Doug Smith Tells The Truth About Wolves, But Will Anyone Listen?
This month marks the twenty-sixth anniversary of the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. Nearly a century after they were exterminated there, it is a wildlife success story, but in 1995 the proposition of wolves in Yellowstone was fraught with political and cultural rancor, and it continues to stir up controversy.
Biologist Doug Smith has been overseeing the project from the start and is unswerving in his commitment to the welfare of wolves. As senior wildlife biologist in Yellowstone, he is the spokesperson for all things wolf, but speaking to crowds and cameras is not his favorite part of the job. He would rather be studying the behavior of these fabled creatures that have fired his passion since childhood.
Smith walks a delicate, often uncomfortable line in Montana, a state where you can find bumper stickers with a wolf framed inside a gunsight alongside the motto “Smoke a Pack a Day.” It is also a state where dedicated wolf watchers follow the fortunes of wolf packs as if their lives were a soap opera. Public meetings are often tense and confrontational. Ranchers vilify wolves while others, whose livelihoods depend on tourism, see the wolves as an asset. Outfitters who lead guided hunting trips have added wolf-watching tours.
Smith’s work with wolves began with a senior project in high school. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Idaho and a doctorate from the University of Nevada, Reno. He has written four books, including the Montana Book Award winner Decade of the Wolf, coauthored with Gary Ferguson. In addition to his fieldwork, he has taught classes for the Yellowstone Forever Institute, Earthwatch, and on college campuses.
I’ve known Smith for a long time. For years we both lived in Bozeman, Montana, and our children were involved in competitive Nordic skiing together. We also both enjoy canoeing. One unseasonably warm winter weekend, I talked Doug into a canoe trip down a section of the local East Gallatin River. Girded in winter boots and wool coats, we shared a canoe on the dark ribbon of water and talked at length about his work with wolves. It dawned on me that his story would make for a fascinating interview.
Smith and I later met at my dining-room table (before the pandemic) and spoke for hours about his work, conflicts, beliefs, and experiences. He has thought deeply about the pragmatic and ethical issues surrounding wildlife management in general and wolves in particular. He spoke directly and carefully, his hands cradling a coffee mug, his blue eyes meeting mine.
Kesselheim: You’ve said your love of wolves grew out of your love of nature. Where did that love come from? What experiences led you down this career path?
Smith: I grew up in Ohio. My father bought an old farm that he turned into a camp to introduce children to nature. It sure worked on me: I spent a lot of time there. My dad was not a helicopter parent. He left me alone to explore in ways that I haven’t been able to replicate with my own children. When he and I would get to the camp, he wouldn’t ask where I was going, wouldn’t say when we were leaving. He’d go do his thing, and I’d do mine. I spent immense amounts of time in the woods there, either alone or with my dog.
My father also loved horses and used to take me for rides. He’d sit me in front of his saddle, and we would ride around the woods and talk. He would point out the sugar maples and tell me how the beech trees protected them. His favorite birds were the cardinal and the pileated woodpecker. I had a charmed upbringing.
And then he died when I was fifteen. That is a loss I’ve never gotten over. He was a soft-spoken person who loved nature and horses and introduced me to all of it with no agenda. He never told me what to do or what to pay attention to.
Kesselheim: What led you to wolves in particular?
Smith: When I was twelve or thirteen or fourteen, I read a magazine article about wolves. The thing that got me was how they had been persecuted, and that we had wiped them out except for a few remnants in the far north. I was enchanted by the North Woods and the tundra, and of course I read Jack London, who had a lot of wolves in his stories.
I took my first wolf job when I was eighteen.
Kesselheim: Did you feel like you’d hit the bonanza, or were you too young to realize what it meant?
Smith: I was giddy to get that job. It was my calling, and I knew it even then. I get tons of letters now from young people, and I try to answer them all personally, thinking back to that first job. I had this idealistic notion of wilderness. A lot of that idealism has gotten knocked off over time, but back then I didn’t care about money. I didn’t care about a career track. I didn’t even care about women. I mean, obviously, I was eighteen, so of course I thought about women, but I was just that passionate about wolves.
I’m fifty-eight now, so I’ve had forty years studying wolves. I’m starting to think that I know less about wolves today than I thought I did when I first started! I’ve handled more than five hundred. I fly over and track them and still see them in the field regularly. I saw one yesterday. It’s exciting every single time. But it all started with that camp in Ohio, which wasn’t exactly the wilderness but could still be pretty wild and magical.
Kesselheim: Was there a particular experience there that stands out?
Smith: We had a cabin in the woods, and sometimes I would go there and spend the night alone. There was a big tree out front, and a field, and a trail leading to the tree. There was also a creek where I would catch crayfish and salamanders for hours. I had read in a book that if you ever pick up a rock, you should always put it back exactly as you found it, because you could wipe out animals’ homes if you don’t. That has become a broader ethic for me, about treating other life carefully.
All this was burned in harder because of my dad’s death. He died suddenly, of a heart attack. We’d been out hiking two weeks before. Then boom: my youth ended, like a curtain being drawn. What I still had was the upbringing he’d given me. There were many times that I’d been a failure as his student, but I loved nature and wolves so much that I was dogged about pursuing it. Perseverance is the most important life skill; just keep at something, and eventually you’ll get a break, or maybe two.
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