Think Like A Mountain

In "Think Like a Mountain" Aldo Leopold talks about the death of a she-wolf killed by his party during a time when conservationists assumed that elimination of top predators would make game plentiful. At first, I thought I was reading something Stephen King wrote. It was a little dark and a bit weird, but as it went on I began to understand what was going on. It was just like the predator video we watched in class. If you take away the wolves, then the land begins to suffer. Just because the deer population would rise for a little while doesn't justify killing off the environment and every other species that depends on it. It gave me an uncomfortable feeling when reading about when they were shooting at the wolves.

"Think like a mountain" to me means that you should take time to put yourself in the environment's shoes, in a sense. The fact of the matter is that those mountains need the wolves in order to sustain life and keep balance within the animal kingdom. It's pretty easy to think like that. After all, if a bunch of deer were destroying the land around my home I would be very upset. With that being said, I still believe in controlling the wolf population in the Upper Peninsula. I'm not supporting the annihilation of the entire wolf population, though. That would be foolish, considering what that did to Yellowstone all those years ago. I am in favor of the wolf hunt if done correctly and closely monitored, because there's just too many reports of dogs and livestock being killed by them to go unnoticed. I know that there are some cases where families leave there dogs outside at night, but not every case is the same.