Wolves #2101 and #2301: Part Three of High Altitude Tales

The story of two wolves in Colorado’s North Park, a father and a son, and how the community is – or is not – coming to terms with their presence.

"Wolves represent a lot of what farming and ranching is about, which is like, you have no control ultimately."

Wolves #2101 and #2301: episode 3 of our series High Altitude Tales.

It was all over Facebook about five years ago: a wolf sighting in my home valley of North Park in north-central Colorado. Lots of my friends and family who live there were sharing these grainy images of a black wolf with a radio collar. People’s first reaction was a little awestruck. I mean, the species went extinct from the state way back in the 1940’s! There’d been rumors they were migrating down from Yellowstone for a couple decades. But this photo, this was the real deal. My dad, Jay Edwards, lives in Walden, the one and only town of any real size in the county. I asked him about his first reaction to seeing those first wolf sighting photos.

“I thought that would be cool,” he says. “I think having wolves could be a good thing, certainly an interesting thing. But to cut to the chase. I didn't vote for wolves to be reintroduced.”

What he’s talking about there is that since then, Colorado voters passed a statute requiring its wildlife agency to reintroduce the species. But North Parkers like my dad didn’t like the idea one little bit. They’ve been living with wolves for going on five years now and it hasn’t been easy. My dad has good friends who lost beloved ranch dogs to wolves. He’s worried it could happen to him.

“They were in the yard kind of thing – that's getting close to people,” he says. “I don't know what a wolf does when they're in the middle of attacking something and you step out of the house and say ‘go away, Wolf.’ What happens then? I'm sure they would run, I'm sure they wouldn't stick around. So I feel like my presence is probably more than enough to keep my pets okay.”

But still, most days my dad takes his two labradoodles, Ellie and Panacea, out to the nearby reservoir for a hike through the sagebrush. One time, his dogs acted really scared.

“I'm a little nervous that I've had at least one occasion, where they just…I have no idea what it was, they just came back. And when they came back, they stayed. They were following me like a shepherd dog.” 

It isn’t just ranchers who are adjusting the way they live in North Park with wolves. Everyone is. My dad has even considered whether he should carry a gun when he hikes. For most people who live there, it’s made an already tough life that much tougher. As Colorado undertakes the project of releasing up to 50 wolves in the next 3 to 5 years, I figured North Parkers might have some insights to offer other communities across the region, especially since wolves are migrating out across the West. 

So much of the coverage about North Park’s wolves has been very us versus them. But North Parkers, they’re more complicated than that. So I headed home to hear people’s nuanced feelings about the arrival of wolves.

Gayle and Athena

As soon as I climb out of the car, my old friend and longtime North Parker Gayle Woodsum tells me that her guard dog, Athena, just chased away a couple coyotes from her animal rescue ranch. 

“Athena has bone cancer. She's had it for a year now,” Gayle says. “They said she'd live two months. In fact, you just missed it because in fact, I was like, oh, Melodie should be here right now because she was out working on a couple of coyotes. In fact, I was starting to be worried and I saw her slinky by with her rough up and she was like, ‘Okay, I pushed them away from the ranch, but I'm gonna get it away,’ it was amazing. Oh, there's one right there now.” Gayle points out at the snow-covered meadow.

“Oh, yeah, I can see it walking across the meadow over there,” I say.

We watch the tawny coyote jog off, head down, across the snow. Not only do coyotes tread on Gayle’s land but she’s also spotted wolves. And she has good reason to worry about predators attacking her animals.

“I have mostly rescues and retired animals. So I have animals that are not well, I have animals that are really, really old, and they've been traumatized in the past. And so they're actually very vulnerable.”

Her ranch has llamas, donkeys, horses, you name it, and some of them have arthritis or old injuries that could make it hard for them to escape a predator attack. I tag along to meet a few of them as Gayle finishes up her chores. 

“I just need to let these out. They've all had their grain and then it's a hay thing,” she says. 

We wade into a corral full of llamas eating their breakfast. She points across the barnyard at one animal who keeps to himself.

“You can tell that he's on his way to whatever's next for a llama and they start to spend more time alone. What worries me is if they're out alone, and then they really can be targeted easily, even by a coyote. It doesn't have to be a very sophisticated predator like a wolf,” Gayle says. 

That’s why it’s so important to keep a guard dog around. After chores we head to the house. Athena greets me with lots of sniffs. She’s huge, standing up to my middle, a black and white patchwork of fluff. But when she walks around, she’s stiff from the bone cancer.

“She's the best I've had,” Gayle says. “She's amazing and dedicated. She's clearly hanging on to life and her job. So this is something that a lot of people say, ‘Well, you can't have a livestock guard dog that also lives with the family.’ My experience has been, the more bonded they are to me and the entire ranch, the more like that's who she's serving.”

Gayle has witnessed Athena fight off a whole pack of coyotes single handedly. She’s confident she’s keeping wolves away too. Soon after that first female wolf was spotted in the area back in 2019, she started her own pack that grew to eight wolves. But they wandered out of Colorado’s protection and into Wyoming where they aren’t and soon most had been killed. Now just two are left, the father and a son. You might think Gayle would be anti-wolf. But even though she’s afraid for her animals, she says, “I would love to have them be part of this ecosystem, it's made for it here. There aren't that many people. I think it can improve the health and size of our other herds.”

She’s talking about herds like elk, deer and moose. North Park is the moose viewing capitol of Colorado, after all – the place where they first introduced the species to the state. Technically, moose aren’t a native species here, believe it or not. But wolves are. Gayle says wolves have been back in this valley much longer than officially reported though. She even had an up close encounter. This was back in the early ‘90’s. She was out on a hike in a nearby national forest. 

“I was going through an aspen grove, and came upon it, there was no doubt in my mind, because I literally came within 20 feet of a very, very old wolf that was just standing there. There was no resemblance to a coyote, this was a wolf. And I clearly startled it. Its head was hanging down, and it was looking at me and it felt like this whole exchange of he was just like, ‘I'm on my way out, would you mind?’ And so I just kind of backed off and left,” she says. “And it was a really profound, beautiful experience.”

Gayle proves there’s lots of mixed opinions about these predators. But she does not think Colorado’s voters should have decided to reintroduce the species, a decision that was mostly supported by urban voters. She says rural people already feel invisible.

“Super rural and frontier people who are living in this way that we do, which is not easy to live up here,” Gayle says, “we are not respected, not listened to, don't have voice, are spoken poorly of, are judged in weird ways. It's like two worlds that don't understand each other. I think wolves represent a lot of what farming and ranching is about which is like you have no control ultimately.”

…No control over the weather, no control over government regulation, on and on. And more ranchers are just giving up. Since I was a kid growing up in North Park, the population has been shrinking. It’s now half the size it was back in the 70’s. Back then, we had lots of family-sized ranches, a coal mine, a sawmill, an oil and gas boom, a thriving Main Street. Now we don’t have much of any of those. The county now has the highest rate of senior citizens per capita in the state of Colorado. It’s a community struggling with rural despair: high rates of suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction. (To learn more about North Park’s rural despair and resilience listen to Ghost Town(ing), season 2 of The Modern West.)

But here’s the thing, the smaller the population of humans in this valley, the more it feels like the wildlife is moving in. Mountain lion tracks in the snow right down the middle of Main Street…a moose curled up in the gas station parking lot…black bear sightings most times I go hiking. North Parkers are proud of this wildness. But when it comes to wolves, it’s different. Gayle says it would help if the local newspaper was more interested in educating the public about the value of wolves for the local ecosystem. Instead, she says, the Jackson County Star is splashing full color images of dead livestock that wolves killed all across the front cover. 

“It has a lot of power and influence in a small place like this,” Gayle says. “It's interesting that we're calling animals that are destined for slaughter, they're being raised to be killed and eaten are now being touted as victims. But then the same paper and in that exact same issue on the back page was the huge picture of a very young man holding up a dead I think it was an elk that he had just killed and congratulations like that elk wasn't a victim. Like this guy was a hero. We wouldn't have ever seen the wolf on the front page. ‘Hey, congratulations, you killed sheep!’ So it's just the irony of that. I'm thinking, What does that mean?”

I ask my dad whether he’s offended by the Jackson County Star’s coverage. He says, no, that it helps him see the point of view of ranchers.

“If you want to have wolves in your state, then you should have to see that,” he says. “And you should know that that's somebody's reality, may not be yours, but it's somebody's reality, and it's very unpleasant. Doesn't look good on the front page of a newspaper. But it's just truth telling.”

So I go visit the editor of the newspaper in question. 

The Newspaper Editor

Matt Shuler is a former classmate of mine and a friend. Matt pours me a cup of tea and we sit down at his kitchen table to chat. I ask him about Gayle’s concern that he isn’t taking a fair and balanced approach to covering the arrival of wolves, how she wishes he would do more education about them. He says there’s already a power imbalance for rural people. He considers his number one job to convey the lived experience of local people and what they’re enduring.

“It's the reality. That's the thing that I think I had to get out there is when a wolf attack happens, it was real,” Matt says. “I've gotten hundreds of pictures of stuff, then I got a call from a lady, ‘Quit putting those in there. It's making me sick.’ Like, well, you know, no. There was one out of 700 subscribers that did that.”

Matt says it’s been very hard to do much education about the wolves because state and federal wildlife agencies haven’t cooperated with his requests for information.

“I mean, we're journalists. Where does public information, where's that line? Because I think we have different ideas than maybe other folks. But I also know, I'm not writing down everything I hear. I've got that stuff in my head. You can't get people to talk to you if you quote them in the paper that says, ‘oh, yeah, I saw a wolf’ or even ‘I saw it, but it's buried out in the backyard, I will show you where it ended up.’”

“Somebody said that to you?” I ask.

“No, they haven't said that to me. But I was just using it as an example, that if I put that in the paper, then that would spur a problem. I want to pick the fights that I can win. I don't want to pick a fight, even if I have the right as a journalist to write that. For this community, and the people in this community, you’ve got to be respectful of their privacy as well. It's too small a community to do that.”

In other words, Matt knows exactly where his loyalties lie and that’s with his community. On his cellphone, he shows me the stockpile of photos and videos of wolves his subscribers have sent him. Some are dead wolves. Matt wishes he could provide more balanced coverage about the two remaining wolves, like provide info about how they died. But he says getting info out of Colorado Parks and Wildlife is like trying to get into Fort Knox. For instance, the agency recently provided a map showing the wolves’ location.

“It's kind of useless.”

He says the map only narrows their location down to the closest creek drainage – that’s a lot of country. But he says, the agency knows exactly where those wolves are since they each wear a radio collar.

“That collar sends a signal every four hours, so in a 24-hour period. That’s six times a day. So you have six locations, and you can get a pretty good idea of where they're going, whether they're roaming around in circles, or they're headed out, or they're headed somewhere. But they don't share that information at all.”

If he knew the wolves’ location, he could better educate the public about the species, he says, and help his community protect themselves. But the concern is that people will use that information to lure them into Wyoming where it’s legal to shoot wolves. 

Wolves #2301 and 2101

“My name is Eric O'Dell. I am the Wolf Conservation Program Manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife.”

I ask Eric about Matt’s problem communicating with CPW about wolves.

“Yes, it's a lot of work,” Eric admits. “It's a lot of relationship building. And when that's started in, you never say that's completed. That's an ongoing process.”

And it’s been a lot of work ever since the wolves arrived five years ago. They naturally migrated here, probably down from Yellowstone, across the Red Desert, into Colorado. First a black female named 1084, then a gray male, 2101.

“And in the spring of ‘21 we noticed some some of the way that the movements were being relayed to us from the GPS collars that there's likely a den. And so our biologist went out into the field, spent a lot of time monitoring that den and had documented the first reproduction of wolves in Colorado since they've been extirpated in the early 1940s.”

The pair raised six pups that year. Then the pups started roaming all over North Park.

“And did largely what wolves do. They're carnivores that are on the landscape. There's lots of predation on our native wildlife, our deer or elk, and even some pronghorn, potentially. And they also did get into some trouble as well and had some depredation issues on livestock and herding dogs as well.”

The North Park wolves seemed like an opportunity for Coloradoans to slowly adjust to a new predator on the landscape. But that’s not what happened. It wasn’t long before all of the pups except one disappeared. Only the black pup #2301 is left. 

The online news magazine WyoFile interviewed the hunters – a father and son who work as outfitters – who killed some of the wolves in Wyoming. They admitted to luring them across the stateline into Wyoming using a call that sounded like a distressed pronghorn. They said their reasons weren’t political – it was just a way to get wolf pelts without paying for an expensive trophy hunting license. In Wyoming, wolves are only protected from hunting in the far northwest corner around the national parks. In the rest of Wyoming, they can be killed anytime, anywhere. Unlike in Colorado where they are considered an endangered species. The mother of the pack also disappeared, Eric says, probably from old age.

“And so there is a father and son that we have together in North Park right now.”

Eric says his agency is doing everything it can to try to help North Parkers adjust to living with these wolves. During calving season, they help ranchers put up a special electric fencing with little shiny flags flickering on it called fladry that scares wolves away. And when livestock is killed, the state pays the fair market value up to $15,000, a much greater amount than they pay for bear or mountain lion kills. Eric says the state of Colorado is all in to make sure their wolf experiment works.

“We’re fortunate there's been some legislation passed in the last session that has provided what I anticipate to be very adequate funding, especially as the wolf population is low.”

When I point out that everyone I’ve interviewed feels like this was a decision made by urban voters and imposed on rural communities, that with so much division in our country, the timing feels wrong, Eric says, yeah, he’s heard that a lot. 

But he says, “The decision to reintroduce wolves west of the Continental Divide is not a decision that Colorado Parks and Wildlife made. It's a decision that the voters made. And as a state agency, we're implementing the state statute.”

And now there’s no turning back. Already ten wolves brought in from Oregon were recently released just over the mountain from North Park. 

A Sad Day

“My folks got the place from my great-great grandmother and it's a homestead ranch. We operate 500 acres,” rancher Phillip Anderson tells me. He says, growing up, his grandparents never told stories about wolves because they were killed off in this valley as far back as his family has ranched here and that was in 1919. But now his family does have wolf stories.

“We never had any experience with them until they come out and killed those three ewe lambs for us,” Phillip says. “I think it was around the middle of October, we were just loading up some cows to send in Nebraska to some corn stalks for winter feed and went out to check some supplement tubs that I had out. And there was those three lambs laying there, tore up. And so we called the CPW, and they came out and did a necropsy on all three of them and determined that was a wolf kill.”

It was a kill by the pup #2301, who’s now a couple years old. The killing made it to the front page of the local paper. And it felt like a huge shock to his family’s way of life.

“So there was quite a little bit of discussion with our little girls. Our granddaughters are six and eight. And now Lila, she's four, so they play outside a lot. And those were the questions that they had is, ‘Grandma, what do we do if we see a wolf?’ We hadn't been introduced to those kinds of questions before.”

“What do you tell them?” I ask.

“Find a place to crawl up, because bears can crawl up a tree, but wolves can’t. So you get up on the fence or whatever you can do to get above them.”

I asked CPW’s Eric O’Dell about this fear of wolves attacking humans. He says wolves aren’t a threat to humans, even children.

“There's no documented cases in the lower 48 of wolves attacking people,” Eric told me. “There are instances where it has happened in Canada and Alaska. Those are habituated animals that have become habituated by feeding and other kinds of behaviors.”

But for Phillip, it’s hard to know who to trust. He says he really appreciates the local wolf manager assigned to North Park – just yesterday he called Philp and let him know that #2301 was near his ranch again. Even before his ewes were killed, Philip took all the advice the state recommended: guard dogs, checking his herds at night, he even got help from a wolf advocacy group called Working Circle who volunteered to do range riding on his place (that’s when people ride horseback around the ranch to scare away predators). But still, the wolves attacked. Colorado’s new wolf rules – the ones Eric told us about – do allow ranchers to kill a wolf if they can prove it harassed their livestock or attacked a human. But the burden of proof, well, it’s still on the rancher. And if the government decides it wasn’t a wolf, Philip says, “One year prison, $100,000 fine. Loss of your hunting rights for life. Now, that's a pretty big hammer, isn’t it? It’s a pretty big hammer.”

Philip says Colorado has a long history of collaborating with ranchers to take care of wildlife. Like introducing moose back when I was a kid in the early 80’s, or bringing back bighorn sheep – they couldn’t have done those projects without ranchers’ cooperation. Philip says it was only because ranchers opened their gates to wildlife agents that we have moose and bighorn sheep these days. The wolf reintroduction could change that.

“We're gonna shut the gate to everybody, even recreation. If someone comes and says, ‘Hey, can we come look at the wolf right over there? Can we come watch it?’ You say no, and that's a sad day. That's a sad day when you consider the amount of work and cooperation that Colorado Parks and Wildlife has had with private landowners to develop habitat for all types of wildlife,” Philip says.

God’s Country

Dense fog fills the valley today. I’m headed out to visit rancher Marcy Gruber. Every twig of every tree and bush is coated with white hoar frost and it’s zero degrees out here. Her ranch sits at the base of the Sierra Madres, a restored log cabin and old barns nestled next to the creek…a beautiful sight and it reminds me of why I love this place so much and just what exactly is at stake. 

Marcy pulls up in her ATV and we head down to her barn. She wants to introduce me to her guard dogs.

“So these are the two youngsters. This is Nugget and Rosy.” 

“Well, hello, Nugget. And tell me what kind they are?”

“Nugget is a Great Pyrenees and Rosie is an Akbash/Great Pyrenees cross. And they're both rescues”

Two tall lanky puppies greet me, both of them fuzzy white and wriggling all over. Marcy spends a lot of time at this barn training the dogs to know their job, to bond with the livestock and protect them from predators. Her oldest dog, white and shaggy, sleeps among the sheep flock. It’s almost hard to tell him from his sheep. He’s less interested in my arrival.

“He's 12 years old, and he's also Great Pyrenees. And he's really good with the sheep and the chickens,” Marcy says.

“What’s his name?”

“Vassily.”

“And he's wearing a special collar here,” I point out.

“This is a collar for when the wolves come by. And they actually all have them.”

 “They've got kind of spikes sticking out all around.” 

“Yep. Apparently the wolves go for the neck first. So this is to at least help him have a fighting chance,” Marcy says.

So far, the guard dogs have kept wolves from attacking her herds of sheep and cattle. Gruber knows for a fact that Vassily is capable of keeping predators at bay. One morning, she found his nose all torn up.

“We had a problem bear,” she says. “We've heard when there's problem bears in Steamboat they get put over here. And so we had a bear that kept getting into the hummingbird feeders, so we took those down. And so she kept coming around. At that time, we had lambs. And she would hide in the willows down here and we'd see her come out. And so I think, one night, she just got too close because the next morning he was ripped apart.”

She shows me the long scar across the top of Vassily’s nose. The idea that wildlife agents might bring bad bears to North Park seems like yet another example of how this struggling community is asked to carry more than its fair share of wildlife responsibility. But the thing is, for Marcy, it’s all part of life on the edge of the wilderness. It’s what she signed up for. Even the wolves. Backpacking into these mountains, she started hearing their howls years ago. Gruber grew up in Golden, Colorado, a city girl, but had a lifelong desire to live in the country. But she says the arrival of wolves is a threat to that dream. She’s probably seen ten or more wolves in the valley since they migrated in. Sitting in the ATV, she gestures out towards a bluff.

“Last time we saw the wolf, he was just right up there,” Marcy says, pointing. “On top of where you can see where the road goes up. And he cut across there and he had a sage grouse, he was carrying a sage grouse.”

“Really? Carrying a sage grouse?” I ask, incredulous. Marcy nods.

That’s a little too close for comfort for Marcy. She says wolves have a threatening presence that scares her. She’s read everything she can about Colorado’s new wolf rule, about when she is and is not allowed to shoot one. She just feels confused. The state of Colorado says one thing, the feds say another. She says the wolves, yeah, they could become a deal breaker for her.

“I just wouldn't want to subject our animals to that,” she says. “It wouldn't be fair to them, and I don't want to see it. I don't want to go to jail because I was defending my animals. So at that point, it would be time to sell them.”

Gruber says it feels like urban folks have forgotten where their food comes from. 

“It doesn't just pop on the shelf at King Soopers. So I wish more people would think about that.”

She says if enough ranchers like her end up leaving ranching, it would be a great loss since they also protect the open spaces of the West from development.

“We have hunters come in every fall and they say this all the time – ‘this is God's country,’ and they marvel at just the scenery, the beauty, the peace, the quiet. And I would just hate to see that go,” says Marcy.

When I ask her what the best case scenario for wolves in Colorado might be, Marcy says she’d like to see them managed like Wyoming does, where ranchers aren’t afraid to shoot them if necessary. She thinks the two wolves roaming North Park should be considered chronic livestock killers.

“I think that if we feel that they're predating on us and attacking our livestock, we should have the right to terminate that wolf,” Marcy says. “I mean, I want to get along, and if they're out doing their thing, that's fine. But if they start making a problem for us, I think we should have that choice.”

But Karin Vardaman is someone who isn’t so sure it’s necessary to remove Wolves 2101 and 2301 from North Park.

“No, those wolves should not be removed,” Karin says. “And when ranchers lead with lethal they're not necessarily helping themselves. I get why they're angry, I get it, because of how they're often treated. And loss is an emotional thing as much as it is a financial thing, especially if it's a smaller ranch.”

Karin is the president of Working Circle, that wolf advocacy group that Philip Anderson told me about, the one that provided range riders to keep wolves away from his herd. Karin worked as one of those riders herself. Her approach to the wolf-rancher conflict is very different than most. It all started years ago when she sat on a stakeholder group with a bunch of ranchers in northern California, figuring out wolf management out there.

“I felt like this veil of understanding was just lifted,” she says. “And I really wanted to know more about their story. I guess I recognized I only had half the story of what I was taught and learned about wolves. And I also had heard a lot of false narratives about ranchers’ role in the wolf story.”

Karin wanted to understand why, 25 years after wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone, the wolf wars are still raging in so many communities.

“I came to recognize through that it didn't have to be sides, or that wolves exist at the expense of ranching or ranching exists at the expense of wolves. But that without ranchers stewarding these open spaces, and ensuring these contiguous lands and doing amazing conservation work that ranchers do, we wouldn't have a lot of the wildlife that we have. So I went from being just a hardcore wolf advocate to being a hardcore rancher/animal advocate, but really focused on the ranching side by supporting ranchers,” says Karin.

Karin says it was that major attitude adjustment that led her to North Park, and it happened before the wolves even arrived in Colorado.

“I just had a feeling by looking at maps and records of sightings that wolves were going to come in on their own in two places: one, the northwest corner, (surprise!) and North Park and, of course, they did show up in both places.”

So Karin started reaching out to local ranchers to form relationships and offer guidance. 

“There was a lot of skepticism,” Karin admits. “They were pretty angry about the reintroduction. And because we, even though we are pro-ranch, we still are pro-wolves, folks were just like, ‘I don't know.’ But there were a couple of folks that liked what we had to say. They thought it really made sense, and they invited us onto their ranch.”

Ranchers liked what they said because they didn’t criticize or boss them around but offered specific ideas for their ranch, dealing with wolves on their landscape. Since then, Karin says she’s fallen in love with North Parkers. Just like everyone I interviewed, Working Circle did not support wolf reintroduction in Colorado.

“We need to support these rural communities. I mean, Walden is so special, and North Park… gosh, I'm so sorry, I'm actually getting emotional,” Karin says, tearing up. “And those people are so special, that it just, it kills me when I hear things, the misunderstanding and flatout kind of cruelty, and that's sort of the attitude, so I get that. So what we try to do is we just kind of let people know, we're here. We're here, if you want support.”

Karin says she shows that support by practicing deep listening. Her goal is much more than just giving ranchers a few basic tools, like, ‘just get a dog!’ Or, ‘here’s some electric fencing!’

“They don't actually solve the problem,” Karin says. “They don't actually address what's causing wolves to go after a particular group of cattle and to deter wolves over thousands of acres? Good luck with that, controlling wild wolves. Good luck with that. But what is in our control? The ranch, right? And so why are wolves choosing to go after certain animals over other animals? So if you understand how wolves behave, and they hunt, it becomes very clear. Wolves are always looking for vulnerability.”

Sometimes that means changing cattle nutrition or herd management styles or where and when the herd grazes. Karin says she believes that North Park can successfully adapt to living with wolves in their midst. She’s seen it happen in northern California, Montana, Oregon…

“Ranch families can be viable and keep ranching successfully, we can have our wolves, the agencies can have a lot less headache. So I do see where that win-win scenario can come in and that's why on our website, it says ‘creating a new legacy in the West.’”

There was a question I asked everyone I talked to: what does the best-case scenario for wolves in North Park look like for you? For some ranchers, yes, it looks like being able to kill a wolf, if it attacks your livestock. But no one told me it looked like eliminating wolves entirely. Like Karin says, there is a win-win scenario someplace in the middle. It might be a very narrow window, it’ll take a lot of empathy for people we’re used to disagreeing with. But maybe, just maybe, we can finally call a ceasefire to the wolf wars.