Opinion: 40 years of living with wolves

For 40 years, writes Ben Long, biologist Diane K. Boyd studied the return of wolves to the West, first at Glacier National Park where they trickled in from Canada. Then she moved to Montana's North Fork of the Flathead River, a place so wild and remote that when wolves colonized it on their own, they joined grizzlies, lions, wolverines, lynx and more. The major lesson she learned through the years was that entanglements with humans, especially the ones who wished wolves had never come back, made her job difficult: "Wolf management is people management. Period," she writes in her new memoir, A Woman Among Wolves – My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery. Her hope, she says, is for a more tolerant world: "We can live without wolves, but the world is a much richer place with wolves in it.”