The monster in the backyard: A cultural analysis of wolf conflict in the American West

Conflict between people and large carnivores remains among the most persistent problems in conservation, threatening carnivore populations and the communities that live alongside them. Decades of technical and financial research and intervention, from livestock protection tools to compensation programs, have not resolved these conflicts. Understanding the persistence of these conflicts and finding novel ways forward require attention to topics these past approaches have not yet considered. We argue that monster theory, most fully developed by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, offers a helpful analytical framework for understanding this phenomenon. Monsters, in Cohen's formulation, are cultural constructions assembled from collective anxieties that police boundaries of belonging, resist eradication and stir strong emotional responses. Through a close examination of wolf conflict in the American West, we show that this framework renders legible what empirical approaches to conservation and management often treat as noise, including the intensity of feelings provoked by recovery and the particular fury of communities that understood eradication as settled. We further examine how, in conflicts between people over wolves, communities make monsters of one another. We consider the limits of monster theory in this case, which are also instructive in better understanding the roots of and opportunities for dealing with conflict. We also discuss specific implications for management and science in the American West, as well as the broader implications for carnivore conflicts throughout the world. We conclude that monster theory functions as a ‘mirror’, offering a potent reflection of local culture and as a ‘lamp’, opening narrative possibilities for coexistence that conventional management cannot access. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.