Originally Posted by walking buffalo
Hinsche makes a point that while poison on the trap line was outlawed in 1922, trappers continued to use it on wolves as they could, with some luck, eliminate a wolf pack in one setting, whereas with leg-hold traps they could only catch one or two wolves at best, leaving the survivors to continue with their mischief. Eben-Enenau makes much the same point, but with snares, which were also outlawed (though the prohibition was largely ignored by trappers). A well-set series of snares could catch most of a pack and kill the caught wolves quickly. Ebenau was very skilled in setting snares for wolves, and caught or shot many more wolves than the average trapper. Leg-hold traps large enough to securely hold a wolf had to be fairly large, heavy, and bulky — which would be added work for the already stressed-out trapper. Traps were set along trap lines that were up to a hundred miles long and carrying traps such distances was hard work. Dog teams were not always at hand. After all, game had to be shot for the dogs, or fish caught and dried and transported to the distant line cabins. And then there was the serious problem of bears breaking into trapper cabins and caches. There was thus incentive to not only remove wolves but bears as well. And that, we can safely expect, had a positive impact on the survival of fawns and calves of deer, moose, and woodland caribou.
Eben-Ebenau, who came to Canada in 1929, and to north-western Alberta in 1931, describes matters up to 1951. He was a German blue blood, an educated man with an insatiable thirst for hunting. An excellent writer, he was a hard-nosed, very skeptical man who hunted down hard facts with determination. That’s why he records not only the life of trappers quite similar to Hinsche, and social circumstances far superior to the latter, but of interest from current perspective is his accumulation of quantitative data about trappers, as well as his observations of the behavior of wolves. We therefore know how many trappers there were in northern Alberta, how may wolves they killed, how high was the bounty, and how much was paid out.
Eben-Ebenau was so excellent an observer of wildlife that I made use of his observations in synthesizing the biology of moose in my books Deer of the World: Their Evolution, Behaviour, and Ecology (1998) [here] and Moose: Behavior, Ecology, Conservation (1999) [here]. Eben-Ebenau remained well connected to Germany and provided a first rate exhibition of Canadian moose trophies to the 1937 hunting exhibition in Berlin. He maintained a close contact with the natural museum there, as well as famous German personalities, whom he guided or hunted with in Canada. I got to know Eben-Ebenau personally, exchanged correspondence, and we visited each other. I was able to admire his 1937 collection, now displayed at his home at lesser Slave Lake, where he homesteaded. He became a well known guide and outfitter and was honored by the Province of Alberta for his conservation work. This all becomes significant in view of what Ebenau ultimately writes about wolves in northern Alberta.
Trapper income
Max Hinsche’s (p.53) and partner’s 1926/27 catch amounted to one wolf, and 131 ermines for an income of $74.05. In 1951, according to Eben-Ebenau (p.203), the average income of an Alberta trapper was $426. Eben-Ebenau (p. 197) also wrote that he never made more than $500 a winter. He could make twice that working as a carpenter. Clearly, the income from trapping was very low, even if the value of the dollar then was much greater than today. Hinsche’s and his partner’s 1926/27 expenses were not covered by the above return from trapping.
The bounty for wolves
The bounty for wolves (Ebenau p. 214) in 1935 was $5.00 while a wolf pelt was worth $4.00.
In 1940 the bounty rose to $10.00. 1944 the bounty was still $10.00, but the wolf fur fetched $15.00. In 1948 the bounty rose to $15.00, but the value of a wolf fur was only $4.00. It stayed like that until 1952.
Clearly, the bounty adds considerably to the value of a dead wolf and is an incentive, especially since only the scalp needs to be surrendered.
The magnitude of the wolf kill
The registered wolf kill climbed from 165 in 1930 to 187 in 1935 when the first bounty was paid, but climbed to 1,143 wolves in 1948 when the bounty reached $15.00. The registered wolf kill dropped to 829 in 1952. The rise and fall in wolf kills by trappers roughly parallels the pre-war increase and post-war decline in moose in northern Alberta.
The number of trappers
In 1944 there were 2,668 registered trap lines; in 1948 2,839; 1950 2,813; 1951 2,797; and in 1953 2,654. However, there were additional trappers licenses which were issued to homesteaders, farmers and ranchers. In 1951 there were 3,127 such licenses, plus 2,797 trap lines for a total of 5,924 licensed trappers. The 1953 figures are similar. In addition to trappers, hunters, farmers, ranchers, game wardens as well as predator control officers also killed wolves.
The official kill of wolves is roughly one wolf caught by three trap-line owners per year. We do not know the total kill, including wolves not submitted for bounty payments.
Before proceeding, one must note that the apparent low wolf kill in the early 1930’s takes place when wildlife is recovering from a low in earlier decades, so that trappers, concerned about their own food situation are all too eager to rid themselves of wolves. The low wolf kill thus reflects a low wolf population.
Eben-Ebenau noted that during the maxima of snowshoe rabbit abundance, when the countryside was saturated with rabbits, wolves live to a large extent off rabbits.((I can attest to snowshoe rabbit irruptions, personally having witnessed the 1961/62 rabbit high in BC’s Spazisi northern wilderness). William Rowan of the University of Alberta in Edmonton estimated 32,000 rabbits per square mile during one such maxima — that’s about 36 tons of rabbit biomass per square mile. Smaller carnivores also preyed on snowshoe rabbits during maxima. When rabbit abundance drops, wolves switch increasingly to mule deer as well as livestock, according to Alberta’s former game guardian Mr. B. Lawton (Hewitt 1921, p. 109). During rabbit irruptions wolves avoid and ignore moose. Eben Ebenau observed packs of wolves hunting rabbits among moose while the latter keep on feeding and ignore wolves completely. Ebenau goes on to say that in his very extensive travels he never found a moose killed by wolves in the western part of northern Alberta. Hinsche operated in the eastern-central parts and did not see or kill many wolves, but he did find a few moose kills and noted that moose avoid wolves. That matches with my observations in every region I worked in.
What arises is a picture of thousands of desperately poor men in Northern Alberta, hostile to wolves, trapping for a meager living and eliminating wolves as much as possible, especially when they got paid a bounty and only needed to bring in the scalp. The magnitude of the annual wolf kill is so high that wolves could survive on the massive abundance of rabbits, with a few deer thrown in, while avoiding moose. Wolves were thus severely depleted in Alberta in an ongoing manner early in the 20th century, so much so that they avoided difficult and dangerous prey, left alone livestock, and avoided humans virtually completely. Since wolf packs favored deer, and a deer is quickly consumed, the packs did not have much opportunity to confront humans over kills.
The above suggests that the bounty paid on wolves, far from being ineffective, was very effective in lowering wolf numbers so that big game could built up. Moreover, it is only with current insights into wolf behavior that Eben-Ebenau’s observations on wolves and moose gain significance.
With an army of desperately poor men extracting a living from the wilderness, not only were wolves were routinely depleted, but almost certainly, grizzly bears as well. Thousands of poor men trapping for fur were thus exercising severe predator control.
The myth of the “harmless wolf” is grounded in the reality generated by severe wolf control due to commercial trapping for fur by thousands of poverty stricken trappers who could ill-afford wolves close by. In addition there was systematic destruction of wolves by some native cultures in the far North, as wolves and dog teams and wolves and trapping were not compatible. In the south, meanwhile, there were predator control officers effectively eliminating wolves in farming districts. No wonder the remaining wolves were shy, weary, invisible and harmless, leading to the false conclusion that this was their one and only nature, and that anything to the contrary was due to prejudice.
It’s a shame that biologists, myself included, fell into that false conclusion.
Valerius Geist
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science
The University of Calgary
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