A22 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MARCH 6 , 2022
ca’s first national park, now cel-
ebrating its 150th anniversary.
Each step of their comeback
has been documented in books,
movies and daily reports from the
field by a passionate band of wild-
life watchers. Bean, who helps
lead the nonprofit group Wolves
of the Rockies, is one of those
enthralled with wolves and their
stories. And she has watched in
horror as the body count has
mounted.
“This is a definite war,” she
said.
‘Take wolves out through any
means possible’
A federal judge’s ruling last
month that overturned a Trump
administration policy and re-
stored federal protections to gray
wolves across much of the United
States does not apply to wolves in
Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. It
is in these Republican-led states
where most of the wolf hunting —
and the most intense fights over
wolf management — is playing
out.
The Interior Department is re-
viewing whether to put the gray
wolves of the Northern Rocky
Mountains back on the endan-
gered species list. Interior Secre-
tary Deb Haaland recently
warned Montana officials that
their actions “jeopardize the dec-
ades of federal and state partner-
ships that successfully recovered
gray wolves in the northern Rock-
ies.”
The management of Montana’s
wolves passed to the state a dec-
ade ago. Since that time, it has
sharply restricted hunting
around Yellowstone — until last
year.
The Republican-controlled leg-
islature passed laws mandating a
decrease in the state’s wolf num-
bers and allowing hunters to
catch wolves in neck snares, hunt
them at night and lure them with
bait. Then in August, the state fish
and wildlife commission elimi-
nated rules that only one wolf
could be killed per year in each of
the two hunting districts border-
ing Yellowstone.
The result has been “four to five
months of basically gloves-off,
take wolves out through any
means possible,” Yellowstone Su-
perintendent Cam Sholly said in
an interview. “It is highly con-
cerning to us.”
The culling has also divided
neighbors and relatives who live
at the park’s edge. Dozens of busi-
nesses that depend on tourism
and wildlife viewing argue that
these wolves are worth more alive
than dead. Wolf hunters have cel-
ebrated their kills on social me-
dia, and they defend their actions
as legal and just.
And each day at sunrise, both
sides were watching. In pickup
trucks and on horseback, hunters
“glassed” the hillsides with binoc-
ulars and scopes, checked their
traps and listened for howls.
Their opponents were out, too,
lingering on gravel pullouts on
WOLF HUNT FROM A1 outfitter whose clients shot three
wolves this fall from “a pack of
27!!!!!”
“Way too many!”
Anti-wolf fervor has been
around as long as humans have
shared land with wolves. But it
has flourished in the West in an
era of increasing political polar-
ization. Wyoming permits unlim-
ited wolf hunting across 85 per-
cent of its state. Idaho Gov. Brad
Little (R) last year signed a bill
that allows killing as much as 90
percent of the state’s wolves.
There is a stick-it-to-liberals
flavor to this debate. Around Yel-
lowstone, visiting hunters have
heard others bragging about wolf
kills. On the Facebook page of one
local guide, the O Bar Lazy E
Outfitters, are several pictures of
slain wolves, including one image
where two dead wolves flank a
Trump-Pence 2020 campaign
sign.
“We saved a few elk today,” read
the October 2020 caption.
Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte
(R) himself killed a Yellowstone
wolf last year that was wearing a
research collar and had strayed
from the park. In December, he
killed a mountain lion that was
also being tracked by Park Service
biologists. In shooting the wolf,
the governor violated a state
hunting rule because he failed to
take a required trapper certifica-
tion course, and was given a writ-
ten warning. He later said he
“made a mistake.”
Gianforte’s office did not re-
spond to a request for comment
about wolves; his spokeswoman
defended his lion hunt as legal.
In December, Sholly, the Yel-
lowstone superintendent, wrote
to Gianforte asking him to sus-
pend wolf-hunting in the two dis-
tricts north of the park because of
the “extraordinary” number of
dead wolves. The past quotas in
those areas had not only protect-
ed wildlife, he wrote, but also the
economic and tourism interests
of the state. Yellowstone hosted
nearly 5 million people last year,
the most in its history. Tourism
generates $640 million annually
and thousands of jobs; wolf view-
ing alone accounts for $30 mil-
lion to $60 million per year, ac-
cording to peer-reviewed studies.
“Once a wolf exits the park and
enters lands in the State of Mon-
tana, it may be harvested pursu-
ant to regulations established” by
the state fish and wildlife com-
mission, Gianforte replied last
month. “These regulations pro-
vide strong protections to prevent
overharvest.”
To Sholly’s mind, two main ar-
guments against wolves — that
they prey on livestock and threat-
en elk — are not convincing here.
A wolf has killed livestock only
once in the past three years in the
county that encompasses the
hunting districts near the park.
And elk numbers, locally and
across Montana, meet or surpass
objectives set by the state.
“If we’re not accomplishing a
conservation objective, and we’re
hurting the economies, I’m not
PHOTOS BY LOUISE JOHNS FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTAn animal carcass, lower right, lies sprawled on the ground near Jardine, Mont., on Feb. 7. In less than six months, hunters have shot and trapped 25 of Yellowstone’s gray wolves — a record for one season and
about one-fifth of the park’s population. The Interior Department is reviewing whether to put the gray wolves of the Northern Rocky Mountains back on the endangered species list.
park boundary. Johnson hasn’t
seen that yet, but it wouldn’t sur-
prise him.
“A person can understand if
you want one. One animal of
something. Just to respect it, just
to have it. But when you start
killing like they’re doing, multi-
ple, it’s not even hunting. It’s just
killing is all it is. I totally don’t
agree with it,” he said. “It’s gross,
and it’s sick, is what it is.”
Johnson knows many of the
area’s wolf hunters. He doesn’t
want to name names or start a
feud in the community. But wolf
advocates in town say one of them
is his brother Warren Johnson,
who runs Hell’s A-Roarin’ Outfit-
ters across the creek from Ralph
Johnson’s place.
When a reporter approached
him in his pickup truck outside
his ranch, Warren Johnson didn’t
want to talk wolves. “I’ve been
into it too many times,” he said.
“That’s it.”
Their clients don’t set out to kill
wolves, his wife, Susan, respond-
ed by email, but “we just let our
elk hunters shoot one if the sea-
son is open and they have a li-
cense!”
“We definitely know they need
to be shot to keep their numbers
in check,” she said.
She mentioned another localrabbit. He can point out the two
ivory teeth in an elk’s skull on the
trail — and explain the evidence
that a mountain lion brought it
down. This place that hunters and
wildlife enthusiasts travel the
globe to glimpse is, to him, the
backyard.
Johnson is a hunting guide.
Along with his brother Lloyd, he
runs Specimen Creek Outfitters &
Adventures, a business started by
his father. Winter is normally
downtime, staying in shape for
long summertime backcountry
hunting and horseback riding
trips for clients who want to ex-
perience a real, if disappearing,
Montana. He prefers old-time
hunters — Midwesterners who
show up in L.L. Bean clothes with
wooden-stock rifles — more than
the camouflage and assault-
weapons crowd. Much of the
hunting scene turns him off these
days. This winter more than ever.
He has watched hunters regu-
larly gather in groups as large as
20 above Deckard Flats in the late
afternoon to scan for wolves, then
head out at dawn to shoot them.
He has heard them play record-
ings of howls to lure wolves over
the Yellowstone border. Other
hunters say dead animals, includ-
ing elk and horses, are being left
out as wolf bait along stretches ofForest Service roads, their own
spotting scopes watching for
hunters watching for wolves.
When Bean found the carcass,
she texted a photo of it to Carter
Niemeyer, a legendary trapper
who had been hired by the U.S.
government in the 1990s to catch
the Canadian wolves that
launched Yellowstone’s wolf re-
covery. It was hard to tell, he told
her, but it looked to him like a
trophy animal killed and skinned
in the field.
Bean read his response aloud:
“The reason I say this is the hide
was saved along with the head
removed and the feet sawed off.
This is how an outfitter rough
skins a lion, bear, or wolf before
taking to taxidermy.”
She bent down and tugged at
some soft white hairs that re-
mained near the animal’s tail. She
wanted a DNA sample.
“Okay, listen,” she said, strain-
ing. “You gave up your life. You
can give up your fur. Come on.”‘It’s sick, is what it is’
Nearly every day in winter,
Ralph Johnson and his blue heel-
er, Sage, hike the hills around
Deckard Flats. Johnson can look
at a trampled patch of ground and
distinguish tracks of the coyote
from the fox from the cottontailAlong the outskirts of Yellowstone,
wolf killings erupt into pack politics
Ralph Johnson stands with his dog, Sage, on the Yellowstone River Trail overlooking the northern border of Yellowstone National Park on
Feb. 2. Johnson is a second-generation elk hunting outfitter in Jardine. He does not hunt wolves.“A person can
understand if you
want one.
One animal of
something.... But
when you start
killing like they’re
doing, multiple,
it’s not even
hunting. It’s just
killing is all it is.”
Ralph Johnson, a hunting
guide in Deckard Flats, Mont.