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  • Wildlife, Land, and People: A Century of Change in Prairie Canada by Donald G. Wetherell
  • Robert Irwin
Donald G. Wetherell, Wildlife, Land, and People: A Century of Change in Prairie Canada. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016. 640 pp. $49.95 (cloth or e-book).

Wildlife, Land, and People is a valuable contribution that scholars from many disciplines and fields will enjoy. When it arrived at my office for review, I wanted to reconsider my decision to take on the project: it is over 500 plus pages of text and 100 pages of notes and bibliographic material. Thinking that it was a book focused on wildlife management and regulation, I wondered what new contribution such a study could make that would warrant such a lengthy monograph. As I read, however, I discovered that the book was not at all what I expected. Wildlife, Land, and People is a book about people and animals; it is a story about the ecosystem we share and the way our perception of animals has changed over time. It is not only an environmental history of landscape changes and a history of wildlife use, management, and regulation, but also an intellectual and cultural history of the evolving idea of wildlife. It is easy to read, informative, and innovative.

While Wetherell demonstrates command of a voluminous secondary literature, he avoids conspicuous displays of theory, building his argument on a comprehensive collection of stories and anecdotes obtained through extensive archival research. Given the scope of this endeavour, it is also promising to note that a relatively straightforward argument holds the book together. Wetherell demonstrates that the first century of settler society on the prairies (1870–1970) had consequential and varied impact upon wild animals. Settlement, he notes, transformed the prairie landscape and altered its ecological balances. At the same time, human perception of animals changed. People commonly categorized wild animals according to their perceived economic or cultural advantage as good or bad, friend or foe, valuable or useless. The combination of ecological change and human intervention benefited some species, damaged many others. As he weaves this material together, he discusses the varied, complex, dynamic, and occasionally contradictory way people thought about animals and ecosystems. Over the course of this century of change, Wetherell concludes, a new intellectual milieu eventually emerged in which people developed sentimental attachment to animals and generally came to accept both the intrinsic value of wildlife and the need to salvage (perhaps even restore) the regional ecosystem. Bringing together this grand overview of the cultural, intellectual, and ecological relationships that have shaped the way humans and animals interacted over time is the real innovation in this book.

Parts 1 and 2 of this book, consisting of the first three chapters, establish the intellectual parameters of the study. Part 1 introduces readers to the animals of the prairies in a way that every environmental historian will find useful. The people and their tilling of land, draining of sloughs, [End Page 525] and burning of brush led to the eradication of some animals, the proliferation of many others. I was raised in rural Saskatchewan and surprised to learn that animals and birds such as magpies, whitetail deer and jack rabbits that I perceive as typical actually joined the settlers in occupying the new landscapes. Other game species like the Hungarian partridge and pheasants were actually introduced by settlers when prairie chicken populations collapsed under hunting pressure. In Part 2, Wetherell establishes the intellectual and cultural history foundations for the book. He discusses the changing and varied ideas people had about animals. How smart were they? How useful were they? How does one explain their behaviour? His review includes the viewpoints of Indigenous peoples, writers and artists, rural and urban residents, hunters, naturalists, and scientists.

Part 3 consists of nine chapters and a conclusion; each chapter explores a different element of the human-animal relationship. The chapters are independent coherent essays argued cogently through an exhaustive collection of historical data. Together these essays inform us about the interesting, complicated, and contradictory ways that people and animals have influenced and shaped the culture, society, and ecosystem of the Canadian prairies. A couple of chapters...

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