Varmints and Victims

Frank Van Nuys has penned an excellent book. Varmints and Victims is a splendid reconstruction, commentary, and assessment of how stockmen in the West, backed by federal authorities, extirpated wolves, cougars, and bears from most of their aboriginal ranges. Familiar with wolf reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park and spurred into his research by a similar controversy surrounding hunting cougars in South Dakota where he lives, the author explores the history of predator control in the West. To protect livestock, ranchers, notably private and public wolfers, backed by federal agencies, shot, poisoned, and trapped canids, felines, and bears. State bounties helped sustain the pressure on the varmints. It is not a pretty picture. However, the author describes how dissenting voices gradually surfaced among people tasked with studying and clearing out predators. Scientific evidence coalesced from the late 1920s through the 1930s and 1940s to make the case that predators should be included in wildlife management, even game mammals in the West. Van Nuys explains that the infamous story about the denudation of the Kaibab Plateau in northern Arizona was complicated and resulted from too many deer and livestock and too few predators and human hunters. This example, he says, proved to be a marker in revising our long-standing antipathy toward and treatment of predators

American west · Antipathy · Archaeology · Biology · Ethnology · Geography · Livestock · Political science · Predation · Predator · State (computer science · Wildlife · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Archaeology and Natural History · Ecology · Forestry · History · Law