What’s It Like to Speak for Wolves?
A conversation with ethicist and wolf trustee Bill Lynn.
In January, I participated in the National Wolf Conversation, an event that brought together 25 people with a wide variety of perspectives on wolf recovery. Supported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and convened by the independent organization Constructive Conflict, it sought to build lasting relationships among parties on all sides of the wolf issue.
I’ve covered the arguments over wolf recovery in the U.S. West for many years now, and watching those involved in this entrenched conflict begin to work together toward common ground was a profound experience; journalist Callie Hanson, who also participated in the conversation, and I wrote more about it here.
One of the participants, ethicist Bill Lynn, had an unusual role: as a “wolf trustee,” he spoke on behalf of the wolves themselves. Recently, he took the time to talk with me and share some reflections on the Wolf Conversation.
Lynn is the founder of PAN Works, a think tank dedicated to the wellbeing of animals; a professor of anthrozoology at Canisius University; and a research scientist in the Marsh Institute of Clark University. I edited our conversation for length and clarity.
MN: How are you describing the Wolf Conversation to your colleagues?
LYNN: I'm describing it as a marvelous, moving experience with deep meaning, meaning that we can learn from and should be applied widely. I loved how the process humanized people. I loved how it depolarized their personal positions on wolves and opened the doors to great conversations. Francine [Madden] and Kim [Wolfenden, the event conveners] have this amazing capacity to empathize and draw out empathy — I absolutely loved that aspect of it.
One big critique of these processes from animal advocates is that they’re primarily about human relationships and presuppose that wolves are simply a resource over which there’s conflict. To address that critique, I was brought into the process to serve as a wolf trustee — to represent the interests of the wolves. And I think that made it possible, in the short time we had, to talk about wolves in a way that was very different from the way wolves have been talked about in previous processes.
MN: Tell me more about your role as a wolf trustee. How did it come about and how did it function?
LYNN: When the National Wolf Conversation was announced, my colleagues at PAN Works and I decided to approach Francine and see whether she would be open to having wolves represented as stakeholders. Our board met with Francine and Kim, and we had long discussions about wolves having intrinsic value and wolves being not just a resource but non-human persons on the landscape who needed representation.
We offered the model of a trustee — someone who speaks and acts, with transparency and accountability, for the benefit of others. As a wolf trustee, I wasn’t there representing PAN Works or any other group. I was representing wolves and speaking for the well-being of wolves apart from human interests.
MN: Are there moments from the conversation that you remember as times when you spoke in the interest of wolves?
LYNN: Well, when we first revealed who we were, I stood up and talked about how human supremacy violates the intrinsic value of wolves and doesn't treat them as the non-human persons they are. When I said that, I saw some people go, whoa.
On the second day, we did an exercise where each person stood at a distance from a line on the floor that reflected how often they felt morally judged on wolf issues. That conversation was about us, as people of different identities and policy positions, having experienced the harsh, finger-wagging moral judgment of others and recognizing that we had probably judged others in that way, too.
I felt it was important to point out that being morally judgmental isn’t the same thing as making moral judgments. Making moral judgments — making distinctions between what we ought to do and what we ought not to do — is part of the warp and weft of human life, right? Those kinds of judgments reflect values, and values are a huge driver of public policy. The wolf debate is often reduced to questions of science or economics, but it’s driven by values and ethics.
MN: If I'm understanding you correctly, you were making sure that in rejecting harsh moral judgements of ourselves and others, we didn’t also reject — would you call it moral discernment?
LYNN: Yes, discernment is a great term. The third moment I remember is when we talked about conflicts within groups and between groups, and I added that often, these conflicts also involve an absent other — someone who should be at the table but isn’t.
I made the analogy to colonialism in North America. When the European powers were fighting over North America, the First Nations people were the absent other. They didn’t have a place at the table, even though it was their table to begin with, and they’ve suffered horribly as a result. From later conversations, I know that analogy changed things for some people. They suddenly saw the wolf-human relationship not as a question of how we use a resource but as a question of how we should treat another group of beings.
MN: Is it possible to move toward common ground in a group where you have a wolf trustee — someone representing the intrinsic value of wolves — as well as people who are absolutely convinced that at least some level of lethal control of wolves is necessary?
LYNN: I have colleagues at PAN Works who don't think there's any justification for killing any wolf, ever. It's not that they're not attentive to the circumstances. They just so strongly believe in the personhood of wolves that they would never support lethal control. I deeply respect those views and believe they deserve a place at the table too. Still, I do believe in lethal control in certain very narrow circumstances.
I think these decisions are context based. If a wolf were attacking my dog, for example, and the only way to stop that attack was to kill the wolf, I would kill the wolf. Of course, it gets more difficult when you get to the policy level, but I don’t think these issues are ever black and white.
MN: Wolf recovery is broadly popular in the country as a whole, but it’s very controversial among those most affected by it. One critique of the wolf conversation and similar processes is that by including so many people with experience living alongside wolves, they overrepresent critics of wolf recovery. How do you think about the role of lived experience in these processes versus a more, let’s say, intellectual commitment to the welfare of wolves?
LYNN: I think what that critique misses is the matter of salience. There may be as many or more vegans in the country as there are livestock producers and hunters and trappers, but the wolf issue just isn’t as salient for them. It doesn’t impact their lives in the same way. We need to have a broader dialogue at some point, but I think the representation we had around the table for this workshop was perfectly fine.
I think lived experience is extremely important, and that goes along with the emphasis I place on context, on situating your ethics in a particular society, a particular ecology. I do think that we have to be careful not to overgeneralize — not to look at an experience with one wolf in one situation as indicative of all wolves in all situations. We have to understand the variety of experiences out there and the nuances in both human behavior and wolf behavior.
So another thing I'm telling my colleagues is that I think the wolf conversation process is super, super helpful in terms of getting a conversation started, but it has to be complemented with a scientific process as well as an ethical process. If you don't have the science, then you’re not ground-truthing the facts, and if you don’t have the ethics, you’re not ground-truthing the values. That’s not a shortcoming in Francine’s process per se. It’s a silence in it.
MN: So on the last day of our discussion, one of the ranchers in the group turned to you and said, you know, I have a real problem with this idea of wolves having intrinsic value and having a voice in this process. That evening, you ended up having a long fireside conversation with her and another rancher. Can you tell me how that went, from your perspective?
LYNN: Well, first of all, it was a lovely and fun conversation, full of mutual goodwill. We talked about the practical issues they face in their lives, which informs how I think about the ethics of wolf recovery, and about how I think about wolves and other animals and how they think about them, and how perhaps we both think about them as moral beings to some extent. We found some shared ground where we can have deeper and better conversations going forward.
While she doesn’t use the term intrinsic value, she does recognize that the animals under her care have personalities and so are in some senses persons. And while I don’t believe in top-down, command-and-control management of wolves, I recognize that there are going to be times when people need to directly intervene with wolves on the landscape.
MN: When [the rancher who addressed you] first introduced herself to the group, she talked about how seriously she took the harm to her sheep and how much it bothered her. When wolves attacked her flock, she saw it as a failure of stewardship on her part. It sounds like that was a pathway for connection between you.
LYNN: Yes, exactly. And the stewardship connection is interesting. When people talk about stewardship, I try to slowly and gently investigate whether they mean stewardship in the old dominionist way — we’re given these animals to control and we’re going to try to do that without cruelty or unnecessary pain — or are they talking about an ethic of care, where they care about them as individuals and want to do right by them? Often it is a care ethic, something beyond the traditional idea of stewardship as taking care of resources. And that’s what I heard from her.
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loved this interview, it really resonated with my experience working out in montana and wyoming. thanks for the shoutout too!
Adding a question here from author and friend Ben Goldfarb, followed by Bill's answer.
Q: Who does the trustee represent: the species or the individual?
A: My answer is both. There will be times when one shifts focus, just as we do when talking about individual people and their socieites (e.g., rights, common good). But there is no a priori reason a trustee — or anyone else for that matter — can only care for individuals vs. communities. What level you focus on and when is a matter of context not category.
There is a backstory.
The current fad in the animal space is sentientism which focuses on the moral value of individuals who suffer, indeed restricts moral consideration to those individuals and sees communities and systems playing a secondary and supporting role (i.e., only having instrumental value). Twenty years ago the fad was ecocentrism focused on the moral considerability of ecological wholes, e.g., species and ecosystems. Anthropocentrism, biocentrism (similar to sentientism but with a broader ambit for life) and ecocentrism were vying for attention. All were in opposition to anthropocentrism (focusing moral value wholly or mostly on human beings).
This never made sense to me, as restricting our care based on categories was arbitrary. After all, we allow our care to scale all the time with people and their societies. Why can’t we do so with people, animals and nature? That’s why we started using the concept of geocentrism, as an alternative to rigid a priori categorizations of who and what we can ethically care about. Geocentrism values people, animals and nature as they manifest themselves as individuals as well as ecological and social communities. The “geo" references earth-centred as in all the earth. As importantly, it also references the capacity to scale up and down the focus of ethical care. This is a situated and context-sensitive way of thinking about intrinsic value.
So a well-trained trustee would understand that both individual wolves and their ecological/social communities (which included the species) have an intrinsic moral value to defend. Context will have a big impact on how you think and act on that intrinsic value. This is the geocentric approach.