Timber wolf. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
There are many ways to kill a wolf in America. But most of them are mundane and prosaic. They’re not likely to bring you acclaim and notoriety. Few will hear about your feat if you simply gun down a wolf from a helicopter, kill a wolf with an M-44 cyanide bomb, pour gas into a wolf den filled with pups and strike a match, put out a contract on a wolf with a hired killer from the government, track down a wolf with a drone and shoot it with a long-range rifle and telescopic scope, inject rat poison in an elk carcass and wait for wolves (and whoever else) to feed on it and die an agonizing death, run one over with your cybertruck or, like the current Governor of Montana, catch a wolf in a trap and then after it has struggled to free itself for a few painful days heroically shoot it.
But if you want to get your name in the papers and your drunken face on cable TV, you’ve got to be more creative. You can’t just be a routine sadist anymore, you’ve got to go the extra mile. You’ve got to bring your wolf torture to the people. Consider this: since wolves lost their protection under the Endangered Species Act more than 1,000 wolves are killed in the US each year, either by hunters, poachers or government wolf killers. They’re killed quietly, remorselessly, anonymously. Hardly anyone notices.
A Wyoming hombre named Cody Roberts set out to change all that. Roberts runs a trucking company in Daniel, Wyoming, a small town in the Green River valley southeast of Jackson. He’s a grown man who likes to post photos of himself on Facebook with animals that he’s killed: pheasants, elk, deer and a mountain lion. But merely posing with slaughtered wildlife didn’t get him that much acclaim. Then one day in late February, Roberts was out on his snowmobile, when he spotted a wolf, hit the throttle and began to chase it. All in good fun, you know. Ultimately, Roberts caught up with the terrified, exhausted animal and ran over it–twice, for good measure. He could have run over it a third time and no one would have given a damn. Like 85 percent of Wyoming, this section of the Green River Valley, cleaving between the Gros Ventre and Wind River Mountains, is a predator kill zone, which means you can kill pretty much any wolf you see, however you want to kill it and nobody will pay much attention, certainly not the government or CNN. Chasing down a wolf with your snowmobile and running over it repeatedly is a perfectly legal thing to do in Wyoming. Some even call it sport.
Then Roberts got the idea that would make him famous. Rather than put the injured wolf out of its misery (or, god forbid, find a vet to treat its wounds), why not take it back to town and show off his captive in society? So Roberts duct-taped the wolf’s mouth shut and hauled it all the way home to Daniel, population 158, where he took selfies of himself and his prize. In one photo, the grinning Roberts is holding a beer, as he squats next to the distressed animal, which biologists later estimated was little more than a pup, probably only nine months old. But in Wyoming, even pups are fair game. You can shoot them, trap them, cudgel them, poison them, burn them, and use them as jumps for your snowmobile. Nothing wrong with any of that, legally speaking.
Here’s where Roberts crossed the line that made his name. That evening, Cody took his prize to the oldest building in town, the Green River Bar. Ever a prankster, he walked into the saloon announcing that he’d found a “lost cattle dog.” The bartender, who knew something was up, said, “Cody, you better not bring in a fucking lion!”
It wasn’t a lion (this time, anyway). It was an angular, trembling, gravely injured wolf pup with a light gray coat–a wolf that could barely move. The wolf was now muzzled and had two collars strapped around its neck, a tracking collar and a shock collar. Roberts pulled the wolf around on a leash, showing off his mangled catch to the 30 or so patrons in the Green River Bar, many of them apparently his relatives. After a couple of hours of drinking and boasting, Roberts dragged the wolf out of this venerable establishment and shot it. Shot it dead. (Though to give you an idea of what the Wyoming Fish and Game officials think of wolves, their write-up on the incident referred to the leashed and shock-collared wolf pup Roberts shot behind the saloon as being “harvested.”)
Word of this inspiring spectacle soon spread, ultimately reaching the offices of Wyoming’s Game and Fish Department. An investigation was launched. Not into the wolf’s torture and death, which from the state of Wyoming’s point of view was a thing to be desired, but into how the wolf went social, how it got into town, into a bar, spending hours with humans without killing or even biting anyone, some of the patrons even petting and sympathizing with this wild canid of legendary ferocity. This was the line that must not be crossed. This was the act that must be punished. So Roberts was given a citation for the offense of illegally possessing warm-blooded wildlife. He was fined all of $250, a penalty Roberts gladly paid. One local told WyoFile that Roberts has “been going around town telling people it was worth it. $250? That’s a round for the bar.” It’s the price of fame…or infamy. The two are pretty much inseparable in American society these days.
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Speaking of wolves: For the first time in 16 years, Oregon’s wolf population did not grow last year, but held steady at 178 wolves. The number of wolf packs declined from 24 in 2022 to 22 in 2023, while the number of successful breeding pairs fell from 17 to 15. Meanwhile, there were 36 recorded wolf deaths, 33 of the wolves killed by humans. At least 44 wolves illegally killed in Oregon since 2012. Meanwhile, 16 wolves were killed in response to “kill orders” issued by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife for 10 different packs, the most ever. The total number of wolves killed based on government orders is twice as many as the previous high of 8. Four other wolves died in vehicle strikes, two died natural deaths and one was shot, allegedly in self-defense. Oregon lost another 10 wolves, which were captured in the state and shipped for release in Colorado. Oregon’s wolf population had been expected to grow by 30% per year since reintroduction began in 2008. Instead, the growth rate for the past 8 years has been an anemic 6.3%. It’s becoming increasingly clear that we’ve reintroduced wolves in such a politically compromised way as to give wolf-haters the sadistic pleasure of killing them.
