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This is the stage,

the American West.

What you see...

well, it depends on where you're standing.

It is a landscape of myth and reality...

...a place where the ensemble

not only walks...

they trot, lope,

stampede,

and migrate through history.

Wolves,

bison...

...elk...

...sheep...

and cattle...

...horses...

...and countless other beings...

...wild and domestic alike

aren't just part of the scenery...

...they're co-authors of a shared journey

shaping history,

as much as they are shaped by it,

and when you start seeing the animals

as more than just background,

perspective shifts,

time stretches,

where the land is not just a stage.

No, it remembers...

remembers every footstep.

Where every living being

shares the same purpose,

to thrive

and leave behind the spark of its existence

that will endure into the future,

a future that we all will share.

It's a critical moment

to think about our relationship,

uh, with nature,

our relationship with other organisms,

our relationship with animals.

It's important to recognize this history,

this shared history that we all have,

in order to come to terms with a future

that we're going to have with one another.

Wolves give you that...

that depth of a relationship,

and this relationship is much older

than the United States.

No matter how different we are...

...we look,

we were all, every one of us,

hunter-gatherers once

back in our genes,

our hunter-gatherer genes.

Whether you live in Japan, or Nigeria, or Alaska,

for thousands of years,

much longer than we've been

so-called "civilized" human beings,

we were hunter-gatherers, living off the land...

...and it's also worth remembering

that wolves

were with us too...

...which is why they trot through all the folklore

of pretty much every single country,

every culture.

So often

we approach animals in the natural world

through the stories that we tell about them,

the myths, the legend,

rather than approaching the natural world and animals

on their own terms.

We interpret things in human cultural ways

rather than allowing animals to speak for themselves...

...and it really affects how people view wolves,

and particularly how they treat them

in the real world.

"Lupus in fabula."

"The wolf in the story."

There was a superstition

in ancient Greek and Roman culture

which said that if a wolf saw a person

before the person saw the wolf,

then that person would be struck dumb.

The wolf would steal their speech.

The superstition that wolves could steal a person's speech

was problematic,

because speech was a marker of rationality

and of human exceptionalism.

If a person's speech was stolen by a wolf,

an unthinking, unspeaking animal,

they became no better than a savage beast,

no better than a wolf themselves...

...and that's idiomatically equivalent

to the modern English phrase "speak of the devil."

People know so much about wolves,

not from a biological standpoint,

but from a cultural standpoint.

Scram, bum.

I'm workin' this side of the pasture.

Wolves are in our collective imagination.

In England,

we certainly have our fair share of fear...

although, of course, wolves

haven't been around in this country for centuries.

In our hunter-gatherer past,

we felt a sort of brotherhood with them.

The wolf was a benign spirit,

or a helper.

Wolves don't just feed their pack,

they feed other animals as well.

The ravens follow the wolf pack.

Mice, voles, rats.

Men, when they're very hungry,

used to follow the wolf pack

and pick up the scraps.

In the Wolf Brother books, I write about the Mesolithic.

This is the time of the hunter-gatherers

before farming came along in Northern Europe.

It was often said

a squirrel could hop from one end of England

to Scotland,

from tree to tree, you know,

and never touch the ground,

so it was one vast forest.

People have lived here

for thousands and thousands of years

and left their mark.

There's a massive change

in our attitudes to wolves

from when we were hunter-gatherers

to when farming came along.

Agrarian cultures,

pastoral cultures...

...the wolf becomes the enemy.

The people who wrote the Bible,

the Old Testament and the New Testament,

the passages that they included about wolves

were directly drawn from their knowledge

and their experience of wolves, of wolf behavior,

so they saw wolves hunting,

they saw them preying on sheep,

and they incorporated those as metaphors,

particularly for the behavior of the Devil

preying upon Christian souls,

and Christians were framed as sheep in Christ's flock.

This metaphor probably resonated with later Christian farmers

because it gave them an image to put these ideas to,

so the Devil was a wolf

who preyed upon Christian sheep,

and if they saw a wolf preying upon a lamb,

tearing a lamb apart

in the same way that the Devil would tear apart their soul,

that was a very real, very visceral image for them

to attach their beliefs to.

In early medieval England and in Scandinavia,

there was also this comparison.

Wolves and outlaws

were considered to be akin to one another.

They were both seen as wilderness dwellers

who had been driven away from civilization

to live in the wastes of the wood, or the fenland.

They were also considered criminals,

preying on the community like or as a wolf.

It becomes a symbol of all that's bad and wild

and that we can't control,

hence the idea of werewolves.

Pastoral activities

were an important part of the medieval economy,

and really,

it was often tied up with ideas about ownership.

Sheep were a very important part

of people's diet.

They were also kind of a marker of security and wealth.

Wool paid for the development of key ports

because wool was being traded

and cloth was being sent overseas,

so these ports needed to develop

to keep up with this supply and demand.

The money from wool paid for manor houses,

it paid for churches and cathedrals,

and really, at this point

is when there's very concerted efforts

to exterminate wolves,

because they were an active threat to the wool trade

and the burgeoning prosperity of England at this time.

One of the main advantages of livestock

was that you could cultivate multiple generations

and use the reproduction of the animals

actually to increase your wealth,

so livestock was something

that you could give to your children

through natural reproduction,

perpetuating households,

perpetuating family names

over long spans of time.

When wool became such an important leg

of the economic system,

people were given land

in exchange for removing wolves from an area,

so they were given wealth,

they were given status

in exchange for getting rid of wolves.

Basically, England's wealth

was then predicated on the eradication of wolves.

Wealthy landowners,

driven by the profitability of wool production,

began enclosing common lands

that had traditionally been used by peasants

for subsistence farming and grazing.

Not just wolves,

the starving peasants suffered too.

Stealing a sheep was punishable by death.

Kind of reminds me of an Aesop's fable

about human hypocrisy.

A wolf, seeing some shepherds eating a sheep,

commented, "What an uproar you would make

if I were doing that."

So by the 17th century,

what we call the English countryside

wasn't that different from the way it is now.

I mean, okay, we've got more roads and things,

but in essence,

we'd cut down most of the forests.

This country is still the least forested in Europe.

We still have a few old trees,

but we'd got rid of certainly the wolves,

and most of the other wild animals,

and it was a pastoral place.

For anyone going from that

to somewhere like North America,

which was much more the way Europe had been

in the hunter-gatherer times,

vast forests,

people who still lived in traditional ways,

hunter-gatherer ways,

and wolves and bears and lynxes and things,

that must have been enormous,

not just the threat to survival,

but also the culture clash.

Communicating with people

who believed wolves were their brothers, essentially,

and respected them,

whereas in England,

by then you'd grown up with all the stories

about how terrible wolves are,

and to be shunned,

and the forest is a place to be feared,

not a place to sustain you.

Cultural ideas about anything,

and especially about wolves,

don't exist in a vacuum.

The people who traveled to the Americas from Britain,

they brought stories over with them.

The livestock were a critical colonial partner.

They were property that you could move.

Especially English colonists

came over with domesticated animals,

so they both landed on the beach together.

They met wolves right away,

so within the first year, the first decade,

what you had were conflicts

between wolves and the colonists' livestock,

because there were not enough people

to take care of them every day,

so in most of the colonies,

they preferred animals

that could take care of themselves.

They were often set loose on the landscape...

and then people would go out and collect them.

Sometimes it was the job of really tiny kids,

maybe three, four, five years old

would be sent out to collect the cows

wherever they wandered...

and some of the earliest government actions

in the English colonies

were laws or bounties that were passed

to try to deal with livestock depredation

caused by wolves.

They actually nailed the heads of wolves

to their meeting houses,

which is not what we think of when we think of Puritans

and their churches.

The colonists' heads are full

of all different kinds of stories,

which in part explains their behaviors.

They would dig pit traps,

and then bait those traps,

and they would capture wolves

after they went for the bait

and dropped into these pits,

which meant that they were often handling live animals.

The farmers, when they found these animals,

usually the wolves cowered,

or behaved submissively in front of humans

in this situation,

and often humans tortured them.

You'd have to imagine dispersal of livestock

going wherever they want to go,

and this led to enormous conflicts

between colonists and Native people,

because the two groups of people

might not be in each other's face,

but the colonists' livestock were a constant nuisance

for Native maize fields,

for ruining oyster beds,

and during wars between the two groups,

the first thing that Native warriors would do

was kill livestock

as an expression of them not taking it anymore.

Through the colonial lens of history,

the Indigenous people and wolves

stood in the way of improvement.

They belonged to the howling wilderness.

As we all know,

wolves howl,

they communicate,

and they do it for many reasons,

bonding,

or as a coordinated chorus

to sound like a larger pack marking their territory,

and the sound that travels, well, it ends up in folklore,

folklore that often focused

on stories about people hearing wolves,

thinking they're going to be surrounded by wolves,

attacked by wolves,

but in reality...

it's just a conversation

that has nothing to do with them.

It fed a foundation idea

of what it meant to pacify a wilderness.

To civilize a wilderness was to get rid of the wolves.

If you could get rid of the howling,

well, you were one step closer

to getting rid of the wilderness.

Colonists themselves were often urban or semi-urban.

They entered into a disease environment

that was very favorable to them,

and this was expressed

in them having families that were massive.

You have to measure this

against the diseases that they brought over

that were devastating to Native peoples,

so this was a disease environment

that was very unequal.

Each of these families had an ambition

to set their children up,

not to become rich,

but to have a comfortable livelihood.

This put a lot of pressure on those families

to find additional land

that they could set their children up on,

so these large families

actually became an engine of colonization

as each one of them went in search

of finding a farm for 15 kids.

Ecological change.

The new world began to look like the old world.

The British Wool Act of 1699,

which restricted colonial wool production

to local use

and banned exports and intercolonial trade

to protect England's woolen industry,

sowed the early seeds of colonial resentment.

But resentment?

Well, it's like a loose thread.

You pull too hard...

...things start to unravel.

The way of life our forefathers established

n this foundation of freedoms.o

In a world of fields and fences,

the New Republic maintained bounties on wolves,

but also bounties on creatures.

Vermin, as they were labeled,

were seen as a nuisance

to this agricultural transformation.

That came with a set of ideas about animals and land

that would forever change the continent.

Meanwhile, beyond the newly formed borders

lay vast territories

shaped by traditions and practices

in ways that the citizens of the new republic

could scarcely imagine.

Our territory was vast

so that we would be able

to utilize various resources throughout the year.

For our people, there was nothing wild here.

The predators, wolves, and bears,

are recognized as our relatives.

We lived for millennia with wolves and bears,

with the four-legged, the winged,

the ones that swim,

the ones that crawl above and below the ground.

The health of our communities

was directly related to the biodiversity.

That animal economy

was really the foundation for our economy.

That biodiversity that existed

largely was because of the buffalo.

In the early 1600s,

when French fur trappers first encountered them

in North America,

they called them "boeuf,"

likely because of the Water and Cape Buffalo they knew

from other parts of the world.

In the mid 1700s,

"Bison bison" became the scientific name,

but in our tribal communities,

we more often refer to them as buffalo,

although there's over 330 distinct languages

on this continent.

We all have our terms for the animal

in our own languages.

In Shoshone, it's "Boy-zshan"

or "Kuittsu."

In Northern Arapaho, it's "Heneecee"

or "Hii3einon."

For our grandmas and grandpas, our ancestors,

this animal was life's commissary.

Of course, there was no refrigeration,

and so, imagine a 2,000-pound animal

and preserving the meat

so that it would last you for months.

When you dry the meat,

all of the protein is preserved.

None of it gets denatured,

which happens when you cook it.

All of that buffalo had a use.

That buffalo contains all of the parts

to be able to sustain yourself

if you have the knowledge and know-how.

The bones made into tools,

our clothing,

our shelter,

but it's also central to who we are

in our spirituality,

central to our ceremonies even still today.

The lodge, the tipi,

allowed us to be mobile.

A lodge takes 16 to 18 hides to make a 20-foot tipi,

so if you have a community of 20 tipis,

that's over 300 buffalo

just in the lodges alone.

Some people think the term "nomadic"

means wandering aimlessly,

but that is inaccurate.

Wandering aimlessly

is no way to describe

what the Shoshone people were doing

on our landscape, on our territory.

We knew exactly where we were going,

and exactly for what and when.

Our people were very athletic.

They had to move vast distances.

The Apsáalooke people,

which translates to the "Crow people,"

are strong and rich in culture.

What I understand

and what I was told through oral history,

there was a time where we lived in a great civilization

in a metropolis around the Ohio Valley.

Two brothers decided to go on a vision quest.

Because of a vision quest

and because of the search of the sacred tobacco plant,

those are the reasons why we are here.

"Apsáalooke."

"Children of the Large-Beaked Bird."

The bird, the raven.

Through misinterpretation,

when they tried to translate who we are,

"Children of the Large-Beaked Bird,"

from European contact,

and they called us the "Crow."

Before we had the horse, we had the dog.

The first dogs that Crow came upon,

they were basically wolves that roamed this territory.

It was the wolf that was domesticated

by the Plains Indians tribes,

by our people,

that were the first beasts of burdens...

...and the dogs would be carrying a travois,

and it would be carrying the belongings.

Dogs were really well respected in ceremony

and held positions in the Crow.

It is the horse...

...he's our beast of burden now.

Which translates to "My name is Horse Woman.

I am Greasy Mouth."

I descend from Chief Pretty Eagle,

one of the last-known chiefs of the Crow tribe.

Ever since I was two years old,

I have been on a horse.

The horse in the Crow language

is descriptive,

and it's called "Ichilay,"

and that means

that you use it to look for things.

The horses weren't always here among the Crow.

The conquistadors brought the first horses

to the south

back in the 1500s,

and later,

when the Pueblo people revolted against the Spanish,

thousands of horses escaped

and were also traded north.

It became important to the Crows.

They would use them to go on war parties,

to go hunting for buffalo.

They didn't have guns,

they had arrows made out of arrowheads,

but that's where these buffalo jumps

became very important.

They would chase them down into those buffalo jumps,

and that's how they would get a majority of their meat.

We believe that they have spirits.

Horses have spirits,

and when you become one with them,

they trust you,

you trust them.

If you're nervous or something,

they can feel it.

Some horses, they were sacred.

They would cherish them,

and so they had an important horse

that did everything for them.

They believed that the horse would actually tippy-toe.

It would sneak up on an enemy camp,

and that's how powerful

the horse and the warriors' medicine is.

They would just go into the enemy camp

and steal all their horses.

Hunting was a way of life for the Crow.

When they successfully hunted elk,

the elk teeth were sewn into clothing

to show the skill of the hunter

and the honor of his family.

They called those "iichíilihte."

The wilderness concept

"untrammeled by man" or "leave no trace,"

that makes no sense to Native people.

We used our region,

whether it was high elevation or low elevation,

for over 20,000 years,

just by the archaeological evidence.

We even say longer than that.

The animals...

those that live without fire.

When it came to the land and animals,

the Indigenous people,

they respected them so much

that they would name their children

and children's children after animals,

because of the significant power source

that was within them.

And nobody should be surprised

that this was always a managed landscape.

Euro-Americans were kind of dedicated to the idea

that they were the primary actors

in this landscape,

so they actively erased or hid the evidence

that the people before them were managing these landscapes,

so the idea of a wilderness

is very much a fantasy.

Pushed forward by newspapers

and promoters of American nationalism,

"Manifest Destiny" is an idea

that flourishes in the mid 19th century,

that America was destined to stretch

from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The people who were in the way were Indigenous peoples,

but also rival European powers

like the Spanish and the French,

who would be obstacles to this destiny,

this "obvious destiny,"

reframing what were actually political choices

to be in the hands of God

instead of human beings...

so people pushed on,

encouraged to find a promise,

a hope, a dream.

And as they came upon lands of the Plains Indians tribes,

we did everything we could to protect our home

like they would protect theirs.

To me, when I think about "Manifest Destiny,"

I feel that is a word of...

genocide.

When Lewis and Clark came west in 1804,

they witnessed 30 to 60 million bison.

By 1902, there were less than 23 left in Yellowstone.

What was imposed upon us

was systems of land management

that were contrary to our belief system.

They basically told us that

if you don't become farmers and ranchers,

we're going to take your land...

and they did.

Forces of nature were removed,

and we were removed too.

The things that they eliminated,

anything that could be perceived as a threat,

killing every predator,

and it meant getting rid of fire.

The Native American people knew

that there was this deep connection

between the plant communities and the animals and fire

that was beneficial,

and so intentionally set this mosaic of fires,

low-severity fires,

not the mega fires

that, you know, burn up entire forests.

When you set a fire in the system,

within 24 hours,

the grasses are sprouting again,

and the sprouting of the grasses calls in the animals,

so then, Native Americans would be able to get an elk

or a deer or a bison.

All these animals know when there's fire,

that means it's like ringing the dinner bell.

These light fires were incredibly beneficial

to the whole system,

and caused the nutrients to cycle more vigorously...

until very recently, until about 1850.

Settlers thought they were doing the right thing,

making a landscape much safer for people,

and better for agriculture,

and instead, what happened

is that they created a system

that has been functioning like an engine

missing critical parts.

The system is governed by these relationships

that are ancient and evolutionary...

...so you have the wolf at the top,

you have its preferred prey,

in this area, 95% of what wolves eat is elk.

They're all muscle,

because they run

and travel so far,

and so their meat has a higher protein content

and a lower fat content,

and if you're a wolf,

that's exactly what you need to survive optimally,

and then, you have the food that elk eat,

which, they eat mostly grass

in the warm time of the year

when the protein level in the grasses drops.

They switch to eating aspen trees in winter.

Aspen has a lot of protein in it,

the buds of aspen and also under the bark...

and if there are no wolves in the area

and a lot of elk,

the little sprouts get browsed to death.

Then the elk will just mow them down,

and they're not allowed to recruit,

which means reach maturity,

become adult trees.

The elk, they come up to something like this,

and if wolves are around,

they can take a nip, like, here,

but then they just have to keep going...

...and this whole business of the wolves are gone,

so we can just stand around like we're lawn ornaments,

wreaks havoc with food webs,

and that eliminates habitat

for things like American Redstart warblers,

for example.

Entanglement.

We're always entangled in relationships,

a web of relationships

forged over long, long periods of time.

The settlers reshaped the Plains,

and the large outlines

of the story of American beef

in the 19th century began.

Grass.

Letting your livestock run free.

A way of taking advantage of grass

without needing to claim ownership.

An open range.

A kind of freedom.

The Great Plains

are one of the best places to graze large ungulates

in the entire world.

One of the big moments comes after the Civil War...

...a lot of the markets for cattle were shut down.

The herds started to build up

in places especially like Texas,

and these were semi-feral Longhorn cattle.

There was, uh, estimated to be

about 3.5 million Longhorns around Texas

after the Civil War.

People were trying to figure out how to survive

and make some money off of these Longhorns

that no one wanted to pay anything for.

If they could get those cows up to Kansas,

to those early railroads coming across Kansas,

there was potential to make about $40 per cow,

so that was some pretty good money.

The short trip to Kansas,

that was about two to three months in length,

that trip to Montana here

could take five to six months on average.

Eventually, if they could get that cow to Chicago

or New York City,

they could make potentially even more money.

Then once the cows were here in the Northern Plains,

there weren't fences to keep those cattle contained.

It was an open range,

which is where the name of this time period comes from,

and after the Civil War,

there were a lot of surplus army wagons.

They had iron axles and iron tires.

This was modified into the chuck wagon.

This is the center

of where all life was taking place.

They did have one community toothbrush,

and they all used the same toothbrush.

You have lots of units,

or a lot of outfits,

who are also moving cattle at the same time.

You could almost think of them like giant superhighways

out here in the West.

If you looked off in the distance,

you would have seen dust

from all of these different herds.

Lots of different things

that come up in Hollywood movies

are definitely myths.

Cut!

That does it, boys.

You okay?

Your vision might be

a cowboy on a horse, by himself,

riding off into the sunset.

This was a team job.

You're talking 15-to 25-year-old young men

and 3,000 to 5,000 head of cattle,

and these are typically Longhorn cows

with big six and eight-foot-long horns,

four hooves per cow.

That's a lot of horns and hooves.

Think of those cattle towns

like Dodge City and Abilene

that start popping up across Kansas

as the railroads start making their way westward

across the open plains.

As these cattle drive towns

that originally are set up

so that they can simply get cows to those railheads

and get them on trains,

a whole town establishes itself.

From 1870 to 1890,

the railroads,

the most powerful engine of Western conquest,

brought farmers by the carload...

...and lands were sold

to a flood of new immigrants.

Once the town is established,

farming and homesteading is established,

they don't want these cattle

coming through their fields anymore,

or through their streets of their town anymore...

...and as that railroad continues to push west,

the cattle-drive trails will have to shift as well.

These railroads were connected to Chicago.

Chicago is a place

where the meatpackers Swift and Armour

invented the refrigerated cars,

where they could put these beef carcasses on the trains

and ship them all the way to Philadelphia

and New York City.

Americans wanted their beef to be cheap,

because they wanted to eat a lot of it.

It was the symbol of the good life,

was having a steak on your table

almost every night.

The cattle boom ignited a frenzy

across the United States

as ranchers, investors, and cowboys

chased fortunes fueled by soaring beef demand.

Profits skyrocketed,

but overgrazing left the plains vulnerable.

Then came the winter that changed everything.

An early freeze gripped the northern plains,

followed by a fleeting Chinook wind

that melted snow,

only for an Arctic blast

to lock the landscape

under an impenetrable sheet of ice.

Starving cattle, desperate for food and water,

did what they always did on the open range,

they kept walking.

Hundreds of thousands of cattle perished,

with losses reaching up to 90% of herds

in some areas,

and left most cattle ranchers bankrupt.

Remembered as the "Big Die-Up,"

it forced a reckoning.

It marked the end of the open-range era.

Laws changed,

driving the fence-in movement,

which required ranchers to own and enclose their land.

Barbed wire became the defining symbol

of a controlled and settled west.

When fences go up,

that officially closes the range,

so you no longer are living

in an open-range era.

Once you have fencing up, and your cattle are contained,

they're not free to then roam

wherever they're going to for food and water,

so now you need to provide those things for your cattle.

Now you need to learn how to hay

and create bales and storage of hay

for your livestock to be able to eat.

That meant you needed to deal with water rights,

and who has access to the water,

who has the right to the water,

who owns the water,

and there's a lot of land out there

that has no water running through it.

The livestock growers, the ranchers,

assumed a lot of the risk

while these kind of monopolies

were able to take most of the profits.

In fact, the secret of the packers

and the people who had a lot of power

and developed that power

early on in the late 19th century

and early 20th century,

they passed along the risk of the market

down to the ranchers.

The people nearest to the animals

were the ones that were in the most precarious position,

which makes them feel vulnerable,

and they were.

Federal government began to get involved,

especially in the 1880s and the 1890s,

in wolf control

in order to protect livestock.

It was often in partnership with agricultural organizations,

so for example, in Colorado in the early 20th century,

it was the Wool Growers Association

that helped pay for these programs.

Progress.

Urban expansion.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries,

folks were getting real nervous

about running out of resources...

...so conservation became a big deal.

The government stepped in,

setting up the US Forest Service,

the US Forest Reserve,

and National Parks.

It was about managing what people thought was useful,

like trees and game animals,

while eliminating the useless ones.

There was even a policy in Yellowstone National Park

of killing wolves, getting rid of these predators,

because there was the idea in Yellowstone National Park

that there were good animals and bad animals,

and the good animals were the big, gentle animals

like elk, and moose, and bison

that people wanted to look at,

and therefore, the bad animals were any animals

that preyed on those good animals.

The people who managed Yellowstone National Park

in the early 20th century

were systematically killing off mountain lion and wolves.

When Yellowstone National Park was founded,

it was not founded as a wildlife refuge.

It was not founded to protect wild animals.

It was founded as a park for people to visit,

to see the geological splendors, the landscape.

This was 1872,

and part of the idea

was that if this great place of scenic splendor

were protected,

then the Northern Pacific Railroad

could sell tickets to tourists

who wanted to come out and visit it...

and some of the people involved in the founding of Yellowstone

were economically involved

with the Northern Pacific Railroad,

so it was, in some ways, a very commercial,

I don't want to quite say cynical idea,

but it was not tremendously idealistic,

focused on the protection of a wild ecosystem.

Mountain lion were not extirpated,

but wolves were extirpated from Yellowstone,

and then they were reintroduced in 1995

because ideas had changed

about the purpose of our national parks,

and about how to manage our national parks

in a more natural way, with complete ecosystems.

People had gotten beyond that idea

that there are good animals and bad animals.

So wolves have thrived,

and they are again fulfilling their role

in the ecosystem.

Their populations have increased,

they have dispersed,

so now there are wolves in places

where there hadn't been wolves

for the last 60 or 70 years...

so there are some conflicts.

There are some occasions

where wolves are killing livestock,

and of course, everybody gets very upset about that.

Ranchers get very upset about that,

because ranchers,

people who really run working commercial ranches,

especially family ranches

in Idaho, or Wyoming, or Montana,

are generally not making a ton of money.

If they lose cows or calves

to a pack of wolves,

it's a serious problem.

The cowboy,

immortalized through generations of popular culture,

became a metaphor for American exceptionalism...

...reinforcing the idea of the United States

as a unique and pioneering nation,

a nation that tamed the wilderness,

and now, the wolves are back.

Yes, we like to sing about the beauty

and the romance of the Old West.

Oh...

Excuse me.

Ranchers and cowboys

are emblems of independence,

and the media tied that in

to what it meant to be an American.

To be an American...

Ah, to be an American

is to be unencumbered and free.

♪ Must it be

♪ Can it be

♪ Can it be, oh, Lord

♪ Have mercy ♪

♪ On poor me ♪

I recall I grew up dreaming of being a cowboy.

That's all I ever wanted to be.

I like rural.

I like the mountains.

It's not everybody's gig.

Just look around you.

How many years would you have to be alive

to ride all this country?

Gave it a good shot.

And I bought this place

'cause I always said

I was never gonna own a place

that I couldn't crack my gate and ride through,

and be on public land.

A range rider, cowboy, gay cowboy.

Cowboys kinda think

they're supposed to just ride horses

and take care of livestock,

but more and more,

the West has just gotten, uh, barbed wire,

uh, smaller pastures, and...

Back when I was a kid, you had a cowboy out.

They weren't looking for predators

so much as they were checking the cattle,

and checking the salt,

making sure the cattle were up off the crick bottoms

and out on the ridges,

and that's all changed today.

There are people today

who are very dedicated

to carrying on older traditions and this,

but it's hard to move even cattle 50, 60 miles today

with highways and fences

and getting people to let you ride through.

The guy that owns this ranch now,

he's from New York.

Uh...

Most of my family that grew up around here

is gone or moved on.

And we are the east entrance to Yellowstone National Park,

so people literally ask, want to know,

"Where are the cages they put these animals in at night?"

You say, "Nah, nobody asks that."

Yeah, they do!

And people, like, down there

that move out here,

they move out here because of what it is,

and then they immediately wanna make it something different.

And the first people they cuss are the ranchers

and the farmers.

We're the ones that took care of it forever.

The icon of the cowboy.

These are people that are rugged individualists.

So you have that on the one hand,

but also you have the reality of the American West

as very much

being tied to the federal government.

It's the federal army that conquered this territory,

so this idea of the independent cowboy

has always been in relationship with this state power.

Federal lands

dominate the western United States.

It is as unique as it is vast.

Public lands are not owned by individuals,

but held in trust for the benefit of all.

Grazing permits or allotments for livestock

on public forest service and grasslands,

if managed correctly,

remains an integral part.

This is the annual winter roundup

for the big drive from the summer pastures,

now covered with snow,

to the home range farther south.

This is the last day we're permitted to be on...

on our allotment,

so we're gathering cows to go home

and do all our fall work,

um, sort and wean and preg test, and...

Big shipping time of year

when we get our once-a-year paycheck.

I turned out 160 pairs,

cow-calf pairs,

and 122 yearling heifers and steers.

We do have some wolves,

but I didn't see one this summer.

Yeah, I haven't seen a griz or a wolf with my own eyes

on this allotment this summer,

but my trail cameras have caught quite a few.

Yeah.

Uh, including some wolves and cattle on one camera

on the same day.

I guess there's some below the road.

Huh?

I know there are some down in those trees

below the road. - Yeah...

The wilderness areas in the northern Rockies

are already essentially full of wolves.

It's where people live and work

that the future of wolves will be decided.

Most of these ranches

would not be viable economic units

without some kind of a public land grazing permit.

North of town, I guess,

they have more issues than we do.

They had some younger wolves this spring

that were learning how to hunt,

and they didn't kill any cows,

but they tore a few of them up.

I don't think anybody would say we don't like wolves.

We don't like the effect they have on us.

Yeah, we're gonna try to co-exist with them.

They're fun to look at.

They're cool to be around.

I don't live here because I wanted to live in a...

I guess a...

I wanted to live someplace wild.

We just have cattle up here in the spring, summer, and fall,

and we ship 'em in mid-October...

...and, uh, the only way you can move cattle around here

is really on a horse.

It's high country,

about 8,400 feet,

and our ranch probably climbs up to about 10,000 feet,

and we also have cattle back on the Forest Service,

so that's tens of thousands of acres.

By far the biggest use of public lands,

or any lands agriculturally,

is grazing.

If you look at a grazing map of the western United States,

it's-it's huge.

Got all kinds of wildlife.

We have deer and elk

and fox and coyote and badgers.

I think the majority of ranchers

don't wanna bring the wolf back.

It's a pretty polarizing issue.

A lot of ranchers are against it.

They're afraid they'll lose all their livestock,

or it'll really cut into their livelihood

raising cattle and sheep.

If you stand next to this chute,

the lambs may jump out,

so be very aware that they could jump out,

and if you're on top next to it,

they'll jump on you,

but also, if you put your hands up,

and you keep 'em from jumping,

we'd greatly appreciate that behavior too.

Maybe. Let's see...

We have uno, dos, tres .

Let's have actually...

dos hombres aquí.

Uno izquierda, uno drecha posatare.

Con palitos.

Push 'em up!

Push 'em up, push 'em up.

Push 'em up.

Before, when I was a youngster,

we'd have had to move these sheep 10 or 12 miles

to a railhead

to put the sheep, the lambs, on a rail car.

Now we can bring the truck to the top of the mountain

and do the job right here.

Yeah, they stayed here last night,

but they have a night pen,

which I can show you this afternoon.

Dos hombres, dos paneles.

Sheep have been domesticated

way before the birth of Christ,

and they've always lived with predators.

As they became domesticated,

they depended more and more upon man

to provide their protection,

and it's kind of a symbiotic relationship

between man and their sheep...

...and a lot of people have asked me,

you know, the predator problem,

and they look at it as a financial loss.

I don't look at it as a financial loss.

I look at it as I failed in my job

to protect that sheep.

That's my God-given job

is to protect those sheep,

and if a predator comes in,

there isn't enough money in the world

that can replace the loss I feel,

the failure that I feel,

for not being able to take care of 'em.

When the wagon trains came out of the east,

they all had sheep with them

for a food source down the trail,

that when they got here to Oregon,

the sheep numbers just exploded,

because it's great sheep country.

At one time,

there was probably over 10 million head of sheep

in Oregon.

The numbers were too high for the natural resources.

The people that came out here and homesteaded the ground,

they chose the best pieces,

and that left tens of thousands,

if not hundreds of thousands, of unclaimed land

that the federal government still owned,

so people started just using it.

There was no ownership to it,

and in so doing,

they overgrazed a lot of it,

and that's where the range wars started,

because people would steal grass

from where other people thought they should have it.

My great uncle, he went to Washington D.C.

with 15 or 20 other guys,

and they sat down,

and they drafted the Taylor Grazing Act.

The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934

put a stop to overgrazing

and folks using public land like a free buffet.

The act set up grazing permits.

If you wanted to run cattle or sheep,

you had to play by the rules.

It shaped a multi-use landscape.

Conservation,

forestry,

recreation...

all sharing space,

and now, with wolves roaming free,

the range wars may have ended,

but what is allowed on public land?

Well, that story is still being written.

And compromising is a tough deal,

uh, especially if you've operated in a certain way

for many, many years,

and I mean sometimes generations.

It is important, in many cases,

for those people who run ranches to stay on the land

if the alternative is selling those ranches

for development and further sprawl.

If that's the alternative,

selling the big ranches to be subdivided for sprawl,

then we're much better off

keeping those ranches intact,

working even in the presence of big predators,

even in the presence of wolves.

If I was living in Colorado in the 1870s or 1880s,

I'd probably be afraid of it too,

and I'd probably want to kill them all,

but there's a lot of stories, there's a lot of myth,

and I don't think we need to be scared of 'em

in this day and age.

Well, we always check on our herd anyway.

Probably have to be a little more diligent.

They're kind of shy animals.

They...

I think they'll stay out of trouble when they can,

at least stay away from human beings when they can.

Every three or four days,

we move different campsites

and keep 'em on fresh feed.

They do better,

the rangeland does better.

We put the sheep inside these pens every night

to protect them from predation.

The fence is electrified,

as you can see here,

with a solar, uh, battery-powered charger,

but the electrification isn't to keep the sheep in the pen,

it's actually to keep predators out.

Basically, all you have to do is whistle,

and they'll run into the pen

looking for that protection

that that electric wire provides.

We use biological deterrents,

so guardian dogs, big, large Pyrenees.

Those dogs then can patrol this cleared space,

and they act as sentries,

so if the predator encroaches or approaches the pen,

um, even if he's just curious,

the guard dogs then sound the alarm,

create a lot of noise,

haze the predator off,

and/or wake up the herder,

and the herders' camp is just behind us, uh...

oh, about 100 yards from the night pen here,

and then the herder can respond,

and, you know, address what is going on.

We've been using night pens for over ten years,

and we have not had a single night-time predation.

Blake practices holistic management.

He's got a grazing plan based on those ideas,

and how we can best use this country.

Come on, get up here.

This holistic management seems to incorporate a...

a future landscape that you envision

more than a lot of other philosophies do.

It's in large part a decision-making process.

Those key insights show

that controlled, planned grazing of livestock

is very beneficial

for the grasslands of the world.

There's been good years and bad years, of course,

but figuring out what you were doing

that's causing problems...

You know, send old cows up here that got bad hips,

and ask them to hike up and down a mountain twice a day,

you're gonna have problems.

Um...

sending too young of calves,

or cows that aren't...

uh, prepared to keep track of their calves

and fend off a predator.

The more we know our land,

the more of a positive influence we can be.

Mm-hmm.

The more you're part of it,

the better you feel it.

I think humans just got to get

a little more in tune to nature.

In the bustling cities and towns,

in the places where progress hums,

the wild feels distant.

Most people will never encounter a wolf

outside of a zoo or wildlife center,

yet, if you look closely,

wolf behavior is all around us,

carrying within them

the echoes of their wild ancestors.

I've worked with wolves for three years,

and then have spent over 15 years studying,

observing wolves in the wild, wolves in captivity,

and also our canine friends,

and I see so many similarities in their behavior,

in their communication.

Here in England,

the last wolf was shot in the 1700s.

The landscape, as a result, has suffered,

because wolves were only seen as a predator,

but they are intelligent, social animals,

just like our dogs.

Everything from our canine friends

wanting to lick us when they meet us,

when they greet us,

their beautiful wagging tails,

and so much in their behavior and communication

that goes unnoticed...

things that we may not enjoy

or may not understand,

like our dogs scent rolling.

Information like communicating trust.

By going into this position,

a lot of people would say our dog is submitting,

and it's a little bit like that,

but there's more information

than just surrendering and submitting.

They're actually saying,

"Hey, you could take my life here.

You could place your muzzle around my throat,

or bite me all around these vulnerable areas,

but I have so much trust and faith in you,

I know that that's not what's going to happen..."

and we may see one of our canine friends

display this behavior towards ourselves...

...just like wolves would do to each other...

and in particular, one absolute similarity

I see between wolves and our canine friends

is something that's called functional character.

Our dogs do have functional characters,

and functional character is really amazing,

because it takes us away from, again, this story,

this myth, this tale

that wolves have a hierarchy.

Wolves don't exist in this linear system.

Every individual that is in a particular group

does so because of the functional purpose it holds

to support and harmonize the safety

and functioning of that wolf group.

For example, your breeding pairs,

where they're seen as the guides,

they anchor the group together,

and they are absolutely the go-to individual

that the rest of the wolf family are gonna go to.

They would traditionally be known as the alpha.

They have the knowledge and the wisdom

that anchor the rest of that group together

so that group can survive.

We have other functional characters

that then support the group.

For example, defenders or enforcers.

They defend the group

from other individuals and intruders

that might be coming in.

Now, this might be a rival wolf group.

It could be a bear coming in to forage.

They're also the enforcers within the group.

They can teach the younger ones.

They can teach the adolescents and the juveniles

what is the correct way of being

and communicating within their wolf family.

We then have followers.

They're there to make up the size

and number of the group,

so that if there's a rival wolf group nearby,

then because maybe that neighboring wolf group

has many more followers,

then it means that they're at less risk of rivalry.

Remembering that just like dogs,

wolves are individuals,

and that can also really help us to understand

how we can coexist with wolves

by not just seeing them as a predator,

but the functional character that they are,

and just like dogs need guidance

so they don't get into trouble,

it's a fact

that many more dogs kill livestock

than wolves.

Wolves need guidance too,

and sadly, there are occasions

when some wolves do kill livestock,

and one of the reasons can be where a guide,

or what is known as the alpha,

that individual that can really lead the hunt

and pass on information to the rest of her family

of what to hunt,

are eradicated.

They're shot, killed,

removed by us humans.

Managers,

in keeping with wolf-management plans

that were part of the Wolf Recovery program

and the Endangered Species Act,

said, "Well, now they've recovered.

They've met all the criteria.

Let's hunt them."

You open up a hunting season on wolves,

what gets taken

is wolves are not being hunted for meat,

they're being hunted as trophies.

You kill these wise, mature wolves

that teach the younger wolves, their young,

and various generations of wolves

how to be good wolves,

and you remove them from the population.

It takes about four years

for wolves to learn to hunt really well.

So then what's happened

since these wolf hunts have started,

and this has been widely observed,

is that the conflicts,

these young wolves

don't know what the heck they're doing.

They have, just like a human 13-year-old,

raging hormones.

They don't know what to do,

and so they'll go and start eating chickens

in somebody's chicken coop,

and then they'll go and kill somebody's dog,

and before you know it,

they start doing all sorts of bad things,

'cause they don't know which way is up.

You're disrupting the pack life

when you allow for an indiscriminate hunt,

and as you increase the amount of hunting,

these situations just get worse and worse.

So, here we are,

where we started.

As America continues its tug of war

between conservation and control,

in some areas of the West,

the bounties on wolves are back.

They feed an old fear

that something wild,

something untamed,

might take what belongs to us.

And there are some contemporary examples

of people torturing wolves

in the last few years,

and if you really engage with this history,

I think that, uh, first of all,

you can understand

where this stuff is coming from...

and I think it would be a testament

to our ability as human beings

to change the way that we think and behave

to make space for these creatures

that have been with us throughout our history.

It's very important for our young people

to know our history

as well as our contemporary place

on our landscape,

and so we are no longer able to access

much of our traditional territory,

but we as caretakers

are just part of the system.

Recognizing the importance of buffalo

as a keystone species,

managed as wildlife, as we describe them today.

The importance of wolves and bears to the ecosystem.

Being balanced mentally, spiritually,

emotionally, physically.

This holistic understanding of how we see the world

teaches us that...

that all of the components of our natural world,

all are very important.

And those wolves,

I've ridden right alongside of 'em,

within them being 30 yards off to the side,

right going parallel with me,

and they just looked at me,

and my horse and me are trotting along,

and I look at them.

I'm not worried about them trying to take me.

They aren't gonna do that.

You check fences, you check salt, you check water,

you check where the cows are,

and in that presence,

I think it helps with all predators,

be it grizzly bears, wolves,

mountain lions, whatever...

and it's what I did.

As far as being a range rider and a... wolf spotter,

it don't take much.

Yeah, it's all a living system,

not just a home for cows.

It's a...

it's a place for life.

Much of our country

is now covered with shopping malls,

cornfields,

and highways

that stretch across landscapes

once shaped by hoofbeats

and open skies...

but the land remembers.

There are roughly 385 million unenclosed acres

in the western United States,

and that belongs to the people,

not some monarch.

That's a privilege,

and it's worth standing up for.

In the commons and beyond,

can we, the people,

work with rather than against the wild?

Entanglement, history, myth,

and mutual dependence.

Wolves and people remain co-travelers

in American history,

and this lingering partnership

reminds us that our concerns and aspirations

exist alongside the others.

Where wildness and domestication

endlessly collide...

...a chance remains to restore,

to coexist,

to reimagine what it means to share this world.

The story of the wolves

is ultimately the story of us,

a reflection of how we choose to live

alongside the untamed,

and how we decide

what future we leave behind.