Customer Reviews

Predatory Bureaucracy: The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West

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I recommend this book for anyone concerned with the environment and the effect of government policies on the environment. It is an impressive, well-written scholarly work. It traces national and local policies toward (against) wolves from the mid-19th century to the present. The research is thorough and extensive. It demonstrates a profound understanding of the relationship between government and land-owners and the implications of policies for the ecology of the Western U.S. It includes an unprecedented detailed count of the wolves, coyotes, and livestock killed since 1878. The writing is beautiful. For example, on page 4, Robinson writes: "In fall the crisp weather turned aspen leaves yellow, and the first wisps of snow wafted in like unhurried emissaries from a season the hard, cold ground had never quite forgotten." This is a ground-breaking work.

Pearl Katz, Ph.D.
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Wolves in the West from Rout to Reintroduction
by Wayne Sheldrake, Author of "Instant Karma: the Heart and Soul of a Ski Bum"
It takes a little romance to feel a kinship with wolves, but to become involved in the process of their protection and reintroduction one has to be practical. Michael Robinson, an avowed wolf activist is a practical romantic. Predatory Bureaucracy: The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West keeps the wilderness poetics to a minimum and lets the history, legislation and law of extinction speak for itself.
In a story that is part tragedy and part epic, the power of his tale lies in the character and flaws, of wolves and men. The enemies of wolves, trappers and hunters motivated by bounties or salaries, are portrayed as outdoorsmen of perseverance and skill, men who often admired their enemies even as they killed them. Wolves, though decidedly disadvantaged and obviously doomed, are remembered as insightful and tough (undeniably killers too). The heroes among them knew the individual scent and habits of their human torturers.
From Robinson's long perspective, the true villain of extermination was the triumvirate of environmental holocaust, federal bureaucracy and poison. The quick demise of the buffalo caused wolves serious problems. Abandoned carcasses were an irresistible boon and wolves proliferated. (29) When the free range--literally free: no grazing fees, no fences, no railroads, yet--was repopulated with cattle, wolves did what wolves do. Stockgrowers associations offered bounties, pressing counties and states to do the same. (30-31) But hunters and trappers went where bounties were highest, and they let pups mature until they were worth money. (64) Wolves bounced back, until a system emerged that compensated for the limitations of commercial cooperation, local government, and human nature.
In 1905, the new Forest Service "enacted" grazing fees. Cattleman immediately demanded protection from wolves. (51) About that time, the federal Bureau of Biological Survey was looking for ways to fund scientific projects. (63) They saw they could provide a service by quashing criticism that the FS provided wolves sanctuary, (78) and offering stockmen--very influential constituents of Congress (53)--"a more centralized system" of efficiently poisoning "`noxious animals'." (66) Robinson gives the Biological Survey a face, Stanley P. Young, master-trapper turned Uber-bureaucrat. Young cast wolves as "criminals." (155) He presented slide shows on poisoning to annual stockgrowers meetings and conventions. (155) He solicited annual contributions to the agency from states, counties and "local ranching associations." (164) He reported successes: 25 wolves killed in 1921 (153); 19 dead in 1922. (157) He also contended with little or no opposition. (Robinson includes an interesting chapter that explains the inaction of women's organizations, the American Bison Society, Aldo Leopold and Enos Mills.) When the wolves were gone, he deftly shifted the blame and the bureaucracy flourished, killing coyotes.
Here the book embarks on a complex and innervating odyssey. A new kind of hero, and, paradoxically, a new kind of bureaucracy emerge. Into the late Twenties, conservationists complained internally that the loss of wolves was a loss to science; and predators, they had observed, helped prevent the spread of disease among ungulates and rodents, and controlled populations. (181-182) Young responded by cleansing agency terminology. "Extermination" became "control." (198) In 1930, 148 scientists signed a letter protesting widespread poisoning. (212) F.D.R. tried to cut the BS budget in '31. (257) Congress reversed the cuts. (260) He appointed a critic as Chief. Poisoning continued. (264-268) By 1945, the agency had a new name, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and had adopted new poisons (coyotes spit out strychnine) and aerial gunning. (297) These were seminal years in the development of the practice (and personality!) of conservation activists.
Rosalie Barrow Edge, a lifetime member of the Audubon Society, was "appalled" when she learned the Society turned its head from the BS's poisoning of magpies (246) because the birds ate coyote baits. (169-177) She filed "what may have been the first private citizen environmental lawsuit," and won. (247) William Hornaday, who had fought to save the last bison, shared his mailing list (249), and she helped found the Emergency Conservation Committee, which supported the formation of wilderness, the "removal of all livestock from National Forests," (249) and "indicted `wholesale poisoning and trapping operations'." (250) The committees mass mailings were written by scientists.
Times and minds changed. The scientific work of mammologists like Joseph Grinell and his student E. Raymond Hall came to bear. Aldo Leopold, a former wolf killer, connected the preservation of predators to the preservation of land. (298) Even the founder of the BS "[came] out against the poisoning program." (251) Finally, Stuart Udall became Secretary of the Interior and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring aroused public concern over the impact of poisoning on humans in the early sixties. Still, the institution of poisoning wasn't collared until Nixon banned it in 1972. The ban was disarmed by Ford, Carter and Reagan (327, 329), but by then the Endangered Species Act was law. Though it didn't forbid poisoning per se, it outlawed "any action that would doom a listed species, including destroying its habitat." (323) The Act also gave citizens the right to sue for failure to enforce and mandated reintroduction. In 1986, when the EPA tried to "reauthorize...strychnine for rodent control" Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club sued. (330)
Robinson spends the remainder of the book recounting wolf reintroduction based on the tradition of legal activism and concessions. Wolves were returned to Idaho, Yellowstone and the Southwest amidst the opposition of equally active western ranchers. In Yellowstone, Defenders of Wildlife "promised to reimburse ranchers for the cost of livestock killed or injured by wolves." (341) and wolves "known to be preying livestock" were shot from "planes and helicopter." Still, by 2005, "over 900 wolves roamed Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana," and a few wandered to Washington, Oregon, Utah, and Colorado. (346) Reintroduction in the Southwest was bitter, violent and disappointing. Over three years, the population remained static at 27 wolves. (363)
Robinson's polemic against bureaucracy is strong. The history of the BS as a policy-maker operating as a service at the beck and call of a powerful political constituency puzzles together the zeitgeist, backroom politics, and scientific exchange of the times through the remarkably frank letters and memos of the principals. There's less voice, and less depth to more recent personalities, when the research relies primarily on published statements, news reports, and legal briefs.
The writing is most compelling in the early history of the west, when the individual character of wolves--their heroic escapes, their family loyalties, their tragic ends--packs the narrative with drama and grief. Hunters are masterfully juxtaposed as men whom, though diabolically skilled, possessed wild, near-meditative wolf-wit. Trapping wolves was so difficult (and dangerous to livestock) that poisons came to the fore, but even poisoning a wolf took insight that a naturalist would envy.
Robinson's captive audience, wolf lovers, will be rapt with the epic martyrdom of a species, and they may be agitated to tactical, practical action. Reintroduction opponents might be moved to reexamine the grim history of a bureaucracy that exceeded the viciousness of its prey.

Before you open it for the first time, Predatory Bureaucracy can be bit intimidating due to its length. But once I finally started reading, the pages melted away quickly. Even though I knew the ultimate outcome of the wolf history described in the book - the ultimate reintroduction to great controversy and current/recent debates over delisting them, and the additional difficulties in the Southwest - the parts of Predatory Bureaucracy that transition from chronicling the persecution of predators to a growing appreciation for their value somehow 'tricked' me into imagining that the book would have a happy ending where everybody eventually came to accept the value of intact ecosystems and let up on the persecution. That is, until at about page 330, when I took a break from reading to check my inbox and found an email from Defenders of Wildlife about plans to reinstate aerial hunting of wolves in Wyoming. So that relieved me of any illusions quickly, but I thought the fact that the book was able to induce a temporary disconnect from the reality I know and love is a testament to the author's ability to create an engaging narrative out of what could have easily been just a collection of facts and quotes, making the book both devastatingly informative and quite readable. Recommended for anyone with an interest in wildlife

This is an incredible book detailing the history of the slaughter and extermination of the magnificent wolf in the western U.S. because of pressures from the livestock industry and other special interests.

To say this book is eye-opening would be a gross misunderstatement! You will truly never see the west the same after reading this incredibly detailed account of federal agents' compliance with special interests at the detriment to our natural predatory system.

This book is a highly-regarded study of the extermination of wolves in the US West over the last century. Unfortunately, I'm unable to give it as high a rating as the other reviewers. Certainly Robinson knows his material and he has given us an exhaustive story of how the Bureau of Biological Survey (BBS) and other agencies exterminated the wolf.

Unfortunately, the narrative is not only exhaustive but exhausting. Robinson has given us too much, and culled too little, to make for a compelling story. The basic structure is clear enough: cattlemen cleared out bison and put cattle in their place on the open range; wolves found cattle (and sheep) easy prey; cattlemen and other settlers organized to eliminate wolves; a scientific agency in the federal government found an opportunity to grow powerful by providing the service of wolf extermination to a wide constituency instead of doing science for a narrow constituency; and even after eliminating wolves, the BBS moved to kill other species, which it continues to do today (under a different name). Thanks to its political allies, the BBS resisted all attempts to rein it in, though the Endangered Species Act has slowed it down.

That could have been a six-chapter story. One might have expanded it to perhaps twelve chapters, to allow for changes in the players and their actions over time. Unfortunately, Robinson gives us 27 chapters. We meet a lot of individuals, whether scientists, politicians, stockmen, administrators, bounty hunters, or wolves. But Robinson tries too hard to be thorough, so we meet too many of these characters.

I realize that professional historians generally value this kind of definitive treatment of a subject, and this book certainly provides a definitive history of the wolf extermination program. More implicitly than explicitly, it raises serious questions about the complicity of government in despoiling the environment instead of protecting it. Robinson's analysis of the political support coalition behind a very destructive agency could lead any earnest young environmentalist to despair.

Even admitting all that, the book would have been better had it been shorter.