March 8, 2010
Dealing with the topic of wolves and their impact on our environment is an emotional issue. The emotions run the gamut from admiration and love to downright fear and hatred for these embattled animals. There are few who occupy the area in between these two stances. I admittedly am one of those who view wolves as the beautiful and often misunderstood victims of misinformed humans.
In the past two weeks, I have noticed there have been several articles in the Mini-Cassia edition of the Times-News which address the wolf issue. The concerns range all the way from residents of Sun Valley, who by their very presence, have driven elk herds away from their habitat which surrounds the region – one of the definitions we use when describing predators – to the Fish and Game people investigating the possible poaching of a wolf after the legal hunting season has ended.
I find it extremely ironic that Sun Valley’s mayor is concerned about keeping the Sun Valley neighborhood free of predators. He is one of those who has invaded an area formerly occupied by other creatures, driving them from their source of food and shelter, and are themselves predators, by the very definition of the word. The mayor is concerned that wolves will follow their prey, i.e., the elk which have come into the human habitat to find food which disappeared when humans invaded the area formerly frequented by these displaced animals. And the beat goes on, and has since recorded time.
The scary part about all of this is that wolves themselves are only a small part of the food chain, and if hunted to extinction (again,) will be supplanted by the next phalanx of predators, the mesopredators – coyotes, for one – and the resulting slaughter of livestock and wild life could become even more ugly. As the physicists say, “Nature abhors a vacuum.”
Actually, wolves have been the “bad guys” since the beginning of time. Mythology and legends tell stories of horrendous predations by these fanged beasts. In 17th Century Germany, there was real concern that children who wandered into forested areas could become the victims of werewolves, a scary prospect in anyone’s time. And perhaps, it was this fear of wild predatory animals which prompted the Brothers Grimm to tell their apocryphal story of the big bad wolf who preyed upon a little girl wearing a red hood and her bedridden grandmother, who like the present-day wolf was put in the delisted category because of her advanced age. Actually, I always thought the wolf’s real target was not Little Red but the enticing basket of goodies which she carried. Wolves, like dogs, have an occasional bout with the sweet tooth.
Now, in our area, we have sexual predators, gang-bangers, bullies, inattentive drivers and some unattended dogs which might threaten our well being. Suffice it to say that I have registered a few comments about wolves and how we view them. They rank high in concern, but are actually surpassed in kill numbers by coyotes, bears, wild cats and yes, packs of dogs. (I’ll deal with dogs in another reflection.)
For now, we can read our story books and feel relatively safe. As far as we know, there have been no wolf sightings in Burley.
Sarah M. Blasius
