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The Wolves of Our Nature: A Wrongful Extinction
Daniel Warner
Since we have had the means to outwit wolves, we have driven them nearly to extinction
and forced them into only narrow sections of the world. By passing down mediated superstitions
for countless generations through stories like "Little Red Riding Hood,” "The Big Bad Wolf,”
and "The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” we have put forth an image of wolves as uncontrollable killing
machines in need of extermination. It is only recently that the process of reversing this frenzied
deletion has begun.
Wolves are extinct in the wild in the US and the UK, and only exist in captivity within a
few handfuls of organizations. I had the fortune of working as a volunteer wolf handler for one
such organization-the UK Wolf Conservation Trust based in Berkshire, England. In 2013, I
studied abroad in Reading, England and as part of a class on “Writing the North American
Wilderness,” I had the opportunity to take part in a work placement program as long as I was
able to tie my experience together with the course material. After working at the UKWCT, I have
found myself taking a keen interest in wolves and in how they have been portrayed over the
years. So, why should you care about wolves in the UK? Why should you even care about
wolves at all?
Centuries ago, especially in rural areas, livestock were a primary source of food and
transportation for humans. However, they also happened to be an easy source of food for wolves.
The prejudice against wolves is the result of a fear based in survival that was originally intended
to protect livestock. But this necessary fear has evolved into the deep seated hatred that remains
today, despite the general lack of danger that wolves now present to man.
One of the biggest problems with this anti-wolf mentality is that, because it has existed
unquestioned for so long, its misconceptions have become entrenched even in modern culture

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and have proven extremely resistant to change. The gray wolf and the red wolf are, respectively,
endangered and critically endangered in many parts of the world. A few efforts have been made
to correct the prevailingly negative views regarding wolves, however, and my main focus today
will be to address how two such efforts in particular have contributed to changing the perception
of wolves.
One effort that has been made towards furthering positive information regarding wolves
is the establishment of the UK Wolf Conservation Trust (UKWCT), which is an attempt to raise
the publicity of the wolf's plight and to refocus the incorrect conceptions of them. The objectives
of the trust stem from a generalized assumption that the public's knowledge as well as the
publicly available knowledge is not accessible or accurate enough to be sufficient and so are all
aimed at providing solutions for this inadequacy. And while at the UKWCT the goal is to try to
provide an unbiased view grounded in science and accuracy, it is only inevitable that an
organization whose aim is to dispel misconceptions that portray wolves negatively, despite their
efforts at providing unbiased information, will provide equally biased counter-positive portrayals
to offset this.
The focus of the UKWCT on portraying aspects of wolves that do not typically appear in
media indirectly builds an image of the wolf for visitors to the trust and readers of its magazine,
Wolf Print. Its efforts to reduce the heavy mediation of the modern understanding of wolves also
cannot escape being mediated. One definitive example of this is the UKWCT's use of
"ambassador wolves.” These are wolves that have been socialized to humans by being exposed
to daily human interaction from birth and therefore have a significantly diminished fear of
humans. Having wolves like this allows the trust to interact with the wolves and even allows
them to let visitors interact with the wolves in the form of "wolf walks"- a common practice of

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the trust that lets a certain number of paying visitors accompany a group of senior wolf handlers
as they take the three best behaved and youngest wolves out on chained leeds for a guided walk
around the organization's grounds. In addition to providing the visitors with an encounter with a
real, living wolf, the senior wolf handlers periodically provide information about wolves and
attempt to answer any queries that arise. Such educational anecdotes include: often during the
walks at least one of the wolves will roll over and let a visitor rub the soft part of its stomach,
during which one of the handlers might remark with a comment along the lines of "and here you
have your 'Big Bad Wolf'"; or, at any point along the walk, one of the handlers might remark on
the hypocrisy of Theodore Roosevelt's advocation of teddy bears but derision of wolves, or how
Indians did not fear wolves but revered and lived alongside them for centuries in places like
America before settlers began wiping them out. The utilizing of "ambassador wolves" and
supplementing of the "wolf walks" with anecdotal educational information are ways in which the
UKWCT carries forward its objectives of increasing public awareness and righting
misconceptions. But, by their very purpose, they still carry a directed positive nature instead of
being unfiltered and unbiased.
During a particular presentation given at the trust, a video is played that shows Arctic
wolves bounding through snow and playing together which, along with a significant portion of
the lecture being devoted to the prejudices against wolves and their endangered status, portrays
wolves in a way that is in stark contrast to the frequent notion of wolves being vicious predators.
Regarding the issue of authenticity, the portrayal of wolves that the UKWCT gives is still only
one facet of their complex nature.
Another earlier effort that has been made to change how wolves are perceived is the
movement that developed the wild animal story into a literary genre. The literary movement as a

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whole sought to address a debate formed by the conflicted cultural atmosphere of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that placed Romanticism at odds with burgeoning
Darwinism. Ernest Thompson Seton, author of the story “Lobo, King of Currumpaw” which is
considered the first “Wild Animal Story,” presents in the Preface to his 1898 book Wild Animals
I Have Known, the movement's intended message: "we and the beasts are kin."
Before he began writing animal stories, Seton made a living partly as an animal trapper.
His account of Lobo is in fact a true account of how he was hired to hunt down a particular wolf
in New Mexico by using the wolf’s mate to lure him into a trap. It is the sight of the helpless and
possibly heartbroken wolf in that trap that moves Seton into fighting for the conservation of
animals rather than their killing.
This led him to become deeply involved in the debate about animal’s intellectual
capabilities that is referred to as the Nature Fakers controversy. This was a highly publicized
debate of the early 1900s where on one side John Burroughs and Theodore Roosevelt considered
animals incapable of anything beyond instinct and the remaining majority of the wild animal
story writers considered animals as capable of human emotion and reason to at least a certain
degree. The debate garnered much publicity for concerns of conservation, and Seton's portrayal
of Lobo the wolf is what began the debate and the conservation movement in the first place.
Other early authors of the genre, Charles G.D. Roberts and William J. Long, instead of
making wolves more human-like, construct wolves as if they are forces of nature. These
depictions evoke a sense of strangeness and power that command respect of the wolf, yet they
also maintain wolves as having at least a vague sense of morality or tenderness for humans even
if they do not share as blatant of human characteristics as, say, Seton's wolves.

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One further interesting feature that runs through the depictions of wolves throughout
much of the wild animal story genre is a respect for Indian culture and people. For Jack London,
Long, and Roberts, this is evident in how they use many distinctively non-English words and
phrases (e.g., the phrases "Old Tomah" and “wigwam” are used in Seton’s works instead of God
and lean-to) and portray their wolves as protective of and loyal to Indians. This is similar to how,
at the UKWCT, the wolves are named using the Inuit language rather than English. One of the
wolves at the trust, Nuka for example, is Inuit for "younger brother.” The notions of raising
public awareness, respect for wolves, and of dissolving long held misconceptions regarding
wolves are present in each effort that is made to resolve these issues. The differences then are
how the efforts go about enacting these desired changes.
The reality of the situation is that wolves have been persecuted for centuries upon the
basis of harsh and largely untrue assumptions, myths, fables, and stigmas perpetuated by farmers
from long ago. In those days, they had no other explanation for the sudden deaths of their
livestock and so they blamed wolves. However the subsequent centuries of wolf witch hunts
have overblown a misconception of wolves so great that they have been nearly wiped out as a
reaction to the unnecessary fear.
A century previous to the UKWCT’s founding, the genre of the wild animal story created
its own wolves, garnering readers' sympathy and respect through a very public controversy, and
through making wolves appealing instead of repelling. These actions helped spur the
conservation movement of the early 1900s and eventually the founding of programs like the
UKWCT. Likewise in its goals, the UKWCT has utilized wolf "ambassadors" and modern
science in order to provide accurate information alongside encounters with the mythologized
wolves in the hopes of dispelling the fear of them and making their plight known. Both efforts to

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change the perception of wolves have drawn significant attention towards the need to reduce how
negatively mediated the wolf has become. The UKWCT even has daughter programs as of a few
years ago that extend its reach into the US.
However, the problem remains that the image of the wolf that is being promoted as a
countering response is still not necessarily that of the "real" wolf. Rather, it is merely the direct
opposite of the long standing negative image--the positively mediated version of the wolf. And
while this may not be the most accurate portrayal of wolves, it is at least a step forward.

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Works Cited
"Aims of the UKWCT,” UK Wolf Conservation Trust (ukwct.org.uk) [accessed 20 June 2013].
Coleman, Jon T., Vicious: Wolves and Men in America. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale
University Press, 2004.
Gooder, Steve, "A Man, a Wolf, and a Whole New World,” The Telegraph, 2008
(www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/3337634/A-man-a-wolf-and-a-whole-new-world.html)
[accessed 29 June 2013].
London, Jack, The Call of the Wild, White Fang and Other Stories (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009).
Long, William J., Northern Trails, Book 1 (Whitefish, Montana: Kessinger Publishing, 1905).
Roberts, Charles G. D., "The White Wolf" in Hoof and Claw (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1917), Project Gutenberg, 2012 (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38675/38675-
h/38675-h.htm) [accessed 29 June 2013].
Roberts, Charles G. D., "The Passing of the Black Whelps" in Watchers of the Trails
(Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1976).
Seton, Ernest Thompson, Wild Animals I Have Known (New York: Dover, 2000).
The Wild Animal Story, ed. by Ralph H. Lutts (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).
Wood, Kay C., Smith, Harlan, Grossniklaus, Daurice, "Piaget's Stages of Cognitive
Development" Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology, 2001
(http://epltt.coe.uga.edu/index.php?title=Main_Page) [accessed 27 June 2013].