Everything about Attitudes Toward Wolves totally explained
Throughout the centuries, widely varying human
attitudes toward wolves have been highly-charged and often colored by fear and misunderstanding. As a result, the
Gray Wolf has been
extirpated in much of Europe and the U.S. Historically, people have tended to view wolves as threats to livestock and human well being, believing that they represent a threat to the notions of
civilization and dominance of
nature in general. Better education and the stabilization of the
agricultural sector in developed countries have helped to shed new light on wolves and other predators, which has forced people to reconsider former notions about the relationship between predators and the land.
History
Christian attitudes
The
Book of Genesis can be interpreted as stating that nature exists solely to support man (Genesis 1:29), who must cultivate it (Genesis 2:15), and animals are made for his own purposes (Genesis 2:18-20). By this perspective, nature was only acceptable if controlled by man, more specifically by a Christian culture.
The wolf is repeatedly mentioned in the scriptures as an enemy of flocks: a metaphor for evil men with a lust for power and dishonest gain, as well as a metaphor for Satan preying on innocent God-fearing Christians, contrasted with the shepherd Jesus who keeps his flock safe.
Matt 7:15 "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they're ravening wolves."
Matt 10:16 "Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves."
Acts 20:29 "For I know this, that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock."
Eze 22:27 "Her princes in her midst are like wolves tearing the prey, to shed blood, to destroy people, and to get dishonest gain."
The
Roman Catholic Church often used the negative imagery of wolves in order to create a sense of real devils prowling the real world. Quoting from
Leviticus and
Deuteronomy, the
Malleus Maleficarum states that wolves are either agents of
God sent to punish sinners, or agents of the
Devil sent with God's blessing to harass true believers. However, legends surrounding
Saint Francis of Assisi show him befriending a wolf.
In Europe
Roman Age
According the legend of
Romulus and Remus, the
Roman Empire owed its creation to its twin founders being adopted as babies by a she-wolf known as "Lupa". Wolves were considered sacred to
Mars.
The comedian
Plautus used the image of wolves to ponder the cruelty of
man as a wolf unto man.
Viking Age
Norse mythology prominently includes three malevolent wolves, in particular: the giant
Fenrisulfr or Fenrir, eldest child of
Loki and
Angrboda who was feared and hated by the
Æsir, and Fenrisulfr's children,
Skoll and
Hati. Fenrir is bound by the gods, but is ultimately destined to grow too large for his bonds and devour
Odin during the course of
Ragnarök. At that time he'll have grown so large that his upper jaw touches the sky while his lower touches the earth when he gapes. He will be slain by Odin's son,
Viðarr, who will either stab him in the heart or rip his jaws asunder according to different accounts. Fenrir's two offspring will according to legend, devour the sun and moon at Ragnarök. On the other hand, however, the wolves
Geri and Freki were the Norse god
Odin's faithful pets who were reputed to be "of good omen."
Britain
The various
Norman kings of
England (reigning from
1066 to
1152 A.D.) employed servants as wolf hunters and many held lands granted on condition they fulfilled this duty. King
Edward I who reigned from
1272 to
1307 ordered the total extermination of all wolves in his kingdom and personally employed one Peter Corbet, with instructions to destroy wolves in the counties of
Gloucestershire,
Herefordshire,
Worcestershire,
Shropshire and
Staffordshire, areas near the
Welsh Marches where wolves were more common than in the southern areas of England. The wolf became extinct in England during the reign of
Henry VII (
1485-
1509). It is known that wolves survived in
Scotland up until the 18th century. The last wolf in Scotland was supposedly killed in
1743, by an old man named McQueen in the
Findhorn Valley of
Morayshire
Before its extinction, the wolf was considered by the English nobility as one of the five so called "Royal Beasts of the Chase", which also included the
hart, the
hind, the
Wild boar and the
European Hare.
Ireland
Despite the extermination of the wolf in the late 1700s, most likely
1786,
Ireland throughout most of the first half of the
17th Century had a substantial wolf population of not less than 400 and maybe as high as 1000 wolves at any one time.
Although the Irish hunted wolves, it's evident from documentary data that they didn't see the same need as the English to exterminate the wolves. Although wolves were perceived as threats, they were nontheless seen as natural parts of the Irish landscapes. The level of rewards and bounties established by
Oliver Cromwell's regime after the
Cromwellian conquest of Ireland attracted a few professional wolf hunters to Ireland, mostly from England. Politically, the prospect of numbers of armed Irish roaming around the country hunting wolves wasn't acceptable, given the ongoing conflict between the Irish and the new English settlers, so it was seen as much safer for the English authorities to encourage men from their own country to deal with the wolf problem.
France
The "
Luparii" were royal officials paid by the crown to control
wolf populations in
France during the
Middle Ages. Luparii were responsible for the initial reduction of wolf populations in France, which would become decimated in later centuries.
The office of luparii is today known as the
Wolfcatcher Royal. On 9 August
1787 the office was dissolved due to financing issues but was reinstated ten years later. The office was further modified in
1971 and now serves an administrative function regulating vermin and maintaining healthy wildlife populations.
Soviet Union
In early
20th century Russia, the newly formed
Soviet government worked heavily to eradicate wolves and other predators during an extensive land reclamation program.
In
1917,
Lenin himself promised his followers that if the Communists won power they'd hunt down the last wolf.
Government officials instructed the
Red army to exterminate predators on sight; a project that was carried out very efficiently. The USSR destroyed 42,300 wolves in
1945, 62,700 wolves in
1946, 58,700 wolves in
1947, 57,600 in
1948, and 55,300 in
1949. During
The Great Patriotic War, when the Russian government focused its attention on repelling the
Nazi invasion, wolf populations were given some respite, and actually increased, though after
Germany's defeat, wolf exterminations resumed. From
1950 to
1954, an average of 50,000 wolves were killed annually. The wolf survived mostly because of the vast amount of territory devoid of humans.
In the
Kazakh SSR, some 1,000 professional hunters killed thousands of the wolves yearly to collect government bounties. In 1988, just before the Soviet economy collapsed, the hunters killed 16,000 wolves.
Asia
Central Asia
In
Altaic mythology of the Central Asian
Turkic and
Mongolian peoples, the wolf is a revered animal. The shamanic Turkic peoples even believed they were descendants of wolves in Turkic legends. The legend of
Asena is an old Turkic myth that tells of how the Turkic people were created. In Northern China a small Turkic village was raided by Chinese soldiers, but one small baby was left behind. An old she-wolf with a sky-blue mane named Asena found the baby and nursed him, then the she-wolf gave birth to half wolf, half human cubs therefore the Turkic people were born. Also in Turkic mythology it's believed that a gray wolf showed the Turks the way out of their legendary homeland
Ergenekon, which allowed them to spread and conquer their neighbours.
In
Mongolian
folk medicine, eating the
intestines of a wolf is said to alleviate chronic indigestion, while sprinkling food with powdered wolf
rectum is said to cure
haemorroids.
Japan
In
Japan, grain farmers once worshiped wolves at shrines and left food offerings near their dens, beseeching them to protect their crops from wild boars and deer. Talismans and charms adorned with images of wolves protected against fire, disease, and other calamities and brought fertility to agrarian communities and to couples hoping to have children. The
Ainu people believed that they were born from the union of a wolflike creature and a goddess.
These positive portrayals would end during the
Meiji restoration period. The wolf was deemed a threat to ranching (which the Meiji government promoted at the time) and targeted via a bounty system and a direct chemical extermination campaign.
North America
Native Americans
Wolves were generally revered by tribes which survived by hunting, but were thought little of by those which survived through agriculture. Some tribes, such as the
Nunamiut of northern and northwestern
Alaska and the
Naskapi of
Labrador respected the wolf's skill as a hunter and attempted to emulate the wolf's ways in order to successfully hunt down prey.
In the
Cardinal directions of the
Plains Indians, the wolf represented the
west, while for the
Pawnee, it represented the southeast.
According to the Pawnee creation myth, the wolf was the first creature to experience
death. The Wolf Star, enraged at not having been invited to attend a council on how the Earth should be made, sent a wolf to steal the whirlwind bag of The Storm that Comes out of the West, which contained the first humans. Upon being freed from the bag, the humans killed the wolf, thus bringing death into the world.
The Pawnee, being both an agricultural and hunting people, associated the wolf with both corn and the bison; the "birth" and "death" of the Wolf Star (
Sirius) was to them a reflection of the wolf's coming and going down the path of the
Milky Way known as Wolf Road.
Wolf body parts were considered important additions to certain rituals. Pawnee warriors, known as Wolf People, dressed in wolf skin cloaks when scouting or hunting.
Nez Perce warriors wore wolf teeth pushed through the septums of their noses.
Cheyenne medicine men wrapped wolf fur on sacred arrows used to motion prey into traps.
Arikara men wove wolf fur with bison fur in order to make small sacred blankets.
Nuxálk mothers painted wolf gallbladders on their young male children's backs, so they could grow up to perform religious ceremonies without making mistakes as hunters.
Hidatsan women experiencing difficult births would call upon the familial power of wolves by rubbing wolf-skin caps on their bellies.
Wolves were usually only killed for body parts used in rituals, or to stop them raiding food chaches or horses. Many tribes believed that killing wolves would cause game animals to disappear or bring retribution from other wolves. When the
Kwakiutl killed a wolf, the animal would be laid out on a blanket and have portions of its flesh eaten by the perpetrators, who would express regret at the act before burying it. The
Ahtna would take the dead wolf to a hut, where it would be propped in a sitting position with a banquet made by a shaman set before it. When men from certain Inuit tribes killed a wolf, they'd walk around their houses four times, expressing regret and abstaining from sexual relations with their wives for four days.
Wolves were not always portrayed positively in Native American cultures. The Netsilik Inuit and Takanaluk-arnaluk believed that the sea-woman Nuliayuk's home was guarded by wolves. The Naskapi's believed that the
caribou afterlife is guarded by giant wolves which kill careless hunters venturing too near. The
Navajo people feared witches in wolf's clothing called "Mai-cob".
United States
From colonial times right up through World War II, the
wilderness was perceived as something to be conquered, settled, and cultivated, as through
Manifest Destiny or by man's inherent worldly right. Wolves, for a time, were partially valued for their fur, but in the majority of circumstances (and in some instances today), they were viewed as wholly worthless and decidedly despicable creatures. Humans destroyed the vast majority of their habitat and food source in North America, replacing forests and prairies with
farms and wild
ungulates with
cattle. When the wolves preyed on what little of their natural prey was left, hunters complained; when they then began preying on the
cattle, ranchers, of course, complained, too.
Eventually, American society's perception of the wolf was one defined by indifference, misapprehension, or outright hatred. With few vouching for them, wolves and other predators were destroyed en masse, resulting in a so-called "hunters'
paradise" free from competing predators. To accomplish this, there was no limit to the extent hunters and trappers were willing to go in order to kill predators in large numbers. Besides
traps,
snares, and other mechanical methods, hunters would line carcasses with
poison (usually
strychnine), which would then kill the animals that preyed upon it. The
corpses of affected animals would then themselves become poisonous, which tended to result in a rather long chain reaction of death. Essentially, wolves, like many predators during that time, managed to garner an incredible amount of hatred for a great variety of reasons, many of which were unfounded or embellished so as to fuel public cynicism and expedite the wolves' removal; and, indeed, they were removed from the contiguous 48 states almost completely over the subsequent decades (a small population in northern
Minnesota was the only exception to the otherwise successful extirpation campaign).
Changing attitudes
In the early twentieth century, some significant research performed in the blossoming young field of
ecology led to an important realization about the relationship between predators and the land.
Aldo Leopold, a
botanist,
forester, and
naturalist of the early twentieth century (who is now world-renowned), was at the forefront of this new science. Early in his career during the first quarter of the twentieth century, he encountered a pack of wolves in the mountains of the southwest. He described his encounter thus:
» :—an excerpt from "Thinking Like a Mountain" (
A Sand County Almanac)
Encounters similar to Leopold's were being repeated throughout North America. Early ecologists were the first to recognize the fundamentally flawed rationale behind the creating of the "hunters' paradise." It soon became apparent that overzealous deer, lacking predators, could cause unimaginable devastation to a landscape by browsing every edible bush, tree, and shrub, thereby preventing new growth from ever reaching prominence and ultimately reducing entire ranges to a state of utter desolation. In other words,
"...just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. (Leopold)" Eventually, the deer herd itself would starve of its own inordinateness.
After Leopold's death, the groundbreaking research of wolf scientists such as
Farley Mowat,
L. David Mech, and Adolph Murie helped to shift the wolf's image to that of an intelligent and affectionate creature essential to the proper functioning of a conventional North American
ecosystem. This awareness widely exposed the beneficial nature of wolves, and helped lead to their eventual endangered classification and subsequent
reintroduction efforts. Accordingly, while the
stereotype of wolves as malicious, wanton killers and vile, worthless beasts still has influence in certain circles, a significant portion of the
public has developed a more positive opinion of wolves as interesting, valuable, and noble animals. Society as a whole has begun to realize the morality in attempting to make up for centuries of undue persecution, and knows of the justification behind trying to bring some ecological integrity back to the American landscape.
Since the late 1960s, wolves have been officially protected in the U.S. in some form or another by a national endangered species bill, the latest of which is the
Endangered Species Act of 1973. Additionally, in a somewhat novel development, they've been allowed to naturally propagate in the upper
Midwest, and have been reintroduced to areas in
Wyoming,
Idaho, and
Arizona. In
Alaska, where they're not protected by the Act, their populations continue to be controlled (usually by aerial hunting) in an effort to increase yields for hunters.
Today, organizations such as the
International Wolf Center, Defenders of Wildlife, and continue to attempt to educate people about the true nature of wolves, and such action has proven helpful to past reintroduction efforts, especially in places like
Yellowstone National Park.
The large amount of
research done on wolves in the last half
century has also helped to educate people in a way that helps them to realize how
sociologically similar humans are to wolves, and how people have little to fear from these naturally cautious, complex animals. Biologists L. David Mech, Rolf Peterson and Luigi Boitani have arguably been the three leaders in contemporary wolf research.
This onslaught of pro-wolf
publicity, including that which has been procured from nature
documentaries and
books, has undoubtedly played a role in changing attitudes for the better. Such mediums tend to emphasize the wolf as an affectionate, devoted parent and fraternal animal that's deserving of our respect and protection as integral members of our global
biodiversity.
There are still many though who view the wolf with caution, and consider the criteria a wolf attack has to fill (in order to be counted as an actual attack) as unreasonable and biased in the wolf's favour.
Native American oral history does suggest that wolf attacks occurred long before the arrival of European settlers.
Symbolism Within Music
With the ever expanding growth of Scandinavian based
heavy metal, the wolf has been commonly used throughout visual and audial imagery. Bands such as
Sonata Arctica (who use the wolf as their "mascot"),
Marduk,
Wintersun, and
Wolf, who's logo contains the image of a wolf paw, have used the wolf throughout their lyrics. The symbol of the wolf has been reputed to represent varying degrees of power as well as connections to Scandinavian nations (such as Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden) and their natural habitats (snow, mountains, and forests). Additionally, images of wolves can be more violent, with the focus on their potential ferocity and ability to hunt.
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