Howl: The 1952–56 Rabies Crisis and the Creation of the Urban Wild at Banff

George Colpitts

In 1948, a young husky dog appeared sick and useless in its team in Cambridge Bay, Northwest Territories. Inuit hunter “Eskimo Jack” Ehakataitok pointed out the dog to Sam Carter, the local interpreter at the Hudson’s Bay Company store. When Carter saw the animal running in circles and foaming at the mouth, he picked up his .30-30 rifle and shot it between the eyes.1 A number of months later, Ottawa agricultural scientists confirmed it had been rabid. Between 1947 and 1952, a large number of sled dogs had been acting strangely after being bitten by Arctic foxes. As part of a global resurgence of rabies just after the Second World War,2 rabies had apparently begun vectoring for some time between wild furbearers, especially as “crazy fox disease,” and northern working sled dogs.3 By 1952, it was confirmed in northern Alberta. An Arctic fox bit four sled dogs in Fort Fitzgerald that year, all later testing rabid. When foxes, wolves, and coyotes then bit large numbers of domestic cattle, hogs, and farm dogs in the Fort Vermilion region soon afterward by 1953,4 the disease seemed to have spread well into parts of northern British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.

Although rabies was effectively contained in the north until 1955, when a fox strain broke out in Ontario’s Little North and reached even southern Ontario districts, Alberta’s northern fox rabies outbreak nevertheless constituted the largest and most complex occurrence in Canada to date.5 Unlike earlier manifestations of the disease fought within dog populations, the 1952 outbreak was notable not only for its epidemic extent but also its more complex arcing from large and dispersed northern wildlife population pools on the peripheries of metropolitan and settled areas of Canada. For the first time, as the federal agricultural veterinarian, K.F. Wells, pointed out in 1957, rabies was pooling “in our Canadian wild animals.”6 For that very reason, the 1952–53 crisis posed great quandaries in Banff, Jasper, and Field, British Columbia. National Park towns went into a veritable red alert status with the first reports of rabies at Fort Fitzgerald, despite the considerable geographic distance to that northern Albertan town. The reasons were evident. In Rocky Mountain park towns, wildlife had gained considerable tourist and scientific value. The occasional glimpse of wildlife in towns certified an anti-modern ideal. Park superintendents and the National Parks’ chief veterinarian, B.I. Love, took very seriously the possibility that rabies might infect wildlife populations so iconic in tourist experience and inestimably valuable for science. But the rabies outbreak also provided an occasion for authorities and townies to take up its chief vector, domestic dogs, and, to a lesser extent, cats, and debate exactly what place domesticated animals played in towns situated within natural national parks. The rabies crisis prompted far greater public scrutiny over these animals’ roaming. If Rex the Dog, or Snowball the Cat, had always been given freedom in Banff’s “pristine” nature, public attitudes began to change after 1953, and a new human ecology and relationship between animals and humans within park townsites, and other settled spaces, likely emerged thereafter.

This held especially true in that most wild metropolis, Banff. Located in the Rocky Mountains and central to Canada’s emerging National Parks system after the town’s establishment as a whistle stop on the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1886, Banff and its townsite had complicated the park’s wilderness metanarrative from its beginnings. Many townies owned dogs, and domestic animals undoubtedly struck an ecological balance with wild animal populations nearby. In the case of Banff, the free agency and prevalence of roaming domestic dogs spatially limited, and indeed helped create, the largely ornamental wilderness experience cherished in Banff life. Dogs harried mule deer, and certainly white-tailed deer that would otherwise thrive in the edge environment of town; they drove elk from the town almost entirely; and dogs marginalized problematic wolves, coyotes, and foxes from human communities. In that respect, beyond changing popular understandings of urban animals, rabies control measures reined in dogs and cats in Banff, but in doing so, further problematized the wild–human encounter by encouraging unprecedented wildlife incursions into town life. As happened with so many parks issues in the postwar period, then, these metropolitan natures by necessity had to become more “managed” because of the medicalized threat of rabies. Indeed, what occurred in Banff and other park towns framed the larger debate around urban wildlife for most of Canada in the later twentieth century.7

The 1952–53 Rabies Crisis in Northern Alberta

Given the horrific suffering and death following human “hydrophobia” infection, Ottawa bureaucrats and northerners took very seriously reports of sled dog disease in 1947–49. Rabies is a viral type of the Lyssavirus genus. In humans, a bite from an infected host, usually through its saliva, enters the bloodstream. Although a victim initially suffers only mild symptoms of itching and prickling on the skin where biting has occurred, a fever and headache soon follows. The disease worsens as it is carried in the bloodstream to the brain, where it begins to cause inflammation and affect cognitive functions, mood, and behaviour.8 The acute period of the disease is characterized by agonizing and largely untreatable pain and delirium. The virus colonizes the salivary glands to allow for its chief animal transmission through biting. It also, for that reason, causes muscle spasms in the throat and larynx of the infected animal or human, causing pain when swallowing. Drinking water becomes excruciating painful, eliciting an aversion in both infected animals and humans to drinking water, hence the term “hydrophobia,” the historical name for the disease. Once infection has occurred, and if it is not addressed immediately with vaccines that build up a victim’s immunity, the disease’s incubation in the human brain is largely untreatable and death is almost always certain.9

Complicating the history of rabies was the wide range of behaviours exhibited by its victims. Historically, rabies panics in England from the 1830s onward coincided with moral reform movements that saw the behaviours of “wild” and “unruly” elements of society, both human and urban canine, as a larger problem of unseemly and uncontrolled behaviour in urban environments. Anti-rabies measures, whether quarantine or muzzling, enacted in legislation to eliminate rabies threats were often applied wholesale to dog populations even in areas unaffected by rabies.10 Rabies itself could take on a number of symptomatic faces because of the wide range of its behavioural manifestation. Dogs or other animals infected with “rage” rabies turned classically “mad,” acting strangely, uncharacteristically aggressively and violent. Their difficulty in swallowing made an animal foam at the mouth and bite for no reason other animals or humans; by contrast, “dumb” rabies could cause an animal to exhibit gregariousness, strong affection toward strangers, or associate itself closely with other animals with seemingly friendly intentions. This long period of amicability then changed suddenly when the animal succumbed to the mental deterioration of the disease and turned, in the end, violent and wildly aggressive.11

It was Louis Pasteur who, in 1885, successfully developed a vaccine to treat infected victims of rabies, using the brain tissue of infected rabbits to obtain an attenuated (or modified and therefore less virulent) strain that, once introduced through vaccine into the human body, allowed an individual to develop immunity before the infection from a bite fully incubated within the brain. At the turn of the century, vaccines improved. When the brain tissue from a human victim of rabies was finally used and repeatedly reproduced in chicken embryos, the wild virus’s incubation time was reduced significantly (or “fixed”) and its severity attenuated. With multiple injections of the resulting vaccine, a victim could build up resistance to a wild form of the virus that, though infecting the body, was still following a slower incubation period. This breakthrough also allowed the first dog vaccines to be developed as a key means of combatting rabies outbreaks, since dogs were traditionally the most common carrier of the virus.12

8.1 Alberta’s National Park Towns, Cities, and Settlements.

The outbreak of rabies among northern sled dogs in the late 1940s was taken more seriously after agriculture scientists confirmed the above-mentioned case of a rabid Arctic fox biting and infecting four sled dogs in Fort Fitzgerald in Alberta in 1952. At that point, authorities recognized that a quite unprecedented rabies pool existed in wildlife.13 By early 1953, the disease had apparently spread via wolves, coyotes, or foxes to Fort Vermilion, located farther south and west of Fort Fitzgerald (see Figure 8.1). Vermilion had a population of approximately 30,000 people. In a community economically wedded to mixed agriculture and fur trapping, and an edge environment harbouring sizable local wildlife populations (“the whole country is lousy” with foxes, as one Fort Vermilion resident lamented in the midst of the crisis in 1953),14 the federal government struck an interdepartmental rabies task force;15 the Alberta government, given the lead in management, mustered the Alberta Central Rabies Control Committee. Both federal and provincial committees began work just as quite alarming reports emerged from northern Alberta. By September 1952, some forty dogs, hogs, and cattle had been bitten apparently by rabid foxes, coyotes, or wolves.16 The stories challenged the idealized and peaceable animal kingdom in Disney films of the era:17 one wolf acting erratically and aggressively attacked the bumper of a truck driving the road to Peace River. A completely deranged 150 lb. wolf tried to chew its way through a cabin door behind which cowered a Fort Vermilion farming family.18 In December 1952, a single rabid dog in Peace River country bit no fewer than fifteen people, all requiring the painful and multi-dose “Pasteur” treatment afterward, administered in a course of twelve doses deep into the stomach.19 Eventually some 180 people in Alberta required the same anti-rabies vaccination after being possibly infected by suspect animals.

Veterinary and medical authorities largely contained the 1952–53 crises (ending officially in 1956 with the last confirmed laboratory case). Public education campaigns proved key in averting complete panic throughout the period.20 It is interesting that the rabies outbreak coincided with Alberta’s recently launched Norway rat control efforts, which entailed not only extensive poster campaigns but also displays of killed Norway rats at schools, fairs, rodeos, and exhibitions. Headed by the same Department of Agriculture, Alberta’s anti-rat campaign focused attention on the animal itself and its relationship with humans and, above all, sought to educate Albertans to recognize and therefore kill rats they encountered. Within the visual rendering of the rat as a subject, images of the rodent elicited a broad array of emotions and responses from their audiences, from fear to vulnerability or to imagining human power to control what was presented as an economic and unhygienic pest in Alberta farm environs.21 Unlike the rat campaign, the Alberta government’s rabies information was text-based, its visualizations in brochures more often showing maps of the virus’s spread from a wild north through Alberta’s more settled, civilized south, and specifying remedial actions on the main potential vector in settled areas: dogs.

However, though the Alberta government’s public education diverted attention away from the virus itself, textual information, bulletins, and news reports redirected most attention to wildlife. In that respect, it likely changed human–animal relationships, especially attitudes in urban settings toward wildlife. Unlike in the United States, where authorities fought a similar 1950s rabies strain primarily through a massive dog vaccination program, in Canada, and in Alberta in particular, as Christopher Rutty has pointed out, state authorities hesitated to follow suit with vaccine as a sole strategy.22 Canadians instead used vaccine – for the first time in a widespread program – coupled with dog control programs, and, in Alberta and later Ontario, and with some controversy, wildlife “depopulation.”23

In Canada, both federal and provincial authorities had long used leash and licensing laws as means of controlling the movement of domesticated pets in the midst of rabies outbreaks. Dogs were always part of settled communities in Canada, but their numbers usually exceeded any local capacity to control them. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, urban reform and sanitary movements often prioritized for the state the surveillance, regulation, and control of urban dogs and cats, along with horses, as part of a larger attempt to bring better order and improvement to cities.24 In urban Toronto, efforts to assess taxes on dogs in the city started in 1832 and mandatory licensing followed in 1855. Such measures raised city revenues, identified the dogs in the urban space, and controlled their numbers.25 Regulations sought to limit dogs from running at large and without muzzle in public places, and licensed dogs, in summer months, were required to be muzzled, with the understanding that the rabies outbreaks occurred in the hottest and driest months of the year.26 At the same time, into much of the twentieth century, dog owners, especially those without money to pay for licences or simply lax in keeping dogs on their property or leashed, continued to make room for what can be termed as the “roaming domestic,” an always-criticized free agent in urban settings. Dog agency was suddenly curtailed in periods of rabies outbreaks when authorities eliminated “strays” within settled areas.27 Increased use of pounds in Toronto meant that more strays and unaccompanied licensed dogs could be rounded up, kept over a period of time, and destroyed if not claimed by owners.28 However, even in 1884, the sporadic use of dog catchers, even in the summer months when the “dog nuisance” was considered most threatening, were often found wanting. Toronto could still be “overrun” with strays during these periods.29 Certainly, the ongoing fear of rabies being carried by “curs” and strays within city limits led, at times, to hysteria and mass culls.30

Although dog vaccines employing attenuated and shorter incubating, “fixed” rabies strains were developed by the 1910s and used famously in Hungary and later in Japan in the interwar period, the uncertain effectiveness of early vaccines and the need for multiple injections made most Canadian medical authorities believe that the best means of controlling rabies outbreaks among dogs in settled areas was through quarantine.31 They understood that rabies was usually imported from the United States via dogs crossing the border, often in automobile tourism. In Gatineau-Ottawa in 1925–26 and Kingston in 1927–28, public health authorities had successfully used quarantine programs to contain quite serious outbreaks, coupling them with selective animal vaccinations in farming districts. The protocol was simple. Authorities killed thousands of strays while forcing owners to tie up their domestic animals during the course of the outbreak. The common expression was to muzzle and leash “respectable” dogs during an outbreak while destroying “vagrants.”32

A different response was needed in the 1952 outbreak. Reports indicated that rabies was pooling within wildlife, particularly fox. Although authorities were concerned that wolves, coyotes, and other predators might serve also as carriers, the particular epidemiological characteristics of northern rabies, the seemingly peculiar behaviour exhibited by foxes, and their aggressive and non-specific biting of many other domestic or wild animals made the northern fox outbreak particularly alarming.

In what is now regarded as a controversial decision, the federal government passed by 1953 an ambitious mandatory leash law across northern Canada and, for the first time, mobilized a mass, mandatory sled dog vaccination requirement (eventually administering some 100,000 doses in the north supplied by the Connaught Laboratories at the University of Toronto).33 The campaign, implemented without Inuit and northern Aboriginal consultation, coincided with another outbreak of what was likely distemper that killed many sled teams. Inuit oral history still views the rabies campaign as a case of misguided colonization to modernize the north by moving hunting and trapping cultures dependent on dog teams into towns. Inuit memory links these early rabies vaccination programs with the ill health of their sled dogs at the time.34

The federal government continued to recognize the outbreak as a “dog problem” requiring traditional quarantine measures. However, since rabies was apparently pooling in wildlife, other measures were necessary. The Alberta government, headed by the agriculture department’s chief veterinarian, Dr. A.A. Ballantyne, therefore also used wildlife “depopulation” (used in small programs in US states like Maine) as a means of reducing the overall disease pool. Although not intending to eliminate wildlife, depopulation as a program attempted to reduce the virus’s carrying capacity into settled districts. Ballantyne employed the program on a scale never undertaken before or since. Using only recently appreciated understandings of wildlife population cycles, and recognizing the disease’s vectors in fox, and potentially wolf, coyote, bear, and lynx populations, Ballantyne worked with the province’s forestry branch to employ about 170 trappers to work a twinned trapline to stop the disease’s southward spread.35 By 1953, their traplines extended some 5,000 miles in length that, if stretched out end to end, as the province’s media-releases emphasized, could connect Edmonton to St. John’s, Newfoundland.36 Within a year and a half, trappers killed whatever they could within their allotted lines. Although it is difficult to enumerate with certainty, the province reported that its hired trappers had trapped, shot, or poisoned some 54,000 foxes, 45,000 coyotes, 5,000 wolves, 9,850 lynx, 3,440 bears, 670 skunks, and 64 cougars.37 By 1954, a concurrent cull in southern districts of the province hunted another 60,000 to 80,000 coyotes.38 Using relatively new pellet strychnine guns and cyanide capsules, and now versed in medical knowledge on the safe handling of wildlife, even the roughest employed trapper was fully drawn into a High Modern, state-directed wildlife control effort.39

The government expert provided leadership and coordinated the state’s intergovernmental response to the crisis. Government press releases, radio and newspaper stories, and the widely circulated 1953 information brochure, “Rabies,” all written by Ballantyne himself, communicated the tenets of High Modernism. The brochure’s text and illustrations emphasized the role of the scientific expert in diagnosing suspected cases. The text provided surprising detail on the disease’s epidemiology (specifying the difference between “rage” and “dumb” strains of rabies in animals), and protocols for wardens, farmers, and even the province’s hired trappers to follow when handling suspect animals. Authorities were to segregate for two weeks a dog showing odd behaviour, handle carcasses of destroyed suspected animals with rubber gloves, pack heads in leak-proof containers, and dispatch them with brains intact to the Lethbridge, Alberta, provincial veterinarian laboratory. The brochure insisted that as a matter of course, all dogs should be kept on leash; they were also to be vaccinated. And in cases where suspected dogs were destroyed, their carcasses were to be buried deeply so that other animals could not consume them as carrion.40

The agriculture department concurrently controlled and quarantined dogs in large urban communities far from the source of infection. In Edmonton and Calgary, veterinarians, physicians, and nurses led publicity campaigns to promote annual dog and cat licensing programs, as well as to encourage owners to voluntarily have their animals vaccinated. The rabies scare certainly helped authorities tighten urban licensing programs. They also more effectively rounded up, pounded, and destroyed strays within communities. Perhaps most importantly, the 1952–56 period shifted popular understandings, if not misgivings, about wildlife in urban areas. Wild animals were explicitly understood as potential carriers of rabies. Medical authorities, reaching for the first time many rural, First Nations, and Metis communities in the early 1950s, similarly sharpened sensibilities toward wildlife as a potential medical threat. By May 1953, veterinarian experts had briefed thousands of Albertans at information sessions; many had heard of “an increase in rabies among lynx,” a “rabid fox” cornering a Fort Vermilion farmer, a “queer bear” roaming near Keg River (“queer” connoting at the time abnormal behaviour in the animal), moose at Upper Hay River acting strangely, and even suspect mice biting trappers’ toes in their beds.41 Experts in Calgary, Edmonton, and Banff also stressed how the fox rabies could be carried by wild birds and animals, meaning that, effectively, all wildlife could be understood as wild viral carriers. Lethbridge laboratory testing further demonstrated that virtually all forms of wildlife had been affected by the northern rabies, including beaver, fox, coyote, wolves, bear, lynx, moose, rabbit, cats, dogs, cows, and pigs (see Figure 8.2).42 The potential disease pool, then, was massive, as suggested in a news report, ghostwritten by Ballantyne himself, that “Cow, Bear, Fox are Stricken; Proven Rabid Animals Total 57.”43

In community halls and church basements, nurses, doctors, and veterinary authorities used persuasive visual evidence in slide presentations and films to drive home the point. By the end of information meetings, authorities urged those attending to pick up rifles and shoot any coyote or wolf on sight. Such experts also had on hand for distribution, free of charge, modern “coyote getter” traps and strychnine bait equipment. By Ballantyne’s own admission, the information sessions were to visually and even emotionally move audiences. Whatever its traumatic consequences, Ballantyne included an 8-minute 1929 Britannia film (long out of circulation but reprinted for the purpose) in his travelling information settings. For viewing only when “a medical doctor, public health nurse or veterinarian is in attendance,” the footage showed a rabies-infected child in the United States six hours before his death from the disease. It “isn’t pleasant to look at but on the other hand it isn’t too gruesome,” Ballantyne told the Deputy Minister of Agriculture approving the film’s purchase. If used “judiciously” the film could help “where people are not tying up their dogs or taking no action in poisoning coyotes.”44 Besides the showings in northern Alberta, the film was part of the information sessions in Lethbridge, Calgary, Red Deer, Edmonton, and Grand Prairie.45

8.2 Laboratory and clinical testing for rabies in Alberta wildlife, 1953–55, Annual Report of the Department of Agriculture of the Province of Alberta for the year 1955 (Edmonton; 1955).

8.3 The Alberta Agriculture Department’s visual depiction of the rabies “front” and the apparent success of its “wildlife depopulation” efforts to contain the outbreak. The white dots represent clinical and laboratory confirmations of rabid animals. Report of the Veterinary Services Branch, Annual Report of the Department of Agriculture of the Province of Alberta for the year 1955 (Edmonton; 1955).

The publicity around the epidemic, then, had a significant imaginative dimension (see Figure 8.3). It helped sustain a poison-baiting predator program in settled areas and northern affected places for years afterward. First Nations’ own understanding of wildlife, particularly of Arctic fox, was likely affected by such work.46 Education campaigns likely explain the popular suspicion that a bear, mauling one Banff family in 1958, could be thought of as rabid until proven otherwise.47 At the very least, the public education programs, and later medical and veterinarian studies confirming the cyclical nature of rabies in urban park species such as raccoon and other wild animal and bird populations, helped sharpen public sensibilities.48 It is no exaggeration to say that from 1953 onward, Canadians began to think of wildlife and wildlife in urban spaces, whatever their intrinsic and ecological value, as potentially rabid.

National Parks and metropolitan animals in Banff, Jasper, and Field

Central to rabies control campaigns was a mandatory leash law in both farm rural and town settings in northern Alberta. It was also promoted in urban areas such as Calgary and Edmonton. It was understood as absolutely essential in the National Parks. Mandatory leashing could prove to be “a blessing to get rid of a large number of stray dogs,” Ballantyne wrote at one point, pleased that some sixty strays had been killed in the Peace River townsite as a precaution by September 1953. He believed that such rabies control would help rid problematic strays from all areas of the province, as “this could apply to most cities, towns and villages in Alberta.”49

In Fort Vermilion, where the leash law was particularly enforced by RCMP and forest rangers, and especially among sled dogs within the community, however, mandatory leashing challenged longstanding relationships between domestic dogs, farmer/trapper populations, and the comparatively large numbers of wild animals that thrived in the forest edge within settled environments. In a region where only up to half of land was being taxed and only half of that was actually in cultivation, these northern spaces had much room for large populations of wild animals, including coyotes, wolves, and bears.50 Dogs in Fort Vermilion and in the outlying farm community went largely off leash in such circumstances. They kept wild animals out of farm and town properties; off-leash dogs accompanied and protected children walking to school in the morning. The roaming domesticate was, as a government appointee in the Fort Vermilion area pointed out – complaining of the leash law now applied in his environs – central to life in these settlements. “Farmers want their dogs free, because dogs keep coyotes and bears and other dogs away from their farmsteads, because dogs keep livestock where farmers intend them to stay, because trained dogs watch for hawks and other birds ready to pounce on chickens.”51

But nowhere was the debate about the “free roaming” domestic more acute than in Canada’s western National Parks. News of the positive rabies diagnosis in Fort Fitzgerald, though actually distant from any of the southern National Parks in Alberta, was sent immediately in a circular letter to all western parks superintendents in 1952, along with an American information pamphlet on the characteristics and epidemiology of rabies.52

The circular’s arrival at Jasper deeply alarmed townsite officials. When the Alberta government extended its “quarantine” zone north to the 55th parallel by early 1953, ordering all dogs leashed or chained, and vaccinated, the superintendent understood that his park, closest to the affected area, was most vulnerable to infection if the virus escaped such measures. He immediately asked Dr. B.I. Love, the superintendent and veterinarian expert at Elk Island National Park, to head up a control program for Jasper. Love had already taken measures to protect domestic and wild animals at his own park, including a coordinated trapline system. He circulated a lengthy report on the disease’s manifestations in dogs, cats, horses, and wild animals, as well as brief summaries of the behaviour of rabid foxes in northern Alberta. Love also stressed the importance of preserving and sending heads of suspected animals to the province’s veterinarian service for testing.53

Jasper wardens and the RCMP began rounding up and destroying strays within the park, a policy encouraged in the other parks nearby, including Yoho and Banff.54 The superintendent also ordered that wolves, coyotes, and foxes be destroyed. Wardens were to shoot on sight such animals, especially around settled spaces, and “special efforts must be taken to destroy any of these animals which have become tame and are accustomed to feed on refuse near wardens’ cabins.”55 With a mandatory vaccination program now planned, park gate staff demanded from visitors to see a recently issued certificate indicating that a dog or cat entering the park had been vaccinated in the previous six months. In the case of dogs, owners were required to purchase a park licence (reduced to a $1) for their animal; and owners of cats and dogs were made aware of the rule that they could not be off leash at any time.56

By February 1953, Ottawa’s rabies control committee had advised the National Parks branch to reanimate a long-dormant leash law for all resident dogs and order their mandatory vaccination. Such vaccines, supplied either by the American Lederle Laboratory in the United States or Toronto’s Connaught Laboratories, benefited from recent breakthroughs in attenuating live rabies strains, and delivering it in three rather than multiple doses.57 Dr. Love accordingly headed up the parks’ vaccination program, initially sending some 400 doses of vaccine to Yoho by rail from Vancouver. He coordinated dates to administer the vaccine thereafter at Jasper, Field, Radium Hot Springs, and Banff. In the town of Banff, the mandatory vaccine program in fact went a long way to better implementing the licensing program, long on the books but often overlooked by pet owners. There was immediately a 72 per cent increase in dog licensing when owners followed the mandatory vaccination under Love’s supervision.58

All dog owners presented their pooches at the appointed time for the first of three vaccines. For Yoho, the park superintendent prepared his own park’s publicity for the mandatory vaccination, and included cats, “due to the fact that many persons in western Canada have been bitten by rabid cats.”59 In February 1953, Love vaccinated some 40 dogs in that town alone;60 36 received their third vaccination in August.61

In Banff, there were many more dogs. The mandatory vaccination program caught the attention of the Calgary Herald, which carried front-page coverage, including a photograph of dogs lining up for treatment (see Figure 8.4). “Big dogs, little dogs, dogs with pedigrees and dogs without,” the Calgary Herald reported, “in fact all dogs” made their way to Banff’s warden equipment depot on the Saturday of the first of three vaccines. About 200 dogs were vaccinated on the first day.62 This “veritable parade of local canines – all on leashes, chains or bits of string,” waited about 45 minutes for Love’s vaccination, the Crag and Canyon, Banff’s own local newspaper, reported.63

8.4 The Calgary Herald’s coverage of Banff’s mandatory dog vaccination program, February 23, 1953. Courtesy of Glenbow Archives.

Vaccination was one thing. Keeping dogs leashed and cats indoors, however, was another. The related order that “no dogs are to be allowed to run free and must remain on a leash or otherwise confined. No movement of dogs into the park will be allowed” was more difficult to see through.64 Often accompanying tourists with the advent of the automobiles in the park system, dogs and cats had fit problematically into the wild animal patina developed in the National Parks, especially in town settings. Licensing regulations were harsh against domesticated animals from the start, since from an official perspective they threatened the sanctuary offered to wildlife in parks. Quite simply, the domesticated animal ran amok in paradise. A 1946 park regulation was clear: dogs found chasing game were to be shot on sight by wardens. Specific breeds could not be licensed in the National Park system: “any breed termed as a hunter, such as police, husky, Airedale, hound or crosses of any such breed,” could not be licensed for Canada’s park system at all, since these breeds were suspected of making the greatest impact on resident wildlife.65

There is little evidence that wardens applied earlier legislation against certain breeds or even interfered a great deal with dog owners, especially those arriving in summer as tourist pet owners. But with the rabies threat in 1953, parks branch officials resolved not to discriminate between hunting and other dog breeds, since “under conditions of freedom, almost any dog follows a natural instinct to hunt” and to apply the controls against them without exception, by implication meaning that all dogs would require greater control and leashing within the park at all times.66

The crisis certainly raised to a head the need to better control cats, largely ignored altogether by parks officials and tolerated only because townspeople insisted on bringing them with them to their park lifestyle. Traditionally viewed as inappropriate in the parks, cats were licensed only at a rate set intentionally high – a whopping $5 a year – to deter town citizen cat ownership altogether. By 1953, all admitted that the high licence fee had no deterrent effect; Banff officials had stopped enforcing cat licensing altogether,67 and town residents simply saw the fee as unjust and usually did not buy one. All the same, since it was still seen that cats “are generally hunters and in the vast majority of cases are a menace to bird life and small mammals,” parks officials still saw licensing as a means of limiting cat numbers. Initially, it was thought prudent to allow only one cat licence per household, a view later changed to two, and the cat licence fee was dropped to a still relatively high fee of $3.68

The Calgary Herald, reporting on the vaccination, however, caught the spirit of the urgency of the measures. It noted that a 24-hour watch was in effect at Banff’s townsite for rabid animals; coyotes were being culled, and Elk Island National Park was maintaining a five-man trapline of some 75 miles through its woodlands to depopulate it of potential wild carriers.69 In Yoho, the chief warden reported six coyotes shot on sight along the cordon sanitaire it had established near Field townsite, “under instructions as precautionary measure against possible means of spreading rabies.”70 Wolf and coyote culling, mostly through trapping but also through poisoning, was carried largely near settlements, as they “might be a possible danger should rabies develop in the wildlife in the park.”71

The Problem of Off-Leash Dogs and Cats

The fundamental problem was, however, that despite leash laws on the books, wardens had long not enforced them and town residents had grown accustomed to flouting them in Canada’s parks. Wardens back to 1943 acknowledged their concern that resident dogs, especially, were running free and doing considerable damage to wildlife. Unlike the tourist’s dog, one warden stated, it was resident dogs, “those whose permanent homes are in or near one of the parks [that] do much more harm throughout the year if permitted to run at large.” He stated that it was not necessary to demonstrate that they ran deer, bear, and other large animals, since everyone knew that they did. In writing yet more instructions to wardens to clamp down on the situation, he pointed out that unleashed dogs were able to “chase small mammals or birds, to find and destroy birds’ nests, to alarm visitors or to cause other mischief.”72 However, by the eve of the outbreak, there is every indication that whatever official sanctions existed against animals roaming free, there was little control over Banff’s dog populations. Culturally wired into Banff life was a tradition of owning dogs and allowing them to roam.

Whatever officials wanted, dog owners rarely curbed their animals’ freedom. In 1951, before the rabies outbreak, a concerned citizen was peeved by the “large number of dogs running loose in Banff and out of control . . . upsetting garbage, running and chasing the deer and even attacking people.” The same citizen reported many individuals breeding dogs and raising puppies for sale to other Banff citizenry in a largely underground trade.73 In 1953, now with rabies a new threat to wildlife, a member of the Banff Advisory Council was frank in admitting that “a large number of people” in Banff “were not co-operating in the control measure.” He said that “previous to now all dogs in the townsite have been running at large” and wardens who might have applied the leash law tended to return dogs “to the owners with an apology, rather than having the owners prosecuted.”74

In 1954, the Banff superintendent continued the policy of returning loose dogs and charging owners rather than impounding their pooches.75 The town’s position was to simply fine dog owners after impounding and returning off-leash dogs, without formally charging owners.76 Even by February 1955, the Banff Advisory council, composed of citizen leaders and the parks superintendent, received “a number of complaints” from dog owners when they received phoned rather than hand-delivered summonses to appear in court after wardens saw their dogs running at large.77 Many cited dog owners were clearly ready to test the law in the courts if need be since they had not had an opportunity of reviewing the evidence or contesting the citations handed them.

Even in 1957, one citizen complained about “the large number of dogs which are running loose in his particular area of the townsite,” to which the park superintendent assured him that “wardens now have a drive on to eliminate this nuisance.”78 The superintendent at Yoho found Field residents initially non-compliant in the rabies control measure, to the point where “there have been several dogs roaming unrestrained throughout the town.” In 1954, wardens attempting to enforce the leash law were contending with one woman who, despite their “verbal warnings” on 16, 18, and 19 February in 1954, still let her dog run at large. The wardens finally destroyed the dog on 23 February 1954.79 No less uncooperative was another woman whose dog was reported by wardens at large on 16 and 18 February, then sighted it at 9:10 a.m. on the 22nd. Wardens then made early morning and late evening sightings of the same dog running around town on the following 23, 24, 25, 27 February and 1 March.80 The superintendent records indicate just how many dogs were off leash in mountain park towns as wardens attempted to enforce the leash law. In Field, wardens sighted five dogs running free in town on 16 February alone.81 It is no surprise that the same dog owners letting dogs off leash were also reported on lists of dog owners not licensing their animals in Yoho as well.82

Having already taken the step of barring all domestic dogs and cats from restaurants and eateries in September 1952,83 the Banff Advisory Council supported the more robust application of leash laws. The superintendent initially briefed the council in October about the rabies outbreak and the threat it posed to parks wildlife. One councilman stated that “it was about time some dog control measures were adopted in the park.”84 The council even wondered whether the large numbers of crows and magpies in the town presented a possible rabies threat as carriers, suggesting that an organized cull should be mounted.85

But it was the cat populations in parks that were the first to really be affected by the turn toward greater regulation. The Banff council was alarmed that immediately after the rabies outbreak was announced, apparently with no warning to Banff citizens, wardens began enforcing the leash law against cats. The council was alarmed by reports that wardens were applying “the control measures to cats and proceeded with a program of capture and destroying cats running at large.”86 The Banff Crag and Canyon then fully blew the lid off the cat killing occurring.87 As an outraged citizen wrote in the Crag and Canyon, admittedly, “there were too many stray cats in Banff,” but she was aghast at the “high handed action of pursuing an order to shoot all cats” not on their owner’s property, “regardless of whether they were well-bred and valuable pets, or not.”88 The letter writer urged all Banff citizenry “who love justice,” whether they loved cats or not, to attend the next Banff Advisory Council meeting, where citizens were given a forum to air grievances with parks officials.

The very question of the “rights of cats and cat owners in a national park” thereafter began to animate council meetings.89 Similarly controversial was the council’s attempt to redress the high cat licensing fee, when the superintendent defending the rate said that it discouraged cat ownership in Banff “because cats were not welcome in the National Park.” The Crag and Canyon also reported parks officials’ comments that wardens had a right to enter any home in Banff and remove unlicensed pets from “door steps or even inside homes.” One “authority” had apparently even stated that since home owners were renters within the townsite “residents have no rights in this matter” to say otherwise.90

A townsperson attending one meeting claimed that wardens were using steel traps to take the free-roaming cats, “the speaker claiming to have found a cat in one . . . in an alley between Banff Avenue and Bear Street.”91 Although the parks superintendent disclaimed “all knowledge” that wardens were resorting to steel traps, he did admit that wardens were using “box traps” humanely before destroying the animals.92 That meeting coming to a close (“one of the liveliest and most heated public discussions of the year,” as the Crag and Canyon reporter attending it said93), the commissioner finally relented. He stated that “in view of the opposition which had developed,” he would delay cat measures until 1 April, in the meanwhile “giving the matter thorough publicity.”94 The time would permit cat owners to have their animals properly licensed, and after that wardens would “trap and destroy any unlicensed cats.” The Crag and Canyon ran a front-page article headlined “Cat Trapping Stops ’Til April 1st”95

However offensive the park’s measures against cats were, the Crag and Canyon largely defended the warden service’s clamp-down. Its editorial chided letter writers who sneered at the “brave wardens going after people’s pets with guns,” when pet owners should consider the horrid nature of rabies as a threat to human life if loosed within Banff’s wildlife population. The newspaper repeated what parks officials were stressing, that once introduced, rabies could be carried in all of the parks’ wildlife and bird populations, and wreak havoc on one of the parks’ most important tourist assets.96

But the newspaper could not stifle Elsie McCowan, a Banff citizen. She dismissed the park’s stance against strays simply as “a poor excuse to get rid of cats” in the park. She intended to license her own cat, but “I have no intention of keeping my pet chained up. So What?”97 And there is much evidence that, at least initially, many Banff citizens followed suit. In November 1953, a letter writer by the name of “Fed Up” noted that despite the recent announcement by the chief superintendent to see dogs leashed in the community, “the Town of Banff is still infested with free running cats both stray and otherwise . . . These cruel, slinking creatures are allowed to run free and stalk and kill hundreds of song birds and semi-tame squirrels every year.”98 The writer queried whether anyone else in the town had noticed that there were hardly any song birds to be heard. As far as the leash law, it “had long been a law in the park” but rarely enforced, and “there are probably very few Banff people, pet owner or not, who have not breathed a sigh of relief at the conspicuous absence of stray and loose dogs about the streets the past few weeks”99 as wardens now began enforcing it.

Rabies Controls and the New Urban Wild

The Crag and Canyon welcomed the enforcement of the leash law now being applied against cats. Its editor, Norman Luxton, was also relieved that there was an indication that wardens were taking more seriously the dog regulations. With dog owners “threatened with destruction of their pets if they were found unleashed,” the newspaper pointed out that the “streets devoid of dogs this week were testimony that residents paid careful heed to the warning.”100 By March 1953, the RCMP were at least making test cases out of six local residents running their dogs free by prosecuting them.101 Indeed, by 1958, wardens were no longer issuing just warnings. They were convicting with greater consistency and reporting at each Advisory Council meeting the numbers of warnings and prosecutions given to animal owners, and how many cats and dogs they destroyed. That year, one meeting learned that seven warnings were issued to animal owners, one resident was fined, and four unlicensed cats were destroyed. The administration had identified “habitual offenders” who would to be instructed to remove their animals from the park if they continued to allow them off leash.102 In the first months of 1958, wardens had “considerably tightened” the leash law, with three prosecutions and ten warnings given to dog owners allowing them freedom off the leash, and destroying “four loose cats.”103 In February, they issued eight warnings and three prosecutions for “loose animals in the townsite,”104 and in April, they destroyed one dog and two cats, and laid two charges against dog owners and four warnings.105 When the council took up the case of a woman walking her dog on leash being knocked down by two off-leash dogs, the superintendent reassured members that “the problem of dogs roaming the streets has been considerably reduced,” and that wardens would be instructed to enforce the regulations “more severely.”106 The superintendent was likely anxious to see his wardens doing the job before some citizens did it for them. At least one Banff citizen seems to have poisoned two dogs, likely running off leash, in the townsite in 1957.107 Between the last months of 1958 to 1960, wardens consistently enforced the leash law. Convictions were highest in winter months, when dog owners likely ran their dogs free instead of walking them. But the overall decline in convictions in summer months suggests that dog owners, in particular, were responding to the new requirement108 (see Figure 8.5). By 1960, when there were 3,000 year-round residents at Banff, its summer population grew to 18,000. There were now 223 licensed dogs and 220 licensed cats; and perhaps 3,266 “transient” dogs and cats brought by tourists into the park, practically all of them procuring park licences.109

8.5 Dog and Cat control in Banff, 1958–60. Compiled from Banff Advisory Council Minutes, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 966, File B155, parts 5-8. Library and Archives Canada.

The citation written to a dog owner in the period suggests the new expectations. In one of its only letters written as a warning in 1958 to a Field resident, the superintendent pointed out that “your dog running at large has been the source of many complaints. Yesterday afternoon at about 5:15, I witnessed your dog chasing a deer. The deer crashed through a fence causing injury and suffering to the deer, and extensive property damage to a neighbour’s fence. This cannot be tolerated in a park.”110 By the 1960s, the warden service had clearly raised the issue of dogs “worrying” the deer within the townsite.111 It became something of a celebrated case in Field when a young fawn “was savaged by dogs in the Township” and the superintendent appealed to the public to identify the dogs in question in order to prosecute their owners.112

But leashing dogs likely brought in train numerous human ecological changes to townsites. Dogs enjoying their liberty had run out deer. They had eliminated most elk in towns like Banff for decades, even when their numbers rose elsewhere in the park. Because they were pack animals and could hold some of their own against large dog populations, there seems to have been a “heavy” coyote population of likely around twenty-five animals in Banff by 1951. They were “harassing and probably destroying mule deer” seen in the townsite and the golf course. “These deer are an attraction for visitors and it is very desirable that the small population, not in excess of twenty scattered animals” were protected from coyote that year.113 Soon after, eleven coyotes were shot by rangers. However, coyotes likely maintained at best a small “resident” presence throughout its history and it was likely the large number of dogs roaming Banff townsite that kept coyote numbers so low and mule deer numbers miniscule. Indeed, there were only eleven reported sightings of such deer – and none of white-tailed – by rangers in 1953 while dogs still ran off leash in large numbers;114 elk was nonexistent in the townsite, whereas the animals could be sighted in numbers of 250 and more in the Ya Ha Tinda area in March of that year, 39 in Cascade in November, and 65 at Bankhead in April.115 Moose were seen only as close as the Bow Valley, but not in town at all. There were about 16 black bear sighted at the Banff dump.116

As the leash law was more regularly enforced, wildlife not harassed by free-roaming domestic dogs appeared in larger numbers in town. In 1957, at least one property owner in Banff felt the Banff townsite should pay for “repairs to property damaged by big game.”117 The Advisory Council soon asked for the Department’s policy “regarding property damaged by wild animals,” and that the question was not dismissed outright likely reflects some of the changing human and wildlife ecology of town life.118

A growing problem with greater dog control was that coyotes now enjoyed greater liberty in Banff.119 By 1958, the Banff Advisory Council had received “several” complaints regarding the “annoyance caused by coyotes.” The council took from the reports that the animals were “infesting the town in considerable numbers.” They usually came into the town at night and went into backyards looking for food, “and when one of them starts to howl he seems to set off all the others, they thus cause a good deal of annoyance to the residents of the town throughout the night.” They had apparently grown in such numbers that they were, ironically, attacking dogs tied up out of doors during the night.120 In 1959, the park service had shifted from selective culling (requesting to kill a certain number of animals) into believing that “there is only one course of action to be taken to reduce the number of coyotes in and around the townsite and that is to destroy them.” The methods to be adopted: strychnine and shooting.121 Coyotes now “roaming the streets of Banff” near the Bow River were so prevalent during the night and early morning that Banff’s citizens were in an uproar; a persistent rumour, disavowed by parks officials but given credence from the Crag and Canyon, was that a wolf was also ranging within the townsite as well.122 The newspaper even reported that mothers along Cave Avenue were keeping preschool children indoors “for fear they will be attacked by coyotes which are roaming the area.” One resident on Cave Avenue even saw a pack of six coyotes “feeding on the carcass of a deer which they had dragged onto the street in front of her house.”123

The other, obvious issue, was more threatening: a growing “nuisance” bear population. Now a “much discussed problem,” bears were upsetting garbage containers along town alleys, having expanded their frequentation of the nearby dump.124 It was indeed in 1959 when the parks branch began more assiduously prosecuting “residents or park visitors molesting or feeding the bears.”125 They likely needed to do so. That year, youths in town used firecrackers to startle a black bear likely nosing around garbage for food, causing it to crash through a fence on Lynx Street.126

Bears and coyotes were only a part of a larger, complex, wildlife invasion. Banff citizenry were contending with a sizable and growing elk population in town limits. In 1955, the Banff Advisory Council was concerned that “a large bull elk with a deformed antler has been roaming the streets,”127 and in the next year it took up the unsubstantiated report that “someone had been attacked by an elk” near a local establishment.128 When the national park began to slaughter elk to reduce the park’s overall herd numbers in 1958 and 1959, it was slaughtering animals right within town limits. Citizens were “offended” on more than one occasion having to step over the slaughter offal wardens left on Banff streets.129 Wardens began formally culling problem elk populations in 1959. It is indicative that they killed no fewer than 36 animals in the Banff townsite that year: 12 adult males, 12 adult females, 3 male calves and 4 female calves. There were another 5 males and 2 females killed on the Banff Springs Hotel golf course.130

Conclusion

Scholars have only begun to examine the 1952–56 rabies crisis in northern Canada.131 In the present historiography, Alberta was “allegedly threatened” by wolf rabies in this outbreak, and the undue fear prompted National Parks administrators to carry out intensive wolf and coyote culling and “blanket” Jasper and Banff with poison.132 Predator control in parks like Banff, moreover, is perceived to have “owed more to lupophobia than hydrophobia. Humans appeared far more frenzied than wolves” in the response of officials to rid the parks of the rabies threat in its wild canid carriers.133 However, scholars risk obscuring the reality of the outbreak and even its magnitude by such an approach.134 The 1952–56 outbreak was the first of many rabies outbreaks vectoring from wildlife populations, and, in the subsequent years, vectoring from wildlife within urban and settled spaces. Campaigns to control its various manifestations arguably developed a new relationship between humans with wildlife, especially in urban environments. Although even at the time Ballantyne’s program of wildlife depopulation, on such a large scale, was questioned in terms of its efficacy, it was likely his agriculture department’s widespread publicity about the threat of wildlife rabies that impacted popular imaginations and, in turn, understandings of wildlife. In urban and rural areas, information campaigns had reinforced a very different conceptualization of wildlife as a potential disease threat.

For better or worse, this medicalized understanding of wildlife suggests some of the ways humans have accommodated, if at arm’s length, wild creatures in their settled spaces. National Park towns present an early example of the new urban wild that became idealized in postwar planning to provide more ecologically diverse town and urban spaces. Banff and other National Park towns located within wildlife refuges and sanctuaries were, ironically, very different places in periods when dogs still ran off leash. Since leash laws and restrictions were rarely applied to residents and high-paying tourists during summer months, dogs likely shaped ecologies of these mountain town wonderlands. Rabies changed all that. The 1952–56 crisis made dog and cat control a priority for the Banff Advisory Council and the chief superintendent. Wardens finally enforcing leash laws, however, inadvertently prompted an ecological transformation in the same towns. Undoubtedly the larger numbers of deer, elk, bear, and coyote that made their way into townsites changed tourist and resident expectations. The myriad of postwar postcards and tourist pictures of deer, elk, and even bears within Banff, Jasper, Field, or Waterton suggests what visitors came to take for granted in a National Park experience. Now even in populated centres, tourists encountered wild animals right at the very doors of their town hotels and within town green spaces.

But that poses further questions about similar wildlife invasions in other urban areas. New and growing wildlife populations within urban spaces in the postwar period have enlarged potential disease pools. As a recent study indicates, urban planning that encourages ecological diversity has prompted the setting aside and management of more greenbelts, parks, and walking trails. That has increased the potential pooling of rabies, West Nile virus, and bovine tuberculosis within newly re-established and very urbanized wild animal populations. Humans now in “greener” cities are, in fact, at greater risk of diseases pooling in coyotes, raccoons, skunks, and red foxes, either through their direct contacts with these animals or their own pets’.135 Ironically, while rabies vaccination and control legislation in the twentieth century has led to a remarkable decline in dog rabies cases, wildlife rabies cases have increased significantly.136 The very large population densities of such species as raccoons in urban contexts, likely far greater than in their rural and “wild” environments, allow for significant rabies pooling within urban populations that pose threats to humans and non-urban wildlife populations.137

Authorities, then, undoubtedly contained rabies by the mid-1950s in Alberta. But in so doing, they did much to change attitudes and understandings of wildlife in urban and rural settings. Alan MacEachern argues that National Parks always balance use with preservation, and the greater use of natural spaces required greater management;138 rabies control as part of that management entailed a new imagination of wildlife within towns. In addition to greater predator control, the state promoted new public sensibilities to discourage feeding problematic “highway bum” bears now more prevalent in townsites; it tried to keep tourists from getting too close to highly dangerous elk and moose now showing up regularly in dog-controlled towns. And residents were now constantly reminded to mind their own business as they shared space with a greater variety of wildlife from skunks to red foxes ornamenting town life.139 Most metropolitan spaces now control domestic animals far more effectively than they have in the past. In many settings, that has only invited a new wildlife presence, and with it, a new complex relationship with wildlife-carried rabies at the very doorsteps, and within the mindsets, of Canadians in settled, town, and urban settings.

Notes

1 Library and Archives Canada (hereafter LAC), RCMP G Division to Mitchell, 16 February 1948, RG 17, vol. 4362, file 71, “Rabies 1946–1953,” f. 106380.

2 Horrific rabies outbreaks had occurred in eastern Europe during the war. Afterward, Hungary undertook a massive dog vaccination program. See Christopher J. Rutty, “Rabies Vaccines in Canada” (copy of paper provided to author), in Taking the Bite Out of Rabies: The Evolution of Rabies Management in Canada, ed. David Gregory and Rory Tinline (forthcoming), 14.

3 LAC, Ralph Williams to M. Barker, 9 January 1946, RG 17, vol. 4362, file 71, “Rabies 1946–1953,” f. 106333. Ibid., Charles Mitchell to R.D. Defries, 7 May 1947, f. 106352.

4 See E.E. Ballantyne’s overview of rabies in Alberta, where foxes, wolves, and coyotes were all responsible for biting animals and proved positive to rabies infection. Provincial Archives of Alberta (hereafter PAA), “Rabies” Memorandum by E.E. Ballantyne, in Rabies 1954 file, Acc. 67.31/629.

5 Rutty, “Rabies Vaccines in Canada”, 15–18. See Christopher J. Rutty, “Personality, Politics, and Canadian Public Health: The Origins of Connaught Medical Research Laboratories, University of Toronto, 1888–1917,” in Essays in Honour of Michael Bliss: Figuring the Social, ed. Alison Li, Elsbeth Heaman, and Shelley McKellar (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 273–303; a summative overview of the significance of the outbreak as “the most extensive enzootic of rabies ever known in Canada” happening in 1952–54 is provided by P.J.G. Plummer, “Rabies in Canada, with Special Reference to Wildlife Reservoirs,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 10 (1954): 767.

6 K.F. Wells, “The Rabies Menace in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Public Health 48 (1957): 239.

7 On government and science in the postwar period, see Stephen Bocking, “Science and Spaces in the Northern Environment,” Environmental History 12, no. 4 (2007): 867–94.

8 Karen Brown, Mad Dogs and Meerkats: A History of Resurgent Rabies in Southern Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011): 2–6; John Douglas Blaisdell, A Frightful, But Not Necessarily Fatal, Madness: Rabies in Eighteenth-Century England and English North America (PhD diss., Iowa State University, 1995). On treating rabies, see Susan D. Jones, Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

9 See the disease’s description offered by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Rabies Bulletin, http://www.cdc.gov/rabies/symptoms/.

10 See Philip Howell, “Between the Muzzle and the Leash: Dog-Walking, Discipline and the Modern City,” in Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories, ed. Peter Atkins (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 228–29.

11 “Rage” and “dumb” rabies are described by E.E. Ballantyne, “Rabies Control Programme in Alberta,” Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 20, no. 1 (February 1956): 21–30.

12 Rutty, “Rabies Vaccines in Canada,” 1–10.

13 Ballantyne, “Rabies Control Programme in Alberta,” 21–30.

14 PAA, Jackson to Ballantyne, 2 February 1953, in “Rabies – General 1952–53,” Acc. 67/31/432. Plummer provides an ecological context to the regions above and below the 55th parallel, heavily populated with wildlife. Plummer, “Wildlife Reservoirs,” 768.

15 LAC, “Interdepartmental Meeting” Memorandum, 29 December 1952, RG 17, Department of Health, Rabies – General, 311-R1-1, vol. 1, ff. 116–17. The federal rabies committee minutes are found in LAC, RG 29, Department of Health and Welfare, Rabies, 1953-1077, vol. ٢٩٧٠, file 851-4-094.

16 PAA, Dr. R. Rankin Report, 22 September 1952, Fort Vermilion Meeting, Rabies 1954 file, Acc. 67.31/629.

17 See Ralph H. Lutts, “The Trouble with Bambi: Disney’s ‘Bambi’ and the American Vision of Nature,” Forest and Conservation history 36, no. 4 (1992): 150–71; Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife in Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

18 PAA, E.E. Ballantyne to C.E. Longman, 26 September 1952, C.E. Longman, Deputy Minister of Agriculture Files, Acc. 67.31/437.

19 PAA, Ranger Powell telegram to A.A. Ballantyne, 19 December 1952, Rabies 1954 file, Acc. 67.31/629.

20 Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys, Mad Dogs & Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830–2000; Historical Perspectives of Rabies in Europe & the Mediterranean Basin, and Rabies (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Eric T. Jennings, “Confronting Rabies and its Treatments in Colonial Madagascar, 1899–1910,” Social History of Medicine 22, no. 2 (August 2009): 263–82. On the ways that scientific and medical intervention offered hope in rabies outbreaks, see Bert Hansen, “America’s First Medical Breakthrough: How Popular Excitement about a French Rabies Cure in 1885 Raised New Expectations for Medical Progress,” American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (April 1998): 373–418.

21 Lianne McTavish and Jingjing Zheng, “Rats in Alberta: Looking at Pest-Control Posters from the 1950s,” Canadian Historical Review 92, no. 3 (2011): 515–46.

22 Rutty, “Rabies Vaccines in Canada,” 15–16. It was the position of Charles Mitchell, the Chief Veterinarian officer in the Department of Agriculture, that “it is quite true that the disease has found its way into the wild animal population but this has resulted from the improper control of dogs.” LAC, Mitchell to A.F.W. Peart, 6 September 1950, RG 17, Department of Health, Rabies – General, 311-R1-1, vol. 1, ff. 172–73.

23 The approach taken in Canada was laid out in the provincial and federal plan of action, 13 January 1953, including dog control, vaccine, and “wildlife depopulation.” LAC, “Report of Meeting of Federal and Provincial Officials Held, Edmonton, Alberta, RE: Rabies Control, 13 January 1953,” RG 17, Department of Health, Rabies – General, 311-R1-1, vol. 1.

24 Howell, “Between the Muzzle and the Leash,” 226–33.

25 Amanda Anne Margaret Sauermann, “Regulating and Representing Vagrant Curs and Purebred Dogs in Toronto, 1867–1910” (MA thesis, Department of History, Carleton University, 2010), 27–28.

26 Ibid., 27–28, 42–43.

27 Wells suggests that control measures in Canada until June 1952 “were based solely upon dog control with elimination of strays.” K.F. Wells, “Control of Rabies,” Canadian Journal of Comparative Medicine 18 (1954): 305.

28 Sauermann, “Regulating and Representing Vagrant Curs,” 49–50.

29 Ibid., 51

30 Ibid., 72–73.

31 Rutty, “Rabies Vaccines in Canada,” 4–6. On breakthroughs in chloroform-killed vaccines in the 1930s in the US, see Jones, Valuing Animals, 131–33. A contemporary account of the new fixed virus vaccines being developed for dogs in Hungary and Japan is offered in “The Etiology and Prevention of Rabies,” The British Medical Journal, 14 June 1924, 1059–60. Canadian authorities following quarantine in such circumstances were emulating their British counterparts who effectively controlled the virus with a six-month quarantine of all dogs coming through its ports. See K.F. Wells, “Control of Rabies,” 303.

32 Rutty, “Rabies Vaccines in Canada,” 10.

33 LAC, James. G. Gardiner order, 16 January 1953, RG 17, Department of Health, Rabies – General, 311-R1-1, vol. 1, ff. 110–11. Wells cites this “first major change in Canada’s rabies control policy”: “Control of Rabies,” 307; Wells, “Rabies Menace in Canada,” 240.

34 See Qikiqtani Truth Commission: Community Histories, 1950–1975 (Iqaluit: Inhabit Media Inc., 2013), 27, 76, 143.

35 The decision to create a “crash” in the wildlife populations over a two-year period was made on 17 January 1953: see PAA, Minutes of Meeting, Rabies 1954 file, Acc. 67.31/629. Wells suggests that “the part played by normal wild life cycles in rabies spread is fully appreciated” in reducing wildlife “below the threshold level” to carry the disease. Wells, “Control of Rabies,” 308–9.

36 PAA, Ballantyne to Childs, Rabies Report Ending February 21, 1953; PAA, Rabies – Health of Animals 1952–53, 67.31/439; and PAA, “Rabies Control in Alberta” prepared by the Alberta Central Rabies Control Committee, Agriculture and Veterinarian Services Boxes, Acc. 69.67, file 4 of 4.

37 PAA, Department of Forestry Returns from Trappers, 1953–54; “Rabies Control in Alberta,” prepared by the Alberta Central Rabies Control Committee, Agriculture, Veterinarian Services Boxes, Acc. 69.67, file 4 of 4.

38 PAA, J.J. Ballantyne, “Rabies Control in Alberta” Media Release Article, 1954, p. 3, Agriculture, Veterinarian Services Boxes, Acc. 69.675, file 4.

39 High modernism is explored by Arn Keeling in ‘“A Dynamic, Not a Static Conception”: The Conservation thought of Roderick Haig-Brown,” Pacific Historical Review 71, no. 2 (2002): 239–68; Tina Loo, “Disturbing the Peace: Environmental Change and the Scales of Justice on a Northern River,” Environmental History 12, no. 4 (October 2007): 895–919; and Tina Loo, “People in the Way: Modernity, Environment, and Society on the Arrow Lakes,” BC Studies 142/143 (Summer/Autumn 2004): 161–96.

40 “Rabies,” Central Rabies Control Committee, Edmonton, January 1953. See also L.P. Gauthier, “Notes on Rabies Control, 7 February 1953,” distributed to forestry department trappers in northern Alberta, pp. 1–3, PAA, Acc. 1991.0270, box 61, file R3, vol. 1.

41 PAA, E.E. Ballantyne, Rabies Report Ending Week, May 23, 1953, PAA, Rabies – Health of Animals 1952–53, Acc. 67.31/439. On mice biting trappers’ toes, PAA, Ballantyne to Childs, 27 March 1953, Rabies Report for Week ending March 28, Rabies – Health of Animals 1952–53, Acc. 67.31/439.

42 PAA, Ballantyne to Longman, 15 April 1953, C.E. Longman, Deputy Minister of Agriculture Files, Acc. 67.31/437. For press reports appearing in newspapers, see “95 Rabies Cases Said Confirmed,” Edmonton Journal, 25 June 1953; “Anti-Rabies Vaccine Earmarked for the Arctic,” Calgary Herald, 23 June 1953; “Rabies Outbreak in Alberta Spreads to Edmonton Area,” Sudbury Star, 23 June 1953; “Albertans Treated Against rabies,” Edmonton Journal, 22 April 1953.

43 PAA, “Cow, Bear, Fox are Stricken; Proven Rabid Animals Total 57,” and “Rabid Fox, Bear Battle to Death on North Trail,” clippings in Fish and Wildlife Files, 1991/0270, box 61, file R3, vol. 1.

44 Ballantyne said, “It’ll be a very resolute individual who’ll get up at a public meeting after showing the film and oppose whether or both of above [tying up a dog or coyote culling]. These would be used in our educational meetings.” PAA, Ballantyne to Longman, 5 March 1953, C.E. Longman, Deputy Minister of Agriculture Files, Acc. 67.31/437. On the film’s earlier release by Britannia and its status as out of circulation, see PAA, H.R. Lamberton to Ballantyne, 24 February 1953, Film File, Acc. 67.37/557.

45 PAA, E.E. Ballantyne, Rabies Report for week ending April 11, 1953, PAA, Rabies – Health of Animals 1952–53, Acc. 67.31/439.

46 Hence the decline in Arctic fox consumption noted by Kassam, where “one respondent stated that he was concerned about rabies and therefore chooses not to eat the fox anymore.” Karim-Aly S. Kassam, Biocultural Diversity and Indigenous Ways of Knowing: Human Ecology in the Arctic (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2009), 138. Wells notes that in the Arctic “for 50 or 60 years rabies was known as ‘Wild Fox Disease.’” Wells, “Control of Rabies,” 306. Plummer, an epidemiologist with the federal government, believed that the northern rabies strains affected fox differently, creating a dumb (or amicable) behaviour that sometimes prompted foxes to run alongside dog teams. Trappers and other northerners saw them as “crazy animals.” Plummer, “Wildlife Reservoirs,” 771. Inuit now use “rabies” to understand their own observations of “crazy” fox behaviour and the disease’s epidemiology, particularly its cycling in fox and sled dog populations. See summation of testimony, Qikiqtani Truth Commission: Thematic Reports and Special Studies 1950–1975 (Iqaluit: Inhabit Media, 2013), 333–34; on subsequent outbreaks and the issue of sled dog vaccination, see Qikiqtani Truth Commission: Community Histories, 1950–1975 (Iqaluit: Inhabit Media, 2013), 27, 76, 143.

47 The head of the bear that killed a girl and mauled her mother in 1958 in Jasper was sent to Lethbridge “to determine whether it is rabid, a disease which swept through Alberta wildlife about four years ago.” “Jasper’s Killer Bear Bold Camp Scavenger,” Windsor Daily Star, 11 August 1958.

48 Seth P.D. Riley, John Hadidian, and David A. Manski, “Population Density, Survival, and Rabies in Raccoons in an Urban National Park,” Canadian Journal of Zoology 76 (1998): 1153–64.

49 PAA, Ballantyne to Longman, 25 September 1953, C.E. Longman, Deputy Minister of Agriculture Files, Acc. 67.31/437.

50 PAA, V. Breckenbridge, Chairman of the Agricultural Service Board of MD of Athabasca No. 103, 3 March 1953, Rabies – Health of Animals 1952–53, Acc. 67.31/439.

51 V. Breckenbridge, Chairman of the Agricultural Service Board of MD of Athabasca No. 103, 3 March 1953, PAA, Rabies – Health of Animals 1952–53, Acc. 67.31/439.

52 LAC, Winnipeg Depot (hereafter LAC-WD), Circular, 7 August 1952, Department of Resources and Development, Yoho Files, March 1952–December 1966, Health of Animals, Y210-1.

53 Ibid., 7 January 1953.

54 Ibid., J.H. Hutchinson to the Superintendent of Yoho, 18 March 1953, Y210-1

55 Ibid., J. Smart Circular Memorandum, 6 February 1953, P.2, Y201-1.

56 Ibid., J.R.B. Coleman to A.M.S. McGaw, Eastern Gateway, Banff, 17 February 1953, Y210-1. The policy endured as a problem in tourism, since many auto travellers did not anticipate the need to have dogs and cats vaccinated, and at least one Banff citizen could use the vaccination in the popular criticism of the federal government in the townsite: “If you bring any parliamentary pets to Banff, Mr. Government, don’t forget the anti-rabies vaccination rules.” Ernie Smith, “Mountain Lines,” Crag and Canyon, 23 May 1956. The need for a rabies certificate for cat and dog visitors had been made law in PC 1963-449. Resident dogs and cats were required to have vaccination in 1953; however, the vaccine required three doses. By 1956 an improved dog vaccine made a single annual rabies shot necessary for resident and visiting animals. Regulations were changed in PC 1956-712. In 1960, with rabies no longer a threat, the annual vaccination requirement was not enforced but applied only in the case of dogs and cats coming from rabies-infected areas. LAC, JRB Coleman letter, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 2131, file U229, part 2, f. 1403.

57 PAA, “A New Approach to the Control of Canine Rabies,” n.d., published by Lederer, in PAA Rabies 1954 file, Acc. 67.31/629. The switch from the “Pasteur method” to “fixed,” or phenol-killed vaccines in the 1920s, and finally to the avianized, “Flury” strain in vaccines, is described Robert D. Defries, The First Forty Years: 1914–1955, Connaught Medical Research Laboratories, University of Toronto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 119, 160, 232.

58 There were only 142 dogs licensed before the program; 200 dogs were licensed with the vaccine campaign. LAC-WD, J.R.B. Coleman to B.I. Love, 13 February 1953, Y210-1.

59 Ibid., Memorandum, “To All Dog and Cat Owners,” R.J.J. Steeves, 28 April 1953, Y210-1.

60 Ibid., “Dogs and Cats Inoculated on May 13th at Field,” Y201-1.

61 Ibid., “Dogs Inoculated at Field on August 6, 1953.” Y201-1.

62 “Precaution against Rabies: All Banff Dogs Treated in Free Vaccination,” Calgary Herald, 23 February 1953, 1 and 8.

63 “Banff Dogs Parade for 1st Vaccination,” Crag and Canyon, 27 February 1953, 1.

64 LAC-WD, R.J.J. Steeves, Superintendent, Yoho, 16 February 1953, Y210-1.

65 LAC-WD, National Park Dog License, Dogs and Cats, Acc. 1998-00796-0, box 137, file Y229, part 1.

66 LAC-WD, J.A. Hutchison letter to Acting Superintendent, 13 March 1953, Dogs and Cats, Acc. 1998-00796-0, box 137, file Y229, part 1. The change in policy didn’t agree with F.A. Bryant, superintendent in Kootenay, who saw hunting dogs as “more aggressive” and “natural killers.” He didn’t believe that controlling all dogs would be possible, since there “are times during severe weather when owners cannot exercise their dogs and the dog, when turned loose for exercise, will return to the owner within a few minutes. The hunting dogs are usually tougher and withstand more cold and hunt as soon as given liberty. Dogs in parks have a high nuisance value. . . . The larger the dog, the greater is his nuuisance value.” LAC, Bryant to Director, 20 March 1953, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 1665, file K210-1, part 1.

67 BIM Strong pointed out that “insofar as this Park is concerned . . . we are not enforcing the present cat licensing regulations nor is any action being taken toward disposing of presumably stray cats.” LAC, Strong to Chief Superintendent, 15 June 1953, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 166, file U229, part 1.

68 LAC-WD, J.A. Hutchison, Circular, 13 March 1953, Dogs and Cats, Acc. 1998-00796-0, box 137, file Y229, part 1. The regulations by 1959 did not specify how many cats a person owned; the licence fee was $3.00. dogs were licensed at $3.00, and unspayed bitches at $5.00; the park allowed for first offences but animals pounded the second time could have their licences cancelled and the animal destroyed or removed from the park. LAC, “Extracts from National Parks Game Regulations – Cats and Dogs” 1959, “Dogs and Cats – General” – RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 2131, file U229, part 2, f. 1430.

69 “Precaution against Rabies,” Calgary Herald, 23 February 1953, 8.

70 LAC-WD. T.G. Nelles, Chief Warden, Yoho, 29 April 1953, Y210-1.

71 Ibid.

72 LAC-WD, J. Smart, memorandum, “Re: Dogs Running at Large,” 12 December 1943, “Dogs & Cats,” Acc. 1998-00796-0, box U7, file Y229, part 1.

73 LAC-WD, Stamped 28 March 1951, “Dogs and Cats,” 1997-01159-X, box 111, file 229, part 1.

74 LAC-WD, 19 May 1953, Banff Advisory Council Minutes, Acc. 1997-01159-X, box 104, file 155, part 2.

75 LAC. Banff Advisory Council Meeting, 11 May 1954, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 966, file B155, part 5, p. 2.

76 LAC. Banff Advisory Council Meeting, 20 April 1954, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 966, file B155, part 5, p. 2.

77 LAC-WD, 6 February 1955, Banff Advisory Council Minutes, Acc. 1997-01159-X, box 104, file 155, part 2.

78 LAC. Banff Advisory Council Meeting, 12 November 1957, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 966, file B155, part 6, p. 4.

79 LAC-WD, J.J. Stevens memorandum, dated February 1954, Yoho Files, March 1952–December 1966, Y210-1.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid.

82 LAC-WD, “Dogs Which Have Not Been Licensed, 1954–55,” Yoho Files, March 1952–December 1966, Y210-1.

83 LAC-WD, 9 September 1952, Banff Advisory Council minute books, Acc. 1997-01159-X, box 104, file 155, part 2.

84 LAC-WD, 21 October 1952, Banff Advisory Council minute books, Acc. 1997-01159-X, box 104, file 155, part 2.

85 Ibid.

86 LAC-WD, R.W. Webster to Love, Elk Island, 13 March 1953, Y210-1.

87 Ibid.; “Banff Dogs Parade for 1st Vaccination,” Crag and Canyon, 27 February 1953, 1.

88 Letter, “In Defence of Cats,” Crag and Canyon, 27 February 1953.

89 LAC-WD, 17 February 1953, Banff Advisory Council minute books, Acc. 1997-01159-X, box 104, file 155, part 2.

90 “Public Furor Arises over Pets,” Crag and Canyon, 6 March 1953.

91 “Cat Trapping Stops ’Til April 1st,” Crag and Canyon, 13 March 1953.

92 LAC-WD, 17 February 1953, Banff Advisory Council minute books, Acc. 1997-01159-X, box 104, file 155, part 2.

93 “Public Furor Arises over Pets,” Crag and Canyon, 6 March 1953.

94 Ibid.

95 “Cat Trapping Stops ’Til April 1st.”

96 Editorial, “Pets and Predators in the Park, “Crag and Canyon, 27 February 1953.

97 “On Confining Cats,” Craig & Canyon, 20 March 1953.

98 “Fed Up,” Letter to the Editor, Crag and Canyon, 27 November 1953.

99 “Outcry against Restrictions Unreasonable,” Crag and Canyon, 6 March 1953.

100 “Pets and Predators in the Park,” Crag and Canyon, 27 February 1953.

101 “Dog Owners Prosecuted for Not Leashing Pets,” Craig & Canyon, 20 March 1953.

102 LAC. Banff Advisory Council Meeting, 10 June 1958, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 966, file B155, part 7, p. 3.

103 LAC, Banff Advisory Council Meeting, 21 January 1958, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 966, file B155, part 7, p. 4.

104 Ibid., 11 February 1958, p. 4.

105 Ibid., 8 April 1958, p. 3.

106 Ibid., 13 May 1958, p. 2.

107 Ibid., 12 February 1957, part 6, p. 2.

108 In the month of August, only two warnings were issued to dog owners and only one person was charged for running a dog unleashed. Ibid., Banff Advisory Council Meeting, 17 September 1959, p. 2.

109 LAC-WD, Superintendent to Kramer 1 February 1960, Health of Animals, Acc. 1997-01159-X, box 111, file 210-1, part 1.

110 LAC-WD, Warden letter to Mrs. M. McKinnon, 7 November 1958 Dogs and Cats, Acc. 1998-00796-0, box 137, file Y229, part 1.

111 LAC-WD, R. H. Kendall to Townsite Residents, Field, 22 May 1964, Dogs and Cats, Acc. 1998-00796-0, box 137, file Y229, part 1.

112 LAC-WD, R.H. Kendall, “Circular to Residents of Field,” 13 January 1965, Dogs and Cats, Acc. 1998-00796-0, box 137, file Y229, part 1.

113 LAC-WD, Herbert Green to Chief Park Warden, 12 October 1951, “Wolves,” Acc. 1997-01159-X, box 112, file 226, part 1.

114 LAC-WD, “Summary of Wildlife Observations, Banff National Park, 1952,” ‘Game Animals’ Files, Acc. 1997-01159-X, box 111, file 210, part 1.

115 Ibid.

116 Ibid.

117 LAC, Banff Advisory Council Meeting, 9 July 1957, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 966, file B155, part 6, p. 2.

118 Ibid., 11 July 1957, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 966, file B155, p. 2.

119 LAC, “Mr. Dempster informed Council that he has requested permission to destroy twenty of these animals,” Banff Advisory Council Meeting, 18 March 1958, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 966, file B155, p. 3.

120 LAC-WD, R.E. Edwards, to Mr. Dempster, 13 February 1958, “Wolves,” Acc. 1997-01159-X, box 112, file 266, part 1.

121 LAC-WD, B.I.M. Strong, to Superintendent, 8 December 1959, “Wolves,” Acc. 1997-01159-X, box 112, file 266, part 1.

122 “Coyotes Seen in the Town,” Crag and Canyon, 9 December 1959.

123 “Mothers Alarmed at Coyote Menace,” Crag and Canyon, 16 December 1959.

124 LAC, Banff Advisory Council Meeting, 13 May 1958, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 966, file B155, p. 5.

125 LAC, Alvin Hamilton’s letter to Banff Advisory Council, 30 September 1959, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 966, file B155.

126 “Bedevilled Bruin Batters Boards,” Crag and Canyon 5 August 1959, 1. See my “Films, Tourists, and Bears in the National Parks: Managing Park Use and the Problematic ‘Highway Bum’ Bear in the 1970s,” in A Century of Parks Canada, 1911–2011, ed. Claire Elizabeth Campbell (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2011), 153–78.

127 LAC, Banff Advisory Council Meeting, 7 June 1955, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 966, file B155, p. 2.

128 Ibid., 7 February 1956, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 966, file B155, part 6, p. 2.

129 Ibid., 10 December 1957, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 966, file B155, part 6, p. 3; 21 January 1958, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 966, file B155, part 6, p. 2.

130 LAC, Elk Slaughter, December 1958–January 1959, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 513, file B299, part 4.

131 John Sandlos does not provide this context for the NWT poison baiting programs, in Hunters at the Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007), 206.

132 Tina Loo suggests that the parks department managers “blanketed Jasper and Banff with poison” in States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 159.

133 Karen Jones, Wolf Mountains: A History of Wolves along the Great Divide (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002), 134.

134 Plummer suggests statistics should be read as indicating disease pools: “When an infected animal is demonstrated in a district, this is looked upon as an infected area and very few other specimens are taken.” Plummer, “Wildlife Reservoirs,” 771.

135 Mike Dunbar, Ray T. Sterner, and Shylo Johnson, “Impacts of Wildlife Diseases in Urban Environments,” Proceedings of the 12th Wildlife Damage Management Conference (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2007), 256, https://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/nwrc/publications/07pubs/dunbar073.pdf; see also Catherine A. Bradley and Sonia Altizer, “Urbanization and the Ecology of Wildlife Diseases,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22, no. 2 (2006): 95–102.

136 Dunbar et. al., “Impacts of Wildlife Diseases,” 256.

137 Bradley and Altizer, “Urbanization and the Ecology of Wildlife Diseases,” 100.

138 Alan MacEachern, Natural Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada 1935–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 14–19. Ian McTaggart Cowan suggested the need for management in the growing complexity of Banff wildlife populations in “The Role of Ecology in the National Parks,” in Canadian Parks in Perspective, ed. J.G. Nelson (Montreal: Harvest House, 1970), 321–28.

139 See my “Films, Tourists, and Bears,” 153–78.