From Wyoming and Oregon comes a story most bizarre: Scarlett Johansson’s voice being used to frighten away wolves.
Famed for their emotional intelligence, the gray wolf population around Greater Yellowstone are obviously not adept enough to detect acting when they hear it, as it was a scene from Johansson’s film Marriage Story that has them spooked.
Ever since gray wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park, farmers have had to deal with attacks on their livestock. Some were seeing double digit losses of cattle in a single month.
They are protected and cannot be fired upon or poisoned, so according to multiple reports farmers are using drones to pass over their land playing AC/DC music and the aforementioned Johansson film.
Most could probably understand how “Hell’s Bells” could scare an animal away, but biologists have noted that wolves, for whatever reason, find the sounds of humans arguing disturbing enough to be deterred by them.
“I need the wolves to respond and know that, hey, humans are bad,” the aptly-named Paul Wolf, a USDA district supervisor in Oregon, told the Wall Street Journal, who first confirmed that Johansson’s voice from that particular film clip was being played by the drones.
Euronews reports that the drones and their broadcasts have worked dramatically to lesson predation, with one monitoring period seeing wolf attack numbers fall from 11 in 20 days to just 2 in 85 days.
That’s a huge economic relief to ranchers, and probably good for a laugh and a story for dinner guests too.
WATCH the scene that the wolves find frightening…
This article by Andy Corbley was first published by Good News Network on 8 August 2025. Lead Image: credit (left) Unsplash (right) Brian Johnson, from ACDC – credit Matt Becker, CC 3.0. BY-SA.
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