Yellowstone is the world's first national park,
and everybody in America is very proud of that.
But there's been a
struggle to figure out what a national park should be like.
And probably one of our founding philosophies
is it should be natural.
It should be a natural system that functions the way
the Earth did before humans altered it.
And so it was written into our policy
that we're going to restore and protect natural systems.
And the early managers of Yellowstone
didn't really know what natural looked like.
So we've been struggling towards natural our entire history,
and that definition has evolved.
And that definition, the modern one,
now includes you need to have natural predators.
And so we try to eradicate them:
Wolves, cougars, coyotes, bobcat, and lynx.
We did that in the early part of the 20th century
because we thought that was the ideal.
We didn't have a complex mindset
about policy in terms of natural.
And so we restored wolves because the park service policy
changed towards what is a natural system
that includes large carnivores like wolves.
We also had the Endangered Species Act
come about as law in 1973, that says we cannot wipe
some species off the face of the planet.
And wolves are very much under that umbrella too.
So the best answer as to why wolves
were restored to Yellowstone is
it makes it a natural system.
It was the law.
But finally, people wanted it.
The public's view of nature has changed and evolved.
So creatures that were previously considered bad -
scapegoats - have now had an image alteration
and a lot of the public demanded
that we bring some of these animals back.