Collared: Politics and Personalities Oregon’s Wolf Country by Aimee Lyn Eaton

Abstract

Reviewed by: Collared: Politics and Personalities Oregon’s Wolf Country by Aimee Lyn Eaton Michael J. Beilfuss (bio) Aimee Lyn Eaton, Collared: Politics and Personalities Oregon’s Wolf Country. Oregon State University Press, 2013135, pages. $18.95 (Cloth). ISBN: 978-0-87071-706-2. Wolves are far more familiar to most of us through stories and folktales, than they are in real life. Everyone knows about the big bad wolf from Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs. We’ve heard about the boy who cried wolf and Peter and the Wolf. Then there is Jack London’s White Fang, who is dear to many school children—but unlike the threatening creatures from the folktales, that story relates the taming and domestication of the wild. By and large, we know the wolf only through myth and legend. The stories handed down to us depict this apex predator as a threatening, merciless, and crafty killer. There are some real-life wolf celebrities. Early in the twentieth century the Custer Wolf terrorized ranches in South Dakota. That wolf’s fame was rekindled by the NPR radio show This American Life when actor Michael Chernus read a contemporary Federal Government press release detailing the expansive (and [End Page 154] expensive) hunt, capture, and eventual death of the Custer Wolf. More recently there was OR-7, perhaps the most famous wolf to have lived in the US. Trapped and fitted with a GPS collar in February 2011, the wolf was subsequently tracked on a 1,000+ mile journey from Northeast Oregon to California. The first confirmed wild wolf to set foot in California in nearly 100 years, he quickly became a national media star with stories in MSNBC, Time magazine, the Associated Press, and Reuters among other outlets. OR-7 is just one of the many personalities covered in Eaton’s short and insightful look into the myriad complications raised by the presence of wolves in Oregon. From the late 1940s until the end of the century, wolves did not exist in Oregon. Having been extirpated—Eaton reports the last one in the state was killed in 1946 for a $20 bounty—they weren’t welcomed by all when they began to return through natural dispersion from packs reintroduced in Wyoming and Idaho. The rural, eastern parts of the state were the front lines of the returning wolves. Hunters feared the effects wolves would have on game in the state. Ranchers and their allies feared the financial losses through predation—not to mention the emotional stress of worrying about livestock and finding the mangled carcasses of animals they raised. Stakeholders from the more populated, western parts of Oregon tended to support the wolves’ return; seeing them as crucial links in the state’s biological diversity, as well as potent symbols of the wilderness. Before any wolf packs were established in Oregon, state officials convened a group of stakeholders to come up with a plan to manage the wolves’ impending arrival. Eaton’s book focuses on the establishment, implementation, and evolution of what came to be called the Oregon Wolf Plan (OWP). A capable writer who clearly knows her subject, Eaton intertwines her research on the natural history, ecology, and biology of the wolf with the social and political history of their reappearance. As many of her sources report “wolves are just being wolves,” but as one of her sources sums it up “it’s the people that are the challenge” (108). Written in a style that could be described as journalistic narrative, Collared traces Oregon’s attempts to handle the difficult task of accepting the reality of wolves while also satisfying the various stakeholders. A group of 14 people from across the state, representing various positions, were chosen to make up the Wolf Advisory Committee. They, in turn, drew up the plan later adopted by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Livestock depredations, preventative strategies, lethal removal, and conservation lawsuits, among other complications, meant that the Oregon Wolf Plan was not quite as static as one might have hoped. Rather, it seems to be an ongoing and evolving process of balancing the needs and desires of many contrasting factions. Eaton occasionally...