Wolves through the ages
By Danny Winters

For many centuries the wolf has caught the human imagination and it is quite likely that no animal has, in fact, featured higher in the human psyche for the last ten thousand years. Throughout the ages it has found a niche within the darkest of folklore and has had its name and reputation bandied about in a welter of fables and childrens' stories. Unfortunately for the wolf, it is these myths, legends and misconceptions that have played the major part in the decimation of their species and have provided the moral justification for pushing wolves to the brink of extinction throughout most of their natural range.

Until recently, most of what the public thought it knew about wolves was wholly inaccurate and the popular image of the wolf has traditionally been nothing more than a cocktail of fiction and hearsay reinforced by superstition, selective amnesia, mass hysteria and greed. But there is one further important ingredient in the brew and it arises from our own peculiar species psychology. That ingredient is negative projection and the result of it is that wolves have been identified with all our own worst character qualities. Most of the adjectives which have traditionally been appended to the wolf would be better applied to ourselves. Words such as 'savage' and 'bloodthirsty' have more to do with the history of homo sapiens than with wolves, and the image of the wolf as the mad, salivating beast descending from the mountains and wreaking havoc upon innocent villagers and their livestock suggests an origin in race memories of marauding armies slaughtering and plundering their way across Europe.

It is largely because of these images and misconceptions and less because of their actual demerits, that wolves have become extinct in most of their natural habitats. At one time the wolves dominated the Northern Hemisphere with their numbers running into millions; today, there are less than 150,000 left and it is a mark of their amazing adaptability that there are any left at all.

They have found sanctuary in the world's inhospitable places; the remote wildernesses where humans can not go - or do not want to go; places where man can find nothing to his benefit. If these areas had been fewer or non-existent then it is quite likely that we might have lost the wolf completely

Sadly, for the continued battle for their survival, much of the culture of Europe and Asia still sees the wolf as a kind of nightmare demon possessing the worst attributes of human beings. What makes this kind of projection easy to perpetuate is the fact that wolf society is, to a large extent, a mirror of our own. Their family and social structure are so similar to ours that it is as easy to attach emotive, black propaganda to a wolf pack as it is to attach it to a neighbouring race or tribe - and we all know how much humans love doing that kind of thing.

It is also unfortunate that in Christianity the human race is depicted as God's flock - of sheep! A concept which immediately begs us to look for another animal to serve as the embodiment of evil and the devourer of the innocent and the good. What better animal than the wolf! They occasionally take lambs and other domestic animals to satisfy their needs and we certainly do have to guard our own flocks against them. The wolf offered an ideal profile to Christianity as both a symbolic and material scapegoat and the result was that the wolf, innocent of the raging of human religious and political debate, was forced even further into the dark recesses of our minds by nothing more than ideology.

During the Middle Ages, one belief which arose from nothing more than ignorance was the assumption that, for a wolf to hunt and howl at night without ever being seen, it must be possessed of magical and mystical powers and must surely therefor be a witch or some other sinister being. In fact, wolves do not only hunt - or howl - at night (they are actually arrythmic but tend towards being crepuscular given the choice), they simply find it safer to do so when humans are in the area.

On the subject of superstition, one fact that few people are aware of is that the Louvre in Paris is actually named after 'the wolf fields' - an area where it is believed that many human victims (and captured wolves too) were taken to be tried and burned as werewolves or accused of other ridiculous crimes. Perhaps, by persecuting and destroying the wolf, the persecutors were attempting to symbolically destroy the evil in their own souls and pave the way to their own eternal salvation. Whatever the reason, France was probably the nation which espoused wolf-hatred with the most gusto and the French managed to slaughter tens of thousands of their own citizens in pogroms which erupted periodically for centuries from about the thirteenth century onward.

It is predictable that the seeds of wolf-hatred, nurtured in European culture and religion, would be carried across the ocean and planted in the New World by European settlers. When Europeans arrived in the USA in 1620 they lost no time getting the war with the wolf under way. So frightened were they by the ubiquitous presence of the wolf in the New World landscape that they attempted to build a retaining anti-wolf wall to completely isolate Cape Cod. It is ironic to reflect that all this ludicrous construction actually achieved was to keep the innocent wolves on the outside safe from the vicious and barbaric humans on the inside of it.

The year 1630 was a turning point for the wolf in the New World. This was when Colony Bay, Massachusetts became the first place in America to place a bounty on wolves. It was closely followed by Virginia in 1632 and as the Europeans spread out across the western planes, they spread this cancer with them. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, vast tracts of wolf habitat were lost to the ecosystem as settlers converted millions of acres of ancient forests and grazing plains into arable and livestock farms. This massive loss of habitat decimated the prey base for all of America's large carnivores and the slaughter of tens of millions of buffalo and bison forced wolves and bears and many other species to turn to livestock depredation and, in the process, to come into full confrontation with man. By the 1950's Faced with massive populations of wild carnivores with nowhere left to go, the ranching community decided that the best plan was to kill all of them and in the brief space of about 30 years the grey wolf was reduced from an estimated 6 million animals to complete extinction in the lower 48 states.

One of the most unfair aspects of the continuing persecution of the wolf is the use of marginal and statistically insignificant data concerning depredation. To the layman it must be obvious that all wolves kill all sheep all the time. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Wolves certainly can and do kill sheep if they can reach them easily - and left unchecked will get bolder - but the simple truth is that they actually kill very few indeed and it is usually only one or two animals in a pack that do it. Consider this: In Montana in 1995, 1600 head of livestock were killed by domestic dogs, 800 were taken by cougars (mountain lions), 29,000 were taken by coyotes. A mere 4 were killed by wolves. Converted into percentages, these figures are typical of areas where wolves come into contact with livestock. Is a dead sheep any more dead because a wolf killed it, or is it just that we resent the loss more because a wolf killed it? Anti-wolf activists who wave wolf-attack figures around all have the same problem on their hands - how to explain what killed the rest of the umpteen-thousand cattle in the survey. (Ed: I have seen a report from an anti-wolf rancher in Idaho recently which lists in gory and emotional detail wolf attacks upon humans in the USA over the last 250 years. He could only come up with about 20 cases. I would hazard a guess that more people than that choke to death on Hamburgers every year!)

Thankfully, due to a major shift in awareness, especially amongst conservationists in the USA, we are seeing wolves being re-introduced into the eco-system. Areas such as the western great-lakes states and Yellowstone have been re-colonised and the wolf is becoming, once again, part of natures tapestry, taking its rightful place as top canid predator and restoring the natural balance.

So, before we expose youngsters to the traditional image of the wolf it would be wise to remember where that imagery led in the not too distant past. We must acknowledge that it is not harmless fun even in today's more enlightened climate to use the wolf as a symbol of wickedness or destruction or as a sinister figure in a fairy tale. These kind of images, when instilled early enough, are carried through life as deep-rooted baseline assumptions about the world and they are false and dangerous assumptions.