Lodges That Let People "Sleep With The Wolves" A Bad Idea, Wyoming Wildlife Experts Say

A Canada wildlife preserve offers rental lodges where people can gawk at a pack of wolves just on the other side of giant ground-level picture windows and sliding glass doors.

It’s billed as an up close and personal wildlife experience. While an intriguing tourism draw, Wyoming wildlife experts say trying it with Wyoming’s national parks would be a terrible idea.

“I get nervous that something like that would give people a false sense of security or an unnatural sense of how wolves behave in the wild,” Kristin Barker, a Wyoming wildlife researcher, told Cowboy State Daily. 

Such a set-up for admiring grizzlies in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks would be too dangerous, she added. 

Greg Jackson, the former deputy chief of the National Park Service division of law enforcement, security and emergency services, agreed that having people gawking at grizzlies through a pane of glass likely wouldn’t end well. 

For the bears it could be tempting to see humans so up close and personal — “crunchy on the outside, tasty on the inside,” he told Cowboy State Daily.

Locations where animals can be viewed close-up are becoming popular in some places, but they can also give false impressions about nature, said Jackson, who now runs NPS Park Ranger News.

“At what point do you stop being a national park and start being a zoo?” he said. 

‘Sleep With The Wolves’

The “sleep with the wolves” experience is offered by Parc Omega, a resort-like wildlife park near Montreal in Quebec, Canada. 

It doesn’t involve actually cuddling up with a pack of predators and hoping for the best, but it comes close. 

Rental lodges with huge picture windows and sliding glass doors are set up around a habitat for the wolves. That lets people watch the animals through the glass from just a few feet away. 

The worrisome part is that in such circumstances, wolves can get too acclimated to people, Barker said. 

Wolf attacks on humans are extremely rare, she said. But when they do happen, it’s usually because the wolves have gotten too used to people being close by and have lost their natural fear of humans. 

When that line is crossed, animals end up on the losing end, she said. 

“If you habituate those animals to people, it frequently ends up harming those animals,” she said. 

A Trend Toward Wilder Wildlife 

In Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, the trend for many years has been to encourage putting distance between people in animals – to keep people safe and the animals truly wild. 

Barker said she’s a huge advocate of that approach, rather than putting people in lodges with predators right outside.  

“I might be a little biased because I’m generally not supportive of people getting too close to wildlife,” she said.  

Toward the goal of getting people to back off, the Jackson Hole Travel & Tourism Board this year released the “Selfie Control” app for smart phones. It alerts tourists to back off if they stray too close to bison, bears or other wildlife that could maim or kill them. 

Decades ago, the Park Service took the opposite approach, and actually encouraged close encounters, Jackson said. 

“In Yellowstone, they used to deliberately leave garbage out for bears, so people could come watch bears eat garbage,” he said. 

During his tenure in Olympic National Park in Washington state, Jackson said that he and his fellow dealt with similar situation with deer. 

There was a parking lot at an overlook at the end of a long, steep drive. Vehicles entering the parking lot were frequently overheating, and belching radiator fluid onto the asphalt. 

The antifreeze in radiator fluid is toxic to deer, but apparently deer like the taste of it, Jackson said. 

The deer would flock to the parking lot to lap up puddles of antifreeze, which in turn would draw crowds of tourists who came to watch the deer. 

Rangers tried to “discourage the deer away” from the parking lot, but the antifreeze was “like crack to deer,” he said. 

And people were equally addicted to watching the deer, despite rangers frequently telling them to move along.  

“My gosh, people loved it,” he said. 

Close-Up Viewing Has A Place

There’s still a niche for places where people can see animals up close, Idaho resident Randy Gravatt told Cowboy State Daily. 

He recently retired from the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone, Mont. 

At the center people can delight in watching captive grizzlies ripping apart garbage cans, to test just how “bear proof they really are.”

The center also has two packs of wolves that the public can view through glass, he said. 

So, he can understand the appeal of lodges were people can sit and watch wolves through glass. 

The wolves at the center in West Yellowstone were never wild – they were rescued from places where people were breeding them in captivity, he said. 

The center gives people the rare opportunity to see bears and wolves up close and learn about the animals, he said. 

But he always made it clear to tourists that the experience was nothing like seeing the animals in the wild – where people should keep their distance. 

“It was clear that it’s not something you’re normally going to see,” he said. 

Fat Bear Week Strikes The Happy Medium

Glass-walled wildlife viewing lodges aren’t likely to catch on in America’s national parks, Jackson said. But the push-and-pull of giving people chances to see wildlife without getting too close will go on. 

Technology might have helped strike a happy medium with Fat Bear Week in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve. 

There, lumbering brown bears, larger cousins of Wyoming’s grizzlies, spend most of the late summer and early fall salmon run sitting in the river, gorging themselves with fish.

People absolutely love watching the action and cast votes to select the most impressively huge bear. This year, that honor was bestowed upon Bear 128, a lumbering female mama bear nicknamed Grazer.

There is a viewing platform, behind a fence, near a waterfall where many of the bears gather to feast on salmon, Jackson said. 

But the overwhelming majority of the adoring audience is watching the drama unfold online, through strategically-placed web cameras. 

That allows people to peer directly into the bears’ space without physically being there and running the risk of becoming dessert. 

So far, it’s worked well, Jackson said. 

There’s nothing more exciting in Park Service media than Fat Bear Week,” he said. 

Contact Mark Heinz at mark@cowboystatedaily.com

Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.