Americans' Brutal Near-Extermination of the Wolf

2004-10-14T20:00:00-04:00

Nearly exterminating wolves wasn’t enough; Americans slaughtered the carnivores with appalling brutality. In Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (Yale University Press), Jon T. Coleman , an assistant professor of history at the University of Notre Dame , says that Americans could simply have killed the animals that threatened their livestock. But instead, they severed the hamstrings of already-trapped wolves, dragged wolves behind horses, fractured their skulls, and pierced their guts with fishhooks that had been embedded in food.

*Q. Why were Americans so violent toward wolves?

A.* There is a mystery on an individual level with these farmers having this very brutal yet intimate interaction with these animals. They could sit there and touch them, they handled them, and then they killed them.

But on a culturewide scale, it has a lot to do with feelings of powerlessness or a feeling of losing control that went along with colonization, entering new landscapes and spaces. … Often conquering new lands does not live up to the promise you had going into it. Killing a wolf is a way to restore some kind of order.

*Q. How did wolves, once a terrifying threat, become a symbol of the environmental movement?

A.* Over the 19th and 20th century, you move from an agricultural society to a mainly urban society. Fewer and fewer people have this experience of having their calves and sheep gobbled up.

On top of that, you have a disconnect between the people who are out there killing the wolves and the people who own property. The job of destroying wolves becomes the federal government’s around 1906. This group starts telling different stories about the wolves they’re destroying. These are the famous “last wolf” legends. They portray wolves as these almost romantic outlaws … . You have government hunters standing over the last wolf in the area and mourning the loss of these animals.

*Q. Do the wolves being reintroduced to national parks today have much chance of thriving given our long history of bloodshed?

A.* Wolves have actually found a way to come back now, with government support. You see a lot of pro-wolf sentiment among young people and especially in urban places. You see a lot of antiwolf sentiment in rural areas, especially among Western livestock owners. The reintroduction has taken place in that environment and wolves seem to do all right. The reason I think it works so well is because they’re threatened, from an endangered-species standpoint, but they’re also presented as threatening.

Because they are seen as threatening, it makes the ranchers respond to them, which makes the wolves seem endangered by these political forces, which keeps the federal government involved in their protection.

http://chronicle.com
Section: Research&Publishing
Volume 51, Issue 8, Page A12

TopicID: 7440

New Group Forms to Improve Conditions for Workers Who Make College Apparel

2001-02-04T19:00:00-05:00

Representatives of 30 colleges met this weekend at the to establish the latest in a string of new organizations dedicated to improving conditions for workers who manufacture apparel carrying college logos. The Collegiate Living Wage Association, as it is called, aims not to compete with existing anti-sweatshop groups, but to inform them, one of its leaders said.p. According to Todd D. Whitmore, an associate professor of theology at Notre Dame and the conference organizer, the new group plans to provide information that could be useful to the Fair Labor Association and the Worker Rights Consortium, each of which is less than two years old.p. “What [the living-wage association] adds is precisely what colleges and universities do best in addition to teaching, and that’s research,” he said. Three of the five tasks that attendees at the meeting agreed to try to accomplish involve performing studies on the living wage, developing definitions of and formulas to measure the living wage, and investigating the pros and cons of various strategies to put in place living wages.p. “The research could be made available to whoever wants to make use of it,” Mr. Whitmore said. Representatives of the Fair Labor Association and Worker Rights Consortium attended the conference and “spoke well of the possibilities” of future collaboration, he said.p. The other two tasks the new organization set for itself were “to facilitate implementation of living-wage initiatives by colleges, universities, and other parties” and “to evaluate the actual consequences of these initiatives.”p. The living-wage association currently has no headquarters and no staff; a committee has been chosen to look for a home for the organization and to work out the financing and structure of the group before a second meeting in the fall. Mr. Whitmore said the group’s officials hope to keep “bureaucratic structure sufficiently minimal to make membership available for all colleges and universities,” and to ensure that colleges’ decisions about whether to join the group are “based upon the substance of what we’re doing rather than having cost be a barrier.”

TopicID: 377

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Americans' Brutal Near-Extermination of the Wolf

New Group Forms to Improve Conditions for Workers Who Make College Apparel