Can We be Better ‘Masters of the Household?’

I recently watched a documentary about residents of villages in Namibia who are learning to live peacefully with elephants. How? After numerous attempts to haze or fence them out of cropland and keep them away from dwellings, a nonprofit provided the elephants with a large concrete water tank well away from human settlements.

The film impressed me for its reporting on an elegant way of dealing with a formerly intractable conflict, with equal interest given to the villagers and the elephants. It reminded me of the ongoing efforts in the Madison Valley, and other parts of the Greater Yellowstone region, to find ways for livestock and native predators to coexist without constant conflict.

Seeking to meet multiple objectives seems far superior to solving conflicts that result in a win for one party and a loss for the others. When it comes to meeting the needs of wildlife and the increasing demand for more backcountry recreation, I believe we have room for improvement.

Visitors to Yellowstone are subject to much ridicule for their ignorance of—or disregard for—how to behave around wild animals. Yet locals, while knowing better than to take selfies with bison standing right behind us, aren’t always willing to give wildlife the space they need.

There’s no doubt that roadside critters in the national parks are used to having people nearby. They tolerate us, as long as we are polite and keep our distance. But that doesn’t necessarily hold for the backcountry where our presence is more dispersed and less predictable. We want to believe that we aren’t displacing wildlife. But we don’t always see the bighorns or deer or coyotes taking off to avoid us, often because they have done so long before we detect their presence.

Backcountry recreation doesn’t rearrange the landscape the way a ski resort or other large facility does, but trails aren’t neutral as far as the animals are concerned. The trail itself isn’t the problem; it’s us—our noise, our off-leash dogs, our failure to remember that a moose, bear, or other critter could turn up right around the bend. Research has shown that we disturb wildlife at far greater distances than we imagine. Web cams along forest trails record the number and diversity of animals that use them—at night, when we have gone home. 

Wildlife winter range closures within the Bridger-Teton National Forest have been in effect for going on 40 years. Most—not all—people respect the closures, which were put in place in coordination with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to protect big game. At the time, it was a reasonably easy sell: the animals that fill our freezers need to make it through the stressful winter months without unnecessary disturbance from us.

Human demographics have changed. Big game hunters are now joined by people who want access to the public land for year-round activities of many kinds. The reasons for restricting human presence in winter range are a bit opaque to some folks. When the closures take effect in December and the signs go up, the volume of complaining shoots up along with them. I’ve heard everything from “We don’t cause any harm” to “Can’t the deer go somewhere else?”

The national forests and parks in Greater Yellowstone include a combined total of over 10,000 miles of trails. I don’t mean to suggest that we should stop enjoying these trails, only that we ought to be considerate and mindful of the disturbance we might cause. There is a delicate balance between wanting to be quiet in order to avoid bothering wildlife, and wanting to make enough noise to warn them in advance that we are coming. I find myself wanting to do both, which is pretty hard to accomplish. I do think we need to recognize that some areas should remain trail-free so other creatures can live in relative peace.

If people aren’t willing to give a little to the species we tend to like: elk, moose, deer, et cetera, how can we expect lose our ingrained medieval thinking when it comes to predators? It’s been a quarter-century since I worked to implement a decision made by the Greater Yellowstone Coordinating Committee—made up of the area's forest supervisors, refuge managers and park superintendents—to require bear-proof storage of food and other attractants everywhere within the national forests, not just in officially designated grizzly bear habitat.

The public blowback was intense. People filled meeting rooms to yell at Forest Service employees—not the ones who made the decision, but the underlings who had to deliver the news. As part of the uproar, two Wyoming counties passed resolutions declaring that grizzly bears (and—why not throw them in too? wolves—were “unacceptable species.”  

We’re still treating some forms of native wildlife as unacceptable. Why else would it be legal to run down predators with snowmobiles?

This sends me to a question I’ve been asking myself for a long time: did God, however one might imagine Him/Her/It, go on a Cunard Cruise and delegate authority to us? For longer than I have been on this Earth, a significant amount of Western philosophy doesn’t ask that question, but answers it: God is dead. We have replaced the divine with ourselves.

William Blake, in his poem “The Tyger,” addressed the mighty beast with a question: “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” According to the Book of Genesis, for those familiar with that text, the answer is yes. The tiger is not only God-made but also “very good.” The same must also apply to those “unacceptable” wolves and grizzly bears.

I am aware that Genesis also says that humanity has been given dominion over the earth and all its creatures. But dominion is not the same as tyranny, cruelty or torture. The proto-Indo-European root of the word dominion is dom, as in domicile. So to have dominion means that we might, in this context, consider ourselves “masters of the household.” What responsible master would fail to provide for all of the members of a household? What parents would coddle one child and boot out the other?

I want to believe that in this age of expanding scientific knowledge we have learned something about other living beings and our kinship with them. They are not only sentient, able to feel fear, pain and affection, but have their own forms of consciousness, senses and languages. The more we investigate, the more we learn about what we share with other beings, from a considerable percentage of our genes to a capacity for joy and sorrow.

Yet, defying research that demonstrates otherwise, some people still express the belief that animals don’t have their own lives that they value as much as we do ours. It’s a form of wishful thinking on our part, perhaps intended to reduce our guilt and shame. Yank the hook out of the trout’s mouth before releasing it into the water, after its gills have been starved for oxygen while it has its picture taken? No problem—fish don’t feel. I’ve even heard a fisheries biologist make that statement. If it’s true, one has to wonder why their nervous systems look and function so much like ours. Maybe they don’t feel the hook because the water is too cold? Climate change is taking care of that.

Large and impressive creatures, whether carnivores or grazers, seem to be valued by our culture primarily as subjects for phone photography or as symbols of our proud history. As an example, Wyoming’s state flag includes a white silhouette upon which the state seal is printed. The seal used on the flag features two men, one of whom stands with a lead rope in his hand (the stockman) and has a distinct resemblance to George Armstrong Custer. Facing him is a miner in high-top boots, leaning on a pick. Four banners announce enterprises the state is known for: livestock, mines, grain and oil. (Yes, there is also a toga-clad female figure with a furled scroll, “Equal Rights.” Wyoming was the first state to allow women the right to vote, while it was still a territory, in 1869.)

The ghost-white silhouette on which the seal is superimposed is that of an American buffalo. Symbol of our state—the Wyoming state mammal since 1985. Yet I can’t help pondering how the enterprises featured on the seal have contributed to the buffalo itself nearly becoming a ghost.

We have begun to make amends to this particular creature. Since 1872, when Yellowstone became a national park, the population of bison in Wyoming has grown from 25 (all of them in the Lamar Valley) to around 10,000 (including both wild and captive/managed herds). Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks are home to about half of that total.

Other large and impressive creatures like bears and wolves are featured in “predator art” seen in nearly every gallery from Jackson Hole to Big Sky—larger than life specimens created from paint on canvas, bronze, stone, rebar, wire, and spray-painted sheet metal. Meanwhile the real ones are being persecuted, displaced, declared unacceptable, or, at the very least, disturbed by locals and “tourons” alike. Celebrity grizzly bears making the rounds on social media are often photographed while looking directly at the camera (indicating disturbance) or hustling away in another direction. Visitors to Yellowstone are captured on video as they stride across closed meadows to get closer views of wolf packs and their pups near the den.

We want, in addition to getting that photo, to remember what we have seen—sometimes from way too close: wild animals in their natural habitat. These are reminders, in some ways, of who we are—the masters of the household who have preserved and honored our wildlife, however inconsistently.

People in the Greater Yellowstone region claim the bear, the bison, the wolf, as part of our heroic heritage. So, let’s not eliminate the embodiment of those symbols. Without them, we will have nothing more than a picture or statue of an extirpated species as the symbol of our states, like California’s golden bear.

In spite of the legacy of western European history ingrained in our culture, predators aren’t some kind of incarnation of the devil. Remember Genesis? All good. Getting over this inheritance and improving in the compassion department would help us become better masters of the household. Otherwise, we may continue to perpetuate the kind of dominion that will someday bring us shame.

WRITER'S NOTE: Some good reads on related topics:

 - Ed Yong, An Immense World

 - Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—and Why They Matter