Rebecca Bose: Undoing an American Extinction

"I don't know of another animal mammal that does not protect their young. Everybody protects their young. A wolf does too if another predator came. Of course they would protect their young. But with humans, they are that afraid of us, that they will leave their den. They will leave." – Rebecca Bose

At a moment when gray wolves in the United States are once again under serious threat, with the House just voting to delist them, it's worth asking a question that we seem determined to forget Once we remove protections and populations collapse. Do we really think history won't repeat itself?

This conversation is with Rebecca Bose, curator at the Wolf Conservation Center, where she has spent the last 25 years working at the intersection of recovery and survival for some of the most endangered wolves on the planet. Rebecca is deeply involved in the painstaking effort to undo past mistakes, helping recover Mexican gray wolves and red wolves, two species that were nearly wiped out entirely by government sanctioned killing.

Rebecca walks us through what bringing wolves back actually means - decades of captive breeding, genetic management, pup fostering operations that involve private pilots, biologists hiking for hours into remote wilderness, and an enormous amount of human labor all to give a handful of animals a chance to survive in a world that is still deeply hostile to them.

And we talk about who wolves actually are: parents, teachers, sentient beings with relationships and roles that shape entire ecosystems.

This is a conversation about memory, responsibility, and what happens when we repeat history instead of learning from it.

*Correction from the interview: the current Mexican wolf population is at a minimum of 286 animals on the landscape, not 386.