American Wildlife Policy and Environmental Ideology

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American Wildlife Policy and Environmental Ideology: Poisoning Coyotes, 1939-1972 Author(s): Thomas R. Dunlap Source: Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Aug., 1986), pp. 345-369 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3639703 Accessed: 15-08-2015 07:02 UTC

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American Wildlife Policy and Environmental Ideology: Poisoning Coyotes, 1939-1972

THOMAS R. DUNLAP

The author is a member of the history department in Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

In February 1972, as part of his environmental state of the union address, President Richard Nixon announced a ban on federal use of poison to kill predatory animals and promised to replace the old aim of killing off worth- less “varmints” with a new one, saving both coyotes and sheep by reducing contact between them. His order, and the legislative and administrative action which ratified and ex- tended it, was a major change in policy. Americans had long regarded predators as they had the forests and the Indians- something to be cleared from the land to make way for civilization-and they had commonly used poison to get

I thank Renee Jaussaud of the National Archives and Records Service and the staff of the National Wildlife Federation for their assistance; David Wake of the Mu- seum of Vertebrate Zoology for permission to use the museum’s records; and Starker Leopold, Jack Berryman, and John Gottschalk for interviews. I received useful criticism on an earlier draft of this article from colleagues in my history de- partment, and I wish to acknowledge research grants from the history department and the College of Arts and Sciences of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

345

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346 Pacific Historical Review

rid of “vermin.” Federal predator control work, begun in 1915, enjoyed strong support from the ranchers it served and was, at that time, killing between 60,000 and 100,000 coyotes a year.’ Now, with a stroke of the presidential pen, the ground shifted under this well-established and seemingly well-accepted program.

Nixon’s announcement can be seen in political terms- the action of a President seeking reelection and anxious to win environmental votes. This perspective, though cor- rect, neglects more important, long-range influences. The ban, however much it owed to immediate circumstances, was the result of a long evolution of public ideas under the influ- ence of science and of efforts by conservation and humane organizations opposed to poisoning. Even in the short-term, politics was not all; changes in law and the bureaucracy played an important part in the decision. At the center of the fight was the coyote poison-Compound 1080-which was the mainstay of predator control after World War II.2 It came on the scene before the environmental era, and its initial use and regulation reflected the sentiments of an earlier period. As environmental ideas became more popular it became a symbol-for the woolgrowers part of a modern technology which sustained mankind in the face of an implacably hos- tile nature, for the environmentalists an example of reck-

1. Richard Nixon, “Special Message to the Congress Outlining the 1972 Envi- ronmental Program,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1972 (Washington, D.C., 1974), 173-189; Executive Order 11643, Feb. 8, 1972, Federal Register, XXXVII, 2875. The EPA order cancelling and suspending registration is in FederalRegister, XXXVII, March 18, 1972, p. 5718. See also MichaelJ. Bean, The Evolution of National Wildlife Law (2nd ed., New York, 1983), 235-240; T. S. Palmer, “Extermination of Noxious Animals by Bounties,” in U.S. Dept. of Ag- riculture, Yearbook of Agriculture, 1896 (Washington, D.C., 1897), 55-68; Stanley P. Young and Edward A. Goldman, The Wolves of North America (1944; 2 vols., New York, 1964), I, 296-335; U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries, Subcommittee on Fisheries and Wildlife Con- servation, Hearings on Predatory Mammals and Endangered Species, 92 Cong., 2 sess. (1972), 69.

2. Chemically, the compound is sodium fluoroacetate; 1080 was its laboratory number during wartime tests.

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American Wildlife Policy 347

less disregard for the natural world on which humanity de- pended.3 The ban of 1972 came as part of a sweeping change in the philosophy of wildlife policy, a movement from human management for immediate ends to a policy which consid- ered more distant goals and had as a major objective the sta- bility of the biological system.

The career of 1080 shows how changes in scientific knowl- edge and public ideas about nature were applied to one area of wildlife policy and made what had been an accepted agri- cultural practice a controversial problem in environmental politics. The social and legal setting into which 1080 was introduced in 1945 dictated the way in which it was judged, accepted, and used, and reflected the concerns of the pre- environmental era. Thereafter, scientific knowledge under- mined the assumptions on which the program was based and the rationale for using 1080. Finally, changes in society, law, and administration allowed opponents of the poisoning pro- gram to mobilize a mass constituency and to use their lever- age, through the bureaucracy, to change the program and ban the poison.4

3. There is a large collection of this literature in file: “Poison 1080, Articles and Publications, 1945-1968,” General Files, Division of Wildlife Research, Record Group 22, Records of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Archives (here- after cited as RG 22). See also Jack Olsen’s Slaughter the Animals, Poison the Earth (New York, 1971).

4. Thomas R. Dunlap, “‘The Coyote Itself’: Ecologists and the Value of Preda- tors, 1900-1972,” Environmental Review, VII (1983), 54-70, is an overview of eco- logical ideas about predation and a discussion of the role of science in forming atti- tudes. The current article and an earlier one in this journal, “Values for Varmints,” PHR, LIII (1984), 141-161, expand and develop themes touched on in “The Coyote Itself.” The earlier essay discusses the protests of mammalogists against predator control in the 1920s, while this article deals with one major policy change in the post-World War II period. All three are parts of a larger work on wildlife pol- icy and ideas about wildlife in industrial America, a subject that few historians have studied. A section in Frank Egerton’s “The History of Ecology: Achievements and Opportunities, Part Two,” Journal of the History of Biology, XVIII (1985), 118-122, surveys the literature on wildlife management. James A. Tober’s Who Owns the Wild- life?: The Political Economy of Conservation in Nineteenth-Century America (Westport; Conn., 1981) and Michael Bean’s The Evolution of National Wildlife Law (New York, 1983) survey legal developments. There are summaries of control policies in Stanley

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348 Pacific Historical Review

A Program and Poison

Congress established a federal predator and rodent control program in 1915 as it had many other small pro- grams-as a service for a set of clients. Many people gained and, apparently, none lost. Federal money relieved western woolgrowers of part of the cost of controlling predators on the range, western congressmen were able to point to the program as something they had produced for their constitu- ents, and the agency which did the work-the U.S. Depart- ment of Agriculture’s Bureau of Biological Survey-acquired a regular source of appropriations and people to defend it before congressional committees. The funds appropriated were too small to arouse much public interest, and Congress could argue that the money was returned to the public in the form of cheaper beef, mutton, leather, and wool. Because the public did not care that (or how) coyotes were killed, the wool- growers, who contributed a significant part of the money for predator control, came to set policy for the program. The same indifference allowed the Office of Predator and Rodent Control (the PARC) to become a semi-independent agency, a situation which did not change when the program was trans- ferred in 1939 to the new Fish and Wildlife Service in the De- partment of the Interior; PARC remained responsible to the woolgrowers and only formally to its bureaucratic superiors.5

Paul Young and Edward A. Goldman, The Wolves of North America (Washington, D.C., 1944) and Stanley Paul Young and Hartley H. T. Jackson, The Clever Coyote (Wash- ington, D.C., 1951), 171-222. Sections of Donald Worster’s Nature’s Economy (San Francisco, 1977), notably chapter 13, discuss predator control, but there is little else in the historical literature.

5. Congress set up the operation as an experiment in 1914 and began regular appropriations in 1915. In 1931 it passed the Animal Damage Control Act, giving the program a legal mandate which lasted until 1972. See Jenks Cameron, The Bu- reau of Biological Survey (1929; New York, 1974), 45-46. On legal questions, see Bean, Evolution of Wildlife Law, 235-241. On the early history of the program, see Thomas R. Dunlap, “Values for Varmints: Predator Control and Environmental Ideas, 1920-1939,” Pacific Historical Review, LIII (1984), 141-161.

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American Wildlife Policy 349

The sheepmen wanted the coyote, the only predator nu- merous enough to concern them, exterminated-and they wanted it done as cheaply as possible. Profit margins were low, and while cutting coyote populations meant fewer dead sheep and less money paid to herders, ranchers were reluc- tant to spend any more than necessary. The Biological Sur- vey’s appropriations, too, were low, and it sought the cheapest method of control. Poison seemed to offer the most return for the money, and PARC research efforts concentrated on better chemicals and more attractive baits. It had begun with drop baits (small pieces of poisoned fat) and “stations,” usu- ally a quarter or half a horse carcass laced with strychnine. In the 1930s it tried dropping the poisoned pieces out of air- planes, and it began using the “coyote getter,” a device which fired a charge of sodium cyanide into an animal’s mouth.

In 1937 the Biological Survey’s Denver Wildlife Research Laboratory began working on ways to protect sheep on lamb- ing grounds high in the mountains. Snow closed the passes until shortly before lambing began and the only practical way to protect the sheep was with bait stations put down in the fall which would kill coyotes all winter. Trials were successful, but the most effective poison, thallium sulfate, promised to cause as many problems as it solved. Its use in California in 1929-1930 had raised a storm of protest against “extermi- nation” and the “slaughter” of “innocent” wildlife, forcing PARC officials to an unusual public defense of the program.6 Using thallium in the mountains threatened to bring more

6. Joseph Grinnell, “Wholesale Poisoning of Wild Animal Life,” Condor, XXXIII (May 1931), 131-132; Annie M. Alexander, “Control, Not Extermination, of cynomys Ludovicianus Arozonensis,” Journal of Mammalogy, XIII (Aug. 1932), 302; Jean M. Linsdale, “Facts Concerning the Use of Thallium in California to Poison Rodents- Its Destructiveness to Game Birds, Song Birds and Other Valuable Wildlife,” Condor, XXXIII (May 1931), 92-106; T. Gilbert Pearson, “Poisoning Birds and Mammals,” Bird-Lore, XXXIII (Sept.-Oct. 1931), 362-364; Calif. Dept. of Agriculture, “The California Ground Squirrel Control Program,” Special Publication 109, by Eugene S. Kellogg (Sacramento, 1931).

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350 Pacific Historical Review

complaints, for it was inhumane (killing very slowly and with much pain) and indiscriminate. In 1944 Weldon B. Robin- son, in charge of the project, found dead around the stations (presumably poisoned): 673 coyotes, 24 dogs, 3 badgers, 8 ground squirrels, 4 weasels, 1 cat, 4 eagles, 4 hawks, and 9 magpies. The counts were, he admitted, partial and biased toward the coyote column.7

Despite these drawbacks the PARC found it hard to reject thallium out of hand. World War II increased the demand for wool and mutton, decreased the availability of ammuni- tion and traps, and made it difficult to find and keep herders, who were drafted or attracted to higher-paying jobs. Thal- lium had also been spectacularly successful; it cut losses to predators in the test areas by seventy-five to ninety-six per- cent. Ranchers, Robinson said, were “very insistent in their demands that the use of the poison be continued.” The re- sults “have been so convincing… that to withdraw… [it] would result in serious repercussions in the control pro- gram.” If the PARC did not begin using thallium on a regular basis, he warned, the sheepmen would, and the dead dogs and wildlife would reflect on the agency, regardless of its in- volvement. The Service, he concluded, had to use the thal- lium bait stations, but that use should be carefully moni- tored.8 His concern, it should be noted, was not that use would bring opposition to the policy of poisoning or preda- tor control, but that it would provoke charges of cruelty to animals or destruction of wildlife. Bad publicity would not be fatal to the program, but it would force the PARC to spend time and political capital defending itself. Publicity, though, was unavoidable in one form or another. It looked by 1944 as if thallium could not be safely used (in a political sense) and could not be banished.

7. Weldon B. Robinson, “Merits and Demerits of Thallium in the Control of Coyotes,” (1944) 28, in Research Reports, Division of Wildlife Research, RG 22.

8. Ibid., 36-37, 44-46. See also E. R. Kalmbach to Ira N. Gabrielson, Sept. 2, 1944, with Robinson’s manuscript, “The Thallium-Studded Station as a Means of Coyote Control in Acute Predation Areas” (1944) in Research Reports, Division of Wildlife Research, RG 22.

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American Wildlife Policy 351

A New Poison

Ten-eighty allowed the PARC to avoid this unpleasant dilemma. Developed as a rodenticide during World War II, it proved to be extremely toxic to canids as well. In 1945 the Fish and Wildlife Service began testing it on coyotes, and found it quite promising. It was so deadly to coyotes that a small dose would kill them quickly. (A lethal dose for coyotes was a few mouthfuls of a bait treated at the rate of 1.6 grams of 1080 per hundred pounds of meat.) Other species were less susceptible. Hence, using 1080 instead of thallium, it was be- lieved, would result in fewer problems with bait-shyness from sublethal doses (getting sick but not dying, and thereafter avoiding baits), fewer complaints about suffering animals, and less damage to nontarget species.’ Enthusiasm ran high, with one PARC agent speculating that 1080 might mean the end of all predators. But it was not an ideal material. The pure compound was deadly to humans, and there was no antidote. It was water-soluble and might contaminate streams and ponds. In addition, it was so stable there was the danger of secondary poisoning, particularly in rodent control op- erations. If coyotes died from eating poisoned ground squir- rels it would not matter, but farm dogs would be just as susceptible.’0

Pressure from the woolgrowers, the chance to reduce predator populations, and the apparently greater hazards of thallium outweighed the disadvantages of using 1080. Still, the decision came slowly. Debate within the Fish and Wildlife

9. Eric Peacock, “Sodium Monofluoroacetate,” (1964), 1-6, typescript in file: “Correspondence 1080,” General Records, Division of Wildlife Services, RG 22; Lewis Laney, “New War Born 1080 Coyote Poison May Kill All Predators,” New Mex- ico Stockman (May 1948), 75, copy in file: “1080 Articles and Publications,” ibid.

10. Peacock, “Sodium Monofluoroacetate,” 7; Memo 121, Oct. 24, 1945, by Dorr D. Green, Chief of the Division of Predator and Rodent Control, in which he said, “Careful handling and the danger of secondary poisoning cannot be overemphasized.” Fall: “1080 Articles and Publications,” RG 22. See also E. R. Kalmbach to Lloyd W. Swift, May 8, 1947, in file: “Advisory Board on Wildlife Management-Predator Control, 1964,” Correspondence of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter cited as Correspondence, MVZ).

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352 Pacific Historical Review

Service over the potential dangers delayed use until 1947 and produced a stringent set of regulations, each part “carefully reviewed as to its effectiveness in promoting desirable rela- tions between the Service and the public.”” The Service got the manufacturer, Monsanto Chemical Corporation, to sign a “gentleman’s agreement” which would limit sales to the Fish and Wildlife Service, other government agencies with a le- gitimate use for the product, and licensed exterminators. The Service decided to use 1080 for predator control only west of the 100th meridian, the less-settled part of the coun- try, and there only in areas with serious problems where other methods were not working. The chemical would be employed only in winter bait stations, and these stations would be placed at a density of no more than one per congressional township (thirty-six square miles). The regional director had to approve each location-away from roads, improvements, and water. Only agents trained and authorized by the Service to use 1080 would handle the baits. They were to place the poisoned carcasses in approved locations as late in the fall as possible, remove them as soon as they could in the spring, and personally burn all the remains.”

The regulations proved more impressive in theory than in practice. The program was not controlled by scientists and bureaucrats in Washington but by the people who provided the political and much of the financial support-the wool- growers-and they soon forced the Service to employ 1080 much more extensively. In 1949 E. R. Kalmbach complained from Denver that the initial guidelines had been discarded, and the Service was “promoting the use of 1080 far beyond

11. C. C. Presnall to George Kerr, March 11, 1947, file: “Correspondence 1080,” General Files, Division of Wildlife Services, RG 22. Presnall pointed out that “[p]ublic relations were a major consideration in drawing up” the regulations on 1080.

12. “Statement of Policy Adopted by Fish and Wildlife Service for Use of Com- pound 1080 (Sodium Monofluoroacetate) in Poison Stations to Kill Coyotes” (Nov. 5, 1947) in file: “1080-Misc. 1946-1952, ADC,” ibid. The set of memos in this file, though incomplete, is useful in tracing the internal debate over the new chemical.

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American Wildlife Policy 353

the limits that have been recommended through adequate research.” He was particularly upset about references to tests and experiments, which gave the impression that work done at his laboratory justified the expansion. This, he said, was not the case. “It is not surprising,” he stated, “that my viewpoint is quite consistently at variance with that of those engaged in the operational program. In actual practice, their primary re- sponsibilities are to meet the wishes of a single industry.” The Service, he declared, was making a mistake. “Whereas it may seem logical to heed the opinions of those interests from which much of our finances emanate, it is my conviction that we have gone too far in that direction. Already the unorgan- ized opposition is being heard, and I feel that in time this will take more coherent shape.”‘” He complained again, two years later, that the Service was using too much 1080. The stations (15,289 in 1949 and 16,668 in 1950) “covered” about half the West. Some states were almost saturated with stations-91% of Idaho, 83% of Utah, and 71% of Nevada. And this, he pointed out, had taken place without reducing the use of traps, guns, and strychnine, and only four years after the Denver laboratory had recommended, and the Fish and Wild- life Service had approved, the use of 1080 “primarily on acute predation areas where other methods have not gained the de- sired degree of control.”‘4

There were other indications that the system was not working. Increased use and familiarity caused carelessness and violations of safety precautions. In 1949, an agent com- plained: “As for the sheepmen moving our 1080 stations, this happens more or less all over, and I do wish we could do something to stop them from doing it.” In another case a field agent accepted a rancher’s offer to destroy three stations on his property in the spring (which saved him a trip and

13. E. R. Kalmbach to C. C. Presnall, Feb. 14, 1949 in file: “1080 Corresp- Instructions to Regions (ADC),” ibid.

14. E. R. Kalmbach, memo of Jan. 10, 1951, in file: “Poison 1080-Studies of,” ibid.

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354 Pacific Historical Review

some work but was a violation of regulations). Then the rancher failed to do it. Clarence Cottam, head of the Service’s Division of Wildlife Research, complained in 1951 that some agents were leaving the stations out all summer. Examples of such flagrant breaches of regulations continued to fill the Service’s “violations” file.’5 Individual infractions and care- lessness were not the only problems. In 1953 local officials in Campbell County, Wyoming, purchased two and a half pounds of 1080 for predator control, an amount which PARC agents later estimated would satisfy the legitimate needs of the entire state. A decade later a memo noted that federal use of 1080 in California had been 14.7 ounces while state use (mainly for forest and rangeland rodent control) had been 6,000 ounces. There must, the memo added, be “much irresponsible use here.”‘6

Cottam, a long-time inside critic of the Service’s poison policies, blamed the organization’s top level. These men, many of whom had served in the PARC for years, were, he thought, willing to bend or break regulations for the sake of the ranchers and the field men. The problem, though, went beyond Washington headquarters. It was structural. The program was so closely tied to the woolgrowers that it was al- most impossible to shape a policy which was not based on “the opinions of those interests from which much of our fi- nances emanate.” Those “interests” provided political sup- port for the program, much of the money, and permission for the PARC to work on their land. The people in the field were usually from the local population and shared its values. Even when they were originally from other areas, they had to live with the woolgrowers. The Washington office could say what it liked; the final word on policy belonged to the wool- growers.’7

15. File: “Poison- 1080-Violations,” ibid. 16. John Gottschalk to Stanley Cain, Oct. 19, 1965, file: “Poison 1080, 1965-

1966,” ibid. 17. Cottam continued to be suspicious; see his letters in file: “Advisory Board

on Wildlife Management, 1963, Correspondence, MVZ.”

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American Wildlife Policy 355

And they wanted poison. Low prices, rising costs, and vigorous foreign competition forced them either to reduce their operations or run their flocks unattended on the open range. Unwilling to cut their herds, they cut their herders- with the aid of 1080. In the late 1950s a PARC staff member told of talking to a rancher who had raised “7,000 lambs that spring without a single known loss to predators! And this was accomplished in lambing on the open range, no herders, no fences!” When asked what would have happened if he had tried that twenty years ago, the man ‘just grinned and shook his head.” Pressed, he said that if he “had been fool enough to try lambing without herders and dogs in that area in 1946- when the 1080 program began-the coyotes would have eaten him out of house and home.”‘8

Changing Knowledge, Changing Values

The poisoning program expanded rapidly because the ranchers wanted it, but also because the opposition, such as it was, did not challenge the program in a fundamental way. Mammalogists complained about the possible toll of nontarget species, humane societies about pain and suffer- ing, and some sportsmen, particularly in the late 1940s, about the deadliness of 1080 and the possibility that it would kill game animals. The PARC dealt with these critics by point- ing to the chemical’s selective, quick action and the precau- tions it took to minimize the exposure of innocent animals. Mountain lion hunters, losing dogs to the large bait stations in the high country, remained unconvinced, but they posed no threat to the program.’9” In the early 1950s, 1080 seemed to be a superthallium-extremely effective (coyote casualties were on the rise), humane, and safe for nontarget species.

18. Charles L. Cadieux to Howard J. Matley, Jan. 16, 1961, file: “Poison 1080, 1960-1963,” General Files, Division of Wildlife Services, RG 22.

19. File: “Poison, Use of Poisons, Criticism of, 1949-1965;” and file: “Poison 1080, Criticism of, Use of, 1947-64,” ibid.

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356 Pacific Historical Review

The apparent acceptance of predator poisoning masked new developments: changes in scientific understanding of predation and a shift in public opinion. Opposition to the program of killing coyotes had been based upon romantic, sentimental, or aesthetic grounds. As ecological science de- veloped and wildlife research increased, opponents acquired a stronger scientific base. The nature of the opposition also changed. What had been a fringe position in the 1930s-that wild animals should not be made to suffer-was by the 1950s and 1960s more acceptable to the public. In addition, advo- cates were better organized, more sophisticated, and capable of appealing to a mass audience. Humane societies had ear- lier been either small and aggressive (like the Anti-Steel Trap League in the 1920s) or large and unconcerned with wildlife issues. In the 1960s there appeared new groups, larger than the old radical ones and more aggressive and more inter- ested in wildlife than the mainstream. They acquired paid staffs and published magazines and newsletters, but more importantly, they had scientists on their boards who contrib- uted articles for their publications and helped them argue for humane treatment of wild animals with research results from physiology, ecology, and ethology.

The maturation of animal ecology in the 1930s provided the scientific basis for the new opposition. Scientists, studying animal communities by looking at food chains, trophic levels, niches, and ecosystems, began to see how species interacted and that even apparently useless ones had a function. Re- search on game populations, guided by these ecological prin- ciples, undermined common assumptions about predation and its effects on natural populations. Predation, it seemed, was not a major factor controlling small game, and predator control was not the key to abundance.20 Field experience

20. Starker Leopold stressed the importance of repeated studies in convincing biologists of the importance of food and cover and the relative ineffectiveness of predator control as a means of building game populations. Interview with Leopold, June 18, 1981. On the new research, see Paul Errington, “Bobwhite Winter Survival in an Area Heavily Populated with Grey Foxes,” Iowa State College Journal of Science,

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American Wildlife Policy 357

forced game managers to reassess their position on controll- ing predators to increase the supply of large game. People had thought that man would replace the natural predators he had exterminated, but this was not happening. The most spectacular failure of this idea (an example which became a conservation landmark) was the collapse of the deer herd in the Kaibab National Forest on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. Protected from predators for more than twenty years, the area seemed to be a hunter’s dream. Then, in the winter of 1924-1925, animals began dying of starvation and disease. The herd continued to decline for a decade, and in- vestigation showed that the deer had destroyed their range.2′ This problem and similar difficulties in other areas convinced most game managers that preserving the animals’ habitat- food supply, breeding areas, shelter from predators and weather-and the restoration of natural ecological balances were the best ways to aid game populations. Game experts were, by the 1950s, not inclined to support predator control to increase game populations or to rely on hunters to keep game populations down to the limits of the area.

Ecological studies changed the arguments of the PARC’s opposition by changing its view of nature and of predation.

VIII (1933-1934), 130; Errington, “Vulnerability of Bobwhite Populations to Pre- dation,” Ecology, XV (April 1934), 110-127; Errington and Herbert L. Stoddard, “Modifications in Predation Theory Suggested by Ecological Studies of the Bob- white Quail,” Transactions of the Third North American Wildlife Conference (Washington, D.C., 1938), 736-740.

21. Ariz. Dept. of Game and Fish, “The Kaibab Deer Herd: Its History, Prob- lems, and Management,” Wildlife Bulletin No. 7, by John P. Russo (Phoenix, 1964); U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, Forest Service, “The Kaibab Deer: A Brief History and Recent Developments” (May 1931), by Walter G. Mann and S. B. Locke, copy cour- tesy of E. Raymond Hall, Dyche Museum of Natural History, University of Kansas, Lawrence. For an example of the long-term effect of this incident, see James B. Trefethen, “The Terrible Lesson of the Kaibab,” National Wildlife, V (June-July 1967), 4-9. Aldo Leopold’s famous essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” in A Sand County Almanac (New York, 1949), 129-133, is based on this experience. Graeme Caughley dissented from the conventional wisdom in “Eruption of Ungulate Popu- lations with Emphasis on Himalyan Thar in New Zealand,” Ecology, LI (Winter 1970), 53-72.

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358 Pacific Historical Review

As early as 1935 Bird-Lore, the National Audubon Society’s magazine, began citing the findings of ecological research as a guide to wildlife policy; by the late 1930s it had discarded the distinction between “good” and “bad” species. No longer, for instance, did the magazine argue for hawks on the grounds that they were “useful” because they killed mice. All animals, it now said, were valuable as parts of natural biologi- cal systems. After World War II the Audubon Society found support in the popular works of scientists and nature writers who decried predator killing as unjustified and destructive to wildlife. Nature writing, which had focused on human reac- tions to natural scenes or on individual animals, came in- creasingly to depict what Rachel Carson would call the “web of life.” 22

A major contribution of ecological research was the development of a scientific rationale for what had been a ro- mantic notion. Aldo Leopold, a forester turned game mana- ger turned ecologist and nature writer, was the most impor- tant person in bringing ecology to support the preservation of all nature as a system. Leopold had begun his career com- mitted to maximum production and human management, and he carried these concepts over into his research on game.23 The experiences of the Kaibab, his survey of game conditions in the upper Midwest in 1928-1930, and his con-

22. The Audubon Society’s magazine was entitled Bird-Lore until 1940 when it became Audubon. Continuity and coverage make this the single most useful publi- cation on conservationist thought. Durward Allen’s Our Wildlife Legacy (New York, 1954) is an example of the new scientific studies of the period. The shift in point of view in popular nature writing is a complex subject. The interested reader might compare John Burrough’s essays or Henry Beston’s classic, The Outermost House (1928; New York, 1971), with Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind (New York, 1941) or Donald Culross Peattie’s A Prairie Grove (New York, 1938). A good guide to the older literature is Edwin Way Teale’s “The Great Companions of Nature Literature,” Audubon, XLVI (Nov.-Dec. 1944), 363-366.

23. The evolution of Leopold’s ideas on wildlife management is treated in Susan Flader, Thinking Like a Mountain (Columbia, Mo., 1974). My discussion owes a great deal to Flader; even my work in the Leopold Papers was affected by my com- ing to that material with her excellent study in mind.

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American Wildlife Policy 359

tinuing involvement with game conditions in the United States (supplemented with trips to Germany and Mexico) changed his ideas. By the late 1930s he had come to believe that the best management was that which restored, as nearly as possible, the full complex of species that had inhabited an area. The first essential for stability, he preached, was diver- sity. In “The Land Ethic” he proposed a new way to approach nature: as a citizen of an interdependent community with the ethical obligation to preserve that community. He backed this ethical stand with ecological science and developed his ideas in the essays collected as A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949. The book has become an environmentalists’ bible.

Widespread acceptance of another idea-that mankind should not cause unnecessary suffering-stimulated the growth of the humane movement, and some parts of it be- came militantly committed to helping wildlife. By the 1960s this faction had gone beyond the old campaign against the steel leg-hold trap and “inhumane” poisons and was oppos- ing all “unnecessary” animal death. Defenders of Wildlife, a descendant of the Anti-Steel Trap League of the 1920s, now challenged the basic program of the PARC-killing coyotes- and used scientific evidence to make its case.24 Predators were not only an essential part of the ecology, they also had a well- developed, complex social life in which they formed emo- tional attachments to each other. These arguments, but espe- cially the latter, gained wide circulation with the publication in 1963 of Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf and even more in

24. The development of humane sentiments is well treated in James C. Tur- ner’s Reckoning with the Beast (Baltimore, 1980). On early humane society activity on behalf of wildlife, see the Rosalie Edge Papers, Conservation Center, Denver Public Library; the Vernon Bailey Papers, Smithsonian Institution Archives; and John Richard Gentile, “The Evolution and Geographic Aspects of the Anti-Trapping Movement: A Classic Resource Conflict” (Ph.D. dissertation, Oregon State Univer- sity, 1983). The positions and tactics of the humane movement in the mid-1970s are revealed in U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Merchant Ma- rine and Fisheries, Subcommittee on Fisheries and Wildlife Conservation and the Environment, Hearings on Painful Trapping Devices, 94 Cong., 1 sess. (1976).

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360 Pacific Historical Review

1984 when Walt Disney made it into a movie.25 The book incorporated Mowat’s observations of the wolves’ lives with a description of his own changes in attitude. He had gone to northern Canada to study wolves (for the Canadian govern- ment) with, he said, all the common prejudices about pred