Wolves have long been feared and hated by humans.
We are both fascinated by and terrified of them.
We see wolves as the very symbol of wildness, as a dark presence lurking at the edges of nightmares.
We also feel wolves are a threat to creatures we assume to be rightfully ours: livestock, pets, and animals that we want to be the ones to hunt for our own sport or food.
Wolves have long been depicted as horrifying and scary. Think of stories and movies, to name a few, Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, The Gray, Twilight, Harry Potter, and the legend of werewolves in general.
Yet, there is surprisingly little evidence of wolves being the blood-thirsty, dangerous, human-hungry predators we think they are.
In fact, wolves are known to be sensitive animals, exuding delicate emotions. They are magnificent parents and devoted children. And contrary to what many people believe, they only attack livestock in extreme desperation and hunger.
Lewis and Clark, on their early nineteenth-century march across the continent, found wolves coexisting with native hunter-gatherers who revered rather than cursed and feared the wolf. Lewis and Clark themselves described the unaggressive wolves they encountered on the great western plains and clearly regarded them as no threat to human safety. Despite the hordes of inexperienced pioneers that soon filled the land, reports of wolves attacking or threatening humans were very, very few.
However, with hordes of settlers sweeping into their territory and across the country, this resulted in dwindling numbers of prey for the wolves. Rising numbers of people resulted in rapidly diminishing deer, elk, and bison populations, which are the prey of wolves. So, the wolves began feeding on newly introduced livestock because they didn’t have much of a choice as the invasion of humans in their area was compromising their livelihood.
There is also a misperception that wolves do a lot of surplus killing, as in, kill more than they can eat. This is rare. Prey is too hard-won to squander.
This killing of livestock then made them targets for hunters and trappers.
By the mid-1930s, wolves were almost totally extinct.
Homesteaders and ranchers launched an all-out attack on wolves for this, which was totally supported by the government as being necessary.
And apparently, simply killing wolves by all the “efficient” means possible, including guns, steel traps that clamp around their legs, breaking and ripping them to shreds, and poison bait wasn’t enough.
Wolves were often subjected to the kind of torture that is reminiscent of the worst episodes of human genocide. Wolves were burned alive, dragged to death behind horses, fed fishhooks that were hidden inside the meat, and set free with their mouths and penises wired shut.
For anyone with a heart, this should be making you shudder, recoil, and feel painfully sad. It should also make you angry.
Up through the 1940s, carnage against wolves was widespread, though there were very few of them left at that point.
From the 1970s to the 1990s, though, a newfound interest in preserving our rapidly vanishing wolf population arose.
But this has not been within lots of bitter, largely ignorant, controversial viewpoints thrown into the mix.
An important question for pondering: Who are we as humans to claim we are the most important animal on the planet?
The most worthy ones?
Who do we think we are, that when another animal inconveniences us, the other animal is the one that deserves eradication? That the other animal deserves to be wiped out so that we can do our thing?
Why are we as humans the priority? The top dog? The one that gets to play god and make that decision?
We as humans are encroaching on all the other millions of species of animals around this world. It’s been that way for a long time now. We are taking over all the available space. We are destroying habitats and food sources with our habits and behavior. So what else should we expect, but animals to begin searching for food wherever they can? And for animals to potentially wander into our areas and onto our land, since their own space is rapidly shrinking and thus, they are forced to do so?
And then we believe it’s our right to kill them for it? This is royally messed up.
It’s entitled and self-centered.
It’s lacking care and empathy for other living things that are just as worthy to live a good life as we are.
It’s lacking respect for other living souls and lacking understanding of the issue at hand. We are the ones robbing animals of their space. Thus, how dare we then think we have the right to take their lives for it?
Some anti-wolf people say that wolves help drive certain species to extinction because of their hunting habits.
Uhhhh. No. There is no hard evidence of this, and what’s especially noteworthy about such a flimsy argument is that none of these people seem to consider the torture, unrestricted killing, and habitat reductions done, not by wolves, but by us humans to a TON of other animal species.
Why are wolves important?
A big reason is that they play a paramount role in keeping prey populations healthy by culling the weak and infirm. They keep ungulate numbers in balance with the habitat.
Wolf reintroduction into Yellowstone resulted in an astonishing transformation of depleted rivers and streams, to the benefit of many species of trees and animals, from aspens to cottonwoods to beaver to songbirds to cutthroat trout.
Wolves are also a natural form of real and natural predator control. There was a huge reduction of coyotes which prey heavily on young game animals, as well as livestock.
But despite these positive benefits, fear-mongering and misinformation continue to drive people to fear, despise, and kill wolves, so much as that they are still quite endangered in most parts of the world.
People against wolves say something like this: “Wolves are a predatory menace to the game animals on which people depend, not to mention, a threat to human safety.”
To punch a hole in that argument: Like humans, wolves need to eat. Why are humans the ones of utmost entitlement to game animals? Why can’t people hunt (legally and with sustainable, restricted rules), while wolves are also free to do their thing in order to also live a good life? What’s with this, “We humans are most deserving and screw everything else, because all other animals are lesser”? What’s with the “we as humans deserve first dibs on game animals and wolves deserve to die for competing with us for that?” This is an insane and nasty way of thinking, to say the least.
A lot of hunters and anti-wolf types today feel a knee-jerk disdain for those people who attempt to recognize and engage with wild creatures as sentient, feeling, worthwhile beings. This is a strange disconnect given that traditional hunter-gathered societies insisted on deep spiritual bonds with the creatures they sought, gave them respectful, meaning-filled names, and generally saw them as equals if not even beings with supernatural powers.
Many of these anti-wolf and hunter types prefer to objectify animals and creatures rather than engage with or feel for them for a number of reasons, while they pursue and kill animals as an assumed, given legal right, for their own entertainment or profit, or just on a whim.
Further, while there is evidence of wolves attacking humans on extremely rare occasions and amidst circumstances such as likely mistaking the human for prey, it is very, very rare.
By and large, when a wolf and a human cross paths, the wolf reacts with weariness, caution, and even fear, turning and running away. Wolves are elusive, mysterious, and shy. They tend to avoid humans at all costs.
By far the greatest number of predatory attacks in this and the last century of wolves on humans have taken place in remote areas of India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. In these areas, there is a rapidly dwindling number of natural prey for wolves, there is widespread human poverty, lots of human intrusion on wolf habitat, and the tradition of leaving young children to watch over livestock. All of these factors likely contribute to whatever attacks may have happened, though even then, official records are lacking.
To date, there are just two documented cases of human predation on the entire continent of North America in more than four centuries of wolf-human interactions.
During that same time period, dozens of humans have been killed by a variety of livestock and wild animals, including pigs, donkeys, deer, and llamas. Human deaths from domestic (aka, pet) dogs alone average around 30 per year, and thousands are severely bitten.
So as you can see, our immense fear of wolves is misguided.
While wolves have caused humans very little harm, though, we have caused them an almost unfathomable amount, torturing and killing them to near extinction.
A lot of people still use snare traps in rugged, forested terrain. They used the steel-jawed leghold trap, which wolves are quite susceptible to because the owner of the trap usually hides it underneath snow or brush.
This very trap played a huge role in the significant decline in wolf populations over the years.
It’s an immensely painful trap, one that snaps shut on the wolf’s legs, often breaking bones and largely ripping apart their limbs. Some wolves live for days caught in these traps, suffering from immense pain. Many die from shock, others from infection. Some will chew off their own leg in order to get out. If they do escape, they are often sickly and weaker afterward from the injuries sustained by the trap, and thus, way more likely to die anyway. If the wolf that was trapped is an Alpha-male or Alpha-female from a pack since those are the only two wolves in a pack that breed, this is likely to result in a specific kind of blow to the wolf population in that area if this wolf dies.
These traps are horribly cruel, heartless, and unethical. They are a painful, harmful way to try and kill off wolves. In many places all over America and even the world, they are still legal today.
A lot of current-day legislation all over the U.S. stipulates that wildlife is allowed to and even should be managed (“managed,” meaning, killed) for human benefit.
Again, there’s that sense of entitlement, as in, we humans are the most important lives and livelihood on the planet and should come above all other creatures.
We often use hazing methods to keep wolves and other wildlife at bay, such as letting off firecrackers or shooting heavy little beanbags or even rubber bullets at them. All of which scares and can very much harm the animals. Rubber bullets can even kill them.
In The Empire, the local paper of Juneau, Alaska, in response to this very type of behavior toward a wolf in their town, a woman, Anita, wrote, “Adverse conditioning is definitely the answer to solving the issue of the wolf’s presence at Mendenhall Glacier. A few well-placed rubber bullets or bean bags should send the right message to the lamebrains who deliberately encourage their dogs to approach the wolf and the photographers who crowd and relentlessly seek him in pursuit of their own selfish interests. It’s only fair they should be the ones-not the wolf- to be on the receiving end of a little behavior modification because these people are causing the problems in the first place.”
Hear, hear! We need way more people with this level of insight, logic, empathy, and then with the guts toward taking a stand for animals in this very type of way.
Here is the truth about wolves:
As top predators, wolves are a natural part of a healthy, complicated, self-regulating ecosystem, and removing most of them is only going to mess things up. In parts of the world where wolves are eradicated, it already does, throwing animal populations way out of whack in ways that cause problems.
Without wolves, deer and moose explode in unsustainable numbers, then crash, over and over.
Wolves also offer an aesthetic value to many residents, even if they never manage to see one.
Though there are laws and regulations in some cities and states about harming wildlife, many state laws and records of their applications tell a different story. A lot of court records show that no one serves time for first-time misdemeanor wildlife violations and that full fines on all possible charges are seldom if ever, imposed. Thus, it’s clear there’s a lot of talk about how people “care about protecting wildlife,” but not a lot of action backing it up.
A thought-provoking, cool, worthwhile thing:
There have been a number of cordial, even warm relationships between wolves and humans over the years. In the words of Nick Jans, author of A Wolf Called Romeo (a superb book which I highly recommend, a true story about this very thing), “Clearly, just such a bond must have formed not once, but many times in our collective past. How else did we end up with the shaped children of wolves lying at our feet?” (He means, domestic dogs, which share 98% of genetics with wolves).
All of this aside, killing wolves for sport or because we “think we deserve to” is wrong, period.
Other than in our own delusions, we as humans do not have a right to decide which other animals deserve to live versus which ones deserve to die.
If an animal is inconveniencing us, how dare we decide it no longer deserves a good life? Or even a life at all?
Think about all the animal populations, millions of them, that we have inconvenienced, caused damage to, and even destroyed, with all of our building of cities, our population growth, our pumping of chemicals and gases into the air which is harming the earth as, as a result, animals food sources.
Think of how, as we continue to expand across the earth, animals are forced to crunch ever closer to one another, their own space, shrinking and shrinking as we encroach on them further. Where else are animals supposed to live at this point?
Wild animals are being forced into closer and closer confines with us, because of our choices and behavior, much of which is the result of greed and self-centeredness. And we’ve offered no limits, no boundaries on our expansion as humans so that wolves and other animals are protected and offered their own spaces which will be maintained and kept safe. So what else can we expect? And then we decide it’s fair to kill them for it? This is a huge breach of ethics and care with regards to other living things and sharing the earth with one another.
We humans need a reality check on our sense of entitlement with regards to wildlife and this earth, and fast.
The fate of our planet and all of our wildlife and their livelihoods depend on this.
I’ll conclude this article with some way cool, as well as important information about wolves:
They can hear up to six miles away in the forest.
A wolf's jaw has a crushing power of nearly 1500 pounds per square inch!
A wolf can eat 20 pounds of meat in one meal.
Wolves can swim up to 8 miles!
A wolf howl can be heard up to 10 km away.
A wolf’s howl is as distinct as a human’s fingerprint is to them. Totally unique.
Wolves were the first animals to be placed on the US Endangered Species Act list in 1973.
To restate this again, only two wolf attacks have led to fatalities in North America (one in Alaska and one in Canada) during the 21st Century.
Wolves are beautiful, mysterious creatures that are crucial to our ecosystem and a healthy planet, and are very much worth saving. Please share this article if you feel the same way so that we might spread the word and help continue to save and conserve this incredible animal, as well as numerous other ones.
Source consulted and drawn from for this article: A Wolf Called Romeo by Nick Jans.