Is it surprising that this particular administration is defending wolves?

I think that the national politicians are pretty sensitive to what stirs the national public. And I don't think anybody anticipated how powerful the symbols of Yellowstone and wolves together were in our cultural psyche.

Exterminating wolves was so much more than the idea of ridding the West of a nuisance predator.

The incredible violence of it?

Things like tying their legs to four horses and quartering them to death. Or, dousing them with gasoline and burning them, or wiring their jaws shut, so they would die slowly of starvation. These kinds of hideous acts exposed an interest in not really killing wolves, but conquering them. And I think part of that was because wolves represented this wild untamed spirit.

It goes way back. You see all these biblical alliances between wolves and the devil. The Christ figure protects the sheep from the wolves. It goes on and on and on.

Those kinds of things are deeply embedded in our cultural thinking. The wolf for centuries and centuries has been so much more than the biological animal. One of the reasons that they pose the kind of threat that they do is not just because they eat the game that we eat, but that we see parts of ourselves in them, parts of our self that aren't always acknowledged.

We have projected our shadow onto wolves for centuries. Wolves exist in the shadows and are crepuscular animals, which means they come out during dawn and dusk. They are most active, as are a lot of creatures, during the crepuscular period when light turns to dark and dark turns to light.

When you listen to Bush's speeches, you hear the creation of this "other" -- the big evil shadow of the other, while we are the conquering forces of life and intelligence. But then it turns out that it is we who have perpetuated this hideous behavior and torture at Abu Ghraib. To me wolves are very much a part of that.

Do you think that we're capable of overcoming that impulse to conquer when it comes to wolves? Aren't we just controlling them in different ways by restoring, monitoring and managing them?

I felt that the step of restoring wolves to Yellowstone was right on many levels. I felt that it was wrong for us to exterminate this species that plays a critical role in the ecological processes of wild places. It wasn't that wolves died out because there was no longer habitat or prey. We systematically, consciously, and very effectively killed every last one of them. It was a wrong that I feel that we as a culture committed, and one that we could right.

And now, like anything, there are all the undercurrents and compromises in doing a restoration project, which I had to face pretty directly in the process of going out and trapping wolves [in Canada] to be brought down here -- the whole idea of intervening in their lives. The thing that made me feel better about those kind of questions was that in the areas that we took wolves from there was a 70 percent chance of man-perpetuated deaths.

It's a free-fire zone in those areas. Wolves could be shot or trapped or poisoned anytime by anyone under any circumstances.

So it wasn't as if you took them from some utopian paradise, and then trapped, tagged them and put radio collars on them.

Right. I think here in the early stages of this project there has been an intensive management mode, partly because as scientists we've never had the opportunity to study wolves in this way, in an environment where they've been gone, and then are replaced. We can see exactly what their role is, and what kind of impact they have. It's an extraordinary situation for learning about both the ecosystem and the species itself.

But I think ultimately the radio collars will become something that is used for basic monitoring, and we'll have a situation where wolves exist in the wild. And when they do get in conflicts, when they do kill cattle, especially on private land, then usually the wolves will be killed. But I think that there are always those questions where civilization and wild places and wild creatures meet.

Sure, those are compromises. But here in Jackson every spring the mice just come in and take over the house. And I like mice. I used to have a little family of shrews that lived in a closet. And I let them live there, and that was fine, but there is a certain line that you draw where you decide what is hygienic. So, I think that in the same way there are boundaries to where it will be appropriate to have wolves.

Wolves do kill dogs; they do kill livestock, and that's not going to be tolerated in some areas. And I'm not some dreamy tree hugger that isn't willing to admit that there are always going to be these boundaries. We'll have to come to some agreement of how we treat the wild when those boundaries collide. You see it with fires, you see it with bears, you see it with mountain lions and you see it with wolves.

I think it's still a great privilege to live near wild places even when you have the inconvenience of having huge forest fires sometimes sweep away homes. People make those choices of where they're going to live, and with them comes a certain risk and responsibility.

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