When the Government Puts Wolves in Your Backyard

In October 1990, Richard Mann shot a red wolf that he feared was threatening his cattle. The wolf was a member of an "experimental population" the federal Fish and Wildlife Service had introduced to eastern North Carolina a few years earlier in an effort to save the most endangered canine on the planet. When the federal government introduces endangered species like wolves, it often seeks local buy-in by allowing activities that would otherwise be prohibited. In this case, it permitted private landowners to kill a red wolf if it was "in the act of killing livestock or pets, provided that freshly wounded or killed livestock or pets are evident."

Fortunately for Mann, the red wolf on his property hadn't yet attacked his livestock. Unfortunately for Mann, that meant he was prosecuted under the Endangered Species Act for preemptively killing the canine. He pled guilty, was fined $2,000, and was ordered to perform community service building "wolfhouses" and feeding red wolves.

Since the late 1980s, federal biologists have been trying to keep a tiny population of endangered red wolves alive in and around two wildlife refuges on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, just inland from a string of barrier beaches in northeastern North Carolina. They have spent a lot of time, energy, and resources—in the face of concentrated but consistent local opposition—with relatively little to show for it.

Over the decades, more than 100 red wolves raised in captivity have been released into the area, with dozens more pups placed in wild dens to be fostered. The population peaked at about 120 wolves in 2012, before falling rapidly due to human-caused fatalities of two types: gunshots and traffic collisions. The species has also been interbreeding with the increasingly prolific coyote, which could eventually cause "dilution, degradation and ultimate disappearance of the red wolf as a distinct taxonomic entity," as a 2023 government-commissioned analysis put it. As of September 2024, the wild population of red wolves was fewer than 20.

The red wolf has now become a symbol of federal overreach in the area, and local opposition to it seems to have become as much about resisting the feeling of being trampled by the government as about the canine itself. The animal also provides a salient target for ire over more fundamental issues, as traditional ways of life in a rural area become less tenable.

After Mann's prosecution, local opposition to the introduction grew. The Fish and Wildlife Service maintained that most of the public continued to support the endeavor, and it struck agreements with some landowners to allow red wolves onto their property. But the case increased tensions, particularly with locals concerned that a federally regulated carnivore brought to their doorstep would eventually trigger prohibitions on how they could use their land in an area heavy on farming and hunting.

Rather than rewarding people for helping recover rare wildlife, the Endangered Species Act imposes punitive regulations in the name of protecting listed species and their habitats. It can feel like a punch in the gut when a rare snake or woodpecker shows up on your property bringing government regulation in tow. Imagine the blow, then, when a rare species wasn't simply found on your land by happenstance: Federal biologists brought it to your neighborhood without asking. Oh, and it's a wolf—a carnivore that sits at the top of the food chain and, from your perspective, poses a threat not only to your chickens, pets, or cattle but to any toddlers wandering too far from the porch. It's little wonder that the federal approach turns endangered species into liabilities to avoid rather than assets to help conserve.

In the years following Mann's case, two of the five counties within the red wolf program area passed resolutions opposing the effort. Eventually, the state wildlife commission asked the federal government to terminate the program altogether. The introduction effort, and ill will over it, has ebbed and flowed ever since.

Admirable Aims Unrealized

"The passion of those who began this program to restore a species to the wild was admirable," Jett Ferebee told The Fayetteville Observer in 2014. "But it has become an effort to destroy the rights of private landowners." Ferebee is a real estate developer from nearby Greenville, North Carolina, who owns land in the red wolf recovery area. He has been described as one of the leading opponents of the introduction.

A year earlier, he had detailed various critiques in correspondence to a Fish and Wildlife Service employee, which he posted to an online forum. "I do not need to be told by [the Fish and Wildlife Service], any more, that red wolves are the next best thing since sliced bread. I have been told this for years by your program directors and biologists," it read in part. "I am intimately familiar with your program and how it has morphed into something totally different than what was promised [to] the citizens of NC….I resent that my friends and family no longer want to go to our farm and spend time hunting and enjoying the outdoors. I resent that not only our deer population but also our rabbit population has been decimated. The turkeys are likely next."

Ferebee added that he resented not taking some locals' advice to "just 'shoot 'em in the gut and let 'em walk off.'…I resent that my obeying the law…has left me defenseless to protect my property rights."

The message board runs to nearly 200 pages produced over a decade. It includes protests that genetic records show the red wolf is a hybrid rather than a "true" species and that fossil records contain no evidence red wolves ever inhabited North Carolina. While it contains the hysterics and general tone of many online forums, it presents many reasonable objections that locals have expressed over the years: farmer concerns over wolves preying on livestock, hunter concerns over wolves preying on deer and small game, and landowner concerns over regulations restricting how they can manage their land where wolves roam and den.

The red wolf once roamed throughout much of the southern and eastern U.S., but the population was dramatically reduced by predator-control programs, many of which were boosted by bounties from federal and state governments. It became one of the original endangered species protected by Congress in 1967, under the precursor to the Endangered Species Act. By the 1970s, only a small remnant population straddling the border of Texas and Louisiana persisted in the wild. The Fish and Wildlife Service began trapping the canines to start a captive breeding program with zoos to keep the species alive.

By the late 1980s, the Fish and Wildlife Service identified potential areas to introduce the captive wolves in an effort to reestablish the species. It believed the wolf would thrive in dense bottomland vegetation in Southeastern states. "Ideally," it noted, "such areas would also be isolated, have a low human encroachment potential, and be secured in either State or Federal ownership." It concluded that the "apparently ideal habitat for this species" was found in North Carolina at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, which contained 120,000 acres of "the finest wetland ecosystems found in the Mid-Atlantic region." Moreover, an adjacent military bombing range was expected to act as a buffer between the wolf habitat in the refuge and private lands. Releases of red wolves into the refuge began in 1987. Incredibly, in retrospect, the service wrote at the time: "No private entities will be affected by this action."

Initially, the wolves were released into an area covering a couple hundred thousand acres of federal land in two counties, Dare and Tyrrell. But as the wolf population grew, its range inevitably expanded, and the official recovery area also ballooned—eventually to roughly 1.7 million acres covering parts of five counties, including a second federal wildlife refuge and swaths of private property. By 2014, an estimated 60 percent of the roughly 100-strong red wolf population occupied private lands.

'Nearly Catastrophic'

In September 2024, a red wolf was killed by a vehicle on U.S. Highway 64, which bisects the Alligator River Wildlife Refuge on the way east to the beaches of the Outer Banks. Soon after, five pups that the wolf had sired with a 2-year-old female also died. One collision had effectively wiped out six red wolves, highlighting how difficult species recovery can be.

While biologists may see the red wolf as a missing part of Southeastern ecosystems, landowners and hunters see it much like early settlers saw large carnivores: as a nuisance and a menace. More than 80 red wolves died from gunshots during the program's first 25 years. Some were no doubt poached, but others were likely mistaken for coyotes, which can be killed any time of year and are subject to no bag limit. About the time the experimental population of red wolves was gaining a foothold in the late 1990s, coyotes began multiplying in the region, as they have done from Atlanta to New York City. Red wolves and coyotes don't simply look very similar (especially from a distance or at night), they actually share about three-quarters of their genetic ancestry—hence protests from some that the red wolf is "merely" a "coywolf" and not worthy of protection.

A flash point in the red wolf conflict was a 2010s pendulum of state hunting regulations. In 2012, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission permitted night hunting of coyotes (as well as feral hogs, another prolific nuisance animal) on private land. In the months that followed, at least seven red wolves were shot. Environmentalists sued and in 2014 a federal court blocked the nighttime hunts in the five-county red wolf recovery zone. The North Carolina Coastal Federation notes that the cost to the program was "nearly catastrophic," reporting that "landowners adjacent to the refuge, who had been cooperative or indifferent to the management plan, suddenly no longer permitted access to their property."

In 2015, the state wildlife commission formally asked the federal government to end the red wolf recovery program altogether and remove the existing population. Supporting resolutions were passed by state legislators. A year later, Sen. Thom Tillis (R–N.C.) also called for eliminating the red wolf recovery program, claiming that more than 500 landowners and farmers submitted requests to the service that red wolves not be allowed on their land. "I think it makes the most sense," Tillis said at the time, "to shut the program down to figure out how to do it right and build some credibility with the landowners."

Since the mid-2010s, the recovery program has puttered along in fits and starts. The Fish and Wildlife Service, seemingly responding to landowner sentiments, tried to shrink the recovery area and number of wolves in the wild but manage the remaining ones more intensively; environmentalists sued and blocked the move. The feds again proposed to reduce the recovery area and the number of red wolves being managed, and to relax restrictions that forbid landowners from killing wolves on their property; environmentalists sued and successfully stopped the plan. The service stopped actively releasing red wolves into the recovery area for several years; environmentalists sued and compelled the releases to begin again.

All the while, red wolves have continued to die by gunshot, sporadically but regularly, even as five-figure rewards are offered for information on the illegal kills.

Infringing on a Way of Life

"We were concerned as landowners that something has been put on our property we didn't ask for, we didn't want," Wilson Daughtry, a farmer and landowner in the red wolf recovery area, told The Guardian in 2019. "For me," he added, "it is more about infringement on private property rights. I'm really irritated about that. Coming out here and stuffing those wolves down our throats, you're not gonna get any support like that."

That sentiment echoes one Colorado rancher's description of a 2020 referendum that mandated a reintroduction of the red wolf's larger and more familiar cousin, the gray wolf. The rancher described the state ballot measure as "people on the Front Range—a bunch of city dudes" trying to "cram it down our throats." Residents of Denver, Colorado Springs, and various ski towns largely supported the reintroduction, while nearly all rural counties opposed it.

The red wolf recovery program served as an early model to restore gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho in the 1990s. While the "wolf wars" in Western states have certainly brought and continue to bring their fair share of conflict, those reintroductions in the Rocky Mountain West at least acknowledged the costs that a large carnivore would bring to local communities andmade efforts to mitigate the impacts. Conservationist Hank Fischer, who was instrumental in early efforts, helped establish a program to compensate ranchers for livestock lost to the carnivores, funded by proceeds of wolf artwork sold to back the cause. It paid out nearly $200,000 in the first few years. Then, as Fischer described it, suddenly "the wolf/livestock conflict was no longer an issue dominating the newspapers."

Even though the red wolf program is cited as a model for western gray wolf restoration, the idea of compensating locals who would bear the costs of living with wolves was never at the forefront. In 2020, the North Carolina Wildlife Federation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service launched a "Prey for the Pack" initiative to partner with landowners interested in promoting wolf recovery. It offers a cost share of up to 80 percent for participants who make habitat improvements to their property and allow for monitoring of red wolves, and the program has paid out $350,000 to date.

It seems like a step in the right direction if you want to get locals on board with conserving an apex predator. Yet it took more than three decades to launch.

In the meantime, a lot of water flowed under the bridges of the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, as Francine Madden has documented. The Fish and Wildlife Service hired Madden in 2022 as a third-party mediator to assess the longrunning conflict. Her job, essentially, is to try to help people fighting over wildlife make peace. Madden spoke to more than 150 people over the course of 18 months in compiling her findings about the red wolf. Her report noted that some landowners declined to participate in Prey for the Pack because they feared being "paid to create problems for their neighbors, which they were not willing to do."

"Many felt that at the heart of the conflict," Madden added, was a perceived threat to "landowners' sense of control over the things that are important to them, such as their land, identity and way of life." She cited residents describing community challenges unrelated to the wolf, too, such as "churches closing, the quality of public schools, and the lack of grocery stores, among other problems." Other interviewees detailed additional hardships "in terms of gainful employment (given there is no real industry outside of government, fishing, and agriculture) and the threat of hurricanes and saltwater intrusion." Three of the five counties in the red wolf recovery area have seen declines in real gross domestic product over the past 20 years. Moreover, the number of resident humans in the area has followed a similar trajectory to that of the red wolves: All but one of the five counties (Dare) has declined in population since 2010.

Alienate or Collaborate

The Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula isn't the only place where red wolf introduction has been tried. In 1991, the Fish and Wildlife Service also introduced wolves to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Seven years later, it terminated the effort, citing "extremely low pup survival and the inability of the red wolves to establish home ranges within the Park." That history prompts a question: Why did the government end the red wolf experiment in the Smokies, yet persist with it decades later 500 miles eastward?

Another line from the service's decision to end the Smokies program underscores the wider implications of the ongoing experiment in eastern North Carolina: "Our goal for the recovery of this species includes establishing at least three self-sustaining wild populations that total a minimum of 220 animals." The 2023 federal recovery plan for the species similarly calls for establishing additional populations, to provide "redundancy and resiliency." Its authors expect the wolf's status to "improve such that we can achieve delisting criteria around 2072, in approximately 50 years," and estimate the total costs of the plan at $328 million.

With plans like those, federal officials need to find better ways to cooperate with locals, and not only when it concerns the red wolf. Colorado is currently managing its aforementioned introduction of gray wolves under federal oversight. The Fish and Wildlife Service has decided to restore endangered grizzly bears to the North Cascades in Washington, and it's considering bringing federally listed sea otters back to the coast of Oregon and Northern California. To succeed, it will have to find ways to avoid alienating local landowners and constituencies, like the fishing interests wary of ravenous otters decimating their catch.

While the red wolf may provide a blueprint for how not to introduce an endangered species, Madden, the independent mediator, notes that the situation has improved since its most heated times. In her investigation, she noted, various parties occasionally voiced "cautious optimism about what it could mean to really hear one another…and to establish a starting place to come together and work through the many challenges in this conflict." A sign of that optimism perhaps blossoming came in December when the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission rescinded its yearsold resolutions regarding red wolves and adopted a new one committing to work toward recovering the species.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has gotten a lot wrong with the red wolf. But its fundamental mistake has been trying to do conservation to local communities rather than with them. The people who have to live alongside introduced species have the most to provide for them in terms of potential habitat, as well as potential collaboration as eyes and ears on the ground.

If the red wolf recovery effort has shown anything, it's that it's hard to make headway in recovering a species if the people most affected by it feel like they're having wolves stuffed down their throats.