This remote Alaska island is home to hundreds of feral cattle. But should it be?

Alaska does not count cows as a native species, but on far-flung Chirikof Island, in the Kodiak Archipelago, feral cattle dominate the harsh landscape.

It’s a hard life out there for an unmanaged herd of roughly 2,000 cows, though, and some have wondered whether the island, trampled by hooves and sitting within the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, should instead be returned to seabirds that could desperately use more habitat.

One of those people is Hakai Magazine writer and editor Jude Isabella, who wrote about what she called “The Republic of Cows” in a recent story. With an open mind, Isabella traveled the Chirikof last summer to see the cows for herself.

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The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jude Isabella: I’m terrified of large herbivores. Cows and bulls and horses, and even llamas. I find them all a little bit terrifying and unpredictable. When I do things outside, I’m in British Columbia, and I’m worried about grizzly bears and black bears and cougars and that kind of thing. On Chirikof, when we first see these cattle, we see this one bull that keeps trotting closer and closer to us, and he’s quite large. You turn around, and there’s a herd running towards, I’m thinking, they’re running towards us. And you know, they’re pretty loud. At some point, and it really wasn’t that close, although my heart’s pounding, they turn 90 degrees and just go off somewhere else, and the bull joins them. And, of course, like, “Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” I guess not. But, you know, it was funny, because other people had mentioned, when they knew I was going there, some people bring a gun, because they can be very aggressive. And we did bring pepper spray. You know, I was carrying it, I was ready to use it. But we didn’t need it. We really didn’t.

Casey Grove: That’s interesting. It probably makes you feel better to have it, though, I imagine. Well, maybe we should back up: How did the cows get to Chirikof Island to begin with?

JI: It’s hard to pinpoint an exact date and time that they came. But it’s most likely the Russians brought them. They were trying to establish colonies. So probably 200 years or so ago, they brought them, but then when they left in 1867, when the U.S. bought Alaska from the Russians, the Americans kind of inherited, you know, these introduced species.

CG: But I guess, you know, in the years that followed the Russians leaving those cows there, there was at least one attempt to kind of manage that herd. and that failed. And for many years they’ve just been, like, feral cattle out there. So why have they been allowed to stay? I mean, is it that people think they’re valuable still? It’s just too much of a problem to do something about them? What is that?

JI: You know, at this point, I think it’s less contentious than it might have been starting like 20 years ago. I think people are starting to understand that a feral herd of cattle is not a healthy herd of cattle, with far too many bulls. If you have one bull, you know, he’ll inseminate the 30 cows around him, right? You don’t need that many bulls, and when you do have a lot of bulls, it’s a kind of an unpleasant cattle society, especially for cows, especially for young cows. And they’re domesticated animals, so they’re meant to be managed by humans.

Also, they live and die by how good the winter is, or how bad the winter is, and how much they have to eat. So the island was just covered with cow bones everywhere. You know, tibias and femurs, and scapulars and skulls and horns and teeth. And, you know, there was a lot of bones, I’m not sure I’ve seen that many bones in one place. So, I think I think the Alaskans I talked to kind of understood that. But why they’re still there, I think it goes back to maybe when Alaska Maritime (National Wildlife Refuge) first came about, in like the 1980s, and they had public consultations. But when it came to cattle, yeah, people got a little emotional. And so partly, I think it comes down to the fact that they didn’t want that top-down edict, or the what they saw as a top-down edict, but it wasn’t one. I think, also cattle ranching has a romance around it, and it’s got some kind of legacy. And the people who maybe speak the loudest care about that legacy a bit more.

CG: And you made this point in the story, too, that, for seabirds, that you you wouldn’t even see those at your bird feeder, it’s like a problem of people not seeing them and not understanding, maybe, their plight. And then here you have an island that is literally being trampled by cows that, if that grass was a little bit higher, it’d be better habitat for the birds, right?

JI: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I didn’t go into this thinking, “Wow, cattle are getting a free pass.” It really, really was an organic kind of result of being there, of researching, and talking to all sorts of people. Actually the first ornithologist I talked to, he thought of birds, seabirds, more broadly, seabirds and shorebirds, more broadly. One island like Chirikof isn’t necessarily going to make or break a population, but it’s death by a thousand cuts. And that’s what’s happening with seabirds and shorebirds around the world is we don’t see this massive range. Like we see it on a map, but we’re, you know, we’re talking thousands of kilometers. You can’t see us chipping away at that in a broad kind of way, right? It’s kind of tough. Some people think like in the last 200 years, seabird populations have declined by 90%. With what habitat they have left, why give it to another animal, a domesticated animal that really has absolutely no need for it?