WOLVES: Enjoy at your own risk

I had to respond to Kevin Brown’s My Turn piece on Friday, Dec. 19, “Breaking down wolf myths.”

In his attempt to downplay common fears of wolves, Kevin repeats the popular pro-wolf claim: “There have not been any human deaths documented by wolves in the lower 48 states in the last 120 years.”

This might be technically true if talking strictly about wolves in the wild, where human interaction with wolves is not particularly common, but I found at least two cases involving human deaths by wolves: One in Minnesota from 1989 involving a 3-year-old girl, and another in Detroit from 1981 involving a 2-year-old boy, but these were wolves in captivity. I also found quite a few cases of wolf attacks on children and adults that resulted in serious injury, but not death.

I believe his claim is too narrow in scope and is misleading, because it fails to address any of the fatal attacks reported in Alaska and Canada where vastly more wolves exist (remember that wolf packs were either relatively few or non-existent in Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and Arizona before their reintroduction in the 1990s), and it also conveniently ignores the considerable numbers of humans that have been killed by wolves in other parts of the world like in Europe and Asia. An Associated Press piece from 1985 notes the Indian government reported more than 100 human deaths attributable to wolves in a single year!

A terrifying account involving a farmer and his son being savagely chewed to pieces and reduced to bones by a pack of wolves while the man’s wife watched in horror helplessly from their North Dakota home was described in the Saint Paul Daily Globe on March 8, 1888. Similar incidents have been reported in Kentucky, Colorado, and other territories during the 1880s and before.

We might consider coyotes as being not nearly as formidable or aggressive as wolves, but research turns up a surprising number of coyote attacks on humans, with several of them noted on Wikipedia as having been fatal. As recently as October 2009, a 19-year-old Canadian folk singer named Taylor Mitchell was attacked and killed by a pair of coyotes while she was hiking in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, Nova Scotia.

Wolf defenders continue to perpetuate their arguments understandably, but I think the reality is a bit more brutal than sometimes portrayed. I would take issue with anyone who ridicules others for opting to be armed while visiting the wilderness.

JIM BALLOU

Hayden