‘Canadian wolves are wildlife terrorists’: Interrogating the social construction of the New West's ‘super-wolf’

The return of gray wolves ( Canis lupus ) to the Northern Rocky Mountain (NRM) region of the United States since the 1990s is often hailed as a conservation success story. However, this success has not been without controversy, including the pervasive idea that the ‘wrong’ wolf was reintroduced from Canada. The claim that so-called ‘Canadian super-wolves’ are a non-native and hyper-violent subspecies is then utilized to justify violence against and lethal control of wolf populations and to stymie conservation efforts. Within the field of taxonomy, delineating between subspecies is complicated and fraught, especially in the case of canids’ messy genetic lineages. Yet opposition today is frequently couched in terms of biological non/belonging through an appeal to nativeness. Using a political ecological analysis, this paper interrogates the ‘Canadian super-wolf’ discourse as biologically misleading but also a reflection of broader political-economic anxieties and regional transformations. While assertions of wolf impacts on livestock production and elk populations in the NRM do not hold up to empirical scrutiny, an eye toward scale and geographical context helps explain the durability of such claims. We argue that understanding the narrative of ‘Canadian super-wolves’ necessitates engagement with the particular context to which wolves have returned – the ‘New West,’ in its cultural and political-economic dimensions – and the ways in which they are enrolled in broader social struggles. Wolves have been made into a monstrous, invading threat – shorthand and scapegoat for anxieties surrounding land use, rural livelihoods, and identity – one subject to a nativist reaction with roots in settler colonialism and ideas of wilderness. We conclude that the wolf question is fundamentally social and ideological, and that understanding its dynamics as inextricably material and meaningful highlights the value of critical and transdisciplinary attention to human-wildlife conflict and conservation. Content Warning: Contains an image of a dead wolf held by a hunter (Figure 4).