Living With Canids in Wisconsin — Mapping the Currencies of the Wolf Conflict

Wisconsin’s conflict over our relationship with the wolf is argued where populations are counted and status is set in law. The middle ground between them — where a person comes to believe what he believes about relationship together with others (psychological and social identity) — is nearly empty in the public record. In four sections this paper treats the conflict over wolves as historical, structural and systemic and offers a scaffold and a method for locating any response to it, based upon the scientific literature and evidence-based programmatic efforts. Procuring a Life describes the declining and recovering population records of four predator and four prey animals — beaver, bison, elk, deer, dog, fox, coyote, wolf — in the terms of the currencies into which each was placed by those who effectively exerted control over what happened to those populations. Processing into Provision or Product defines a currency as the form into which an animal’s life is converted — food and clothing, fur, money, symbol and knowledge — and then follows the animal through nine conversions by human hands. From provision to sign, the passage of one skin, a mink coat, is followed through every hand that held it. Causes and Consequences of Conversion names the four hands at every conversion — producer, promoter, arbitrator, processor of currency and value— and finds four regularities in the passage: value rises with each hand; distance from the source and repeated conversion in form increasingly disconnects the handler from relationship with the animal; cost and benefit accrue unequally; and return to original sources has no reliable mechanism of its own. This accounting is contrasted with the value the living wolf produces that no hand holds: fewer deer–vehicle collisions and a richer understory, absent from the conflict because few keep an accounting of them. Mapping Layers characterizes five relevant systemic levels, and finds the critical two middle layers — psycho-social identity development and small-group formation — without survey, study or program. In the one Washburn County district followed class by class, the boys stand above the state in language at grade 8 and at the state at grade 11 — the years in which hunting is learned — a loss the structure of the households does not predict and the paper reads as made in the sparse-language groups, the team and then the camp, whose standards a few leaders set. The review of the literature distinguishes the ecologists’ attitude surveys from a developmental psychologist’s study of motivation still to be done, compares a scaffold of women’s intergenerational return of relationship beside the market chain that skims off value at each phase of conversion, and closes with PACKS, a five-year family-based research methodology and program designed to fill the gap in conceiving ways to resolve our conflicts around wolves and other wild animals.