WOLVES IN THE GARDEN

Our false beliefs about wolves are responsible for most reports of wolf attacks. Such stories have less to do with the biology of wild animals than with the psychology of western European Christianity over several tormented centuries. Wolves speak to the human mind with the power of myth: they represent the energy of the Earth, the passions of human life and death. These include sex. It is not by accident that the Latin words for "wolf" and "whore" are identical, that in English we refer to a sexually aggressive man as a wolf, and that when a girl has her first intercourse, French speakers say "elle a vu le loup." For many Christianity was at war with human sexuality, the World, the Flesh and the Devil were potent and menacing.

Therefore it is not surprising to learn that by the time of the Inquisition, the wolf had been equated with Satan-the "wolf" in Christ's fold. In the words of Barry Lopez, in his classic study Of Wolves and Men, "there was a great mystery about the wolf and fabulous theater of images developed around him. He was the Devil, red tounged, sulphur breathed, and yellow eyed; he was the werewolf, human cannibal; he was the lust, greed, and violence that men saw in themselves." All that we most feared and hated in ourselves, we projected onto our age-old companions, the animals with which we felt the greatest kinship. And so wolves were to be killed, brutally if possible, to rid the world of sin. Werewolves, too, were tortured until they confessed to shape shifting and gory sexual crimes, and then were executed.

When Europeans arrived in North America, they bought with them eighteenth-century versions of these same lurid misconceptions. To them was added a new concomitant: a struggle against the wilderness that was both literal and mythic. The settlers arrived with a mission to tend a garden in a wild land. There was no place in the garden for predators. Wolves were killers and, in addition to any actual threat, reminded the newcomers that they were ultimately not in control, even in this new and promised land.

On both continents wolves were persecuted with fury; hundreds of thousands were slaughtered. In North America they were trapped and poisoned by ranchers, bounty hunters and professional "wolfers." In the melodramatic spirit of the American West, the last survivors in each area were described as outlaws and given bandit names: "Three Toes,""Mountain Billy" and "Custer Wolf." A hundred and fifty men tried to kill Three Toes and collect the gold watch offered in reward. It was all very exciting. Between 1881 and 1918, bureaucrats in Montana alone paid out on $80, 730 claims for wolf bounty.

We cannot distance ourselves from this carnage by declaring that the people who accomplished it were evil. Many of the wolf killers were civil servants hired by democratically elected governments to carry out the public will. Virtually everyone was of the same culture released a Guide to Finding and Killing Wolves, "to be issued to as many ranchers, hunters, trappers and forest rangers as possible." In 1090, the superintendant of ALgonquin Park wrote an aricle entitled "How should we destory the wolf?" Not "Should we?" that could be taken for granted even by an official custodian of nature-just "How?" In the early sixties, when the first careful study of wolves in the park was undertaken, it ended with a determined effort to "collect" the carcasses of wolves from the study area.

That was only thirty years ago, yet today such an action would be unthinkable. Although a few people are still fogged in by the prejudices of bygone times, a fresh wind has blown through the public mind. Perhaps the enthusiasm of the sixties succeeded in lightening our spirits. Certainly Hiroshima, Silent Spring and the subtle new science of ecology have gradually changed our thinking. Wolves, which just a short time ago were burdened with all that was bestial and menacing in nature and in ourselves, suddenly have become the symbols of a born-again wilderness.

"In wildness," Thoreau told us, "is the preservationof the world." Many of us, with the fervour that comes of knowing life itself may be at risk, have placed our hopes on the side of the wolves and wilderness.

People deeply at odds with themselves have been at odds with wolves. So it is a sign of great hope that we find ourselves drawn to them with renewed sympathy. Yet our change of heart will be of little significance if we merely become engrossed in a new mythic drama, with wolves now cast as shining heroes and their human critics assigned to play the black-hearted villians. We cannot spend our lives on the set of a Walt Disney film, where wolves are nice puppies that eat only mine, and every person who kills an animal is a shady character. Reality, as we currently understand it, is more interesting-and more challenging-than that.