Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Meat Eaters 12 and 26 presented by Moultrie Mobile and OnX Maps. 12 of Meat Eaters biggest and baddest hunts from the last year released throughout 2026. These are long form episodes so you get more of what you love. The first one up is my baited bear hunt in Manitoba. If you've ever wondered what a baited bear hunt is like, you'll love this episode.
My favorite part was watching a younger bear spend an hour trying to figure out how to get a creatively hung beaver carcass down from a tree. Check it out now on MeatEater's YouTube channel and be on the lookout for more 12 and 26 in the coming months.
In the first half of the 20th century, America came very close to destroying its wolves, which were saved by the insights of a new science that changed the country's understanding of predators. I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers.
Limited supply available at velvetbuckvineyards.com. Enjoy responsibly. golden-eyed lightning rod. In the 1920s, as flappers and jazz and Hollywood captivate American cities, a man named Bill Kaywood is engaged in a different cultural project. At 50, K. Wood is a stocky stump of a man with a face like a granite cliff.
He's a professional assassin of wolves, but says he loves the animals he watches die. He's a real fellow, the big gray is. Lots of brains. I feel sorry every time I see one of those big fellows thrashing around in a trap, bellowing bloody murder. Kaywood is the sort of American that writer D.H. Lawrence, getting his first extended exposure to this country, will describe as stoic, a killer.
And what he is doing is mop-up work. Where the continent only three centuries before had easily held 100,000 wolf packs, by the 1920s, few packs remain anywhere in the U.S. outside Alaska, the Great Lakes country, and the Lower South. Kaywood is after the last survivors in the West.
Few enough animals that ranchers and government hunters hired on their behalf have started giving the animals individual names. They call two of these last gray wolves Kaywood is tracking down rags and greenhorns. Animals that had once lived in packs, once had mates and pups, rags and greenhorn are enduring lives of lonely desperation.
Like a significant percentage of gray wolves who turn to livestock, they're too old and frail to bring down elk without a pack's help. Younger wolves who ended up stock killers often had suffered crippling injuries, frequently by losing multiple toes or an entire foot escaping the serrated jaws of the new house four-and-a-half steel trap.
Rags had seen two of the mates he had had during his lifetime panicked and helpless in a trap. He learned from that and is himself unmaimed. Rags is an old wolf. The ranchers say 17, but he's probably closer to 10 or 11, and now either travels alone or with two younger wolves who are far less crafty.
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Chapter 2: What historical events led to the near extinction of wolves in America?
But Rags and Greenhorn live in a nation that cannot brook a single wolf remaining alive anywhere. It's Rags' turn first. Across weeks of time, Kaywood sets his traps and Rags digs them up. With a wolf that smart, the former bounty hunter rigs a trap set designed to snare a wolf by a back leg as it digs up other traps with its front paws. It works.
With a trap biting into a rear leg and a second trap sprung on the drag line of the first, bouncing after him on a three-foot chain, the old wolf spends a final day in tortured flight. In the end, hemmed into a box canyon, he confronts a fate he's escaped for a decade. Purposefully, he limps straight towards Kaywood, yellow eyes fixed and staring as the metal clanks over the rocks behind him.
Kaywood stoically shoots the equivalent of an octogenarian wolf in the head. Next, Greenhorn. It's December, cold and snowing on the Front Range, and with her teeth mostly gone, the elderly wolf can't down a deer, let alone a cow. She's desperately hungry.
She knows the scent of strychnine, but Kaywood has attracted her with a horse's head wired to a juniper around which he's placed chunks of fat suet soaked in poison. Greenhorn shies away from the smell again and again. She knows from her own experience and from wolf culture that this scent means tragic danger.
She's witnessed the thrashing, vomiting endgame more than once, but she's starving to death. She circles back, picks up a chunk of suet, swallows it, then another, and one more. It's the day after Christmas, 1923. Kaywood believes she's the last wild wolf born in the state of Colorado.
By the early 20th century, a new institutional player emerged to confront wolves and other predators in the United States. Before 1905, it seemed that C. Hart Merriam's new Bureau of Biological Survey, created to map the wildlife that was left in post-frontier America, was sitting pretty. Teddy Roosevelt was president and the Bureau was dear to his heart.
But Congress was growing testy about funding an agency interested in pure science. At Livestock Association meetings, Western ranchers were arguing that the vast Western public lands Roosevelt had set aside from homesteading were refuges for predators that attack their stock. Since the Fed had created this situation, the ranchers believed the Fed ought to fix it.
So in an act of self-preservation, the Bureau of Biological Survey remade itself into the solution to the country's so-called predator problem. Claiming that America suffered from, these are the Bureau's words, wolf-infested national forests and the federal public domain, the Biological Survey engineered its own public support.
Between 1907 and 1909, it issued four reports on the so-called predator-big-game livestock relationship in and around the new national forests. A young, slightly educated Minnesotan named Vernon Bailey, who was a whiz at trapping animals, authored most of them.
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Chapter 3: Who was Bill Kaywood and what role did he play in wolf eradication?
With its new funding, the Bureau was building a plant in Albuquerque to produce strychnine baits in volume. Chillingly, they called it the Eradication Methods Lab. By 1921, this federal killing facility had moved to Denver, in which location it eventually perfected an amazing witch's brew of ever-deadlier predicides. But for the next two decades, federal poisoners relied on strychnine.
It was potent, twisting wolves into a strychnine signature, their bodies wrenched and their tails shot straight out as if they'd been struck by a bolt of lightning. Federal hunters quickly grasped the wolf's fatal flaw.
The smaller American coyotes had evolved an adaptation called fission-fusion, living in social groups when possible, fusion, but capable of scattering when ecological pressures called for it, fission.
But wolves are so strongly family-based that wolf killers realize that killing one animal and using it sent on your baits meant, as one bureau hunter put it, you could quickly kill all the members of whole families of wolves with unmistakable evidence that the remaining members of the wolf family have been seeking the lost member.
Neuroscience studies at this very moment are verifying the brain chemistry grief that wild canids suffer from the loss of their mates. At this fecund moment, two new developments were about to alter the art of the country's wolf story, though. In 1915, scientific naturalists founded the Ecological Society of America.
And at their first meeting in Philadelphia, the founding members, Frederick Clements and Edith Clements, Charles C. Adams and Victor Shelford, agreed on a focus for their new discipline. There was adaptation and natural selection, of course, along with investigating the flow of energy through nature and an analysis of seral stages and climax conditions.
Shelford, who had just published his landmark Animal Communities in Temperate America, pushed his colleagues to work on biotic communities as well. In 1915, the society counted 307 members. But it was an old-fashioned topic, an idea Western culture had known since the time of Herodotus and Plato as the balance of nature, that pushed ecology towards rethinking the role of predators.
The biological survey's policies had assumed the European folk position. Predators were evil and disposable, their eradication made for a civilized nation. The ecologists believed there might instead be dynamic equilibria at work in the natural world. That assumption would become the crux of a raging battle in American and Western science for the next half century.
The other development of the moment was America's creation of a national park service in 1916. Initially, Yellowstone, the world's first national park, had emerged as a symbol of just how far the wolf warriors intended to go. In 1914, Yellowstone had invited Vernon Bailey to come and show its personnel the best techniques to exterminate wolves.
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Chapter 4: How did the Bureau of Biological Survey change its mission regarding predators?
They had browsed the browse line too high to be able to reach. And Leopold decided he was going to do a historical study of this. So he wanted to know how many of these eruptions had happened in the 19th century. He was able to find two. But he found 45 of them that had happened after 1900 when we began to have success in removing predators.
And so it made him, it gave him an understanding of what the relationship was between predators and their prey. And then he goes the full distance, of course, and sort of not only coming to realize how important wolves are in America to encouraging us to begin to restore them. Well, Dan, I'm sure there's more to say about wolves, probably more than can be said, but we'll leave it there.
There'll be more wolves to come. I'll do at least one more episode. Indeed. Hunting demands preparation, persistence, and gear that will not quit on you. That is why I wear First Light. This isn't about hype. It's about no compromise gear. Built to perform, built to last. Whether it's their industry-leading merino wool, keeping me comfortable through the cold and the hot,
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