Wolf Pushback

In getting to know wolf advocate Suzanne Asha Stone, she believes strongly that wolves belong in the wilderness. She is a hunter, she farms, so she understands the pushback to her philosophy from those communities. “There is almost nothing better than waking up on a fall morning out in the woods and hearing and elk bugle. It’s just incredible. I think it was the fact that we were missing some of these key components, wolves being one of them, it just felt like we had made some pretty poor choices when it came to eradicating some of the most key species that helped keep our ecosystems intact. We have really gone overboard with wolves. They have been unjustly persecuted to the point where whole communities were going out to catch a wolf and hang it in the town square, they burned them, they wrapped them in barbed wire and just did horrific things to them. It was so far above and beyond any reasonable concerns at the time about wolves, they became a center for persecution, a way for people to express some pretty dark elements of human nature that has nothing to do with wild wolves and their behavior. I felt this was something that really needed to be brought out to the public and let people make up their own minds about how to manage wolves and whether to bring them back. This should be based on reality and not just superstition and fairy tales. That is really where it came from. A sense of these animals being the true underdog, literally.