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It’s the same (very, very) old story about wolves

The following op-ed written by Luke Koenig was published in the Santa Fe New Mexican on July 20, 2025.

When I was younger, I worked as a seasonal park ranger in Yellowstone National Park. I worked in the youth program, where I had the privilege of taking groups of teenagers into the world’s first national park for extended periods of time to teach them how to camp and introduce them to conservation work.

We would also teach them ecology and lessons on the human and natural history of the park. My favorite was the wolf lesson. My co-instructor and I would begin by reciting Little Red Riding Hood, saying, “Stop us when you recognize what the story is.” We would rarely get past the second sentence.

The mythology of the Big Bad Wolf is deeply ingrained in our culture. But as light has peered more into our shrouded understanding of this mythic creature, perspective has begun to shift.

This is exemplified most notably in Aldo Leopold’s famous essay, “Thinking like a Mountain,” when he recounts killing a pack of wolves, before learning, later in life, of the indispensable role these predators play in the broader ecosystem.

He recounts watching the “green fire” die in a mother wolf’s eyes. He writes, “I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” We would end our lesson by having the teenagers read that essay.

That was first published 76 years ago. And in the intervening years, Leopold’s intuition begat a robust body of scientific research.

Yes, we know, with certainty, that wolves stabilize rather than deteriorate hunters’ deer and elk populations. Trophic cascade has become a simple enough concept that even children can understand.

And yet, it’s with the piercing irony of history that in the same region where Leopold had his revelation, old mythology prevails.

Recently, the Grant County Commission voted 4-to-1 to support neighboring counties’ declarations of emergency regarding the impacts of the imperiled and critically endangered and Mexican gray wolf population. Two hundred and eighty-six individuals brought back from the brink of extinction, from a purposeful extermination campaign from the days when asbestos insulated our homes in a pre-Civil Rights Act America.

And we think the emergency is their threat to us.

It’s a matter of science. Wolves are irrefutably positive for the ecosystems in which game animals thrive. It’s a matter of facts.

There has never been a recorded attack by a Mexican gray wolf on a human, and cattle depredations have gone down. Or is it? Because it might just be a matter of something deeper, that no amount of logic can seemingly penetrate. A matter of myth. Stop me when you recognize what this story is.

Luke Koenig is the Gila Grassroots Organizer for New Mexico Wild and lives in Silver City.

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