Quebec’s contest to kill five thousand Wolves made a policy of eradication into a public competition, complete with prizes for successful hunters. Farley Mowat presents the announcement as more than a proposal to reduce a predator population: it exposes how official decisions could reward killing even as the ecological case against Wolves remained contested and government biologists advised against the campaign.

Causes and Background

The announcement came amid a broader dispute over declining big-game populations. Mowat notes that increased access by light aircraft and snowmobiles had brought hunters into previously hard-to-reach parts of Canada, contributing to pressure on moose, deer, elk, and other game. Hunters, outfitters, guides, and lodge owners blamed Wolves for the losses and called for their destruction. In Mowat’s account, governments listened to those claims, while the competing possibility—that human hunting was a major part of the problem—received less attention.

The setting made the proposed contest especially consequential. Mowat reports that several North American wolf races were virtually extinct by 1973, and that Canada had until recently held about 15,000 timber Wolves. Against this background, the Quebec minister of Fish and Game decreed the contest in late 1972, despite contrary advice from his own biologists. It was open to hunters from both Canada and the United States, widening the pool of participants beyond the province whose government had authorized it.

The Contest and Its Rewards

The declared goal was 5,000 dead Wolves. The contest did not merely permit hunters to kill them; it organized the killing as a contest of individual achievement. Special prizes were promised to the most successful hunters: a wolf’s lower jawbone encased in clear plastic and inscribed as a lasting tribute to the human killer’s skill, courage, and hardihood. The trophy transformed a body part into an official emblem of prowess, making the campaign’s celebratory language part of the policy itself.

The announcement is distinct from evidence that the target was reached. Mowat describes the decree and its intended scale, but the account here does not establish how many Wolves were killed in the contest or what final result it produced. Its documented significance lies in the authorization and public framing of mass killing, not in a reported tally of the event’s outcome.

A Wider System of Incentives

The contest belonged to a wider system in which killing Wolves could bring direct financial rewards. Mowat describes provincial and federal bounties ranging from ten to thirty dollars per wolf, which in periods of low fur prices effectively subsidized trappers and traders. In one winter, a trapper working along the Manitoba–Keewatin boundary claimed bounties on 118 Wolves, including 107 young born the previous spring. He had spread strychnine over a large area, killing not only Wolves but also Foxes, wolverines, and other carnivores; that year, each wolf bounty was worth twenty dollars. The example shows how public payments could encourage methods whose effects extended well beyond the animal named in the policy.

Other practices described by Mowat reveal the range of human pressure behind the official rhetoric of wolf control. Aircraft were used to pursue Wolves on open ground or lake ice, sometimes until they collapsed. In a separate example of government-linked wildlife exploitation, a provincial tourist scheme arranged expensive caribou safaris in which hunters paid for organized trips and trophy antlers. That was not part of the Quebec wolf contest, but it parallels the larger pattern Mowat identifies: wildlife was treated both as a supposed threat to human interests and as a resource from which hunters and tourism operators could profit.

Significance and Aftermath

Mowat places the Quebec decree within a political conflict over who defined the wildlife problem and whose interests shaped the response. Hunters and businesses framed Wolves as destroyers of game; the contest converted that accusation into a government-sanctioned goal and rewarded participants for pursuing it. The contradiction at the center of the episode is that the state acted on the demand for mass killing even though its own biologists had advised against the decision.

The book records resistance to anti-wolf policy elsewhere: the Ontario Wolf League helped secure the repeal of Ontario’s wolf bounty, while the Canadian and American Wolf Defenders may have helped persuade Minnesota to abandon a proposed extermination plan. Those developments offered a measure of hope, but they are not reported as consequences of Quebec’s contest, whose final results remain unspecified. The announcement therefore stands as a revealing act of policy in its own right: a competition whose target, prizes, and official backing made the conflict over Wolves visible without resolving it.