Collared: Politics and Personalities in Oregon's Wolf Country

Introduction

1 Introduction On the last Thursday in April 2012, the Wallowa County Chamber of Commerce hosted a community meeting titled Wolves II: Know the Facts. Perhaps due to the weather, which was cold, blustery, and threatening snow, or perhaps because it was a school night and also calving season, the meeting failed to gather the standing-room-only crowds for which the region and topic have become known. Instead a small group comprising mostly families complete with grandparents and children spread across the back rows of the chamber’s business center. After a flag salute for which all the attendees stood, covered their hearts, and recited the Pledge of Allegiance, Fred Steen moved to the front of the room. He stood with feet shoulder-width apart, hands clasped behind his back, handgun holstered at his side. Steen is not a wildlife biologist. He is not a rancher. He did not have a PowerPoint presentation or any handouts.Yet he talked about wolves and their impact within the county for almost an hour. He was at attention the entire time. He is the Wallowa County sheriff. “A number of livestock producers were dissatisfied with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife,” said Steen. “The cattlemen felt their needs andissueswerenotbeingrepresentedandtheywereupset.Iwasapproached in 2010 by a few different producers and asked to assist with management and issues of potential depredation. After considering the situation, the 2 Introduction sheriff’s office decided wolves are a public concern, and this is an issue of keeping the peace.” Following that decision, Steen and his office began to treat any potential wolf activity as criminal. “We set up a method by which when there was a suspected depredation the livestock producer had the option of calling the sheriff, USDA Wildlife Services, or ODFW [Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife]. The goal was to create a specific and directed protocol,”said Steen. “We go in and let the evidence take us where it will, and we maintain control of that evidence whatever it may be. We make sure carcasses are properly handled and frozen and retain possible genetic material for the labs to analyze.” Speaking to the group, Steen recalled a phone conversation from early in the month with a woman who suspected a wolf had been on her property and wished to file a police report, a common and encouraged move. She had let her five-year-old son and their malamute out to play in the yard, said Steen. Fifteen minutes later the boy came back inside visibly shaken and upset, telling his mother there was a monster near the house, and the dog had run off. The woman sat her young son down and showed him a variety of images depicting coyotes, dogs, and wolves in the wild.The boy pointed to an image of a wolf. Steen took the woman’s statement and filed it in his office alongside the dozens of other wolf-related reports that had been recorded in the last two years. In the case against wolves, the more documented information the better, said Steen. Five-year-olds identifying monsters seen at more than fifty yards, dead cows being cordoned off in fields and their remains stuffed in cold storage, samples of potential wolf DNA being sent to university forensic labs: from an outside perspective this can seem like hysteria. Given historical context, however, it becomes a pattern. For hundreds of years humans have been afraid of wolves. They’ve feared being attacked in the night, their children being dragged off, their livestock eaten. They’ve imagined wolves as the devil’s dogs, eyes glowing yellow, teeth dripping as they guard the gates of hell. They’ve told their children Introduction 3 stories of the Big Bad Wolf who ate Grandma, the wolf who will huff and puff and blow the house down, and the wolf in sheep’s clothing. The resulting historical manifestation of these caricatures was the widespread hunting and killing of wolves throughout much of Europe during the Middle Ages and in the United States as the New World was populated by Europeans. There is little doubt that American colonists brought their stigma against wolves with them into the new territories. As wolves killed domestic animals important to human survival, conflict between early settlers and wolves became unavoidable. The first official wolf bounty was set in 1630 in Plymouth Colony. Other bounties followed and within the...