Geoffrey O'Gara and Dan Whipple DUE WEST

Residing in Fremont County, Wyoming, we do not worry about wolves, because wolves have been officially banned from here by our county commissioners. When we herd the livestock in on a wintry night - a dog and two spayed cats - we don't worry that one cat's missing, because, well, why bother, when the wolves have been told in no uncertain terms to stay away?

So on a recent snow-clad night we built up the fire and settled down with the newspaper in our usual mood of unflappable security. Until we read this:

"Bill proposes Wyoming wolf control."

The Wyoming state Legislature, fed up with the federal program that manages the reintroduced wolves in our state, is going to take over.

Thumbing our many noses at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, we are demanding control not only of wolves, but of every troublesome species in the state, from banana slugs to Yeti.

Anyone who has ever tried to herd cats can tell the solons what a bad idea this is. Managing a wild species is much, much harder than managing, say, vegetables. It requires satellite photos, a fleet of trucks, angel dust and other hallucinogenic drugs, helicopters, enormous quantities of food (pellets for elk and sandwiches for biologists, or vice versa), a national forest worth of timber to print plans and reports, and a large building next to the Potomac River.

Staff? Well, of course you need managers, and planners to write plans for the managers, graduate students to write studies for the planners, medical personnel on 24-hour call to administer vaccines for various diseases acquired by the animals in the refuges, and administrators to manage the planners and managers, and ministers to pray over the meals.

That works out to about two government persons for each wild animal.

Oh, and you may need a wildlife biologist too. Or not.

But all that's the easy part. The hard part is the meetings.

We went to some meetings when the feds first began working on a plan to reintroduce wolves in Yellowstone National Park, back before we started shaving. We didn't think there'd be much to talk about - the plan, we imagined, would be to lasso a few wolves, put them in cages, put them in the back of the truck, drive south, and open the tailgate. That seemed to be what the original planners were thinking of, though the plan ran about 400 pages long.

The first plan, that is.

We kept going to meetings. Some people were really angry, and talked about the risk wolves posed to the family pet, Rufus, or their baby daughter, Angelina. Other people were all smiles, and levitated as they talked about the broken heart of the American West, and how the wolf would heal it, like an aortic bypass.

Wildlife advocates promised that the wolf would wander into the deep wilderness of the Yellowstone Plateau and never be seen again. As proof, they showed us that page of the plan. Then, even though the wolves were never going to bother anybody, they offered to pay ranchers pretty good money for every calf the wolves dined on. Secretly, a few ranchers suspected they might finally start making a living.

We kept going to meetings. We were hoping that at some point a wolf would show up, perhaps with a power point presentation of his own. We were disappointed.

We kept going to meetings. Angelina grew up, and, after a stint with Up With People, became a wildlife biologist. Then a few years ago, while we were sleeping in the back row at a wildlife lecture in Washington, D.C., a bunch of wolves were released in Yellowstone. The rest is history. Or hysteria.

Now the Wyoming legislature thinks it's time for state government to take over. Ever resentful of the heel of the federal government on our wind-burned necks, they have seized this moment to demand the keys to the wolf-mobile.

Have they forgotten what it takes to keep wildlife '"wild"? Have they forgotten about birth control for bison and brucellosis vaccinations for elk, about pink eye in bighorn sheep and whirling disease in trout, about feedlots to keep the elk out of somebody's hay, about leading the trumpeter swans south in an Ultra-lite? Hey guys: being wild isn't what it used to be.

Perhaps the solons think that management is just a matter of issuing proclamations that say, rather fiercely, "Listen, you bad doggies, stay in Yellowstone, or we'll shoot you." If you think that works, come to Fremont County, where the commissioners said "shoo!" and the wolves, as if on cue, were howling at our door.

Somewhere outside that door is our missing cat, who, as far as we know, has not read the plan.

E-mail Due West columnists Dan Whipple (dswhipple@earthlink.net) or Geoff O'Gara (gogara@wyoming.com).