Perhaps the most commonly asked question
about wolf recovery is that
"Did we reintroduce the wrong wolf?"
And this is a long answer, so I'll try
and make it as short as possible.
Our naming of nature is an artificial system
developed by Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish monk in the 1700s.
And I don't want to criticize Linnaeus,
and he did a great job, but essentially
it's an artificial system putting names on parts of nature
that might not be actually different things.
But there are different things in nature.
You have plants and animals and they're different,
and we can call them that and it works.
His system really works very well until you get down
to the very finest levels of naming, of distinction.
That's the subspecies level.
You have species, and then below species,
you have subspecies.
And wolves are the worst example of the subspecies concept.
The leading wolf biologist in the world
does not believe that subspecies even apply to wolves.
And why is that?
You get different subspecies,
and originally there were 24 different subspecies of wolves,
now they're five.
It's constantly being reduced, and of course,
this prominent wolf biologist thinks there should be none.
But how do you get different kinds of things in nature?
Different populations become isolated
so they no longer interbreed.
When they don't interbreed anymore,
the genetics become different.
When the genetics become different enough,
they become different things.
First subspecies and then species.
Wolves always get around, and it's very hard
to isolate two populations of wolves.
Very hard. Nothing stops a wolf.
Not a mountain range. Not a river.
Sometimes not even oceans.
The wolves here immigrated to Asia and back.
They are very good at getting around,
so you don't get much isolation.
The best genetics show that wolves in Mexico
to wolves in the Arctic are on a continuum of change,
from South to North.
So there's no place we can go in and say
this group of wolves is different from that group.
That's a genetic analysis.
And the Mexican wolf can interbreed
with the Arctic wolf very capably.
So did we reintroduce the wrong thing? No.
Were the wolves that we put here slightly different
from the wolves that existed here 100 years ago?
Probably. Nature's always changing.
We looked at the weights of the handful of wolves.
31 from Canada, which is a very small number.
And they were slightly larger than the wolves
that existed here 100 years previously: 6 to 8% larger.
That is well within the natural variation
of wolf size across the continent.
So despite this frequently asked question,
these Canadian wolves are unnaturally large,
and they're therefore at a very big advantage
to killing these elk because these elk
aren't used to such a large predator.
Of all the arguments not to have wolves,
and there are some good ones:
they're tougher to live with,
that's an absolutely good argument.
The idea that we put something in here that's exotic
or different is perhaps one of the weakest.