Wolves, as Real as it Gets
(maybe done)

We never had an Outdoor Idaho program generate an angry petition before. We were used to hearing praise for our programs. We prided ourselves on producing well-researched shows, beautifully shot, and at least we tried to be fair and balanced. A strongly worded petition demanding elimination of the program certainly rattled my cage, but it was the shifting sands of public policy that ultimately doomed the program to obscurity.

 

Having lived near a small mountain town since the 1970's, I had a sense of how rural folks viewed the fearsome predator, suddenly at the top of the food chain. Rangers and hunters and outfitters imagined the damage wolves could inflict on their livelihoods.

City folk, on the other hand, tended to be more generous. Many saw wolves as noble intelligent creatures, overgrown dogs who lived and worked in packs and were excellent parents, with cute pups.

We all know that wolves are creatures of legend, capable of impressing us with their teamwork and intelligence, while at the same time shocking us deeply. It's no wonder our views can be so diverse and deep-seated, depending upon where we live and what we do.
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"Buck fever" really is a Thing. You don't realize the extent of the malady until much later in life. I had taken up elk and deer hunting in my late twenties and had been marginally successful, but I usually had enough backstrap in the freezer to treat my IdahoPTV colleagues to an occasional elk feed.

While the fever festered into the fall, I just knew I did not want wolves disturbing and dispersing elk in my favorite hunting ground, in Boise County's high country. Hunting was hard enough. I will say, however, that it made a great excuse when coming home empty-handed. The wolves got em all.

I mention all this because I knew how important it was to walk that fine line when tackling something as controversial as Wolf Re-introduction. Transporting wolves into Yellowstone National Park was one thing; but returning them to the Frank Church River of No Return wilderness, in central Idaho, seemed politically tone-deaf.

I had not seen Outdoor Idaho's "Wolves in Idaho" for 15 years since its original airing, but when I finally did view it again, I convinced myself that it was a reasonably well-balanced program. The show featured a rancher who had been affected by wolves, and how he was trying to cope. The only bright spot for him was that wolves chased off all the coyotes pestering his sheep.

We found the first person to legally shoot a wolf in Idaho. He walked us through the kill and talked about the hate mail he had received. "My life kind of turned to chaos for a couple weeks," Robert Millage told us. "It was almost like there were groups out there prepared and waiting to start calling the first person that shot the first wolf."

For the program, we also organized a town-hall meeting in the small village of Lowman, where wolves had followed the elk into the valley as the snow piled up in the higher elevations. The concern of the twenty townsfolk who showed up at the Lowman café was that, sooner or later, there was going to be a tragedy.

A mother with grade-school children told us that "one morning after they caught the bus, Jim had been out there with them and he went back out and there were fresh wolf tracks across the top of kids’ footprints. There’d been a fresh snow, so the story was very very clear."
Others talked about their own encounters: "They have no fear at all. It was standing there, and I yelled at it, and it just stood there and glared at me."
"The people are about as skittish as the animals are," stated another. "We're all starting to pack guns up here."

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On the flip side, the program also featured Carter Niemeyer, a government trapper who made his living trapping wolves until he was asked to coordinate Idaho's wolf recovery efforts for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

"Most people don't even understand what a wild wolf is all about," he told us. "So there's just a lot of fear and misconception on the one hand, and on the other hand they resemble someone's pet dog. So you elevate them to a status where they're noble, majestic and man's best friend. The real answer is that it's somewhere in the middle of all this."

We also talked with wolf advocates and people from the Sun Valley area, who loved to watch wolves with spotting scopes when they howled above town. It was like a celebration for many of them, akin to a tourist attraction. People would occasionally gather in groups, from a distance of several miles, to watch and listen to the animals.

From a distance of 15 years, I expected to find where "Wolves in Idaho" had veered off-center. I guess I found it, near the end of the program. Carter Niemeyer, the one running the reintroduction program, got the last word. "I don't know if coexistence is the best word to use," he said, "but the wolf is here, and it's going to be here for a long, long time to come. And people are going to have to learn to live with the wolf."

Apparently, that's not something everyone wanted to hear.
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In 2009, after the program had aired a few times Jon Hanian called to tell me the bad news. “Hunters and ranchers up north did not like your wolf show, and they signed a petition to defund public television.

 

And I remember how calm and unperturbed Jon was as he told me the news. Jon was the press secretary for Governor Butch Otter. Before accepting a job in politics, he had been a respected, award-winning straight-shooter type of reporter. He had broken major stories and even served a stint as the managing editor for the CBS affiliate, KBCI TV, in Boise.

This obviously was not Jon’s first rodeo. I got the strong impression that he had been dealing with much bigger issues that day than a petition about a TV show.

 

I asked Jon how the Governor viewed things. “Everyone knows the Governor sees wolves as just another of a laundry list of unfunded federal mandates,” said Jon. “But Mr. Otter did appreciate that you guys had once showed him on the steps of the Statehouse telling 250 angry hunters and ranchers that he wanted to be the first to buy a wolf tag so he could hunt them.”

 Years later Jon and I were reminiscing about that time. He couldn’t remember what the petition said. I never did actually see it; the only thing I could remember was how concerned I was when Jon told me.

“I do remember talking with you all about wolves,” he said, “and I was one of those lucky few who got to try some of that prized back strap.” 

Obviously, for both of us, the petition had become a non-issue.

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We continued to re-air the program after the petition, which made some sense. "Wolves in Idaho" had won significant praise, winning a regional Emmy, a First Place in the Idaho Press Club Awards, an Edward R Murrow award, and was honored by the New York Film Festival and the Council of International Non-Theatrical Events. But we warned the receptionist that she might get some phone calls.

Unfortunately, our well-crafted program did not have a long shelf life. Two years after the show first aired, the U.S. Congress removed the wolf from the Endangered Species list. We pulled it back from the repeat broadcast schedule. 

We figured much of our show would have to be rewritten, some footage re-shot, and the program re-edited. We thought it best not to re-air “Wolves in Idaho” without including what it might mean to have the wolf off the Endangered Species list.

 

I had already moved on to several other topics, and it was clear to me that the political and judicial winds surrounding the wolf would not die down for a few more years. One day someone from the Outdoor Idaho staff might decide to update the fascinating story of wolves in Idaho. I think it would be worth revisiting.
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I will say, in hindsight, that Outdoor Idaho's "Wolves in Idaho" should have paid more attention to the social consequences of the Feds bringing fifteen wolves into Idaho in 1995 and twenty more the next year.  Those 35 wolves and their descendents had become "Government Wolves," the kiss of death in some parts of the state.

No wonder the phrase "Shoot, Shovel, and Shut Up" was how so many ranchers and outfitters and rural folks viewed wolf re-introduction. I remember flying into one of the ranches on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, and talking to a hunting guide. He told me it was not unusual for people to gut-shoot the wolves they saw, so that it would go off somewhere to die. That certainly eliminated the shoveling part.

                                                    
The show also did not delve into something that was apparently brewing under the surface. Some officials with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were arguing among themselves that the wolf had no need for that free ride into Idaho. Wolves, they argued, would travel on their own dime to get to Idaho.

 

As predicted, the wolves trucked and helicoptered into Idaho flourished in the central Idaho wilderness, in part because the state's Fish & Game Department had done such a superb job of building up elk populations. In less than ten years wolf numbers had exploded to more than a thousand, and ranchers began experiencing cattle and sheep losses beyond wilderness areas.

 

The retired director of Fish & Game, Virgil Moore, remembers being told by scientists before the re-introduction that the wolves would stay in Yellowstone and Idaho's backcountry wilderness, and would max out at a few hundred wolves. "Since that time, everything we had on paper in 1995 kind of went out the window, and we’ve been chasing this ever since.”

One of those who questioned the government's approach to bringing wolves to Idaho was Roy Heberger, a retired biologist with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

In 1994, a year before wolf recovery began in earnest, Roy had taken his concerns to the regional office in Portland, Oregon. "My rationale was that re-introduction would create social problems, whereas natural re-population may be a softer way to obtain recovery. Obviously, my argument failed."

Roy's conclusion: "Recovery in Idaho was a biological success, much thanks to the Nez Perce Tribal staff. but it was also a sociological failure."

I became friends with Roy through social media years, long after the wolves arrived, and we've had occasion to discuss what might have been done differently. He frankly is not sure it mattered how wolves got to the state. Some people are going to hate wolves, regardless of how or when they entered Idaho. I do think he's correct on that score. 

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With wolves, everything is controversial, even their numbers. Most estimates put the current number of wolves in the state at around a thousand, but talking about wolves is a fluid debate, since they move around so much, including to Oregon and Washington. Some wolf advocates accuse the Fish & Game Department of enlarging their estimates, thus allowing for more drastic measures to be taken.

 

But, according to Carter Niemeyer, who gave me an update in April of 2025, it's hard to know what else state legislatures in the West can do to wolves that isn't already being done. In Idaho there are currently no limits on the number of wolves killed. Hunters and trappers can kill wolves year round and can even receive "incentive payments" for their efforts. Killing puppies in their dens is also not off-limits. 

 

"LIvestock losses remain extremely low, as to be considered rare," Carter told me, "and statewide elk herds in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming are more abundant today than 30 years ago when the wolves were re-introduced."

 

I think what Carter Niemeyer said in our 2009 "Wolves in Idaho" program -- that wolves are here to stay, and adjustments will have to be made -- is a true statement.

And another thing most people can agree upon. Wolf recovery is more about people than it is about wolves.