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Book Review
| Predatory Bureaucracy: The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West. By Michael Robinson. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005. xvii + 473 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Paper $24.95.
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| As wolves are being restored to the landscapes and the histories of the American West, scholars are paying increased attention to the reasons for their extirpation nearly a century ago. Was it due to a hatred located deep in our psyche, a cultural drive fed by folklore, a biological imperative, or an economic necessity? Michael Robinson contends that such forces were necessary but not sufficient for the elimination of wolves in the West. Fur trappers, bounty hunters, and tons of strychnine reduced wolf populations, but did not completely eliminate wolves, as ranchers had hoped. Instead, the rugged individualists of the ranching frontier turned to a federal agency for the professionalism and efficiency required to exterminate persistent predators. Drawing on the political strength and financial resources of the livestock industry, this agency pursued a relentless campaign against predators and rodents throughout the West, and survived long after its original mandate was outdated. |
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According to Robinson, livestock interests in the early twentieth century, having decimated the once abundant wolf populations with bounties and poisons, turned to the newly created Forest Service and then the Biological Survey for assistance in finishing the remaining predators. This coincided with the Progressive era emphasis on wildlife management, which provided a scientific rationale for reducing predators in favor of deer, elk, buffalo, and other desired species. By the 1920s the Biological Survey was pursuing a few last "renegade wolves" into the mountains and canyons of western Colorado as well as killing coyotes with millions of strychnine baits spread across hundreds of miles of western landscapes. The core of Predatory Bureaucracy is Robinson's detailed narration of the Biological Survey's survival in the face of many attempts at reform. Parrying aside criticisms that predator control was cruel to animals, that poisons indiscriminately killed many desired species, and that it benefited only a few ranchers, the survey continued its poisoning of all sorts of unwanted species, including coyotes, magpies, crows, and prairie dogs. |
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Although some of this same ground has been ably covered by Thomas Dunlap's Saving America's Wildlife (Princeton, 1988), specialists in wildlife, western history, and the politics of natural resources will find new information here, especially in Robinson's focus on wolves, and in his attention to Stanley Paul Young, who supervised the Survey's work in Colorado. More general readers may struggle with the prose style and his tendency to become immersed in the minutia of bureaucratic behavior. Not all readers will agree that Young should be singled out as the villain of the story and will look instead to more complex structural explanations that would link predator control with mining, ranching, forestry, and irrigation bureaucracies. Finally, Robinson presents his evidence, whether political testimony, scientific reports, or Young's wolf stories, at face value, while some of these, especially the stories of "last wolves," are rich in mythical and folkloric content, as demonstrated brilliantly by Jon T. Coleman in Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (Yale, 2004). |
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These weaknesses may limit its value for some readers, but should not diminish the significant contributions that Predatory Bureaucracy makes to our knowledge of wolves, wildlife in the West, and the behavior of natural resource bureaucracies. |
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Tim Lehman is professor of history at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana, and the author of Public Values, Private Lands (North Carolina, 1995). His current interests include wolves and ranchers in the American West. |
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