Nate Blakeslee > Quotes

“Rick’s dream, though he seldom described it as such, was to someday tell a story so good that the people who heard it simply wouldn’t want to kill wolves anymore.”
― Nate Blakeslee, American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

“Can a wolf in the wild experience what we know as joy and happiness?” Rick said, his voice breaking noticeably. “And my answer is yes.”
― Nate Blakeslee, American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

“The science was on Smith’s side, but it didn’t seem to matter to ranchers and hunters, or to state legislators. The debate wasn’t about science anymore, if indeed it ever had been.”
― Nate Blakeslee, American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

“What we normally mean by ‘education,’ ” he once told a crowd of wolf advocates, is, “I want someone else to know what I know so they will have my values.” In his experience, it didn’t work that way.”
― Nate Blakeslee, American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

“But wolves, Rick felt, were more like humans than they were given credit for, in their tribal ways and territoriality; in their tendency to mate for life; and in the way male wolves provided food and care for their offspring, so unusual in the animal world. He loved to quote the early-twentieth-century English philosopher Carveth Read: “Man, in character, is more like a wolf… than he is any other animal.”
― Nate Blakeslee, American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

“It was her stunning blend of confidence and competence that inspired them, her indomitable will, her ability to bend a harsh landscape to her own ends, to do what needed to be done to provide for herself and her family every day, without fail.”
― Nate Blakeslee, American Wolf

“In Of Wolves and Men, Barry Lopez recounts the story of an ethnographer posing a riddle to an elder among the Nunamiut, a tribe in northern Alaska. At the end of his life, the researcher asked, who knows more about life in Alaska—how to escape a blizzard, how to find caribou, how to survive on such a harsh landscape—a wolf or a man? “The same,” the elder replied. “They know the same.”
― Nate Blakeslee, American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

“By the 1920’s, the wolves had been all but eliminated from the continental United States, except for a small population in northern Minnesota and Michigan’s upper peninsula. It was a campaign unprecedented in its scope and thoroughness. One species almost completely whipped out another. The impetus for the killing was clear enough, but as Barry Lopez asked in “Of Wolves and Men”, his seminal meditation on the fraught relationship between the two species, why did the pogrom continue, even after the threat to the westerner’s way of life was essentially gone? Why did our ancestors feel they had to rout out every last wolf, and why were hunters still so eager to shoot them in the few places they remained?
There was hate, Lopez decided, but there was something else, too. Something more akin to envy. Here is an animal capable of killing a man, an animal of legendary endurance and spirit, an animal that embodies marvelous integration within its environment. This is exactly what the frustrated modern hunter would like, the noble qualities imagined, a sense of fitting into the world. The hunter wants to be the wolf.”
― Nate Blakeslee, American Wolf

“Yet it wasn’t until she was dead—until the New York Times saw fit to give her an obituary—that Rick realized just how far her story had traveled, how powerful the simple act of storytelling could be. Maybe it didn’t matter if he never wrote his book about O-Six; maybe, in a way, he already had.”
― Nate Blakeslee, American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

“Elk inspired people; they were a symbol of everything that was special about living here.”
― Nate Blakeslee, American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

“but the watchers knew their story”
― Nate Blakeslee, American Wolf

“Nor did Yellowstone’s early managers understand what would happen to an ecosystem without predators. Once the wolves were gone, the ungulate population in the park exploded, and the quality of the range quickly began to deteriorate. Overgrazed hillsides eroded, and stream banks denuded of woody shrubs began to crumble, damaging prime trout habitat. Elk browsing at their leisure, undisturbed by predators, decimated stands of young aspen and willow. Too many animals on the landscape brought starvation and disease, and the elk population followed a boom-and-bust cycle. By the 1930s, Yellowstone officials had no choice but to do what they had done with the wolves. They started quietly culling the park’s enormous elk herds, shooting thousands of animals in an average year (usually in the winter, when few visitors were around to see the carnage). This continued until the 1960s, when hunters in areas adjacent to the park pressured their elected officials to intervene. Fewer elk in Yellowstone, they knew, meant fewer elk migrating out of the park in winter, which in turn meant fewer hunting opportunities. The elk population was once again allowed to grow untrammeled.”
― Nate Blakeslee, American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West

“He has gone to the top of Specimen on the last day of his life, Rick suggested, because that was where he and 42 had gone together countless times - to mark a particular tree that served as a kind of sentry post along the edge of the Druids’ territory. Of course, she wasn't there that summer day when 21 visited the spot alone. But her scent was still present, Rick reminded his audience, which would have offered 21 at least a glimmer of hope at finding his missing mate. “Now the question at that moment would be: Can a wolf in the wild experience what we know as joy and happiness?” Rick said, his voice breaking noticeably. “And my answer is yes.”
― Nate Blakeslee, American Wolf

“he had reluctantly approved the shooting of a handful of Yellowstone wolves who had attacked livestock grazing near the park. Such culling wouldn’t normally have been allowed under the Endangered Species Act, but a special concession had been made to ranchers in the original reintroduction plan: any reintroduced wolves who preyed on livestock would be shot. The wolves’ overall impact on ranching hadn’t been severe; around two hundred cattle—out of roughly five million across Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming—were lost to predation in an average year. (By comparison, tens of thousands of cattle were killed every year by winter storms, lightning, floods, or drought.) But some individual operations near the”
― Nate Blakeslee, American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West