Native American Animals

As colonial communities developed and overtook their indigenous counterparts, the dependency on the natives to participate in wolf predation and subsequent game management dwindled to a point where communities felt they could handle the predators internally. The problem and early solution, as described by Jon Coleman, fell in the field of local legislation: “Town councils across New England passed laws aimed at taming unruly beasts, but free-ranging livestock was a fact of life.” Early Americans were able to adapt folklore and stories about the dangers of wolves quite easily due to their shared sources of nutrition and the predator’s ability to capitalize on the slower and more vulnerable animal property. This integration of legend and property

In this idea of human-animal relationships, there is a line drawn between domesticated animals as human property (as tools in the case of dogs or food in the case of livestock) and wild animals as a variety of potential revenue (as food in the case of deer and other prey or bounty to eliminate the threat in the case of wolves and other predators). This dichotomy begins to define the idea of game as a broad, hunting-based category in a rudimentary sense, including even animals on higher trophic levels than the humans seeking to regulate them. Local governments sought to establish lifestyle cohesion for agriculturalists to protect their own authority as well as their community’s subsistence and did so through incentivized regulation

“The transformation of the United States from a rural into an urban society helped save wolves from extinction,” as urbanized development separated what was once an existential threat to farmers into a removed idea, leading state and the federal governments with greater responsibility to wolf eradication and other forms of regulation. “Instead of vengeful farmers with their pit traps or local nimrods with their hounds and axes, degree-toting bureaucrats hired professional wolf killers to deliver the final blow,” as the wolf populations grew smaller and smarter, making local wolf hunters an outdated option for curbing the livestock thieves. As Coleman notes, the government employees charged with this once-localized task are educated and professionals, transferring the idea of game regulation from one of survival necessity to one of hierarchal responsibility. This shift brought along a new idea of the predators as “laudable vermin”, an effort on the part of the government regulators “to make their department look good, and, by infecting wolf lore with nostalgia, the government men began to erode the cultural consensus that underwrote Americans’ loathing of wolves.” Culture change provided opportunity for political cohesion between the state