National Geographic Live's Wild Wolves of Yellowstone offers intimate insight into pack existence
At the Orpheum, biologist Doug Smith shares stories from reintroducing the animals back into the national park and observing their complex behaviours
Biologist Doug Smith recounts the effort to reintroduce grey wolves to Yellowstone National Park. Photo by Alex Wenchel for National Geographic
Vancouver Civic Theatres presents Wild Wolves of Yellowstone with biologist Doug Smith on February 12 at the Orpheum, as part of the National Geographic Live speaker series
DOUG SMITH LOVES WOLVES but he isn’t sentimental about them.
Now retired, the wildlife biologist led the effort to reintroduce grey wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, restoring balance to an ecosystem that has thrived in the 30 years since the return of its apex predator. But the Yellowstone Wolf Project was bitterly and loudly opposed at the time.
“I’m no stranger to wolf hatred,” Smith tells Stir in a call from his home in Montana, just two weeks after testifying in front of state representatives against a bill to reduce the wolf population by 50 percent. They couldn’t have a better advocate but the animus runs deep.
“It’s cultural,” he says. “Probably the first 30 years of my career I thought if people actually had accurate information, they’d change their minds. And they don’t. What they think about wolves comes from their value system, how they think the world should be, and so it’s really hard to flip people. But, having said that, 50 years ago almost nobody liked wolves. Now it’s 50-50. Half love ’em and half hate ’em and I’m trying to preach the middle and nobody’s there.”
It’s hard to imagine that anyone would leave Smith’s National Geographic Live presentation, Wild Wolves of Yellowstone—a talk that’s illustrated with photos and videos that comes to the Vancouver Playhouse on Wednesday—with anything but reverence for these remarkable animals. The story of Yellowstone’s recovery effort is rousing on its face but this close-up look at wolf life also teases a deeper human curiosity. Smith’s team ruthlessly observed the Yellowstone population and won an intimate insight into pack existence but also its individual stories.
There is, for instance, the tale of a breathtaking wolf known as “21”. This smart and resourceful male exhibited a range of intriguing behaviours including a style of leadership that Smith describes as “magnanimous”, but in using the word he acknowledges that we’re already flirting with the dreaded tick of humanizing a species we can never really understand. Still, how else should we characterize 21’s response to the death of his mate?
“I talk about that in the show,” says Smith. “I mean, I’m not about human exceptionalism at all. Humans exist on a continuum with other animals, and I don’t mean just mammals, so you can’t go out there and say, ‘This animal has emotion and this animal doesn’t.’ Yet you want to use terms that describe it accurately. Not ever being able to get inside a wolf’s head, you can’t impute to know what they’re thinking, but it’s clear that when you watch 21 his whole life, his mate dies, and he does things you’ve never seen before. What’s going on? I don’t know! Do I think he’s feeling something? Oh yeah. I think the answer—and I hesitate to use this word—is that it’s a form of grieving. I don’t want to say they’re like us, but they’re on a line of relatedness.”
Certainly we can have a complicated, perhaps romantic emotional response to these creatures. Smith clearly admires the indefatigable nature of an animal that faces a short and frequently brutal life.
“Humans give up,” he says. “We can think life is hopeless but a wolf would never think that, ever. I flew thousands and thousands of hours, tracking them, and I saw them with broken legs, and they’re still helping their pack attack a bison. Their leg is dangling but it’s not like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna sit this one out.’ I know all animals are like that but wolves really brought that home for me. Everything is now because tomorrow you could be dead.”
Equally, sometimes you persist against all odds. The first population of grey wolves was imported in ’95 from BC and Alberta—“We were worried they’d head right back to Canada,” Smith chuckles—and three decades later the famed “Molly’s Pack” is still roaming the vast national park. The name is in tribute to Mollie Beattie, director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service when Yellowstone finally welcomed its wolves after a gruelling, 20-year bipartisan effort that gathered momentum with the Reagan administration and ended under Clinton.
“Reagan’s director of the national park service was very pro-wolf,” recalls Smith. “He had a button with a picture of a wolf and the eyes lit up. I have the pin. It doesn’t work now but I still got it.” Meanwhile, Beattie herself accompanied those first crates that arrived from up north. Smith believes such an initiative wouldn’t make it through Congress these days. In view of that, and given what he’s observed in 44 years of studying these animals, who has the better politics? Humans or wolves? It’s a frivolous question, maybe, but it raises a laugh from Smith.
“I mean—I’m gonna say wolves, by far,” he answers. “They live in families, though you can stay or leave any time you want, and everything you do is important. Humans are kinda involved in all this sideline BS that we get hung up on that really doesn’t matter. I don’t think a wolf cares what tree it shits behind. Here in the US there’s all this talk about who gets to use what bathroom. I mean, for crying out loud. And they spend a ton of time on it!” 
Related Articles
