Lessons from wolves
Stopping by a roadside antique shop in a small Upper Peninsula hamlet a year ago last January, shortly before the beginning of the pandemic, I spent time looking over a rusty link of chain attached to a set of steel jaws hanging from a ceiling post. A tag read, Wolf Trap: $50. My wife looked at it, then remarked, I don t really want this in our home. We moved on to the secondhand glass and dish displays.
The dilapidated steel trap was a relic from the past. It also carried a warning of what might be coming. In Michigan, legal protection of gray wolves has been part of our political landscape for close to 50 years. The U.S. Endangered Species Act, originally passed in 1973, initially provided federal protection. Under that legislation, any trapping of wolves in the Great Lakes Basin was forbidden.