Like any good western tale, the story of wolves in Oregon is a story of family against family, violence, greed, and land.

Since time immemorial, wolves were a fixture in the Pacific Northwest. They hunted and raised offspring, coexisting with humans for thousands of years. But by 1946, Canis lupus had disappeared from the landscape following a century of hunting and habitat loss.

In 1999, a lone wolf descended the east side of Hells Canyon, a chasm deeper than the Grand Canyon along the border with Idaho. When it swam across the Snake River, it became the first wolf to enter Oregon in more than half a century. A decade later, a pack called Wenaha successfully bred in the state. Wolves had officially returned to Oregon. 

The matrilineal Wenaha has continued its line for the past 15 years—a century for a wolf, whose lifespan averages two to five years in the wild. The reason for the pack’s longevity remains a mystery, but a strong family bond is likely a factor. “Wolves cooperate, help each other, and show loyalty toward their kin,” Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) biologist Aaron Bott told me. “Most  animals don’t mate for life. They don’t work together or stick together to raise offspring. It’s unique in the animal kingdom. Wolves are like us.”

Both Wenaha matriarchs carried a gene that causes their coats to fade from jet black to silver. Many of their offspring have also sported black fur; family resemblance begins to surface in years of camera-trap photos. These sightings, daily signals from collared individuals, and DNA tests frame what humans know about these wolves. They’re an elusive animal; when I went searching for Wenaha last spring in canyon country, and for the eponymous packs in Bear Creek and the Upper Deschutes, all I found were a severed elk leg, an elk skull, a deer bone perforated by wolf teeth, and some saucer-size tracks on a snow-whipped field. But their lives are so much vaster than these remnants of their predatory power.

From winter to spring, when snow covers the forest floor, they walk single file to save energy, sniffing for the scent of elk. They can run 25 miles per hour continuously over long distances, and 40 miles per hour in short bursts—a speed equal to a tiger’s. They see and smell extraordinarily well. Yet, nine times out of 10, their hunts are unsuccessful. They can even be gored by a bull elk’s antlers. For wolves, life is a constant negotiation with death.

In mid-April, when the snow turns to streams, the breeding female gives birth to a litter of pups in a den. They crawl out, their blue eyes blinking against the May brilliance, and wrestle, chase, howl. They climb over fallen trees or hide inside their hollowed cores. While their parents hunt, an older sibling babysits the pups. If it’s a hot summer day, they splash in a pond. When the parents return, they regurgitate the meat for the whining pups. Before long, fall sets in, the elk and deer have their breeding season, the woods are astir in the race to fatten and prepare for winter, and the ancient cycle repeats itself.

But lately that cycle has been disrupted, as wolves in Oregon are threatening the livelihoods of humans, to the detriment of their own lives.

As recently as this spring, there were just 178 wolves in Oregon. While poaching and vehicle collisions contribute to that low—and, for years, stagnant—number, lethal removal is still the biggest factor. ODFW issues permits to kill wolves when there are two confirmed attacks on livestock in the same area within nine months. In 2023, 32 lethal removal permits sentenced nearly one-fifth of wolves in Oregon to death. Half of those animals were dispatched. (If a targeted wolf stays out of an area long enough for a permit to expire, the animal can’t be killed.)

The permits are a sore point for ODFW officials, who face criticism from all sides. Environmentalists condemn lethal removal as cruel, ineffective, and ecologically unsound. “In the medium to long term, killing wolves and disrupting pack structure typically leads to more predation,” says Danielle Moser, a wildlife program manager at Oregon Wild, citing a 2023 meta-analysis for the European Commission.

Conversely, many rural residents argue that ODFW isn’t killing enough. Some even say that wolves should be eradicated from Oregon once more.

In his farmhouse outside Enterprise, a cattlemen’s town in the embrace of the Wallowa Mountains, John Williams told me what it’s like to live among wolves. “They are a magnificent animal. Understand that the scale of a wolf is like no other animal you’ve seen,” he said, as a thunderstorm lashed the windows and newborn lambs baahed from a live camera feed. “But they’re causing devastation in the cattle industry. In Wallowa County, there’s not a ranch out there that’s not having some sort of impact by wolves.”

Williams is the wolf committee cochair for the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association. “Ranching is not a lucrative business,” he says. To make it work, a rancher needs 92 calves to sell or retain annually per 100 cows. Wolf depredation (an attack on livestock) cuts into the slim margin. During the birthing season, “you try to save every lamb, every calf. It doesn’t make any difference how much it costs you. [That’s] the ethics of raising livestock.” In the winter, it takes getting up every two to four hours to check in on newborn lambs and calves. Williams has nursed weak calves in front of the woodstove inside the house. After such care, losing an animal to wolves is financially and emotionally shattering; one rancher told Williams that he turned out his cows to pasture with tears in his eyes 
because “too many of them are going to die the most horrific death known to man.”

To prevent attacks, ODFW and environmental groups recommend nonlethal deterrents like fladry (flags around fencing) and patrolling ranch hands, but Williams sees them as ineffective and costly. “Wolves make a monkey look like an idiot,” he says. “You always think you’ve figured the wolf out. And he will have learned that trick yesterday.”

In his view, the biggest barrier to social tolerance is the difficulty of receiving ODFW’s confirmation of a wolf depredation. Williams remembered a district attorney who once said, “It is easier to get a murder one conviction in the state of Oregon than it is to confirm a wolf kill.” He allowed that the bar for confirming kills has become more favorable since 2023, making it easier to get compensation as well as lethal removal permits.

Still, like many ranchers, Williams believes that cohabitation with wolves is an ideal espoused by people living far away from wolves themselves. “A rancher is going to feed his kids and he’s going to pay that mortgage first, and then you can talk to him about sustainability,” he says. “The fight is, should we remove the cows or the wolves? I’m not going to go there. Private property rights usually say the cow has a right to be there.” 

The fiercest opposition to wolves takes place not in pastures, but on social media. In 2022, the Baker County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page posted about a wolf depredation of a dog, drawing hundreds of heated comments. One user wrote, “Now cattleman, sheepman, elk herds, deer herds, are all being decimated….Wolves do absolutely, hunt for sport…people are more important. Kill them all!” Many users simply wrote, “s s s,” an acronym for Shoot, Shovel, and Shut Up—an unofficial motto for the anti-wolf community. (In 2023, 12 wolves were poached in Oregon.) Another popular remark was, “I wouldn’t have reintroduced them. Our ancestors removed them for good reason.”

But the most chilling comment for me was, “a person of color gets malled [sic] there will be a bounty again.” I was a Korean American journalist, heading to report in areas where environmentalists confided about receiving death threats. It would have been naive to ignore the conflation of the pro-wolf community with people of color and allies, and the evocation of lynching and bounty-hunting. Several likes and laugh emoji responses to this comment appeared to celebrate violence against people of color and wolves as retribution to a single enemy.

Social media is not known for cultivating respect and nuanced dialogue, and some wolf experts prefer to minimize the focus on online discourse. “I get heartburn over the fact that social media and the news blow things out of proportion because most conversations I have with people are extremely civil,” Bott told me.

Born and raised in rural Wyoming, the ODFW biologist cut his teeth researching wolves in Yellowstone. He practices subsistence hunting and considers himself an environmentalist. With a wild mane of hair and evident sincerity toward benefiting both humans and wildlife, Bott is in the middle ground, which he believes has more contingents than it might seem at a glance. “Not all ranchers want wolves dead. There’s a lot of good people out there,” he says, pointing out that many ranchers are more interested in sustainability and conservation.

Nevertheless, online discourse amplifies two tenets of the anti-wolf community: that wolves kill for fun (that they’re cruel, in other words) and that the animals aren’t native to Oregon. Some critics claim they’re a larger invasive subspecies from Canada.

Both beliefs are scientifically unfounded. Michelle Dennehy, communications director at ODFW, says the average number of livestock animals killed during a wolf depredation is typically in “the one to three range.” Mass killings are rare and occur only because the opportunistic animals plan to return to scavenge carcasses. And in terms of DNA, current Oregon wolves are the exact Canis lupus that flourished here for 700,000 years until their extirpation. They returned on their own, across land and river.

While wolves are endemic to Oregon, there is one nonnative species of which 1.24 million individuals roam the state’s public and private lands: cattle. “There’s no native cow species on the North American continent,” former livestock worker Chad Neu told me. “When [the ranchers] say that ‘cows trample the ground and produce habitat for grasses,’ that’s true, but they’re assuming that the land [would otherwise be] a wasteland. If cows weren’t there, bison, elk, deer, longhorn sheep would be on this land, and they would do a better job.”

With an Instagram feed showcasing ultra-runs and vegan recipes, and a tech job in Hillsboro, Neu fits the image of a progressive urbanite oblivious to the concerns of rural Oregonians. In reality, he descends from three generations of loggers and grew up in Monroe, Oregon, population 647. After graduating from Oregon State University, Neu worked as a hunting guide in Idaho and a cattle counter in several western states. For a time, he also managed cattle for a rancher in Blodgett, west of Corvallis.

“Because I grew up on a farm, slaughtering animals isn’t gross to me,” he says matter-of-factly, recounting how he used to kill rabbits, chickens, and pigs his family raised for food. One day, however, it took several rounds to kill a neighbor’s pig instead of one clean shot to the back of the head. “Pigs are very similar to people,” Neu says. “That was the beginning of the end for me.”

I asked Neu what he thought about the emotional toll of wolf depredation. Ranchers say they are heartbroken by losing animals that they destined, after all, for slaughter. Neu has his doubts. “Ranchers view cattle as a commodity, as an investment, and that’s where the care comes from. I wouldn’t say that they love their animals,” Neu says. “I’ve heard them say, ‘We try to give the best life possible for moral reasons.’ I don’t buy that either, because unhappy cows don’t weigh as much. And weight is all that matters to them. It was clear [the cows] were just money.”

As with many issues in America, money runs through the heart of the matter of wolves. After a confirmed wolf depredation, a livestock owner can receive compensation from the state of Oregon—anywhere from $1,000 to $12,000 per animal. In 2023, there were 77 depredation events in Oregon, leading to 91 injured or dead cows and sheep. With the approval of an additional $1 million in funding last year, the wolf compensation program more than tripled its budget.

Cattle owners are also lobbying to pass a bill that would increase the payout by seven times the market value of a lost animal to account for miscarriages, weight reduction, and PTSD-caused infertility. Within the broader debate about wolves, the “multiplier” legislation is itself a bees’ nest of controversy. In 2018, a High Country News investigation found that increased payouts in Oregon didn’t reduce lethal removals. On the other hand, cattlemen say the multiplier is the key to building social tolerance for wolves, and ODFW officials I interviewed were open-minded about its potential benefits. The bill died at the end of the 2024 legislative session but will be on the table again in 2025.

Ranchers receive no payment for losses from other predators, the weather, or diseases, which claim the vast majority of the four million US cattle that die every year before slaughter. Predators cause 5.5 percent of total cattle loss nationally, with coyotes and dogs doing the most damage, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Wolves rank far lower than those animals—even lower than vultures—at 3.7 percent of predator-caused loss and 0.2 percent of total loss. Oregon’s numbers mirror these national figures. Even if unconfirmed deaths, miscarriages, and weight loss multiplied the real harm tenfold, wolves would be far from the biggest thorn in ranchers’ sides. Culture, not data, leads to claims that “all are being decimated” by wolves, according to Neu.

“It’s a rallying cry for rural people. It’s one of the things that rural folks feel are being forced on them by the urban elite, which makes it an emotional issue,” Neu says. Culture is the reason he sees hunters, not ranchers, as central to the wolf debate. “The cult of eating meat in the US is very wrapped up in machismo. Hunters play into that because harvesting your own meat is the pinnacle. A lot of people in small towns listen to hunters just as much as they would listen to ranchers, if not more. Cattle people may not want to eradicate all the wolves, but hunters want to actively go out and kill them.”

In rural communities across the West, crosshair T-shirts and “Smoke a pack of wolves a day” bumper stickers have become as much about predators as about 21st-century partisan politics. But hunting culture’s roots run much deeper.

Long before political debates, long before America, wolves and people had lived in harmony in the land now called Oregon for at least 12,000 years. First Peoples thought of the animals as relatives. The wolf “tribe,” the salmon “tribe,” the bear “tribe,” and all other communities of life spoke to and sustained one another in what the Indigenous called the Original Laws. To communicate with plants and animals, to ask for permission before taking lives, and to never take more than what you need: these were not myths or folklore, but laws that ensured harmony and abundance since time began, as Joe Whittle (an Enterprise-born, enrolled member of the Caddo tribe) writes in his essay “The Original Laws.”

This balance began to end with the arrival of white people. In the 1830s, the US government started devising plans to use settlers to colonize the Pacific Northwest with minimal cost and involvement. Over the next few decades,
federal lawmakers encouraged settlers to seize Native lands before the government could negotiate treaties with tribal nations. Not only did the government promise to acknowledge settlers’ land claims, but it also paid militias to eradicate Indians. By the 1850s, Oregon newspapers were calling for “one large genocidal campaign to kill all remaining Native people,” writes historian Julius Wilm. On the night of October 8, 1855, militiamen called “the Exterminators” attacked an Indian camp in Rogue Valley, killing dozens of sleeping people. Also in 1855, militiamen killed Walla Walla chieftain Peo-Peo-Mox-Mox while he was negotiating peace terms, dismembering his body for trophies.

In Wallowa County—where wolves first returned to Oregon, and where I looked for the Bear Creek and Wenaha packs—the Nez Perce resisted the loss of their ancestral land for years. But upon the discovery of gold in 1861, the US government issued an eviction notice to the Nez Perce. A war ensued, and though it was one of the fiercest any tribe fought, the Nez Perce were ultimately defeated.

The settlers were now free to remake the tribes’ ancestral land as they wished. They felled old-growth trees, which had shaded and cooled streams for salmon. They let their cattle devour lush foliage. They hunted animals to extirpation, including grizzlies and elk. (For all the furor about “reintroduced” wolves, the present-day Oregon elk descend from Wyoming elk brought in for sport hunting, shipped by train and released in Wallowa County in 1912.) The last wolf in Oregon was killed for bounty in 1946.

Oregon’s colonialist government formed out of “wolf meetings” that discussed wolf eradication. Our state was architected by those who made no distinction between Native Americans and endemic species; who strove to “remove all indigenous species, including humans, that stood in the way of the picture Manifest Destiny had painted of how the American West should look and how its natural resources and life should be treated,” as Whittle writes.

The resistance to wolves has never been just about dead cattle, but the right to control who deserves to live on the land—passed down from the nineteenth century to the present. 

Few people in ODFW meetings, town halls, and wolf committees make the connection between settler history and cohabitation with wolves. Julian Matthews is trying to change that. “How they treated the Indians and how they treated the wolves and the grizzlies are the same thing,” says the enrolled Nez Perce member and coordinator for the nonprofit Nimíipuu Protecting the Environment. “We lived in harmony with [the animals]. The whole issue is what they consider the ‘economy.’ What created this issue is the non-Indians coming out here with cattle and sheep, sectioning off the areas that they thought they own now.” Matthews points out that wolves have historically preyed on deer, elk, and moose, targeting weaker animals. “It was a situation that worked. The rights of wolves to live and exist [became a problem since] the non-Indians wanted to get rid of them because it was cutting into their revenue.”

Wolves hold a special spiritual and religious significance to the Nez Perce, who see a kinship with the animals’ fierce subsistence off the land. Called hîmiin in the Nez Perce language, the gray wolf is a leader among animals, revered for its strength and family bonds. In 1995, the Nez Perce Tribe in Idaho voted to reintroduce wolves, in partnership with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. 

Almost three decades hence, hundreds of wolves are killed each year in Idaho under a state-funded bounty system. They’re protected on the Nez Perce reservation, but they’re hunted or lethally controlled on lands across Oregon, Idaho, and Washington that were ceded by tribes through the Treaty of 1855 and the Treaty of 1863—more than 16 million acres where the tribes retain their usual and accustomed hunting, fishing, and gathering rights. Therein lies one of the keys to cohabitation with wolves, according to Matthews. “It is a jurisdiction issue. We can’t have our rights eroded by not taking action,” he told me. “Everyone knows the Nez Perce Tribe supports dam breaching because it’s widely broadcast. We need to do the same thing with the wolves.” Matthews believes the tribes should assert their treaty right to protect wolves and other wildlife in ceded territory. Then the next step would be “not letting Forest Service allow cattle grazing in National Forest lands, trashing up the creeks with no control.”

US Forest Service land comprises the most important habitat for wolves in Oregon. There are 285 livestock permittees—0.00007 percent of Oregonians—who run cattle on these 7.3 million public acres. Aside from their effect on the flora and water systems, the cattle displace elk and deer, which then move to private land where wolves could follow them. Meanwhile, if wolves kill cattle on public land, that counts toward financial compensation and two incidents of depredation required for lethal removal; conservationists argue this is doubly penalizing wolves and disincentivizing tolerance.

An oft-cited OSU study posits that, with millions of acres of wilderness, Oregon’s ecological carrying capacity is 1,450 wolves. Enough land exists for wolves to reclaim their place in Oregon’s ecosystem. But is there enough will? More people would need to be convinced to change their beliefs that wolves are relentless killers or an invasive species, that they’re merely a biological entity to manage and control. Indigenous worldviews, among others, show that it’s possible to respect the wildness of other species while relating to them as kin, empathizing with them, and appreciating them as more than just a function on nature’s balance sheet.

The wolf’s inherent charisma makes this easy. “The more you study and learn about them, the more you realize how impressive this animal is, how tenacious it is in the landscape, despite having so many obstacles. So I think they command respect whether or not you like them,” Bott says. “Even though I’m trying to be as scientific as possible, I gravitate toward wolves because they’re a remarkably wild animal in a world that’s losing wildness at a rapid rate.”

I was reminded of this when I finally caught sight of a wolf. It was the day after I’d searched for the Wenaha pack in the remote reaches of Wallowa County. As I was leaving, on the side of Interstate 84 near Boardman, a large silver and snow-white wolf lay dead, its face turned toward me. I drove past, unable to pull over and dodge speeding cars to approach it. But this flashing, indelible image hollowed me out. The animal was magnificent, even in death. I could only imagine how much more magnificent it would have been alive. 

Here’s one truth no one can deny: so much nature is already lost to us, yet the wolf can persist, even if on the margins. For the sake of wolves and all interconnected life, Matthews thinks it’s time we change our way of relating to the nonhuman. “We are not above fish. We are not above grizzlies. We are not above wolves. We are just a part of it,” he says. “Just like the Creator put us all here to live, we want to make sure that wolves, their spirit, and their offspring continue living without being murdered. We have the responsibility to protect them as a tribe and as fellow inhabitants.”