It is easy to forget that until recently, states paid bounties on the killing of a whole range of animals. In Property in Wolves, Professor Jack H.L. Whiteley explores the history of such bounties and of the ways such bounties subsidized particular forms of property ownership. His work is both eye-opening and provocative.
Anyone who has lived in rural parts of the mountainous west has witnessed the phenomena of a line of cars pulled onto the shoulder of the road, with excited occupants craning their necks or pulling out cameras to capture the sight of a wild animal walking nearby. Usually such sightings are limited to moose, elk, or bighorn sheep, but occasionally one can see a coyote, bobcat, or even a wolf. Such animals, joined by mountain lions, foxes, lynxes, and jaguars, among others, today are celebrated, painted onto the tail fin of Frontier Airlines’ planes, and often legally protected.
The central insight animating Property in Wolves is that state bounty practices incentivized property owners to engage in particular uses of property. To some, the title may suggest that the article is another contribution into the large literature on animal capture and the “poor reynard” of Pierson v. Post fame. To the contrary, Professor Whiteley’s focus is broader than individual capture.
The article’s lens is trained on state-supported efforts to eradicate wild animals. As Professor Whiteley explains, “[b]eginning in colonial America and ending in the middle of the twentieth century, state legislatures set bounties on wolves and other animals they deemed ‘noxious,’ a category which included most large predatory mammals.” (P. 618.) The rise in environmental awareness changed things starting in the 1970s, as the country moved from hunting to protecting many of these now endangered wild animals.
Focusing on wolves in particular, Professor Whiteley lays out some of the explanations given for the change in attitude towards such animals. (Pp. 630-32.) But even as late as 1970, “twenty states still had laws offering bounties on wolves.” (P. 630.) As Property in Wolves shows, over several centuries, the country engaged in a sustained, state-subsidized, effort to deal with the threat, primarily to domesticated animals, posed by wolves and other wild animals.
State bounty statutes were grounded on the need to protect livestock—sheep and cattle—and, later, wild game, from wolf predation. Readers interested in the details of these programs will appreciate Professor Whiteley’s rich discussion of the ways states responded to the possibility of fraudulent claims by, among other things, cutting off the ears of pelts and requiring disposal of the bodies of animals submitted by hunters for payment. (Pp. 644-49.)
As the article observes, “[b]y creating incentives to extirpate particular wild animals in order to spur livestock raising, [bounty statutes] subsidized livestock over other uses.” (P. 652.) Ranchers not only got the direct advantage of payment of such bounties coming out of the public purse, rather than being a cost borne by affected ranchers, but they also made other, more profitable, uses of the land from which such wild animals were removed. (Pp. 653-57.)
To a considerable extent, the bounty statutes accomplished their goals. In Montana alone, 80,000 bounty payments for wolf carcasses were paid over four decades, and the eastern cougar was entirely killed off. (P. 658.) Agriculture and livestock, aided by these bounties as well as technological improvements such as barbed wire and railroad transportation, spread across the continent, eating away at former forestland. Professor Whiteley tells the story of these bounties in a way that draws the reader in and that shows the heavy roll of the state in “taming” the wilderness.
For property professors, the article’s final section, in which Professor Whiteley ties his presentation of bounty history to Professor Robert Ellickson’s theory of how property rights regimes emerge, is probably the most provocative part. After presenting Professor Ellickson’s account, which emphasizes the importance of group cohesion and the privatization of ownership as risks of ownership diminish, Property in Wolves makes a fairly big claim. “The theory suggests that bounty statutes on predatory animals encouraged not just specific uses of land, but the development of private property in land itself.” (P. 663.)
Even for readers not fully convinced by either the theory or its application to bounty statutes (couldn’t diminished numbers of predators be used to explain the continued prevalence of federal lands in the West rather than providing an explanation for privatization), there is still a lot of value in having to think through how bounty statutes altered land use patterns as the nation expanded. Professor Whiteley does a good job responding to alternative theories regarding the impact of these statutes on property development. More importantly though, the article highlights the difficulty of conceptualizing this history absent such state subsidies for agriculture.
Overall, Property in Wolves tells a fascinating story that forces readers to recognize the myriad ways—including through wilderness bounties—that state policies shape property norms and property formation.
