By Robby Cantrell

     Stuart Hall has had no lack of coverage about the hardships the wolf has faced. All students read Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf over the summer, a novel that documents the tragic misconceptions that humans have about wolves and the danger this made their species face in the 1960s. Then, over the course of two chapel periods, we watched Wolves at Our Door, a documentary from the late 1990s that also provides an inside view to the friendly, familial nature of this beautiful creature, clearing up many other wrongful stereotypes.  One might deduce from all this coverage over the past century—and the accompanying awareness about the necessity of wolf preservation— that the future of the species is looking bright.  Sadly, this is not the case, and the time wolves have left grows shorter every day: the time to act is now.

     As Mowat’s book explained, the early 20th century was a dark time for wolves. The Defenders of Wildlife website, a leading pro-wolf force, reports that millions of wolves were slaughtered during this period through poison, hunting, and trapping… The wolf population in our country was all but eliminated. Settlers encroached on the territory that countless generations of wolf families had inhabited before them and almost wiped their species from existence.  In the late 1960s environmental awareness started to become a major worldwide concern, and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 officially made the wolf a protected species. Species recovery programs picked up speed by the 1990s, and wolf aficionados cheered as wolves were reintroduced to Idaho, Yellowstone National Park, and some areas of the Southwest USA.

     But while these steps are progress, wolves are far from safe, and the fate of their species is still highly uncertain. As Jennifer R. Wolch states in her book Animal Geographies, the average wolf hunter in  America of the 1800s killed four to five thousand wolves in ten years, and the survival of the species has only gone downhill from there. The slaughter has continued, and Defenders of Wildlife estimates that, as of 2009, there were only 52 southwestern wolves left in the wild and only 100 red wolves. The damage humans have done to them has been exponential and longstanding, and we are still far from undoing it. Despite this dire situation, our society is still fighting the wolf: Defenders of Wildlife’s site tells how they filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in 2009 after the FWS pulled wolves from the list of protected species. Once they were off of the list, wolf hunting was legal in Idaho and Montana. By the time the case’s conclusion last year placed wolves back on the protected list, 20% of the current wolf population had already been massacred. In Alaska the situation is even worse, with approximately 1000 wolves killed by aerial hunters in 2010, a practice that is deplorably still legal though actively opposed by Defenders of Wildlife. Some humans are fighting for wolves to paw their way back into significance, but many others are still ignorantly fighting to wipe them from existence. We cannot allow the second group to succeed, and there are, in fact, simple ways that you can help.

     Defenders.org (DOW) and NWF.org (the National Wildlife Federation) are both great sources of current information about the wolf. Both are Better Business Bureau Accredited Charities, both accept donations, and both have great incentives for it: the minimum “Adopt a Wolf” DOW donation of $25, for example, gets you an adorable 8” plush wolf puppy.  Of course, donating is not the only way to help: spreading the word about the problem is also an invaluable way to assist the cause, considering the leading cause of death in wolves has been misinformation and ignorance. Tell your friends about the issue. Get involved in supporting the cause in some way—online or off—and the wolf may have a chance yet. Strength comes in numbers, and if more people learn of the perilous situation that one of our most beloved species is in, there is still time to get this beautiful and misunderstood species back on its feet… or, in this case, paws.