Diane K. Boyd
speaker
610 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Diane K. Boyd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Even if the wolves are howling, you have to go, shh.
That's probably at Mammoth Gardener area. That happens all the time up there.
The same thing's happened to the wolves in Yellowstone because they were taken from Canada where they don't see people and they had no exposure to livestock. They're very wild at first. And then they can't get away from humans. So after a while, they just start disregarding people.
And like if they have to cross the road, there's a wolf jam and everybody's crowding with their cars and they're trying to bring their pups across the road to a better spot. And they can't even get through because of everybody. So they get kind of laissez-faire about it and they get used to people, conditioned or habituated people. And that's passed on to the next generation next.
And then when they leave the park and they go outside the park and they walk down some open public land spot where there's a hunter with a rifle, they don't think anything about it. So they're pretty easy targets.
I know. And yeah, it's tough. And the unfortunate thing is a couple of years ago, there were 25 Yellowstone wolves killed just outside of the park because they're used to people and they wander around. Anyway, that's like out of 100. So it's about a quarter of the population. And there were a couple of particular individual wolves that were very well recognized and
loved by the wolf masses and photographed and they got killed and this this just went viral and this huge hatred for these people who shot these wolves because they were so special and I make the point when I give talks and stuff I said you know if you really feel that strongly it's
You should really be concerned because every year there's about 300 wolves shot that way in Montana, but you don't know them. They're not famous. They have just as important of lives. They live, die, eat, breathe, get injured, heal up. The same as these movie star wolves in Yellowstone. And you should feel that way about, oh, wolves, in my mind. Oh, yeah. In my mind.
Right, yeah, yeah, the dentist. Dina Dentist killed him, right?
Yeah.
It is bizarre. Thank you for understanding that. I forgot about Cecil. But when we were first... monitoring the wolves and glacier. There was just a handful and we would catch them and we would give them names because it's easier. Like Phyllis was wolf 8550 and Mojave was wolf 8963. They had both names and numbers. And so when we did our scientific papers and reports, we used a number.
Because we were told by the officials that we don't want you to name the animals because what happens when Phyllis kills a cow, if that happens?
Then you can't manage Phyllis. So we went along with it, but we used the names and we did the scientific stuff with numbers. But then when you go into the park, people would want to know what's going on. You need to talk about these different wolf numbers, 86, 54. And they say, well, who is that? Oh, that's Aspen. Oh, yeah. And they would know by the name. So whatever works.
Yes, and I know the wolves in Yellowstone, they don't have names, they have numbers, but they're so identifiable by 907 or whatever that it becomes like a name.
Even though it's still a number.
Right. It's like, oh. Jericho, yeah.
You know, it's been interesting to me because for my career, I've done everything. My first year, my first job, I worked up in northern Minnesota in a little tiny 300-person farming community. And I was hired, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, to go in and help farm.
prevent livestock depredation and when wolves killed cattle or sheep to go in and remove which meant trapping hollowing and they were euthanized and when there weren't depredations to go out and research traps and put collars on the other wolves and it was I mean this was big stuff for a girl from Minneapolis pretty naive to go up and save the folks of North Home from the wolves you know oh my god
It was such an important summer for me to learn professionally and personally. And I wrote about that. But I learned a lot. And it was interesting work. But I realized, yeah, wolves can cause conflicts for people. And it was a new concept for me.
Well, they would be me because I was the one catching and trapping me.
Showing 121–140 of 610 · page 7 of 31
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