Please don't eat Bullwinkle

Do you ever watch a nature show on TV and wonder whether you should cheer for the cheetah or the antelope? While you were reading Decade of the Wolf, did you feel any sympathy for the elk or the cattle that ended up on the canis lupis dinner table? Joel Berger, a professor at the University of Montana and senior scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, gave this Moose-eye view of the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone in The New York Times today.

Until the mid-1990s, the moose of the Yellowstone basin lived in a kind of moose paradise, without predators. The wolves had all been shot out about 70 years earlier. Grizzly bears were heavily hunted, and there were few of them. Without their traditional predators, Grand Teton moose were docile, naïve.
That all changed in the mid-1990s when the grizzlies rebounded because of a ban on their hunt and when wolves were reintroduced to the Yellowstone region. The first Grand Teton moose to encounter a wolf probably thought it was nothing more than a big coyote, which she didn’t fear. We reconstructed the interaction from tracks we found in the snow. From what we could see, the wolves just walked up to the moose and grabbed her 300 pound calf and ate it.
Grand Teton moose have learned a lot since then. Most of us think of moose as these dim lumbering Bullwinkles, but they figure things out.

Most of us have hiked in grizzly country and some have lived around wolves so we can maybe appreciate why even Douglas Smith, the expert author of Decade of the Wolf, felt nervous riding his horse into the back country of Yellowstone. It's rare humans to feel like prey, but on those occasions when we do, it should make us aware of the truism that man is not separate from nature, but lives in nature. There is no nature separate from man; our big challenge is to figure out how to live in harmony with the natural world, not in opposition.