Before you declare what you think about wolves, consider what you think about babirusas.
If you need to look up what a babirusa is, don’t feel surprised. This wild hog with elaborate tusks lives in Indonesia, where it was once common, then hunted to near-extinction, recovered, and now a controversial wildlife management issue. That makes it both similar and unfamiliar to North American wolves. And what some Americans think about babirusas reveals fascinating insights into not just how we think about wolves, but how we think in general.
Babirusas and wolves featured in a new study looking at how someone’s sense of identity affects, and sometimes distorts, what they believe about the world. The researchers gathered about 1,000 survey participants in nine U.S. states. First, they provided short descriptions of the two animals, which are both popular and troublesome in their respective home habitats. Then they asked two sets of questions: What was their attitude toward each animal, wolves and babirusas, and what was their political identity.
But half the people were asked about animals first and politics second. The other half started by identifying their political identity and then considering the animals. The difference was striking.
Those who started the survey with the animals felt roughly the same way about both wolves and babirusas, tending to be tolerant or neutral, regardless of political persuasion. However, if they began by declaring they leaned Republican or Democratic, their attitudes swung significantly. While both parties were neutral on babirusas, self-described Democrats strongly favored wolves while self-described Republicans opposed them.
“Once you think someone’s on the other team, if that’s your starting point, you’re in a really hard position,” said study co-author Justin Angle. “Once you fall into that framing, it’s really hard to break out of it.”
Angle studies marketing at the University of Montana College of Business. He teamed up with UM social scientist Alex Metcalf, who’s based in the College of Forestry and Conservation. While the idea that someone’s sense of identity can change how they think about products is well-known in the marketing world, it’s less familiar in the wildlife-conservation sphere which seems to focus on biology and ecology.
Metcalf had also just published a separate study of wolf attitudes in Montana, and found a surprisingly high level of tolerance for the predators. That research ran contrary to the fierce debates at the Montana Fish and Wildlife Commission over wolf hunting rules, and the continuing push in Congress to remove Endangered Species Act protection from wolves throughout the Lower 48 states.
Last August, the Montana commissioners spent seven hours arguing over wolf regulations. Members representing the northwestern third of the state claimed wolves were eating too many elk and needed their numbers suppressed by more hunting. Region 3 Commissioner Susan Brooke, who represents the Greater Yellowstone area, countered that wolves weren’t eating enough elk to prevent farmers’ crop damage. On the contrary, Brooke said, those wolves powered a major tourism economy.
“I have hundreds of people who have written letters, who have businesses, who are agriculture-based, that are asking us to leave Region 3 at the existing quota,” Brooke said at the time. “Ag producers and people whose livelihoods are based on wolves want me to advocate for a quota in Region 3.”
Brooke did not respond to Mountain Journal requests for additional comment on this story.
But her observation about wolf popularity was borne out by Metcalf’s earlier research. In the long-term study published in the journal Conservation Science and Practice, Montanans saying they were “tolerant” or “very tolerant” of wolves made up 41 percent of respondents in 2012. That share rose to 50 percent in 2017. By 2023, 74 percent held that attitude.
Over the same timeframe, attitudes toward wolf hunting moved in the opposite direction. In 2012, 71 percent of Montanans were tolerant or very tolerant of wolf hunting. That fell to 61 percent in 2017, and 58 percent in 2023. Wolf trapping slipped from 40 percent tolerant or very tolerant in 2012 to 36 percent in 2023.
Figuring out who is the hero and who is the villain can become more important than the problem that needs solving.
Metcalf and Angle designed the new study to explore how public appreciation of wolves could be so at odds with political opposition to them. The two researchers suspected that division might stem more from people’s political positions than actual facts on the ground. And they guessed people might have a range of personal frameworks, or identities, that shape their attitudes in debates.
If that shifting identity idea seems esoteric, consider what many Montanans just experienced in their football fandom. In December, the University of Montana Grizzlies played the Montana State University Bobcats for a trip to the national finals. It’s a safe bet to assume every Griz fan wanted to see the no-good ‘Cats lose. But when the playoff sent the Bozeman team to the championship game, suddenly many Missoula fans found themselves rooting for Montana against Illinois State (where the Bobcats won, 35-34).
“The idea that opinions are malleable just because you activate a piece of my identity — it’s not a flattering concept to confront,” Angle said in an interview with Mountain Journal. “You like to think you’re well informed, that your opinions are based on reason and logic, and you arrived at this opinion through a process you feel good about.”
Actually, people frequently shift between one identity and another, according to MSU political science professor Eric Austin, who was not involved in the wolf study. Someone’s sense of place, for instance, can make them feel like a city person or a rural person, oriented toward the Rocky Mountain West or the Southeast, in ways that have nothing to do with whether they’re liberal or conservative or male or female.
“A lot of it comes down to what’s our upbringing on things like politics or public lands or the outdoors,” Austin said. “What constitutes our identity is multifaceted. It changes depending on if you’re a Democrat or Republican, a hunter or a skier, a hiker or a mountain biker.”
Austin says the way a topic becomes a story plays a big part in what identity is triggered in listeners. Figuring out who is the hero and who is the villain can become more important than the problem that needs solving.
The wolf study found that not only do people take on the attitudes of their political tribe even though they might think otherwise about wolves in other contexts, they tend to assume the other side has much more radical opposing views than that side really does. And that tends to pour gasoline on an already smoldering conflict. Social scientists call this social identity theory where people sort themselves into “in-groups” and consider others “out-groups.”
“The common assumption, oft echoed in popular press, seems to be that wolves are hated by Republicans, most vehemently by hunters and agricultural producers, and loved by Democrats, most passionately by animal rights activists and environmentalists,” the researchers wrote. “Activated identities can distort perceptions of objective facts … For example, support for political violence is higher among Americans who overestimate the extremism of their partisan rivals.”
In other words, it’s a conflict feedback loop.
There’s an upside to that realization, however. Angle and Metcalf propose that starting the conversation without activating a contentious identity can help reach solutions, rather than standoffs. It’s a tactic to de-escalate conflict, like approaching a street demonstration by asking “how do we keep everyone safe,” instead of “where are the troublemakers?”
Angle also produces the weekly podcast A New Angle, which recently featured wolf biologist Diane Boyd. She started studying wolves in the 1980s as they expanded their Canadian habitat into the Glacier National Park region and she kept doing so for the next five decades. Although wolves were listed as endangered under the ESA, many Americans weren’t ready to welcome them back. Much of that suspicion stemmed from lack of knowledge of what wolves might do.
“Once she realized neither she nor the ranchers wanted any cattle to be killed by wolves, that was a shared goal they could build from,” Angle said. “Goals are different than identities, but that’s something that unites us. Identity can divide, but it can also unite.”
