Myths surround wolves
By NICK GEVOCK Chronicle Staff Writer
Despite their tendency to make headlines, Ed Bangs says wolves are actually pretty boring animals. Yet the intensity of people’s reaction to the toothy critters is fascinating.
“It’s pretty much the same worldwide, people are people and wolves are wolves; when you mix the two, the reaction is very predictable,” Bangs, the man in charge of wolf recovery in the Northern Rockies for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said recently. “You hear the same stories about the same kinds of things.”
Things like, wolves kill for fun.
Or wolves are just looking for a chance to attack people.
Or, when they’re around children, wolves are a serious threat.
Although years of studying wolves has shown that none of those things are true, Bangs said, the facts are often overshadowed by wolf folklore and mythology.
Wolf tales span the globe and span the centuries, depicting the wolf as everything from a beneficient beast eager to assist man to evil incarnate, waiting to gobble him up.
Despite being one of the most studied animals on Earth, those stories do more to shape human perception of wolves more than any biologist’s work.
“In the wolf we have not so much an animal that we have always known as one that we have consistently imagined,” writer Barry Lopez penned in his classic book on wolf-human interactions, “Of Wolves and Men.”
WOLVES AT THE DOOR
When two packs of wolves began attacking livestock in the Madison Valley last month, Bangs was bombarded with complaints from Montana’s congressional delegation, the governor, ranchers and local officials.
Wolf attacks on livestock are never taken lightly and both packs were wiped out by federal trappers, Bangs pointed out.
But the reaction to the attacks stunned him.
“Wolf stuff brings out this tremendous emotion,” he said. “The mythology of wolves feeds all that stuff.”
It is true that wolves at times prey on livestock. But ranchers’ losses to wolves are minuscule compared to those caused by weather, disease and other predators, he said.
It is also true that, in extremely rare cases, wolves have bitten people, although most of those incidents involved rabid wolves or ones that had been fed and become accustomed to being around people. In North America, however, there are no documented cases of a healthy, wild wolf attacking people.
Clearly, the intensity of emotion surrounding wolves is far more pitched than the threat. Wolves strike alarm in humans to a degree that bears and mountain lions do not.
“Cougars kill people, and people don’t cry out to wipe out the whole species,” said Kimberly Byrd, who earned a doctorate in conservation biology at the University of Minnesota studying people’s perceptions of wolves.
Byrd and others who study wolf mythology say the immense body of wolf folklore, more than anything else, seems to drive people’s perceptions of the animal.
“The depth with which this animal enters into the symbolism in our culture is tremendous,” Byrd said.
THE BIG, BAD WOLF
Throughout the ages, fables have bestowed wolves with one of four basic characteristics — foolish, wise, helpful or evil, said Kevin Strauss, a storyteller from Ely, Minn.
The portrayal of wolves in various cultures has “a lot to do with how people made their living when they made up the stories,” Strauss said. “These aren’t so much stories about wolves, they’re stories about people.”
Stories featuring wolves as villains are plentiful, including a verse in the Bible in which Jesus described himself as a shepherd, safeguarding his flock of sheep from wolves.
The “Three Little Pigs,” “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Peter and the Wolf” are just a few of the fairytales that cast wolves as evil creatures scheming to gobble up the main characters.
In Germany and Eastern Europe, farmers for centuries despised wolves for occassionally attacking livestock, and that comes through in the stories.
“The society from Central Europe was very similar to colonial America — a farming society,” Strauss said. “The stories they passed on, not just about wolves, reflect those values: hard work, perseverance, domestication as opposed to wilderness.”
And yet, in other cultures the wolf has always been admired, even revered.
Numerous American Indian tribes respect wolves for their hunting ability and courage.
Even some stories from Eastern Europe and Russia depict wolves as heroes, where the wolf helps people, despite the fact that much of the region’s folklore casts wolves in a negative light.
In Finland, herders saw wolves in a positive light, or at least a neutral one, Strauss said.
One Finnish story has a good wizard creating the wolf to control the reindeer herds. The wizard formed the animal’s backbone from the main roof beam of a human’s house, its claws and teeth from the iron nails and its eyes from the glowing embers of the home’s fire.
In the end, the wolf also managed to keep the evil Lord of the Dead out of the forest, serving to protect people, too.
As testament to the power of such stories, Strauss said some Finns, who were watching captive wolves, asked whether wolves could turn their heads. After all, if their necks were made from roof beams, they’d be too stiff to bend, wouldn’t they?
NOT JUST ANCIENT LITERATURE
But it isn’t necessary to go back centuries to find literature that feeds negative perceptions of wolves.
The United States government added to the mythology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, said Mark Madison, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service historian in Shepherdstown, W.Va.
Throughout that period, the government waged a successful campaign to eradicate the wolf in order to protect livestock and dwindling big game herds. Although the loss of wildlife was largely due to uncontrolled hunting and loss of habitat, the wolf made an easy scapegoat, he said.
“The scientific community really propagated this ‘big bad wolf’ thing,” Madison said. “If you look back at our literature in the 1930s, the wolves are portrayed as kind of snarly looking, they’re always described as kind of murderous and bloodthirsty.”
While wolves did prey more heavily on livestock at the time, that was largely due to the decimation of game having taken away their usual prey.
And federal official also touted wolf killing as a way to make the woods safe for hunters and anglers.
“The more effective propanganda were leaflets sent out to Boy Scouts, farmers and ranchers, saying, ‘This is what we’re doing to eradicate the wolf,'” he said. “These big predators didn’t have much of a consitiuency.”
FOLKLORE LIVES ON
But times change. Now the federal government and conservation groups are trying to shift perceptions, urging people to see the importance of wolves in wild ecosystems.
The gift shops in Yellowstone National Park now stock stuffed toy wolves. The Grizzly Discovery Center in West Yellowstone has a few wolves in captivity to help educate tourists. A 1993 book, “The Three Little Wolves and the Big, Bad Pig,” even attempts to turn a classic “bad wolf” story on its head.
However, it’s unlikely folklore so ingrained in American culture will go away soon.
And Strauss said that’s not a bad thing. Stories are one of the best ways people learn because they appeal to basic emotions.
He likes to tell many of the lesser-known tales about wolves from other cultures, but he’s careful to choose stories that reflect wolves as both beneficient beasts and evil incarnate.
That balance is important, he said, because wolves are wild animals and can be unpredictable.
Yet for all efforts at balance, the big bad wolf is not likely to disappear entirely.
“I’m not sure scientists will be able to counter the stories and appeal to the emotional side of our brains,” Strauss said. “Just giving people statistics and scientific facts will not alleviate those concerns.”