Property in Wolves

Abstract

From colonial times until the mid-twentieth century, governments paid bounties to kill wolves, mountain lions, and other wild animals. Clearing the wild was a sustained legislative project. Based on new research, I argue that these bounty statutes have implications for the history and theory of property. The statutes were, in their intent and effect, land use regulations. For more than three centuries, they encouraged livestock. By removing wild animals, the statutes made livestock-raising a more cost-effective use of land than it otherwise would have been for landowners. And by removing wolves and other ecologically important species, they changed the character of land in ways that diminished the value of wilder uses. The statutes chose winners among land uses, and they operated over a much longer timeframe than conventional accounts, which date land use regulation’s origin to the early twentieth century, would suggest.

The statutes also had a deeper consequence. They encouraged private property itself. Predation on livestock is the kind of “large event” that, on an influential theory developed by Robert Ellickson, makes collectively-owned land valuable. By acting to remove the threat of wild animal predation, public law weighted the scale toward privately-owned, fee-simple land regimes. This discovery raises questions for a popular normative justification for private property in land. The Article finally develops ideas to why animal eradication was such a pronounced public policy. The phenomenon suggests the influence of cultural preferences on property regimes.

Keywords: Property, Legal Theory, Wildlife, Land Use, Economic History