When Francine Madden heard about the people of Wyoming who killed the gray wolf after being wounded by his snowmobile and show it off in a local bar, he was disturbed, but not too surprised.
He has seen a lot in his almost three decades of work as a wildlife conflict mediator. He settled disputes over gorillas in Uganda and tigers in Bhutan, but for 50-odd years, gray wolf management has been an intractable American problem.
Dennis Fast/VWPics/Universal Picture Group via Getty Images
Since 1973, gray wolves have been on and off the federal government’s endangered species list. While wolves are on the list, advocates say the protections help wolves in their natural habitats and allow them to roam the great American West as they have for hundreds of years — not treated, as some say, “like vermin.” On the other hand, some ranchers then say there are too many wolves and they have to bear the economic – and emotional – cost of lost livestock.
“I saw my animals dying and being killed,” Kathy McKay, owner of the 1,600-acre K-Diamond-K ranch in Washington state, told CBS News. He said he couldn’t sleep at night because he was afraid of his animals, and he lost about 40 to wolves.
While wolves are not on the endangered species list, as they are now in certain states in the lower 48, advocates say wolves are being killed indiscriminately. Lawyer and advocate Collette Adkins, director of carnivore conservation at the Center for Biological Diversity, said wolf carcasses were “piling up” and there was a “cowboy mentality” around a species that was often not considered worthy.
K-Diamond-K Guest Ranch
Enter Madden. Made a mediator by the federal government in December, this is the second time he has stepped into the morass, albeit on a larger scale. He facilitated an 18-person working group in Washington state on gray wolves in 2015, helping to make several policy decisions on population management.
Almost a decade later, he and his company Constructive Conflict are back, this time on a national level. But in some ways, the side has become more entrenched. Madden said he was speaking to Americans who “feel their way of life, or what they want to live, is under real threat.” But he remains confident of having all parties at the table from 2025.
Sides are drawn along partisan lines
Thousands of gray wolves roamed the American wilderness for centuries until hunters, ranchers and others nearly wiped out the species. In 1973, the federal government listed them as endangered in the lower 48 states. Fewer than 1,000 wolves roamed the U.S. at the time, according to the International Wolf Center.
Protected from hunting, gray wolves began to flourish, and some people became concerned that they were killing livestock and threatening communities and tribal lands. Soon the pushback began.
Dennis Fast/VWPics/Universal Picture Group via Getty Images
Animals are killed, businesses are closed, and sides – often drawn along partisan lines – are dug up, each convinced they know the right approach to managing gray wolves. For many, “wolves are a symbol of government overreach,” Adkins said. The new act spread the division further; when the population rebounded, the gray wolf was removed from the federal government’s endangered species list in 2020 and management was transferred to the state.
Wolves began to die. One example: a third of the gray wolf population in Wisconsin was killed by hunters and hunters when protection was removed, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found in 2021.
John Vucetich, a professor at Michigan Technological University, along with more than 100 other scientists, wrote to the Biden administration to restore protection. Lawsuits began, and on February 10, 2022, gray wolves in the lower 48 states — except for the Northern Rocky Mountains population — were added back to the list by court order.
The news devastated McKay, who was born on a farm his parents bought in 1961.
“I don’t understand how someone 300 miles away has so much control over our livelihoods and the safety of our livestock,” McKay said. “Why should we ask?”
K-Diamond-K Guest Ranch
Different views, constant division
Working group members in Washington state couldn’t move any policy in the years before Madden arrived, he said, and they “couldn’t speak civilly or constructively to each other.”
“The cost of the conflict over wolves has been staggering,” he said, adding that no agency has been able to quantify the damage to the economic cost – or the social cost – of the conflict.
“We are uncomfortable in the same room, with different points of view. Ranchers bear all the burden, and there are environmentalists who we feel have no skin in the game,” said Washington rancher Molly Linville, a working group member whose husband’s family has farmed 6,000 acres for more than 100 years.
In the year after Madden started mediating local conflicts, “he was able to come up with a decision they all agreed on,” she said. By the end of the three-year, $1.2 million state contract, he said, the working group had come up with some constructive policies to manage wolves in his state.
Madden brings that same optimism to the national dialogue.
He is nearing the end of the first year of his three-year, $3 million contract. His group contracted three companies to work on this project; one, the film company, will document the conversation around the gray wolf and share the film with the public. His group has started to select about 24 participants who will continue to talk about how to collect gray wolves.
He traveled to Montana in June to meet with livestock producers and reservations and visit tribal nations. In the past year, he met people from Wisconsin, Montana, California, Idaho, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Colorado, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Indiana. Madden acknowledged that “skepticism” abounded when he told people about his group’s approach to the conflict, but said many were open to speaking out because he felt that “the current vicious cycle of conflict in this country is destroying both men and wolves.”
They still believe in America’s power to listen to each other.
“There is real hope that on a national scale, in this very divided society, we can come together for this conversation to take steps in the right direction for the long-term survival of our community, culture and wildlife conservation,” Madden said. .
