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The Wolves of Our Nature: A Wrongful ExtinctionDaniel Warner

Since we have had the means to outwit wolves, we have driven them nearly to extinction

and forced them into only narrow sections of the world. By passing down mediated superstitions

for countless generations through stories like "Little Red Riding Hood,” "The Big Bad Wolf,”

and "The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” we have put forth an image of wolves as uncontrollable killing

machines in need of extermination. It is only recently that the process of reversing this frenzied

deletion has begun.

Wolves are extinct in the wild in the US and the UK, and only exist in captivity within a

few handfuls of organizations. I had the fortune of working as a volunteer wolf handler for one

such organization-the UK Wolf Conservation Trust based in Berkshire, England. In 2013, I

studied abroad in Reading, England and as part of a class on “Writing the North American

Wilderness,” I had the opportunity to take part in a work placement program as long as I was

able to tie my experience together with the course material. After working at the UKWCT, I have

found myself taking a keen interest in wolves and in how they have been portrayed over the

years. So, why should you care about wolves in the UK? Why should you even care about

wolves at all?

Centuries ago, especially in rural areas, livestock were a primary source of food and

transportation for humans. However, they also happened to be an easy source of food for wolves.

The prejudice against wolves is the result of a fear based in survival that was originally intended

to protect livestock. But this necessary fear has evolved into the deep seated hatred that remains

today, despite the general lack of danger that wolves now present to man.

One of the biggest problems with this anti-wolf mentality is that, because it has existed

unquestioned for so long, its misconceptions have become entrenched even in modern culture

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and have proven extremely resistant to change. The gray wolf and the red wolf are, respectively,

endangered and critically endangered in many parts of the world. A few efforts have been made

to correct the prevailingly negative views regarding wolves, however, and my main focus today

will be to address how two such efforts in particular have contributed to changing the perception

of wolves.

One effort that has been made towards furthering positive information regarding wolves

is the establishment of the UK Wolf Conservation Trust (UKWCT), which is an attempt to raise

the publicity of the wolf's plight and to refocus the incorrect conceptions of them. The objectives

of the trust stem from a generalized assumption that the public's knowledge as well as the

publicly available knowledge is not accessible or accurate enough to be sufficient and so are all

aimed at providing solutions for this inadequacy. And while at the UKWCT the goal is to try to

provide an unbiased view grounded in science and accuracy, it is only inevitable that an

organization whose aim is to dispel misconceptions that portray wolves negatively, despite their

efforts at providing unbiased information, will provide equally biased counter-positive portrayals

to offset this.

The focus of the UKWCT on portraying aspects of wolves that do not typically appear in

media indirectly builds an image of the wolf for visitors to the trust and readers of its magazine,

Wolf Print. Its efforts to reduce the heavy mediation of the modern understanding of wolves also

cannot escape being mediated. One definitive example of this is the UKWCT's use of

"ambassador wolves.” These are wolves that have been socialized to humans by being exposed

to daily human interaction from birth and therefore have a significantly diminished fear of

humans. Having wolves like this allows the trust to interact with the wolves and even allows

them to let visitors interact with the wolves in the form of "wolf walks"- a common practice of

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the trust that lets a certain number of paying visitors accompany a group of senior wolf handlers

as they take the three best behaved and youngest wolves out on chained leeds for a guided walk

around the organization's grounds. In addition to providing the visitors with an encounter with a

real, living wolf, the senior wolf handlers periodically provide information about wolves and

attempt to answer any queries that arise. Such educational anecdotes include: often during the

walks at least one of the wolves will roll over and let a visitor rub the soft part of its stomach,

during which one of the handlers might remark with a comment along the lines of "and here you

have your 'Big Bad Wolf'"; or, at any point along the walk, one of the handlers might remark on

the hypocrisy of Theodore Roosevelt's advocation of teddy bears but derision of wolves, or how

Indians did not fear wolves but revered and lived alongside them for centuries in places like

America before settlers began wiping them out. The utilizing of "ambassador wolves" and

supplementing of the "wolf walks" with anecdotal educational information are ways in which the

UKWCT carries forward its objectives of increasing public awareness and righting

misconceptions. But, by their very purpose, they still carry a directed positive nature instead of

being unfiltered and unbiased.

During a particular presentation given at the trust, a video is played that shows Arctic

wolves bounding through snow and playing together which, along with a significant portion of

the lecture being devoted to the prejudices against wolves and their endangered status, portrays

wolves in a way that is in stark contrast to the frequent notion of wolves being vicious predators.

Regarding the issue of authenticity, the portrayal of wolves that the UKWCT gives is still only

one facet of their complex nature.

Another earlier effort that has been made to change how wolves are perceived is the

movement that developed the wild animal story into a literary genre. The literary movement as a

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whole sought to address a debate formed by the conflicted cultural atmosphere of the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that placed Romanticism at odds with burgeoning

Darwinism. Ernest Thompson Seton, author of the story “Lobo, King of Currumpaw” which is

considered the first “Wild Animal Story,” presents in the Preface to his 1898 book Wild Animals

I Have Known, the movement's intended message: "we and the beasts are kin."

Before he began writing animal stories, Seton made a living partly as an animal trapper.

His account of Lobo is in fact a true account of how he was hired to hunt down a particular wolf

in New Mexico by using the wolf’s mate to lure him into a trap. It is the sight of the helpless and

possibly heartbroken wolf in that trap that moves Seton into fighting for the conservation of

animals rather than their killing.

This led him to become deeply involved in the debate about animal’s intellectual

capabilities that is referred to as the Nature Fakers controversy. This was a highly publicized

debate of the early 1900s where on one side John Burroughs and Theodore Roosevelt considered

animals incapable of anything beyond instinct and the remaining majority of the wild animal

story writers considered animals as capable of human emotion and reason to at least a certain

degree. The debate garnered much publicity for concerns of conservation, and Seton's portrayal

of Lobo the wolf is what began the debate and the conservation movement in the first place.

Other early authors of the genre, Charles G.D. Roberts and William J. Long, instead of

making wolves more human-like, construct wolves as if they are forces of nature. These

depictions evoke a sense of strangeness and power that command respect of the wolf, yet they

also maintain wolves as having at least a vague sense of morality or tenderness for humans even

if they do not share as blatant of human characteristics as, say, Seton's wolves.

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One further interesting feature that runs through the depictions of wolves throughout

much of the wild animal story genre is a respect for Indian culture and people. For Jack London,

Long, and Roberts, this is evident in how they use many distinctively non-English words and

phrases (e.g., the phrases "Old Tomah" and “wigwam” are used in Seton’s works instead of God

and lean-to) and portray their wolves as protective of and loyal to Indians. This is similar to how,

at the UKWCT, the wolves are named using the Inuit language rather than English. One of the

wolves at the trust, Nuka for example, is Inuit for "younger brother.” The notions of raising

public awareness, respect for wolves, and of dissolving long held misconceptions regarding

wolves are present in each effort that is made to resolve these issues. The differences then are

how the efforts go about enacting these desired changes.

The reality of the situation is that wolves have been persecuted for centuries upon the

basis of harsh and largely untrue assumptions, myths, fables, and stigmas perpetuated by farmers

from long ago. In those days, they had no other explanation for the sudden deaths of their

livestock and so they blamed wolves. However the subsequent centuries of wolf witch hunts

have overblown a misconception of wolves so great that they have been nearly wiped out as a

reaction to the unnecessary fear.

A century previous to the UKWCT’s founding, the genre of the wild animal story created

its own wolves, garnering readers' sympathy and respect through a very public controversy, and

through making wolves appealing instead of repelling. These actions helped spur the

conservation movement of the early 1900s and eventually the founding of programs like the

UKWCT. Likewise in its goals, the UKWCT has utilized wolf "ambassadors" and modern

science in order to provide accurate information alongside encounters with the mythologized

wolves in the hopes of dispelling the fear of them and making their plight known. Both efforts to

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change the perception of wolves have drawn significant attention towards the need to reduce how

negatively mediated the wolf has become. The UKWCT even has daughter programs as of a few

years ago that extend its reach into the US.

However, the problem remains that the image of the wolf that is being promoted as a

countering response is still not necessarily that of the "real" wolf. Rather, it is merely the direct

opposite of the long standing negative image--the positively mediated version of the wolf. And

while this may not be the most accurate portrayal of wolves, it is at least a step forward.

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Works Cited

"Aims of the UKWCT,” UK Wolf Conservation Trust (ukwct.org.uk) [accessed 20 June 2013].

Coleman, Jon T., Vicious: Wolves and Men in America. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2004.

Gooder, Steve, "A Man, a Wolf, and a Whole New World,” The Telegraph, 2008 (www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/3337634/A-man-a-wolf-and-a-whole-new-

world.html) [accessed 29 June 2013].

London, Jack, The Call of the Wild, White Fang and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Long, William J., Northern Trails, Book 1 (Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 1905).

Roberts, Charles G. D., "The White Wolf" in Hoof and Claw (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917), Project Gutenberg, 2012 (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38675/38675-h/38675-h.htm) [accessed 29 June 2013].

Roberts, Charles G. D., "The Passing of the Black Whelps" in Watchers of the Trails (Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1976).

Seton, Ernest Thompson, Wild Animals I Have Known (New York: Dover, 2000).

The Wild Animal Story, ed. by Ralph H. Lutts (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

Wood, Kay C., Smith, Harlan, Grossniklaus, Daurice, "Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development" Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology, 2001 (http://epltt.coe.uga.edu/index.php?title=Main_Page) [accessed 27 June 2013].