storytelling Archives - When We Talk About Animals

Ep. 44 – Rick McIntyre on the stories of Yellowstone’s greatest wolves

When Yellowstone became America’s first national park in 1872, gray wolves — which had roamed and shaped North America’s landscape for millions of years — were being massacred nationwide in a government-led extermination campaign. The eradication of these predators, who were cast as livestock-threatening villains, began soon after the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth Bay. The colonists set bounties on wolves and the war escalated in the decades to follow. As our guest once documented, wolves and their pups were shot, trapped, hunted with dogs, poisoned, dragged from dens, baited with fish hooks, set on fire, and intentionally infected with mange. One community even paved a road with wolf carcasses. In Yellowstone, the job was completed in 1926 when the last two pups in the park were killed.

Wolf 21 — one of Yellowstone’s most revered and beloved alpha males — howls as he approaches the long-dominant Druid Peak Pack. Born in 1995, Wolf 21 was known for never losing a fight, never killing a defeated opponent, and for his deep commitment and visible affection for his mate, Wolf 42. Video still by Bob Landis.

The loss, brutality, and profound ecological consequences of this atrocity slowly began to sink in. Seventy years after the last Yellowstone wolves were killed, the U.S. government took unprecedented measures to reclaim what it had destroyed. In 1995 and 1996, more than thirty wolves from multiple packs were brought to the park from Canada and released in a grand experiment that would become the most successful wildlife reintroduction effort in history. Within years, more than 100 wolves in 10 packs were thriving across the 2.2 million acre park and the ecosystem was rebounding spectacularly. The roughly 100 wolves that live in the park today — which awe, inspire, and fascinate millions of visitors each year — are their descendants.

Our podcast guest, the internationally renowned wolf expert Rick McIntyre, has dedicated his life to those wolves. As a ranger naturalist, he spent more than 40 years observing wolves in America’s national parks. For the past 26 of those years, he’s observed the wolves in Yellowstone nearly every day, accumulating more than 100,000 sightings — more than any other person in history. What Rick saw unfolding through his telescope is awe-inspiring: epic adventure stories of wolf family dynasties. He watched wolves perform acts of bravery and kindness, suffer crippling injuries, conquer enemies and then treat them with benevolence, wage war over territories, form lifelong partnerships with touching loyalty, and play exuberant games of king of the castle. His work leaves no doubt that wolves are individuals with unique personalities, emotions, and complex relationships like our own. His stories have shown millions of people that these still-persecuted animals deserve our respect and need our empathy.

“One of the things that strikes you, probably more than anything else, is what emotionally fulfilled lives they live,” says McIntyre. “They have deep emotional connections to each other.” Photo by Julie Argyle.

Since retiring from the park service in 2018, Rick has published a magnificent series of biographies of some of Yellowstone’s most noteworthy wolves. These include The Rise of Wolf 8, The Reign of Wolf 21, and his latest book, The Redemption of Wolf 302. As the writer Nate Blakeslee aptly put it: “With this third installment of Rick McIntyre’s magnum opus, the scope and ambition of the project becomes clear: nothing less than a grand serialization of the first twenty years of wolves in Yellowstone, a kind of lupine Great Expectations.”

After retiring from the National Park Service, McIntyre wrote a series of biographies of Yellowstone’s greatest wolf leaders: Wolf 08, one of the first reintroduced wolves who grew from a runt into a powerful pack leader; his adopted and brave son, Wolf 21, known for his long and successful reign as king of the park’s Druid Peak pack, his deep devotion to his mate, and his unusual benevolence to his defeated rivals; and 21’s nephew, Wolf 302, who started life as an irresponsible Casanova, but transformed his character and died as a heroic father.

These stories are especially important right now. Wolves desperately need federal protection from extreme and cruel wolf-killing laws recently enacted in the states of Montana and Idaho. These laws could destroy the state’s wolf populations, undoing decades of progress. In this episode, McIntyre tells the extraordinary stories some of Yellowstone’s greatest wolves, describes the wolves’ unique personalities and the pack’s dynastic dramas, and explains why science-based federal action is needed to protect these wolves, who are at risk of being massacred once again due to draconian new state laws.

Wolf 302, whose life is the subject of McIntyre’s latest book, showed little promise as a renegade young wolf of living up to the legacies of the great Yellowstone wolf leaders who came before him. But Wolf 302’s character matured as he got older, and he ultimately came to lead — and sacrifice for — a new pack in his old age. “302 was a free spirit who marched to a beat that was different from the other male wolves I’ve known,” McIntyre wrote. Photo of Wolf 302 by Doug Dance.

McIntyre’s first book on the Yellowstone wolves, *The Rise of Wolf 8*, tells the story of the reintroduction of wild wolves to the park through the life of one of the original reintroduced wolves, Wolf 8. Born in Alberta, Wolf 8 (far left), his parents (center), and his three much-larger brothers (one of which is on the far right) were released in the park in the mid-1990s. The smallest of his brothers, Wolf 8 was mercilessly bullied in the pack’s temporary acclamation pen. As a yearling, he encountered a mother wolf, Wolf 9, and her eight pups in desperate straits after the pups’ father was illegally shot by a hunter. Unexpectedly, Wolf 8 bonded with the family and became the alpha male of the park’s largest pack until his death in 1999. Photo by Jim Peac, National Park Service.

Ep. 27 – Ed Yong on telling the grand, urgent and surprising stories of animal worlds

*“People often are best at learning when they encounter something that defies their expectations, where the gap between reality and expectation is the widest,”* says Yong. “I think one wonderful thing about covering the animal kingdom is that there are so many such gaps. Animals constantly surprise us in what they do and what they are capable of; even the people who know them best and who study them, people who devoted their lives to the understanding of the animal kingdom, are constantly surprised.” Photo courtesy of Ed Yong.

“Every human being is a colony,” Pablo Picasso once said. The insight is made literal in Ed Yong’s acclaimed book, I Contain Multitudes, about our hidden relationship with the microbial world. “If we zoomed in on our skin,” he writes, “we would see them: spherical beads, sausage-like rods, and comma-shaped beans, each just a few millionths of a meter across. They are so small that, despite their numbers, they collectively weigh just a few pounds in total. A dozen or more would line up cosily in the width of a human hair. A million could dance on the head of a pin.”

These microbes are not just hitching a ride, but enabling us to become ourselves: they help digest our food, sculpt our organs, and craft and calibrate our immune systems. To be at all, Yong demonstrates, is to be in partnership with them. Yong’s work has contributed to a radical shift in how we understand animals — from discrete organisms motivated by competition to living islands, communities of hidden beings.

“Toughie,” the last-known living Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog, died in captivity in September 2016. The species is now considered extinct. Yong wrote about Toughie and the people who cared for him in his story, “Animal Extinction Caring for the Last of a Species.” Photo source: Brian Gratwicke.

Ep. 20 – Gabriela Cowperthwaite on the legacy of “Blackfish”

“When I see people standing on the faces of cetaceans, what is it that they’re doing? We’re mastering,” Cowperthwaite says. “We’re trying to be bigger than and better than them. What does that say about us?”

The filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite, did not set out to make a film that would force a national moral reckoning over how we keep whales in captivity, slash the profits of SeaWorld, and make her an unexpected enemy of a multi-billion dollar industry. But that’s what happened. Cowperthwaite wasn’t a marine mammal activist before she made the documentary Blackfish. She was a mom who had taken her kids to SeaWorld, and she was a talented filmmaker, with over a dozen years of experience creating TV documentaries. She set out to tell the truth, and the truth — told by Cowperthwaite — proved to be, like the orcas themselves, complicated and powerful.

Blackfish is the story of a single 12,000-pound protagonist, a performing orca bull named Tilikum, who killed three people while in captivity. In tracing Tilikum’s narrative, from his violent capture in the wild as a two-year-old orca to his life as a highly feeling and intelligent animal becoming psychotic while living in what one interviewee calls “a bathtub,” Cowperthwaite reveals the orcas’ extraordinary nature, the horror of how we have treated them in captivity for so long without understanding or acknowledging the consequences, and the profound regret of trainers who once cared for Tilikum. In doing so, Cowperthwaite illuminated for the American public the profound disconnect between Sea World’s public image and the reality of what it means for humans to treat orcas this way.

“As a little kid, the thing you do when you go to [zoos] is knock on the glass,” Cowperthwaite says. “It’s the first thing you do. Even as an adult you have to stop your impulse to tap on the glass. It’s not that you want to see [the animal], it’s that you want it to see *you*. The idea that we will be acknowledged by something ‘out there’ is electrifying to us.”

Shot on a budget of just $76,000 and released in 2010, Blackfish has been viewed by more than 60 million people and has become one of the most impactful and successful documentary films of all time. Sea World’s stock price plummeted 60 percent following the film’s theatrical premiere, the U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously to provide $1 million toward a study on the effects of captivity on orcas, and celebrities, airlines, fast food giants and musical tour groups spoke against and dropped associations with Sea World. Eventually, the company responded to public pressure by announcing changes at its theme parks, including officially ending its orca breeding program and phasing out orca shows all together by the end of 2019. Cowperthwaite’s David slayed SeaWorld’s Goliath not with a sword, but with a story.

Ep. 8 – Charles Siebert on translating nature’s symphony

The early twentieth century bio-philosopher Jakob von Uexküll studied the private worlds of animals, and the perceptual differences and similarities between our worlds. Uexküll used a musical metaphor to explain his idea that each organism has a distinct, subjective and all-consuming life-world. To Uexküll, in the words of Dorion Sagan, “Organisms are instruments in a sort of celestial music show of which we hear only strains.” In his view, as Sagan writes, the multitude of earth’s organisms — a word derived from the Greek word, organon, for “instrument” — formed a many-membered orchestra of extraordinary richness.

“Our human gaze has been misdirected,” says journalist and poet Charles Siebert. “We look heavenward for deliverance when deliverance comes from looking down and back into the biology from whence we came and that great symphony we’re part of.”
(Photo courtesy of Charles Siebert)

Once, while attending a symphony by Gustav Mahler and sitting beside a young man absorbed in following along the score, Uexküll wondered if it is “the task of biology to write the score of nature.” “Each voice of a person or instrument is a being for itself, but one which melts into a higher form through point and counterpoint with other voices, which from then grows further, gaining richness and beauty in order to bring forward to us the composer’s soul,” he wrote. “Reading the score,” the young man sitting beside him told Uexküll, “one can follow the growth and branching off of the individual voices that, like the columns of a cathedral, bear the weight of the all-encompassing dome. Only in this way does one get a glance into the many-membered form of the performed artwork.” Our guest on this episode has devoted his career to observing and writing these interplaying “scores” of natures, the stories of animals, through prose and poetry. His work has allowed millions of readers to hear and appreciate anew strains of non-human animals in nature’s symphony.

“Words are all we have… We’re stuck with words, but there’s a way to manipulate them and use them to free our thoughts and our thinking rather than build cages,” Siebert says. The windowsill in Siebert’s office hosts a menagerie of animal figurines. Each represents an animal he’s written about, and many represent creatures that we are at risk of losing forever. (Photo courtesy of Charles Siebert)

Ep. 7 – “Eating Animals” film director Christopher Quinn on the hidden costs of factory farming

The award-winning screenwriter, film director and producer Christopher Quinn’s latest film, “Eating Animals,” explores the costs of cheap meat. “It’s not just about losing all these resources, but about losing ourselves,” he says. “Our sense of self. Our spirit.”

For 2.5 million years, humans sustained themselves by eating plants and animals that lived and reproduced without our manipulation. That changed 10,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens began to intervene in the lives of a few plant and animal species, sparking what we now call the Agricultural Revolution. The Industrial Revolution followed some 10,000 years later, in the early 1700s, revolutionizing our eating habits yet again. Just as the Humanist religions were defining human beings as the image of god, humans started to view animals as meat machines. Farmers brought the techniques of the factory system into the slaughterhouse, dramatically increasing the number of animals they could raise and kill for food. The industrialization of agriculture has led to the practice now known as “factory farming,” a multibillion dollar industry that controls nearly a third of Earth’s land, is transforming ocean ecosystems, and produces more greenhouse gas emissions than planes, ships, trucks, cars, and all other transport combined.