In the spirit of transparency, I have to start this piece by saying that I am a fan of wolves. I know that many in the field of agriculture don’t care for them because of their habit of eating livestock, but since I was a kid, there’s been something about those animals that is inspiring to me, and it’s with wolves that our story starts. 

Since the establishment of Yellowstone up until the late 1920s there was a concerted effort on the part of many different entities and organizations to rid the area of wolves. In their mind, they only saw wolves as vicious predators that would hunt and kill more peaceful animals, and livestock, so, open season was declared. Not only open season but an actual, organized effort by what would become the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to systematically hunt them down and kill them.

The efforts were successful. For the decades between the late 1920s and the mid-1990s, there were very few recorded sightings of wolves in the area, and then only in few numbers and on the move. Man had shaped nature to fit his image of how he thought it should be. Except for the unintended consequences. 

During this time, people began to notice some pretty significant changes in the landscape. The elk population, wolves’ primary prey, began to boom. Without their primary predator, there was nothing to curb their massive expansion. The massive numbers needed copious amounts of food, and soon areas became denuded, and trees began thinning. The park began eroding, and the dangers of mudslides and other ecological disasters began increasing.

Now that wolves were gone, the coyote population began to increase as well, which led to a significant decrease in their prey animals, and a huge domino effect was ruining the ecosystem in the park. The removal of one species led to the deterioration of the entire region, and left unchecked, would likely have spread to the rest of the area, nation, and perhaps the world. 

Wolves were reintroduced in 1995, and since then, balance has started to be restored in many different ways across the park. So, why the long drawn-out story? That simple word: balance. So many times we get caught up in protections for natural spaces when it comes to hunting, or camping, or recreating that we forget just how delicate the balance of nature is. 

The removal of one species of plant, animal, or fungi may seem like a great idea at the time. Who likes mosquitos? Who would be remiss if they were gone? But there’s a huge ripple that takes place with their absence. Many animals feed on mosquitos, and more animals feed on those animals, and so forth. It’s a shockingly short chain from a small thing like a mosquito to human beings ourselves. 

It falls to the actions of people every day when out in nature, and to legislators to protect and preserve nature as it is. Nature has done just fine without us for years, but it’s a slippery slope before we can’t survive, some new illness, depletion of crops or livestock, and all because of the removal of one small element. 

Anyway, that’s just one man’s opinion.

Braden Nelsen is a staff writer with the Davis Journal and has worked in many different industries before becoming a writer. He is a historian, an outdoorsman, and a cinephile, with expertise and opinions on a wide variety of topics.