Wolves in the Wild and Their Place in Nature

Your children are starving, the winter is approaching and it is your responsibility to feed your family, their extended family, and the entire pack. Under these circumstances even you would kill an elk or two. In 1995, 14 wolves were brought from Canada into the Yellowstone National Park, in an effort to see how they would affect the ecosystem if they were reintroduced into America. The two decades after the wolves were integrated into the park has been filled with conflict as citizens fight for or against reintroducing wolves country-wide. Wolf activists, farmers, and hunters are the main players in the fight for or against wolf reintroduction. Wolves are a vital part of our ecology, the animal kingdom’s food chain, and economy; and as such should be reintroduced to all the areas that the wolf roamed before they were wiped out by European explorers.

The ecology, or how living organism interact with their environment, starts from the top, or the predator and goes down to the soil and streams. Before the wolf was introduced to the Yellowstone National Park, elk populations have grown too large for the land to sustain them. Due to the large number of elk eating the grass and trees, the grass has been eaten, and the soil has become loose due to the lack of grass to hold the soil in place (Hannibal 2012). The exposed soil makes the land more susceptible to changes in the weather (Hannibal 2012). When wolves were reintroduced into the Yellowstone National Park, the willow trees grew back, the Aspens grew more abundantly, and the grass managed to regrow(“In the Valley of the Wolves”). The elk still ate the grass, willows, and trees; however because the wolves were now preying on the elk the elk had to keep moving and stay in areas wher...

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