Text and Photos by Jim Robertson

Truer words have seldom been spoken concerning the Wyoming wolf-torture travesty that occurred late last winter (but due to a state law protecting the names of wolf-hunters, didn’t come to light until April). The quote, “It absolutely sickens me… but evil must be exposed” was from a patron at the Green River Bar who witnessed the wolf-abuse there that night. Had he stayed for the final act of the horror show, he would have seen Cody Roberts drag the animal out behind the bar and end her life (“euthanized” is the tactless term that state game departments are so fond of spewing out). In case you haven’t heard the latest wolf-kill injustice from the “Cowboy State,” here’s what went down:

On the 29^th of February, Roberts was out on his snowmobile hunting for coyotes—or wolves—or whatever else he could find that is considered legal to kill there at that time of year. He was well within Wyoming’s so-called “predator zone,” which constitutes 85% of the state, where no game laws exist to regulate the “harvest” of “undesirable” species like coyotes, foxes, or wolves along with raccoons, porcupines, jackrabbits, or even stray cats. Wolves, like coyotes in these zones, can be killed without limit, season or even the possession of a hunting license.

Indeed, anyone in a designated “predator zone” with a hankering to boost their flagging self-esteem by causing others to suffer can employ such strategies as baiting, trapping, snaring or even running them down with a snowmobile (a loathsome practice so popular in the state it’s perversely known as “chasin’ fur.”)

Cody Roberts must have thought himself a fine upstanding, law-abiding citizen when he spotted a 9-month-old female wolf and proceeded to give chase. Young wolves can really move, but her pursuer accelerated to full-throttle, overtaking and “disabling” her—the common method is running over a victim again and again until it stops moving.

At this point you, kind reader, are probably wondering what kind of tweaked, twisted person would do this to a beautiful animal?

Well, the sad fact is, according to a long-time Wyoming rancher, “It is very common for people to take their entire families out on snowmobiles and train their kids to run down coyotes. To them, it’s considered just a normal activity. There’s no question they do it with wolves too. if they can. If they can’t run them down, they’ll chase them until they fall in the snow from exhaustion and then shoot them. It’s considered a fun, wholesome weekend activity.” 

But Roberts crossed the legal line when he brought the “disabled” (read: crippled, incapacitated, exhausted, internally-bleeding) juvenile animal back home with him.  But that must have proved boring, so he traded his hunting cap for a thinking cap and came up with a bright idea—one that was sure to bring whoops of reassuring praise from his fellow hunters and wolf-haters. He decided to haul the wounded wolf to the Green River Bar in his local, small-minded town of Daniel, Wyoming. To ensure the severely injured creature was completely helpless, he taped the young females’ mouth shut.

Since the Green River Killer is the nickname of Washington’s Gary Ridgeway, the serial killer with the highest body count in the country to date, the Green River Bar is a fitting name for an establishment that caters to likes of animal abusers like Cody Roberts. Agents at the FBI behavioral science lab have known for years that animal cruelty, like fire-starting and bed-wetting, is part of the “homicidal triad” that often leads to psychopathic serial-killing of helpless human victims.

Just yesterday, on April 17^th. the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission heard hours of testimony from incensed citizens, many calling for harsher penalties for Robert’s behavior than the paltry $250.00 misdemeanor fine he paid (without ever spending a minute in court) for possessing a live, warm-blooded animal—the only Wyoming wildlife law they felt applied in this case. (Again, running over a panicked wolf with a snowmobile is still considered perfectly legal there even in this day and age). Others used their maximum two-minutes of testimony time to call for immediate changes in Wyoming’s backward policy regarding wolves in the state’s heinous predator zones. This approach seems more likely to head off this type of mindless, destructive behavior in the future.

This case is far from the first incidence of wolf-hating animal abusers making a public spectacle out of legally “harvesting” wolves. You may remember the U.S. Forest Service trapper, Josh Bransford from Grangeville, Idaho (one of the states next door to Wyoming), who posed for a loathsome photo with a live wolf he’d trapped.

Another self-proclaimed wolf-hater, Toby Bridges, hosted an anti-wolf page on Facebook cleverly entitled “lobo-watch” where he bragged, in gory detail, about how he intentionally ran down a family of wolves who were trying to cross Interstate 90 at Lolo Pass on the Idaho/Montana border.

Barbaric, outdated customs like “chasing fur” are inevitably relegated to the past as any society moves forward. Countless cases can be sighted, but one animal-abuse tradition springs foremost to mind.

In the mid-nineteenth century, during the same shameful period that bison were being hunted down to virtual extinction in this country, a sick, sadistic practice (right out of early Rome or London in the Middle Ages) was threatening to become a tradition in California. For fun, profit and to entertain of the burgeoning masses, Spanish vaqueros lassoed grizzly bears—the animal chosen for California’s state flag who actually have become extinct there—and brought them into town squares to be pitted against bulls and forced to fight to the death. These bloody displays of barbarity were usually held on Sunday, right after church let out.  

Meanwhile, Aldo Leopold’s understanding of the value of wolves came too late for one wolf family. In his enduring 1949 book, A Sand County Almanac, published shortly after his death, he wrote: “We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water. When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf. A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming melee of wagging tails and playful maulings. What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.

“In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy…When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable side-rocks. We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; 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.”

Leopold opened the door for others who began to appreciate wolves for who they really are. As renowned naturalist Farley Mowat, author of the 1963 classic, Never Cry Wolf, observed:  “We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be—the mythological epitome of a savage, ruthless killer—which is, in reality, no more than the reflected image of ourself.”

The first time I beheld the sight of wolves in the wild was outside a decrepit mining-town-turned-tourist-trap in a bear reserve on the Alaska/British Columbia border. Due to local persecution, wolves had not been seen in the area for decades, and their return that year was greeted with generous appreciation by an assembly of lucky bear watchers and photographers who shared in my elation.

But the spectacle lasted only one short season and by late fall a few resident tyrants—under the self-delusion that it’s all here for them—had trapped, shot or otherwise driven off the entire pack. Today the only sign of wolves is a hand painted plywood sign advertising “Wolf Hides for Sale” in front of a detestable trinket shop on a muddy back road of the wretched little town. Wolves in Alaska can legally be killed by anyone, practically anytime, by any means imaginable (former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s personal favorite is strafing from low-flying aircraft).

“Locals” of backwater towns in Wyoming seem to think that wolves were unwelcome non-residents who were unfairly imposed on their happy hunting grounds by the big, bad federal government. They act like they were here first, but they forget that wolves have been on this continent for tens of thousands of years longer than any pioneering forefathers who swept through, replacing bison and elk for cattle and sheep.

Modern humans with their traps, snares, poisons, and rifles are the only thing new to the fine-tuned system of checks and balances that has regulated itself since life first evolved. New to the scene are cowboys and their monoculture “crop” of cows, along with barbed wire fences and four-wheelers. New are pack trains of sport hunters, intolerant of any competition from mere canines, yet eager to take trophies of wolf heads and hides, while leaving the unpalatable meat to rot. New is the notion that humankind can replace nature’s time-tested order with so-called “wildlife management”—a regime that has not yet managed to prove itself worthy.

Unmatched manipulators, modern humans have moved so far beyond the natural order that population constraints like disease or starvation are no longer a threat to the species’ survival (as long as society continues to function). But wolf packs are at the mercy of nature’s generosity. Wolves can’t afford to be acquisitive; without a plentiful prey base, they perish. Theirs is a precarious struggle, without the comforting promise of immortality.

Jim Robertson is the author of Exposing The Big Game: Living Targets of a Dying Sport