Both parents, Olga Geist and Alexander Shutov, were naval engineers specializing in marine architecture (his mother worked on submarines and icebreakers).

Valerius Geist graduated from high school in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1957 and started to study zoology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he met his wife in 1958.

The family went in 1967 to Germany on a post-doctoral fellowship awarded to Valerius, and he completed his postdoctoral studies in Seewiesen at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology (1967-1968) under Konrad Lorenz.

[citation needed] He testified on wildlife conservation policy in court, before Senate of the State of Montana and before the Parliamentary Committee on Environment, and Sustainable Development in Ottawa.

[7] By triggering panicky flight behaviour in deer packs and causing them to migrate, wolves promote the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease.

He was openly critical of the myth that wolves do not attack people and observed that Joseph Stalin promulgated this Big Lie in his effort to disarm the rural population which had traditionally kept firearms for protection.

Further, the explanation offered by Geist to how the Pleistocene ecology of the Gray Wolf did not have the same impacts, were that megafaunal hypercarnivores such as the taxa Machairodontinae, Panthera, and Arctodus simus suppressed them as a direct consequence of intense competition amongst the megafauna predator guild, at the time.

He suggested that ancient cave art was more likely to be graffiti, left by young men who dared one another to go deep into the earth to make their marks.

[14] In the late 1980s, Geist hypothesized that "specialist, aggressive, competitive Rancholabrean fauna" such as Arctodus were a barrier for humans (along with other Siberian megafauna such as moose, grey wolves and brown bears) when migrating into North America (both Beringia and below the ice sheets).

[15] Male A. simus were the largest and most powerful carnivorous land mammals in North America, with the potential specialization in obtaining and dominating distant and scarce resources.