Daniel Curry is a range rider in the state of Washington, serving as a buffer between wolves and cows and wolves and ranchers. He is also the star of a short film that is making the rounds in the U.S. West.
He was in Carbondale on Nov. 21 to screen the film. We sat down with Curry to talk about his work. Here's an excerpt from the conversation:
Curry: I’ve worked with wolves for a little over 22 years now. And when I was 30, I read an article in a local paper for the city of Spokane. And what I read in that article was really disturbing. The rancher lost cows. The wolves lost their lives for eating those cows. And as taxpayers, we paid an exorbitant amount of money to have that happen.
By 'have that happen,' I mean lethal removal of that pack. So at that time I was working in a sanctuary for wolves. It's a world-renowned sanctuary. So I was really passionate about wolves. I really value animals. And I saw these animals suffering at the hands of our own state agency and thought that there's got to be some way to improve that situation. When everybody's losing, there's room for improvement, obviously.
So I moved up to Washington, in the corner of northeast Washington, to help in any way I could. And eventually I read about range riding from a Canadian paper. I thought that I could utilize my wolf behavior knowledge and my skills with wolves coupled with my knowledge of horseback riding and cattle behavior, put those together and offer some kind of service to the community, both wildlife and the people of Washington state to go beyond coexistence.
I don't really like that term 'co-existence.' I like 'co-thriving.' I think co-existence is a very subpar way to live. We're just barely existing with each other on the planet.
So that's what I dedicated the next 12 years of my life to and, well, now I'm talking to you.
Marsh: Talk about the work you're doing these days.
Curry: Right now, my focus is in Washington state. That's where the main base for Project GRIPH is. We're also establishing chapters of our nonprofit in the Western U.S. I've been to Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Arizona, and we're trying to establish a service like we've done in Washington in a larger geographic area. I've gone to speak to the communities of all these areas — ranchers primarily — and also some state agency personnel. They're all experiencing the same problems of trying to figure out a way forward.
We have a very good service. We have a service that's got a proven track record. We've worked with people that, you know, start pulling what little hair they have out of their head, saying 'the only good wolf is a dead wolf.' There's just too many of them.
And now they're taking videos of these animals interacting with the cows because they don't have conflicts. My goal is to take that proof-of-concept, that service, and scale it up to the Western U.S. I've also had some interest from France and Finland as well.
We're going to continue to come up against potential conflict as we grow unfettered in these wild areas. These animals are learning from us that with humans come food sources. We have all kinds of options that we'll have to take advantage of because we're leaving [the animals] very little. Project GRIPH focuses on conflict mitigation, but we also focus on education and outreach and just preventative maintenance. When I started working with animals when I was a little kid, the old adage really stuck with me: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
That's kind of our philosophy, so to speak. If we get on the landscape and we prevent any kind of conflict from happening and we don't have to worry about all this, like, turmoil that comes from the conflict, we don't have to worry about all the ancillary costs that we have to pay people now for compensation. Like saying, “Hey, if you lose cattle, we'll just pay you money”. That's fraught with loopholes and problems in itself.
The way I look at it is, the world and that biodiversity is like a well-tuned machine. Everything's connected. Everything has a purpose. All these life forms are incredibly important. In my opinion, they're all sentient beings. And the sooner we find that out, the better.
Marsh: Yes. And we've become separate from the natural world. You know, the old Christian idea of humankind having dominion over the animals - I think it's destroyed that connection.
Dominion doesn't mean dominate. It doesn't mean exploit. It means guard. It means to be a steward.
It means caretake for. Like you said, we've divorced ourselves from that natural system. And thinking that by doing that we can act as the governing agent of what should be or what shouldn't be. That’s very dangerous because we're managing it from a human-centric point of view.
Look how we've learned about wolves. Look how wolves are portrayed when we're kids. We've demonized these creatures based on the historic experiences we've had in the past, based on some archaic knowledge in our brain. You know, as we colonized the United States, we moved West and we brought livestock with us. But we're not participating in a nomadic tradition now. We're basically altering the natural environment. And then we're upset when there are animals taking advantage of that loophole. That's something that's not evil; they're surviving.
What these animals are left with is a dwindling landscape and they're doing the best they can. The sooner we start managing for a collective better, like a collective whole, we'll get somewhere positive.
If we continue to manage from this human-centric point of view, we will continue to diminish our ungulate herds. We will diminish our large carnivores. We're going to be left with a world that's not natural. I mean, we are the only animal that throws the natural environment off balance. And, at this point in human evolution, we're also the only animal that will bring it back into balance.
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