Ontario abolishes the wolf bounty

Ontario’s abolition of the wolf bounty was a rare policy reversal in a campaign otherwise sustained by public payments, organized hunting, and official claims that wolves threatened game. Farley Mowat presents the change as a concrete success won by a small group of advocates, while setting it against continuing efforts elsewhere to encourage wolf killing.

Background: Incentives to Kill Wolves

Provincial and federal governments offered bounties of roughly ten to thirty dollars per wolf. When foxes and other furs fetched little, these payments effectively subsidized trappers and traders. The bounty therefore operated not only as a declaration of hostility toward wolves but also as a source of income that could make killing them financially worthwhile.

The account describes how that incentive could extend beyond the intended target. A trapper working along the Manitoba–Keewatin boundary collected bounty on 118 wolves in one winter, 107 of them young born the previous spring. Although the law called for wolves to be killed by trapping or shooting, he used strychnine across a large area, wiping out nearly the entire local population of foxes, wolverines, and other smaller meat-eaters as well. Wolves were worth twenty dollars apiece that year; foxes had no market value. The episode makes the bounty’s wider ecological cost visible: an incentive aimed at one species could reward poisoning that reached many others.

The Ontario Reversal

Against this system, the Ontario government recently revoked its provincial bounty on wolves. Mowat attributes the change largely to the persistent efforts of the Ontario Wolf League, a small body of ordinary people organized to counter anti-wolf pressure groups. Their campaign was supported by newer biologists more interested in studying living animals than in studying dead ones. The repeal thus joined public advocacy to a different scientific emphasis: wolves were to be encountered as living subjects of study, not simply treated as animals to be removed.

The account identifies the policy change but gives no date, implementation details, or evidence about its later effects on wolf numbers. Its significance lies in the reversal itself: a government withdrew a financial incentive that had made wolf killing part of the ordinary economy of trapping and trade.

A Qualified Success Amid Continuing Campaigns

The repeal stands in sharp contrast to other government actions described in the same account. Late in 1972, Quebec’s Minister of Fish and Game ordered a contest open to hunters from Canada and the United States, with a target of 5,000 dead wolves, despite contrary advice from the minister’s own biologists. Prizes included wolf jawbones encased in clear plastic. In Minnesota, authorities had proposed killing 200 wolves each year until the state’s wolf population was eliminated. Mowat reports that the Canadian and American Wolf Defenders may have helped force the Minnesota government to abandon that plan, but presents the outcome as uncertain rather than confirmed.

These contrasts locate Ontario’s decision within a broader political struggle rather than as the end of wolf-control policy. Mowat describes the provincial repeal as one of the anti-wolf campaign’s successes, achieved by persistent advocacy, while other governments continued to consider or promote large-scale killing. The change offered a limited but tangible counterexample: policy could move away from rewarding destruction, even as the wider pressures behind wolf persecution remained.