Superwolves and Tall Tales: How Conspiracy Theories Fester and Divide

Bri Lipo was seeking one classic backcountry experience when she found herself swimming in another.

She’d hiked the forest trail to Jerry Johnson Hot Spring on the Montana-Idaho border for a soak with friends over Thanksgiving break. They found the pool occupied. A round of friendly introductions followed, with the usual “What do you do?” questions. Lipo said she was studying wildlife biology.

“This man in the pool said he hoped I was going to bring help for the ‘real critters,’” Lipo recalled. “Then he spent the next 15 minutes on how the wolves out here aren’t natives, but are Canadian superwolves brought in by the government.”

“Real critters,” according to the man, were the deer and elk he liked to hunt. And that was much harder, he explained, because Canadian superwolves transplanted in Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s were slaughtering all the big game.

“There’s a joke in the biology world that when you talk about wildlife in Montana, it always eventually comes back to wolves,” Lipo said. 

Canadian superwolves supposedly weigh 175 pounds and have eight canine teeth, while “real” American wolves weigh about 100 pounds and sport four fangs per mouth. The Canadian superwolf story has for years been debunked as a conspiracy theory. Earlier this summer, WyoFile journalist Mike Koshmrl recounted the controversy and what current science says about wolves of different sizes.

Nevertheless, the conversation got Lipo thinking about how tall tales persist in the wild. So, she put on her social-scientist hat and looked into why people believe conspiracy theories and what happens when they do. She found the wildlife world is both an especially fertile environment for fake news and a relatively unstudied one.

Some bits of wildlife misinformation may start as harmless campfire gags. Take boiling fish over Yellowstone geysers: It happened. But that has led tourists to believe they can go anywhere and do anything they want in the park. Then there are modern hoaxes like the 2022 incident where someone in Wyoming posted to social media claims that Yellowstone lakes were boiling and the park’s caldera was about to explode.

Those stories can metastasize into conspiracy theories that cause real problems. University of Ottawa political scientist Daniel Stockemer told Mountain Journal he’d never heard of Canadian superwolves, but has growing concern for how disgruntled people turn misinformation into mass movements.

“Conspiracy theories spread in an environment of distrust,” Stockemer said. “People like to have easy answers for complex scenarios. There’s always somebody to make responsible for anything bad that might happen.”

In the case of Canadian superwolves, Stockemer speculated the mythical monster could help groups who want a reason for their unsuccessful hunting trips. Or it might reflect a larger narrative about how Canada was taking unfair economic advantage of the United States.

Stockemer was recently lead editor of Misinformation Review, a collection of current research on conspiracy theories. He said the levels of politically focused propaganda have been steadily growing in the U.S., where his studies show between 25 and 30 percent of citizens hold deep suspicion of public institutions. That compares to about 15 to 20 percent of citizens in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.

While Stockemer connected portions of the trend to the rise of populist organizations such as the Tea Party in 2009, he said it could be traced much farther back. During the 1990s in Montana, an antigovernment group called the Freemen pushed a doctrine of “individual sovereignty” based on even older ideas popularized by the Posse Comitatus Act of the 1960s. 

The Freemen claimed the corporate banking system was unconstitutional and the federal government had no authority to foreclose on bankrupt farms or reject their self-created money orders. In 1996, they staged an armed standoff with the FBI that lasted 81 days and ended peacefully though most of the group’s leaders were arrested.

“Conspiracy theories go hand-in-hand with populism,” Stockemer said. “You put the world in two camps, one bad and one good, with an explanation why you can blame someone. And you feel better because you know more than the others.”

To better learn what people thought about wildlife, Lipo also put people in two camps: hunters and wildlife advocates. But this was for the purpose of an opinion survey presented to 1,000 people in nine states with known wolf populations.

While Lipo’s research is pending publication, the Alabama native is working on her Ph.D. in human dimensions at the University of Montana’s School of Forestry. One of her advisors is Alex Metcalf, whose research has provided numerous insights on how people’s feelings about wildlife reflect their tolerance for wolves and grizzly bears, and how their political identities may conflict with their personal feelings.

“There are lots of wildlife-related conspiracies,” Metcalf told Mountain Journal. “But there’s been almost no research on those conspiracy theories, until now.”

Lipo’s project presented respondents with five theories about wildlife management and had them rank their surety on a 100-point scale from “not certain” to “undecided” to “positive.”

In addition to the story of Canadian superwolves in Yellowstone, the survey inquired if environmentalists exaggerated Endangered Species Act requirements to block land development, if wildlife reintroductions were intended to restrict public land access, if the federal government underfunds ESA reviews to help private developers, and if the government deliberately hides reports about dangerous wildlife encounters to prevent public panic.

Lipo acknowledged the hunter/wildlife advocate labels were an imperfect measurement, since many people might land in both camps. She wound up with approximately 200 self-declared “hunters” and 800 “wildlife advocates.” That split roughly mirrors other studies showing 15 to 20 percent of adult Americans consider themselves part of the hunting sports community.

What Lipo and Metcalf wanted to find was the “perceived group deprivation” for each survey topic, which is an established way social scientists measure the impact of conspiracy theories. Once people place themselves in a group, they tend to seek out threats to that group and enemies to blame. Conspiracy theories satisfy that search in three main ways:

·   Social: The theory explains why you feel isolated, or why others succeed at your expense.
·  Existential: The theory explains your feeling of powerlessness.
· Epistemic: The theory fills a gap in a pattern so that a bigger picture makes sense.

“So that’s why you got fired or why God hates you,” Lipo said. “It shows that powerful actors must be creating something or trying to hide something. Somebody ‘did this’ to you.”

Many conspiracy theories contain kernels of truth. In the Canadian superwolf example, it’s a basic rule of math and biology that larger body sizes have smaller surface area in relation to their mass. That makes it easier for larger mammals and birds to conserve heat in cold environments. So, wolves tend to be physically larger in northern latitudes of Canada than the same animals in the Lower 48. They adapted.

That holds true for the descendents of the wolves from British Columbia and Alberta that were transplanted to Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s. Compared to historic “American” wolf packs in northern Minnesota which average about 62 pounds, the Greater Yellowstone “Canadian” wolves have a mean weight around 92 pounds.

But there’s no evidence to suggest that those larger northern wolves are more vicious, hungrier or otherwise different in behavior than their southern cousins. Studies by the University of Montana and Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks show wolves haven’t caused declines in elk populations, and in fact, elk populations are thriving. Testimony at a recent state Fish and Game Commission hearing on wolf-hunting seasons noted that elk overpopulation around Yellowstone National Park’s northern border was causing serious problems for ranchers, while wolf-watching contributes an estimated $80 million a year to the local economy.

This creates a troublesome feedback loop: If you’re feeling aggrieved by the powerful, you aren’t likely to trust powerful institutions. And although institutions like universities and state wildlife agencies do the research that might clarify a situation, you aren’t likely to trust their results.

In the news business, scientists call this the “hostile media effect.” It shows that the more engaged someone is to a political party, the more likely they think the news media is biased against that party.

A new study in the journal Political Communication took that a step further to show that people think misinformation — incorrect information from social media sources — unfairly targets their side more than opposing sides. As a review of the study in NiemanLab explains, “This study confirms that people’s perceptions of misinformation are driven by the same sorts of emotional identities and motivated reasoning that shape how they view the mainstream media.” The result is known as “negative partisanship,” where voters define themselves by what they hate or fear rather than what they support or like.

To make things worse, most people say publicly that they don’t believe conspiracy theories, even when they might do so in private. Stockemer and fellow University of Ottawa political scientist Jean-Nicolas Bordeleau observed in the Harvard Misinformation Review that this is the case.

 “Across all countries,” Bordeleau wrote, “believing in conspiracy theories is non-normative (i.e., not the ‘normal’ view to have). Hence, social desirability could deflate individuals’ self-reported answers to questions which measure beliefs in conspiracy theories.”

So, not only do discontented people tend to blame made-up enemies for their problems, they keep the source of their attitude a secret. That makes it still harder to have open debate on hard topics.

“If people aren’t feeling heard or empowered in wildlife management, they lean toward conspiracy theories,” Lipo said. “More information doesn’t help them feel more connected or involved. If we show them more facts, that doesn’t treat the problem.”

What might help, she suggests, is more stakeholder involvement earlier in a public decision-making process. But that’s asking a lot. The public commission meeting where the Yellowstone elk-and-wolf numbers came up lasted eight hours. Few have the personal free time, or sitting endurance, to hold a stake that long. And the research indicates that a person’s preexisting beliefs will overwhelm any new information that might change their mind.

“People care so much about wolves,” Lipo said. “They’re large and charismatic. They’re very symbolic in tribal cultures and the history of the American West. You’ve got the Big Bad Wolf and Red Riding Hood and government overreach. People feel a lot about them.”