Of Wolves and Men

There were a few I spoke with, however, who were quite different. It was as though these men had broken down at some point in their lives and begun to fill with bile, and that bile had become an unreasoned hatred of many things. Of laws. Of governments. Of wolves. They hated wolves because—they would struggle to put it into words—because wolves seemed better off than they were. And that seemed perverse.

Diversity, many now suspect, is not merely a characteristic of life, either biological life of cultural life. It is a condition necessary for life.

The basis for conflict between these two groups becomes clearer if your recall that while people like Bierstadt and Karl Bodmer were exhibiting America's primitive beauty in European salons, American pionneers were cursing that same wilderness as the symbol of their hardships - not to mention decrying the genteel men who praised it but lived for their part in the comfort of a European city.

It is a commonplace of history that men condone violence for righteous causes and then feel guilty about it. It is also true that those who condemn violence most severely are sometimes its greatest voyeurs.

Let’s say there are 8,000 wolves in Alaska. Multiplying by 365, that’s about 3 million wolf-days of activity a year. Researchers may see something like 75 different wolves over a period of 25 or 30 hours. That’s about 90 wolf-days. Observed behavior amounts to about three one-thousandths of 1 percent of wolf behavior. The deductions made from such observations represent good guesses, and indicate how incomplete is our sense of worlds outside our own.

The truth is we know little about the wolf. What we know a good deal more about is what we imagine the wolf to be.

Nunamiut Eskimos believe that during winter a healthy adult wolf can run down any caribou it chooses, but it doesn’t always do this for reasons known only to the wolf. And perhaps the caribou.

It seems to me that somewhere in our history we should have attempted to answer to ourselves for all this. As I have tried to make clear, the motive for wiping out wolves (as opposed to controlling them) proceeded from misunderstanding, from illusion of what constituted sport, from strident attachment to private property, from ignorance and irrational hatred. But the scope, the casual irresponsibility, and the cruelty of wolf killing is something else. I do not think it comes from some base, atavistic urge, though that may be a part of it. I think it is that we simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it