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In light of these and many other very positive first-hand accounts of mutual interaction between wolves and men, how can we explain the fear and loathing that have been so prevalent in our recent history? Indigenous peoples like the Inuit and many Native American tribes certainly do not share it. They have retained an intimate relationship with Nature and often feel that the spirits of man and wolf are one and the same. For most of us who have lost touch with the wild world, the wolf became our enemy as soon as our ancestors abandoned hunting and took to raising animals for food. This has been a long process that began in the Middle East some 10,000 years ago. A conflict of interest between man and wolf began the moment that humans plucked animals from the wild and forced them into domesticated servitude. To hungry wolves, following their natural instincts and unrestrained by their instinctual taboo on attacking humans, domesticated animals were easy prey.
For millennia wolf and man had shared the wild country, each respectful of the other’s boundaries. They had learned to live together harmoniously, so much so that they shared a common spiritual existence in a way that is familiar to Ootek, Mowat’s Inuit companion, and to many other indigenous people. They would not have dreamed of killing a wolf. For them the wolf was an integral part of the land they both shared.
Over time in the ‘civilised’ world wolves have been punished for being themselves. They have been persecuted for centuries and hunted down all over the world. Where once they were found everywhere in North America, Europe and in Asia, the campaigns of extermination have eliminated the wolf from most of the United States, Mexico, Europe and the Far East. We have justified this brutal campaign by vilifying the wolf in many of our favourite stories.
I freely admit that I was not immune from the malign influence of these stories, as I discovered when I went to visit Shaun Ellis and his pack of captive wolves. On the train to Cornwall my pulse rate increased, I began to break out into a cold sweat at the mere prospect of coming face to face with a wolf. In the event I need not have worried. I was mesmerised. Their long legs, enormous paws, elastic gait and those intelligent, penetrating amber eyes instantly banished all fear and replaced it with a mixture of curiosity and admiration. Though I cannot pretend that this experience had the transforming force of Shaun Ellis’s first encounter with the amber-eyed stare of a wolf in Thetford, I nonetheless returned from Cornwall with a completely different view of this beautiful species. I may not have much liked dogs, but I was captivated by the wolf.
By no means is everyone as convinced as Shaun Ellis or Farley Mowat that we are, or were once, capable of enjoying a close and cooperative working relationship with wolves. Quite the reverse. Brian Hare, the animal behaviourist, whom we shall meet later on, points out that throughout history no other animal has been portrayed so consistently as the Bad Guy. Children are taught to fear wolves with such tales as Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. From historical times to the present, wolves have been persecuted, hunted down and killed until now they are listed as endangered species in some regions. There are occasional redeeming stories such as that of the she-wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome, after they had been left to die; but, by and large, we have viewed wolves with a mixture of fear and loathing. This makes it all the more remarkable that today we have chosen to take their closest cousins into our homes and into our hearts.
Shaun Ellis and others who have spent time with wolves are motivated to dispel their evil reputation, which they believe to be thoroughly undeserved. It is true that wolves do occasionally kill humans, but this is a vanishingly rare event. Humans, on the other hand, kill thousands of wolves on a regular basis. If our ancestors were once their close allies, what could have happened to transform them in our minds into the cunning evil creatures that nowadays we believe them to be? I am not alone in linking many features of the modern world – states, cities, complex and largely dysfunctional societies, even infectious disease – to the consequences of agriculture. Before that revolution, which began some 10,000 years ago, we lived as hunter-gatherers and left traces of our lives in places like Chauvet and Altamira. Although we had become the top predators of our time, we still depended on a deep understanding of the land and the animals with which we shared it, including, even perhaps especially, the wolf. When we left the life of the hunter-gatherer to raise crops and animals we were able to settle in one place rather than follow the herds on their annual cycles of migration. We no longer needed the wolf and we abandoned it.
In Never Cry Wolf, Farley Mowat puts the transformation of the wolf from friend to enemy like this:
There is extensive evidence to show that far from being at enmity the wolf and hunting man worldwide enjoyed something approaching symbiosis, whereby the existence of each benefitted the existence of the other. But as European and Asian men began divesting themselves of their hunting heritage in order to become farmers or herdsmen, they lost this ancient empathy with the wolf and became its inveterate enemy. So-called civilized man eventually succeeded in totally extirpating the real wolf from his collective mind and substituting for it a contrived image, replete with evil aspects that generated almost pathological fear and hatred.
European men brought this mind-set to the Americas, spurred on by bounties and rewards and armed with rifles.1
We turned the wolf from our friend into our enemy when its natural instincts led it to attack domestic flocks on which our own livelihood came increasingly to depend. We can get a sense of this whenever reintroduction is proposed.
When thirty-one wolves were moved from Alberta to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 after an absence of seventy years and in the face of energetic local opposition, they had an immediate and very positive impact on the park. Numbers of the wolves’ main prey, elk and deer, fell rapidly and the damage these cervids had been doing by browsing on young trees was quickly reversed. But as the years passed, the influence of the introductions spread to other animals, not just their prey, and then to the physical landscape of the park itself. Numbers of elk and deer declined, but that was only the beginning. The deer learned to avoid parts of the park where they could be more easily hunted down. The containment of the cervids triggered an astonishing regeneration of trees, particularly along river valleys and in the many gorges. Before very long, the once bare hillsides were covered with quivering groves of aspen, willow and cottonwood. Songbirds returned. So too did beavers, which, by damming rivers, created shallow ponds for fish and other aquatic life. Wolves killed coyotes, which led to an increase in small mammals like mice and rabbits that in turn encouraged more hawks, bald eagles and other raptors. Bears benefited from the increased berry crop on the regenerating shrubs and their numbers began to rise. All of these welcome changes followed from the reintroduction of the wolf and spread down through what ecologists call a ‘trophic cascade’.
There is a lively debate in Scotland at the moment. Using Yellowstone as an example, supporters of the wolf programme point out the advantages in cutting red deer numbers by reintroducing their one-time nemesis. But opponents raise the prospect of wolf attacks on humans and particularly on domestic animals like sheep and cattle. These familiar concerns are voiced around Yellowstone since wolves spread out from the National Park into the surrounding farmland as the numbers within the park increased. Wolves have been taken off the register of endangered species and hunting is once more allowed. It is proving difficult to find a balance between conservation efforts, aimed at maintaining a sustainable population of wolves in Wyoming and the neighbouring states of Montana and Idaho, and the hostility of a public brought up to fear the wolf.
In the version of events I am proposing, Palaeolithic hunters cooperated with wolves in killing animals. The wolves, lacking the equipment easily to dispatch a large animal such as a bison, risked injury when they killed slowly through blood loss. The wolves rounded up the prey, and held it at bay until the humans arrived to kill it with a spear. This instinct for cooperative hunting survives to this day. For example, a Rhodesian ridgeback will corner a lion until a hunter arrives to shoot it.
The kill was divided, the wolves taking the innards and the offal, the humans preferring the meat. The cooperation was only possible because of the similarities in social organisation which allowed wolf and man to work together, and this empathy was incorporated, over time, into the subconscious mind of both wolf and man. It was lost after the dawn of pastoral agriculture, starting about 10,000 years ago in the Middle East, when the wolf was painted as the enemy of man. However, the valuable atavistic empathy, embedded in the psyche of both species, was transferred by humans from wolf to dog. For the wolf’s part, even though they learned to fear us, they never saw us as their enemy and still retain the ancient empathy. And that is why they did not eat Shaun Ellis.
Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf was published in 1963 and went on to become a bestseller, eventually being translated into 37 languages. The Disney film of 1983 helped to spread the central message of the book: that, far from being murderous savages, wolves were gentle, family-loving, free-spirited creatures, misunderstood and wrongly persecuted. In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, David Graber wrote, ‘By writing Never Cry Wolf, Mowat almost single-handedly reversed the public’s image of the wolf from feared vermin to romantic symbol of the wilderness.’ The villain of the piece, the Canadian Wildlife Service, which according to Mowat had bowed to pressure from the hunting lobby in an effort to exterminate the wolf from North America when they sent him up on a phoney mission, was deluged by complaints from outraged citizens. They responded by claiming that Mowat’s account of his mission was factually inaccurate. For instance, he was not alone but accompanied at all times by two other biologists, and it had never been the intention of the Wildlife Service to exterminate the wolf. Nevertheless, however fanciful it may be, Never Cry Wolf is credited with starting to reverse the public’s negative image of the wolf and setting in train the series of conservation measures, like the Yellowstone reintroductions, that continue to this day.