One Nation, Under Ted (Cont.)

Outside Magazine December 2001

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One Nation, Under Ted (Cont.)

"THE WOLVES ARE coming," says Mike Phillips, pointing to the mountains. On the outskirts of Bozeman, Phillips is cruising down the highway toward the Flying D in a pickup. "This is ground zero of the large-carnivore restoration movement."

Phillips, a sandy-haired 43-year-old, is pointing not at the mountains, but at the scattered homes, farms, and shops on the outskirts of town. "The wolves are right over that ridge," he says. "They're gonna be on the Flying D someday, with its bison, moose, and elk. But still, they'll leave and walk north into settled lands and into this valley and get stuck among human habitat. They're gonna eat people's boots and knock over trash cans and kill the cat. They will cause problems, but they won't cause as many problems as they're credited for."

Openly challenging the ranchers' perspective, Phillips wants to reintroduce the wolf—as in big bad—to the public. "Do you know how many sheep are killed every year by wolves?" he asks as we pass under the arch marking the property line of the Flying D. Before us unfurls a hilly range that eventually erupts into the 10,000-foot Spanish Peaks. "About six. And cows? About the same. Do you think that's low? OK, fine, double it. Now, do you know how many cows just die every year in the normal course of the livestock industry? About 30,000."

To listen to Phillips is to get the sense that all the difficulties of cattle ranching in the West, which are considerable, get blamed on the fanged mug of the wolf.

But the Turners' efforts to redefine the wolf haven't always won over environmentalists, either. Last year, their work with some Yellowstone wolves penned up on the Flying D drew fierce criticism from humane groups. Turner biologists, working with Fish & Wildlife, were testing Skinnerian ideas to create a generation of wolves with no appetite for livestock, trying the same methods used to rid Malcolm McDowell of sexual cravings in A Clockwork Orange. The wolves were fitted with electric collars, permitted to approach livestock, and then given a strong shock.

Andrea Lococo, Rocky Mountain coordinator of the national animal-protection group Fund for Animals, excoriated the practice. "We think it's absolutely ridiculous that we should try to alter the natural behavior of wild animals, particularly to benefit a private industry that uses public lands," she said. Reaction from the right was no better. "Wolves are killers by instinct," says Steve Pilcher, executive vice-president of the Helena-based Montana Stockgrowers Association, "and I doubt you can really take that out of them." Others were merely bemused: "I have to respect Ted's imagination," says The Nature Conservancy's McCormick, "but we haven't tried to do that. Our scientists would suggest it wouldn't work."

To the Turner camp, the experiment embodies a question that's at least worth asking: If adaptation in nature occurs all the time in the normal hustle of the ecosystem, then why can't we help adapt the wolf to provide some wildness but not too much? It sounds ridiculous, and typically Turnerian in its hubris, except that we've fully domesticated all kinds of animals and partially domesticated scores of others.

But a wolf? Phillips expected flack, and he got it. "No other private organization has ever gone shoulder to shoulder with the U.S. government and helped deal with the daily grind," he says. "Wolves are tough. They wear you down fiscally, they wear you down emotionally. Nobody likes you."

This morning, there are eight wolves being cared for on the Flying D—six pups, a mother, and a yearling—not free, but penned. They were killing sheep 60 miles away, so Fish & Wildlife removed them and accepted the Flying D's invitation to take them in. Phillips believes in a form of "soft release"—keeping them penned up for a while so they lose their homing urge. In the past, wolves that were "hard released" have wandered great distances to get home.

We pick up Beau at his ranch house and head over to a cluster of outbuildings. Phillips pops the door on a freezer truck parked to the side and, stiff as a board, a 300-pound buffalo calf falls out the back, stands miraculously like a ballerina en pointe, and then falls over and thuds into the dirt. Then out come a giant bison drumstick and a rib cage as preposterously large as the one that tipped over Fred Flintstone's car. The first chore of the morning, apparently, is to feed the wolves.

The truck jackhammers a few miles up and down hills until a fenced-off slope dramatically comes into view. The wolf pen has a perimeter fence to keep out the bison. Inside that is a 15-foot-high chainlink enclosure bent at the top to prevent climbing, and inside that is an electric fence. The gate is locked with a chain, latched with a bolt, and secured with a bungee cord. Phillips undoes them all. Quietly we drag carcasses and parts just inside the pen.

"Step over that," Phillips says, indicating the threshold at the gate. "It's hot." As he closes the gate behind us, the wolves react to our presence. They maintain their distance but take turns sprinting up and down the far length of the fence, really, really fast. We set out the gargantuan lunches and fill the water troughs. Then Phillips says, "Let's go have a look at them. Stay close."

As we walk toward the racing wolves, we have to be careful not to stumble on any of the dozens of gnawed hooves that litter the grass. Toward the other side, where the wolves apparently drag their food, the place is a crowded boneyard of ungulate feet. Above us, a half-dozen ravens watch from the trees, making a noise that sounds like a demented laugh track. I look across to see eight highly aroused wolves galloping back and forth, and I am thinking: That's an agitated mother wolf with six pups; they are hungry and penned in; we are moving toward them as an aggressive pack.

I don't have my Boy Scout manual on me, but if memory serves, none of this is particularly safe. Yet as we get closer to the pack against the fence, the wolves squeeze out to one side and race to the far fence by the gate, obviously terrified.

"They've gained a little weight," Beau says hopefully, as if he's talking about frail octuplets in the neonatal ward. Phillips examines the holes they've dug to sleep in. Some pups are in one of the wooden shelters. Phillips pops the top and we all stare in at a pup curled and sleeping. They are handsome animals. You want to pet them.

I definitely remember what the manual says about that.

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