Albert K. Fisher, busily studied the food habits of birds of prey in an effort to stem their slaughter by farmers and sportsmen. In the same decade, biologists viewed the decimation of large predators in Arizona’s Kaibab National Forest and the subsequent irruption and destruction of the local deer herd as a particularly stark example of misguided eradication efforts, making it clear to many just how little was known about predator-prey relations.2 Environmental historians have viewed this reconsideration of predator and prey as part of an American enlightenment in environmental thought. As ideas about balance and interconnectedness filtered into the mainstream through the discipline of ecology, many Americans began to see nature through the lens of any number of metaphors: webs, organisms, pyramids, communities, systems, even machines. Over the past few decades, the ecology of disturbance has raised questions about the accuracy of some of these metaphors, but they continue to carry a great deal of meaning nonetheless. And for good reason. They can be powerful representations for how environmental components might relate, and are especially useful in considering relationships between animal species that eat one another. Though ecology as a discrete discipline came to prominence mostly through the work of botanists and zoologists during the decades around the turn of the century, the rise of wildlife management during the interwar period had a great deal to do with making ecological ideas the basis for an ethical relationship with the land and its critters. Aldo Leopold wrote most elegantly about this new way of viewing the land, and scientists such as Stoddard, Paul Errington, Waldo McAtee, Charles Elton, and Leopold himself conducted much of the field science that would help prop it up. Their insistence that predators were an integral and necessary part of ecological processes was central to this ethical shift.3 But within this small scientific community, there was little consensus on how to implement research into a system of conservation-oriented land [18.191.211.66...

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