Canis lupus friendatus

They should be viewed not as wild, killer dogs with bloody fangs, as sociology professor James William Gibson writes in The Los Angeles Times, but "considered community members."

Like many other well-meaning souls in California, Gibson is upset about the success of wolf-recovery efforts in the Rocky Mountains where wolves were once extinct. Or, more accurately, he is upset that wolves reintroduced to the region in the mid-1990s have done such a marvelous job of expanding their range and rebuilding their populations that they are now being treated like other animals and hunted.

"This fall, hunters have killed more than 193 wolves in Montana and Idaho, and the slaughter is not finished," he writes. "The Idaho season has been extended to March 31 to allow hunters to reach the quota of 220 wolves approved for killing in the state by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The limit exists because wolves in the area were only recently removed from the endangered species list. In Alaska, where wolves are more plentiful and there is no such quota, hunters in airplanes have killed more than 1,000 wolves in recent years."

You would think it would make someone who professes to love wolves happy that the animals are "plentiful'' in Alaska, but apparently this is not the case. Gibson can't seem to get past that unsettling idea that some wolves die violently at the hands of man. This is part and parcel of the great wolf-lover disconnect that I just don't get. I like the idea Americans have a new found respect for wolves, but I find it difficult to accommodate the ignorance that prevents them from accepting the world of the wolf for what it is.

Wolves live in a war zone. Violent death is as common to them as a credit card is to you. Wolves are killing machines. It is their beauty. It is their role in nature. It is the way they live. And it is the way they die.

Wolves are tribal in the most primordial sense. They kill each other on a regular basis to protect their territory. Some scientific studies have found up to 65 percent of wolf deaths come from wolves killing wolves. Other studies have found most of those deaths, up to 90 percent, come within a couple miles of the boundaries of wolf territories.

Wolves, it would seem, don't like other wolves much better than people sometimes do. Wolves kill other wolves to limit competition for prey -- moose, caribou, elk, deer, etc., which is exactly the same reason wolves are sometimes killed in large-scale, organized, government-backed efforts by people in Alaska. Admittedly, there is other wolf killing done here, too. There are controlled harvests of wolves through regular hunting and trapping that enable people to obtain wolf fur. If you live in the North Country, an inherently more inhospitable place than California, a wolf-fur ruff on your parka can save your face from frostbite in winter.

If you happen to be Inuit or Yupik or Athabascan, or share the beliefs of other indigenous American peoples, you might even think of the wolf that provides the ruff as having given itself to you as part of some spiritual exchange. If you are a professor living in Los Angeles and a Yale fellow, of course, you do not think this. If you are well-educated Yale fellow and professor living in warm, urban, civilized, car-filled Long Beach far from the war zone in which wolves live, you somehow think that Aldo Leopold (to quote Gibson again)

... wouldn't be surprised to find that some people still see [wolves] as evil enemies. And he would be encouraged by one important cultural change: that there is no widespread national celebration over the renewed wolf hunts, no validation of powerful hunters as masculine heroes. Instead, hundreds of thousands have signed petitions asking that the Fish and Wildlife Service re-list the Rocky Mountain population as endangered.