The phenomenon of unrestrained hunting and game depletion in Utah occurred throughout the West. There was a skiff of snow on the ground, but they saw the tracks of only one deer in three days.” The human impact on game herds was so severe that deer hunting was completely banned in Utah from 1908 to 1913. The following remark by a Randolph resident specifically describes the dearth of game in Rich County in the late 1890s, but his statement is equally descriptive of hunting conditions for the entire region: “My father and a neighbor, Tom Daniels, went deer hunting in the late fall.

Throughout Utah, chronic overhunting nearly eliminated big game populations by the early 1900s. Unfortunately, unsustainable hunting practices continued even after agricultural settlements were successfully established. Hunger forced the first Mormon settlers to shoot whatever game they could find. With virtually no agricultural foods available, the first pioneers avidly hunted animals in the nearby ranges, but only two years after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, hunting parties were often forced to travel many miles to find elk, deer, and other game. Profligate waste by pre-pioneer era fur trappers had apparently reduced the number of game animals in the lower valleys, but game remained abundant in the mountains. On May 6, 1847, Brigham Young observed: “The prairie appeared black being covered with immense herds of buffalo.” The pioneers found far fewer game animals in the Great Basin than on the Great Plains. When Mormon pioneers journeyed across the Great Plains en route to the Salt Lake Valley, large game animals-the primary quarry of wolves-were extraordinarily abundant. I suggest that encouraging wolf recolonization in Utah would revitalize the languishing environmental ideals of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and demonstrate to today’s ecologically astute world that Latter-day Saints take seriously their stewardship of the animal kingdom.įrom Beast of Desolation to Wilderness Icon Herein I review the history of human attitudes towards wolves in the Intermountain West and the contemporary arguments for and against wolf restoration in Utah.

These and other forum letters as well as newspaper stories and television reports confirmed what was already suspected: when it comes to wolves, Utah is a house divided. The pressure to bring wolves back has no point other than pursuit of a dream of Eden. This obsession with reintroducing wolves has no logical grounds other than the desire to live in a pristine world, a kind of holy nostalgia for a time that no one really remembers.

I might be amenable to if wolf advocates could give me a better reason than just telling me how noble wolves are. , or we can join the 21st century and welcome this magnificent and beautiful animal back into its ancestral hunting grounds.” In response to the above letter, another individual derided wolf restoration: We can either take the ranchers’/ wise-use side and treat the wolf as we did when it was eradicated from Utah. The Deseret News printed the comments of one wolf advocate who exclaimed: “Utah is a wolf ‘no-man’s land,’ and we will be making up wolf policy as we go along. On the heels of the Utah wolf’s capture and return to Wyoming, impassioned public forum letters written by individuals on both sides of the wolf debate appeared in local newspapers. Then, as wolf proponents postured to charge the federal government with illegally transporting an endangered species, the USFWS swore that any future wolves wandering into Utah would remain free. The USFWS returned the wolf to northern Wyoming as expeditiously as possible, thereby pacifying hostile ranchers. Conservationists cheered the return of Canis lupus to Utah, while ranchers and big game hunters cried “Wolf!” Personnel from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) found themselves in the middle of a canine crisis and acted on political instinct by appeasing both pro- and anti-wolf camps. The event received a great deal of media attention since wolves had not been recorded in Utah for some seventy years. On November 30, 2002, a gray wolf from Yellowstone National Park was captured in mountainous terrain twenty-five miles northeast of Salt Lake City. Monson is a visiting instructor of geography at Brigham Young University.

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