The Humane Economy: How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers Are Transforming the Lives of Animals by Wayne Pacelle

Author:Wayne Pacelle
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780062389664
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

The Visible Hand and the Free Market: Humane Wildlife Management in the United States

Wolves and Alpha Returns

Coming back to Isle Royale was a reunion of sorts—not the kind where you reconnect with people and a place, but in this case just the place itself. I had returned to this wilderness where I had left a few fleeting footprints decades ago, but it was the wilderness that had left the permanent mark on me.

I had first laced up my hiking boots during a summer thirty years ago on the island—among the most isolated of America’s national parks and buffeted on all sides by the cold swells of Lake Superior. I’d been drawn to the park’s wolves, moose, and boreal forest since reading about them in National Geographic magazines and books as a kid, and I had long dreamed of seeing the place firsthand. So when I got my acceptance letter from the Student Conservation Association for a summer position there, it was a rush not unlike getting into my college of choice. Sound the trumpets! I was on my way to Isle Royale, with backpacks, wolf packs, and much more awaiting me. I could hardly wait to step on ground freshly trod upon by wolves and hear their songs in the stillness of the night.

That was May 1985. There was a sharp chill in the air, and the waters still held onto the subarctic cold from the winter when I arrived by ferry from Houghton, on the north shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. After two weeks of training that took me to all major parts of the islands, I was assigned to patrol the island on foot and by boat, to interpret the wonders of the park for visitors, to pull duty at the visitor center, and to perform assorted other tasks that gave me plenty of angles for a proper introduction to this epic landscape. The main island and the outlying ones that make up the archipelago had no outsized features—no towering mountains, ancient tree species, or cascading waterfalls. Yet their rocky shores, crystalline lakes, and aspens, spruces, and firs left any alert visitor in wonder at the beauty of it all.

Isle Royale’s wolf pack started with emigrants from Ontario in the late 1940s, trekking in winter some twenty miles across ice-covered Lake Superior. It wasn’t a paradise for these lupine pioneers, who were used to punishing winters but perhaps not to the unyielding snows. But there were plenty of reasons to stay. There were no permanent human settlements on the island, and the people who visited came and went without any guns on their hips, leghold traps slung over their shoulders, or livestock in tow. Congress had restricted hunting, trapping, and grazing on Isle Royale in 1940 when it designated the 210-square-mile archipelago a national park. The wolves had also stumbled onto a place without competing bears or cougars. They could easily run off the coyotes and coexist with the nimble foxes. As for prey, there were no

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