That age old fraternity of nature, where man’s presence is unnoticed and his absence un-regretted.
William Beebe’s definition of wilderness has always resounded with me. It is wonderful to think that there are places in the world where humankind’s presence goes un-noticed. It is both sad and maddening that those places are shrinking and disappearing every day.
A few days ago a friend, Cindy of the wondrous Woodsong, posted on wolves, an animal that holds great meaning, a sacredness, to her. I commented on the post, a comment meant to point out that wolves in fact have attacked and killed a person in North America, but despite my being in agreement with much of what Cindy was saying I believe I didn’t state my case very well, and seemed to have come off rather badly there. And while we agree on the salient points we miss on some others.
The wolf is a wondrous creature, a social animal with an amazing hierarchy. It is a creature of intelligence and a creature of the wilderness. That it is a creature of the wilderness is the crux of the problem, not a problem for us, but for the wolves. We continue to shrink wilderness at an unprecedented rate, encroaching on their home and conflict is bad for the wolves.
Humans have long had a relationship with wolves, and while they may be vilified by some for various reasons, not being able to tame them isn’t one of them. The evidence of our relationships, and the domestication of them is all around us, perhaps it even lies curled at your feet. For our "best friend" the dog is but a wolf. Although it has been long thought that dogs are have are descended from wolves and perhaps some other wild canids, DNA studies have shown that their direct ancestors were wolves, and nothing else. In fact dog’s DNA is so close to wolves that some taxonomists have classed them as a subspecies of wolf… Canis lupus familiaris. Estimates of when the domestication occurred vary greatly, and it is likely that it happened separately on a number of different occasions, between 10,000 and 150,000 years ago.
When I went back to read my link to the story of a young man’s death from a wolf attack near Wollaston Saskatchewan I followed a couple of other links at the bottom of the article to studies on wolf attacks in the USA and Canada and also world wide. (they are pdf documents). The first article is a technical bulletin that details most known attacks by wolves in North America. It made for fascinating reading. I have to admit that prior to the incident in Wollaston I had bought the "wolves had never attacked a person" thing. Turns out that there has been numerous incidents, of varying degrees of seriousness (although when you factor into the number of wolf person encounters and that there are probably some 50,000 wolves in Canada alone these incidents are a pretty rare occurrence). The author of this case study, Mark E. McNay groups the incidents by the different reasons for the attack 1) Agonism (Which McNay defines as a behavioral pattern exhibiting features of both aggression and avoidance, arising from a conflict between aggression and fear (Rudin 1997). Agonistic behavior includes most aggressive behaviours and non-aggressive ritualized behaviors related to wolf social interactions including territorial defense, rank-order interactions, and sexually motivated aggression. Agonistic aggression is often preceded by some warning or threat display (Fox 1971:134).; 2) Predation; 3) Prey testing or Agonistic charges; 4) Self-Defense; 5) Rabies; 6) Investigative Searches; and 7) Investigative approaches. Significantly, habituation to people plays a significant role in many of these incidents. Also significantly the incident almost always ends badly for the wolf or wolves.
Reading the world wide case study made it very clear that North American wolves pose much less of a danger than wolves in the rest of the world, Europe and Asia. The conclusion I came to as to why that was is that we have more wild here, less places where wolves and people butt up against each other on a regular basis. In the extreme case of India, where there is very little wild, and limited prey species for the wolves, there are many incidents of wolves preying on people. In one area some 200 children were killed and many more attacked over a fifteen year period (1980-1995).
I love wolves and have had the good fortune to see them on numerous occasions in the wild, both near where I grew up and in almost every place I’ve lived. I’ve stumbled upon a wolf killed deer while the carcass was still steaming, knowing full well that the pack was just out of my sight (but that I wasn’t out of theirs). I’ve never really been scared of them in the encounters, comfortable in the knowledge that they were more wary of me and probably wanted nothing more than for us to put distance between ourselves.
The lessons of the attacks and other encounters though seem fairly clear to me, that we can not continue to shrink the wilderness that is their home without there being more conflicts. And we can not habituate them to our presence, by leaving garbage where they roam or even worse feeding them, without it leading to trouble. And almost always that trouble spells the death of the wolf.
Many people have long vilified the wolf and other large predators. In part because sometimes they compete with us, and our commerce, and in part (I believe) because of fear. Both the fear that comes from not understanding something, and the primal fear of large predators that rests in us as the result of our early days as just another prey species on the Savannah. The more that we do to learn about the wolf (and other life) and the more that we learn to respect them, and especially their space and their wild nature, the less of that persecution and vilification will happen. I’m thrilled that I live somewhere where wolves live, but I’m also concerned that two would be comfortable enough to roam around our house. Concerned because I have two small children, one of whom plays outside all the time, and that it is worrisome that these would not show the fear of town as they should. The death of my child would not seem to me to be an acceptable risk of living in a wild area.
"There’s an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it’s our own myth, the American frontier, that’s deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I’ve seen, and their kids will see nothing; there’s a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now." — Peter Mattheissen
Literary postscript.
When I was a young man I first read Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat and was gripped by it as I had been with few books. Somewhere I have an autographed copy, Farley Mowat was campaigning in Manitoba during a provincial election campaign and I went with one of my teachers to a rally in Dauphin where he was speaking, just so I could get the book autographed. If you have any knowledge of my dislike for politics you would know that that involved a big sacrifice.
Mowat is a great storyteller, but unfortunately I’ve come to learn that he is one with an agenda, and that he is rarely bothered by letting facts get in the way of that agenda. Never Cry Wolf did much to help the wolves cause, and helped promote a better, hmm not understanding but empathy towards them. Unfortunately much of it is pure fiction. I think that L. David Mech, one of the preeminent wolf researchers in the world, and a man who also lived among the wolves in the remote arctic, said it best. In his book The Wolf Mech acknowledges that Mowat is an excellent counterpoint to Little Red Ridinghood’s portrayal of the wolf as a savage man-killer, but that neither of the stories were grounded in fact.
Comments
8 responses
Lots of good information in this post. I hadn’t known all that about Mowat.
When I read this post, Clare, I am reminded of the exponential growth of human population:
After millions of years of extremely slow growth, the human population indeed grew explosively, doubling again and again; a billion people were added between 1960 and 1975; another billion were added between 1975 and 1987. Throughout the 20th century each additional billion has been achieved in a shorter period of time. Human population entered the 20th century with 1.6 billion people and left the century with 6.1 billion.
As you say, the tragedy occurs on the boundaries where we overlap with wild animals, and those boundaries keep changing as we push further and further into their territory.
How can you make your world safe for both Travis and the wolf? Is it possible? I think a world without wolves is not a good world for Travis either. I think this is the work for all of us–to figure out how to protect wolves, their territory, and ourselves.
Clare. Reading your post about wolves reminded me of a day a dozen or so years ago at work. My employers were a couple in business and a couple in life. Fran, the art director, grew up around The Pas. She has some Aboriginal blood. We were meeting with a woman from an organization related to government about some design work they needed. The lady was Aboriginal. Our office was located in a 100 year old Victorian home. Glenn and Fran had an apartment on the 3rd floor. When our prospective new client showed up for our first meeting she practically stopped in her tracks when walking into the main floor of the office. She started talking a lot about a great spirit she felt somewhere in the building. With Glenn and Fran’s blessing she started following the call of the spirit, which led her to the third floor and a wolf coat that had belonged to a long gone ancestor of Fran. It was one of the coolest things I’d ever witnessed.
Thanks Pablo – I’ve an interesting ancedote about Farley Mowat involving a signficant incident in Northern Justice, which involves a resident of Arctic Bay. I intend to post on the incident one of these days and relate the Mowat story as an aside. But I need a book that is in storage as I don’t want to get it wrong. He is an extremely interesting person with a powerful personality. I remember when I got the autograph from him, he did a wolf howl for me which sort of stopped all conversation at this rally.
Robin Andrea – therein lies the crux of the problem. The problem lies not so much with wolves but with us, and shrinking wilderness. And I don’t want to understate this, wolf/person incidents are very rare. I don’t want there to be a world without wolves, and I think they’ll be with us for a long time. I think we do have to do more to see that there is space for them. There has been no more sign of the wolves (that we’ve seen) around town so the danger is probably minimal. But it does exist. One thing that struck me when I read the North American paper was the number of incidents in Nunavut, a place where there is a LOT of wild and not very many people, and even then some involved wolves that were habituated to people, fed or otherwise. Rabies is a big issue here also. There is probably a bigger danger from dogs here than wolves (and they are controlled pretty well also).
Hey Morris,
Thanks for sharing that story with us, good to have another Roblinite’s input.
Hey Clare, I’m very impressed by this post, particularly by how you’ve struck a fine balance between expressing your awe and love of wolves and a pragmatic respect for their potential to harm us in rare, particular circumstances. It seems everything to do with wolves carries great emotion – which, in my opinion, is neither surprising nor undesirable.
Have you been following the discussion of Barry Lopez’s book Of Wolves and Men at Whorled Leaves? They’ve moved on to Rachel Carson now; the final post about Lopez’s book was Debs summary (http://whorledleaves.blogspot.com/2006/05/parting-thoughts-on-lopez.html).
Clare, I’m glad you posted about this.
Had some problems viewing my comments for awhile, it seems to be corrected now finally.
Thanks Pete. I haven’t visited Whorled Leaves (I always want to say “Visualize Whirled Peas” when I see that) for awhile, I guess I’ll have to go look. I have to confess that Of Wolves and Men effected me in different ways each time I read it, I guess it depended on my mood. Perhaps it is time to read it again (if I can figure out what box it is in).
Thank you Pamela, I was hoping to hear from you given your expertise with the family.