Two U.S. Forest Service employees were so frightened by howling wolves that the agency sent a chopper to evacuate them from Idaho's Sawtooth Wilderness Area in late September.
Gifford Pinchot must be spinning in his grave. Some of you may be appalled about such cavalier squandering of your tax dollars. We're mostly amused but also reminded that irrational fear of wolves persists for no good reason. And while fear of man-eating wolves could not derail restoration of wolf populations to the Northern Rockies - one of the more notable triumphs of endangered species recovery - the long-term prospects for people and wolves to coexist likely will require ongoing educational efforts to enable people to separate fact and fancy.
Apparently the Forest Service employees, who've not been identified, are not among the many tourists who pay thousands of dollars going to Yellowstone National Park and elsewhere hoping for a chance to hear wolves howl.
We've heard wolves howl. Sometimes it makes the little hairs on the back of your neck stand straight. Mostly it makes us thankful we live where we do, where the “Call of the Wild” is not confined to a bookshelf.
You can't blame some people for seeing wolves as a something of a mixed blessing. Some kill livestock and pets. And some people worry that too many big-game animals will wind up in wolves' stomachs instead of people's freezers. These are matters that are manageable - and, in fact, are being managed. Montana has an excellent wolf-management plan that provides a clear blueprint for keeping self-sustaining populations of wolves in balance with other wildlife and people.
But danger to humans from wolves is a non-issue. Or should be. Those two Forest Service workers were in far greater danger of falling off that rock or of crashing in the helicopter sent to fetch them than they were of being torn to shreds by howling wolves.
Simply stated, instances of wolves attacking humans are extremely rare - not just recently, but throughout much of recorded history. According to “The Fear of Wolves: A Review of Wolf Attacks on Humans,” edited by John Linnell, no human in all of North America has been killed by a wolf since 1900. Over the past 400 years worldwide, attacks on humans were rare and mostly attributed to rabies. There is no recorded instance of a predatory wolf killing anyone in North America. Aside from rabid wolves - a modern rarity - most instances of wolves biting people documented worldwide over the past four centuries involved wolves unnaturally habituated to humans, wolves trapped or captured by people and wolves persisting in areas where the natural habitat had been greatly altered by humans.
Wolves are wild animals. All wild animals - from squirrels to white-tailed deer to wolves - have the potential to hurt you. But the record is pretty clear that you're in far more danger from the squirrels and deer than from wolves.
The Forest Service might want to alert its employees to this fact before deploying them to occupied wolf habitat from now on. And the rest of us would do well to keep it in mind, too. There are plenty of issues that need to be addressed to make wolf management an ongoing success. Thankfully, danger to people isn't one of them.
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