Wolves Population at Yellowstone National Park

It is estimated, by the wildlife documentary, 'National Geographic Expedition Wild: Inside the Wolf Pack,' retrieved from YouTube, 200,000 grey wolves once freely and wildly roamed what is the United States. Trappers, ranchers, and settlers hunted them to near extinction in the United States.US. Trappers wanted their fur to sell. Settlers were afraid of the wolves, and ranchers wanted to kill the wolves to save their livestock. Grey wolves in the United States were hunted almost to extinction. Sadly, in 1926, the last wolf in Yellowstone National Park was killed.

In 1995 the National Park Service in Yellowstone began to return the grey wolf back to its natural habitat. The return of wolves has strengths like it has helped other species inside the park and it has helped to rebuild he parks rivers and its plants. Sadly, not everyone is happy about the return of wild wolves to Yellowstone National Park. This paragraph is showing mostly Pathos because settlers were trying to kill the wolves and the film is saying sadly they were hunted to almost extinction.

According to the documentary, in 1995, park rangers trapped two beautiful grey wolves in Canada and brought them down to Yellowstone, tracked them and released them into the wild. Showing Pathos because of the two grey wolves that are being trapped. Wants us to feel that emotion to feel bad and try and help the wolves. These wolves’ names were a female named Wolf #9 and a male named Wolf #10. Soon after their release #10 was murdered by a hunter outside yellowstone boundaries. Wolves are natural wanderers and Wolf #10 crossed outside of Yellowstone boundaries and wolf #9 was found close to wolf #10 and she had little baby pups. The Park Rangers wanted to protect the pups, so they collected Wolf #9 and her pups and returned them deep inside Yellowstone. This is how one pair of wild grey wolves would begin the process of naturally changing Yellowstone’s ecosystem for the better. A little bit of Logos and Pathos in this paragraph. When the Park Rangers wanted the wolves to be safe, they transferred them into Yellowstone, so they wouldn’t get hurt. The nature of these wolves are still showing signs of pathos because no one wants the animals to get hurt.

Wolves are great hunters, especially in cold snowy winters. Wolves have the prefect fur for the cold snowy Montana winters, and long legs for jumping over the snow and huge paws with webbing between their feet that act like snowshoes so when they run they can stay on to top of the snow making hunting large animals easy. They also can jump very high and can run very fast. They also travel long distances to look for food. The wolf’s jaw is its most powerful weapon. In the beginning, the returning the wolves to the park, the elk were an easy target because they did not know that they should be scared of the wolves so many elk were killed and eaten. Wolves do not kill for fun, they only kill to eat and don’t kill animals just to be mean. This is showing a ton of Ethos because it is convincing us that this is what wolves do and some cool facts about them. We want to be entertained by them and look at them as an animal in its own habitat and not a predator that we have to be worried about.

Wolf packs only eat one animal at a time and they hunt for the easiest and weakest prey in a larger pack of elk, deer, or bison. By eating the animals that are sick and weak it takes those animals out of the packs and allows the strongest of the animal packs to survive making the pack healthier. Elk are now smarter and have learned to be scared of the wolves and change the way they used to graze. This has helped to naturally thin the elk population and allowed the ecosystem that the very large pack of elk used to kill because of too much grazing, especially by the rivers, and now new plant life has grown. These plants are used by many other animals like beavers, bugs, and bears. Even the fish benefit from not having the elk eating all of the plants on the river bank and the river bank does not experience as much erosion also making it healthier. Expressing Logos because it is telling us that the strongest animals in the pack tend to survive, also saying that Elk is now smarter on how to survive. And in wildlife that is the logical explanation and reason on how animals live.

When the wolves eat a large animal like a bison or elk, the animal’s body will feed many different species like birds, eagles, coyote, and even grim grizzly bears. Before wolves the bear population was not as healthy or large because they didn’t have the speed to kill an elk or a bison, so now the bear waits for the wolves to take down the faster animals and then they eat off the dead animal too making the bears and all the other animal species in Yellowstone healthier also. This is giving a lot of reasons on how the wolves hunt for food and explaining what kind of animals they eat.

Ranchers around Yellowstone do not like the wolves and they hunt the wolves as soon as the wolves cross the invisible boundary of Yellowstone, this is not fair to the wolves because they could not possibly know where the parks boundary lines are because there are no fences. These beautiful creatures are being hunted simply for doing what they are naturally born to do and that is roam and look or food. Wolves don’t kill for fun but only to eat, and they are very misunderstood. After all, it is man and ranchers that moved into the wolf’s natural habitat. According to the documentary, Wolves account for only a small portion of livestock deaths. Wolves should not be hunted because they are soon going to be endangered and people should realize that before they kill them, this has a lot of emotion and thought into going and hunting a wolf. One part of the ecosystem that wolves help is the pronghorn antelope. Wolves save pronghorn antelope fawns from coyotes who eat them when only a day or two old because fawns are defenseless and can barely walk the first few days they are born. Coyotes almost wiped these out, but wolves reduced coyotes by almost half in the pronghorn breeding grounds by running off the coyotes and giving the fawns an opportunity to grow. This is showing people that wolves are trying to protect the pronghorn antelope by letting them grow and not get eaten by Coyotes, showing Ethos.

Without wolves, deer and elk, Populations grew so large that they were unhealthy and ate away a large amount of vegetation. Wolves killed deer but also changed the deers grazing activities and the vegetation grew again, especially among rivers. So, animals like beavers and fish were helped when the wolves reduced the elk eating all of the river vegetation and ruining the river banks. Now because of wolves, river vegetation is back, and all the river animals, fish and bugs are growing. Birds and beavers are back, and the plant growth allows for little animals like rabbits and mice to move in and be safe. Also bears now have more berries to eat. Wolves and their strong jaws and big teeth look scary, but they are also very helpful to the natural habitat they are in and they should be protected from hunters. Expressing a lot of Pathos because it’s saying that wolves are not bad at all and people tend to think they are bad because they try and kill us when we get near them. They are just trying to live and survive like all of us. 

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