Steve Moore, a former journalist who is now a successfulsyndicated cartoonist, created the charming concept and story for the recent animated feature film Alpha and Omega. Alpha and Omega features the tale of two young wolves who are relocated from Canada to Idaho to help repopulate a wilderness area bereft of wolves. It’s no coincidence that this story parallels the real reintroduction of wolves into the United States back in 1995 – the start of one of the biggest wildlife success stories in America’s history. That real-life relocation gave Moore the idea that ultimately became Alpha and Omega, he told Defenders in an interview from Boise, Idaho, this week:
Steve Moore and his son Chris at Red Fish Lake in Idaho
How did you come up with the idea that became Alpha and Omega?
“A few years after my family and I moved to Idaho from Los Angeles, I read a newspaper article commemorating the 10thanniversary of the wolf program. There was a story about one of the first wolves in the program, Wolf B1 or Wolf B2, one of those. The story was showing the tracking of the wolf’s radio collar, showing where the wolf went when it was first dropped off in Idaho. It kept heading north, then turning around and coming back, heading north and turning around again, over and over.
“It kind of got my imagination going – maybe he was trying to get back to Canada! So I just imagined what would have happened if the biologists had tried to trap a mated pair, and they messed up and got two wolves that hated each other instead. Alpha and Omega is like the flip side of that old movie The African Queen: instead of two humans who hate each other trying to get through the wilderness back to civilization, this was two wolves who hated each other trying to get through civilization and back to the wilderness.
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