Screen shot, Colorado Wolf Reintroduction
Dear Lobo,
Deciding who has the right to be where and the right to which resources is perhaps the question for the ages. Your people were very happy to consume everything from bunnies to bison before we came along. My people (humanity) fight continually over who gets which land and who decides what to do with it. Sometimes it’s people vs. people, sometimes people vs. nature. Too often, all is decided by violence, as is the case by those whose actions led directly to the extinction of your subspecies.
Maybe we will someday do a better job of recognizing each other’s humanity. Maybe we will someday do a better job of recognizing the rights of nature, and officially grant those rights to rivers and forests and wolves.
I began writing these letters to you nine years ago when I named the 1894 date of your death as Environmental Era Year 1.
I can’t find that I previously quoted Seton’s own words from Lives of Game Animals to you. He had you and Blanca and your pack in mind when he wrote the following:
His True Character – A Challenge
“Thus I have offered evidence of the courage, the chivalry, the strength, the playfulness, the love loyalty, the fidelity, the friendliness, the kindliness, the heroism, the goodness of the Wolf—completing my attempt to set before you the faithful and fearless portrait of a creature so long maligned; to piece together the little scraps of truth I have found in countless hunter-tales, like gold raked out of garbage bins; to make known the wild one’s true character and his way of life as it really is.
Now, with the evidence before me and much more of the same available, and with the story of Lobo in mind (for it is true in the main), can any one wonder that I love the Gray-wolf and credit him with true nobility of character—with the attributes of a splendid animal hero?”
On this anniversary, may all of us humans stive to be worthy of the kind of praise Seton gave to the wolves.
All my love to you and your kind, David