Eight minutes, if things go right. That’s how long it takes for a wolf — or for someone’s beloved pet — to strangle to death in the snare traps approved for use by Montana House Bill 224. But
sometimes things don’t go right. When the snare cinches on either side of the trachea the suffering is longer, more brutal. And for dogs, whose vocal cords are more easily crushed than those of
wolves, there’s no crying out to their owners for help.
When wolves were first introduced into Yellowstone and northwestern Montana in 1995, the state’s elk population was around 110,000. Today it’s around 140,000. Over the past 26 years Montanans worked together to maintain a Big Sky big enough to hold a wide range of life, domestic and wild. We drew on that unique superpower nature wired into us humans — cooperation
— and though it wasn’t always easy, or pretty, we made it work.
Now there’s a different strategy afoot, one as old as politics itself: Gin up fear and anxiety in constituents, and then present yourself as the cure. It’s very much like what was happening 26 years
ago, when former Senator Conrad Burns swore to reporter Pat Tucker that “If they put wolves in Yellowstone, there’ll be a dead child within a year.” He probably didn’t believe it. But then that was never the point.
There’s a cost to tossing aside our power to cooperate. And part of that cost is a shredding of the very idea, the very hope of a “last best place” — a phrase firmly connected to the wildness within our borders. How sad to have a state government eager to trade away all that we could be together, just to curry favor from angry men with an itch to kill.
Gary Ferguson
Bozeman
Bozeman Daily Chronicle Letter to the Editor 3/23/21