7/8. The Western Safari, Sheridan's Irony, and the Scientific Ignorance Driving the Wolf Slaughter — Dan Flores— The mid-nineteenth-century American West became a safari destination for wealthy European nobility who engaged in serial, unjustified massacres of wildlife, meticulously recording kill counts as trophy tallies. Flores documents a historical irony: General Philip Sheridan, traditionally maligned as a villain, actually protested the systematic buffaloslaughter and subsequently protected Yellowstone fauna. Flores emphasizes that wolves were poisoned ubiquitously throughout this period due to unscientific Old World superstitions and profound ecological ignorance, reflecting medieval prejudices rather than empirical understanding of predator-prey dynamics and ecosystem function.