Cody Roberts walked into the Green River Bar joking that he’d found a lost cattle dog. The woman tending bar that evening seemed to know what would happen next.
“The bartender goes, ‘Cody, you better not bring in a fucking lion,’” an eyewitness recalled. “She knew he was going to bring something in that was not a dog.”
Roberts didn’t listen. It wasn’t a dog and it wasn’t a lion, but moments later he reappeared with a muzzled, leashed wolf — an animal that wanted nothing to do with the Green River Bar.
“It didn’t want to go,” the bar patron recalled. “Like you know when your dog doesn’t want to go to the vet?”
The 42-year-old resident of the small western Wyoming town of Daniel muscled the reticent animal inside. The gravely injured wild wolf remained in the rowdy tavern for hours thereafter.
Wyoming, and the rest of the world, wouldn’t learn of Roberts and the wolf for a month. Since then, the allegations against Roberts — that he ran down the wolf on a snowmobile, taped the injured animal’s mouth shut and showed it off at the bar before killing it — have become international news. Authorities have released few details about what happened beyond two short videos and a citation that showed he was fined $250 for possessing a live wolf.
This account of what happened at the Green River Bar on Feb. 29 comes from an eyewitness to whom WyoFile has granted anonymity. The person, who was at the bar that night and later alerted authorities to what had occurred, is being left nameless at their request for their own safety. The worldwide outrage over this incidence of animal abuse has generated rampant death threats — even toward those who had nothing to do with it. The eyewitness provided WyoFile with videos from that night which corroborated their account.