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Authors: Peter Steinhart
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PredatoryAnimal and Rodent Control Service, which employed hunters to trap and poison wolves, mountain lions, coyotes, and bears.
By the time PARC was established, poison had already eliminated all but the wariest of wolves, the wolves that were unlikely to take poison or step into a trap or the vee of a gunsight. Frustrated bounty hunters attributed to these remaining wolves extraordinary qualities. A wolf in the Chiricahua Mountains was said to have taken a cow every four days for at least four years. Old Aguila, a wolf that eluded Arizona trappers for eight years, was said to have cost $25,000 in stock. Individual wolves grew legendary, and before the war years were over, wolfers were selling tales of mythical wolves to popular magazines. Stanley Young, for example, in
Last of the Loners
, described Three Toes of the Apishapa, a wolf that was noble by day and diabolical by night: “Happy, carefree, led by the spirits of the wild,” Three Toes and his mate “played in open sunny places, and then on dark nights trotted through the dusk, slaughtering and gorging in a bacchanalian orgy of blood feast.” When Three Toes’ mate was poisoned, the wolf howled in anguish, and then “there was new hate, new viciousness, new striking back at man.” As the trapper approached, Three Toes waited: “Keen wolf teeth, bloodthirsty, ready to snap the veins in the throat of man, were at the end of his quest, and he could not come within their reach until they were made harmless.” The trapper, the model of hard work and intelligent progress, always won.
In practice, the world of wolf control was less heroic and less dutiful. Bounty hunters sometimes left the dens untouched in order to ensure continued production of wolves on which to collect paychecks and bounties. They sometimes submitted the ears or noses of dogs or badgers or coyotes as those of wolves. And they sometimes turned in parts of animals for bounties in one county, sneaked them out the back door, and sold them again in another. In 1909, Vernon Bailey, a biologist with the Bureau of the Biological Survey, wrote a
Key to the Animals on which Wolf and Coyote Bounties are Paid
, to help county and state agents determine whether they were getting badger or dog parts from a professed wolfer. To keep the federal PARC trappers from abusing the bounty systems, the government required them to turn in the pelts, which the service then sold.
Because they were pursuing the last and wariest of wolves, PARC hunters became more skillful, more patient, more persistent than the run-of-the-mill bounty hunters. They set their traps around wolf-killed livestock, hoping the wolves would return, or set them on wolf runways, where they had found wolf urine or scats and knew wolves would return to sniff and leave scents. They spent months in pursuit of a single wolf.
But the traps merely finished off the toughest cases; it was poison that did the wolf in. Cowboys and trappers alike sprinkled strychnine crystals or inserted capsules of it into incisions in a carcass. Strychnine had a bitter, quininelike taste that caused wolves to spit it out, so trappers molded the tablets into balls of fat from the back of a wild burro or horse and scattered the baits around a wolf runway or a dead deer or cow. PARC hunters treated thirteen million acres of Arizona with such baits in 1923. They killed ravens, coyotes, foxes, wolverines, weasels, eagles, dogs, and human children with their poisons, but the justice of their cause was deemed unassailable. Mark Musgrave closed his newsletter to hunters, “Remember our Slogan, ‘Bring Them in Regardless of How.’ ”
And his hunters did. Within three years, PARC hunters eliminated the last fourteen hundred gray wolves from Texas. By 1925, it was concluded that no wolves were rearing young in New Mexico, and in 1926, Musgrave reported from Arizona, “There are no more wolves left inside the borders of our state.”
When wolves grew rare, coyotes kept the
By the time PARC was established, poison had already eliminated all but the wariest of wolves, the wolves that were unlikely to take poison or step into a trap or the vee of a gunsight. Frustrated bounty hunters attributed to these remaining wolves extraordinary qualities. A wolf in the Chiricahua Mountains was said to have taken a cow every four days for at least four years. Old Aguila, a wolf that eluded Arizona trappers for eight years, was said to have cost $25,000 in stock. Individual wolves grew legendary, and before the war years were over, wolfers were selling tales of mythical wolves to popular magazines. Stanley Young, for example, in
Last of the Loners
, described Three Toes of the Apishapa, a wolf that was noble by day and diabolical by night: “Happy, carefree, led by the spirits of the wild,” Three Toes and his mate “played in open sunny places, and then on dark nights trotted through the dusk, slaughtering and gorging in a bacchanalian orgy of blood feast.” When Three Toes’ mate was poisoned, the wolf howled in anguish, and then “there was new hate, new viciousness, new striking back at man.” As the trapper approached, Three Toes waited: “Keen wolf teeth, bloodthirsty, ready to snap the veins in the throat of man, were at the end of his quest, and he could not come within their reach until they were made harmless.” The trapper, the model of hard work and intelligent progress, always won.
In practice, the world of wolf control was less heroic and less dutiful. Bounty hunters sometimes left the dens untouched in order to ensure continued production of wolves on which to collect paychecks and bounties. They sometimes submitted the ears or noses of dogs or badgers or coyotes as those of wolves. And they sometimes turned in parts of animals for bounties in one county, sneaked them out the back door, and sold them again in another. In 1909, Vernon Bailey, a biologist with the Bureau of the Biological Survey, wrote a
Key to the Animals on which Wolf and Coyote Bounties are Paid
, to help county and state agents determine whether they were getting badger or dog parts from a professed wolfer. To keep the federal PARC trappers from abusing the bounty systems, the government required them to turn in the pelts, which the service then sold.
Because they were pursuing the last and wariest of wolves, PARC hunters became more skillful, more patient, more persistent than the run-of-the-mill bounty hunters. They set their traps around wolf-killed livestock, hoping the wolves would return, or set them on wolf runways, where they had found wolf urine or scats and knew wolves would return to sniff and leave scents. They spent months in pursuit of a single wolf.
But the traps merely finished off the toughest cases; it was poison that did the wolf in. Cowboys and trappers alike sprinkled strychnine crystals or inserted capsules of it into incisions in a carcass. Strychnine had a bitter, quininelike taste that caused wolves to spit it out, so trappers molded the tablets into balls of fat from the back of a wild burro or horse and scattered the baits around a wolf runway or a dead deer or cow. PARC hunters treated thirteen million acres of Arizona with such baits in 1923. They killed ravens, coyotes, foxes, wolverines, weasels, eagles, dogs, and human children with their poisons, but the justice of their cause was deemed unassailable. Mark Musgrave closed his newsletter to hunters, “Remember our Slogan, ‘Bring Them in Regardless of How.’ ”
And his hunters did. Within three years, PARC hunters eliminated the last fourteen hundred gray wolves from Texas. By 1925, it was concluded that no wolves were rearing young in New Mexico, and in 1926, Musgrave reported from Arizona, “There are no more wolves left inside the borders of our state.”
When wolves grew rare, coyotes kept the
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