Early on, Never Cry Wolf was debunked by genuine wolf biologists. A former colleague of Mowat’s, reviewing his book in The Canadian Field-Naturalist, compared it with Little Red Riding Hood, and said the two had “about the same factual content.”
But that didn’t matter. Mowat was off, and the wolf with him. Cut now to the 1980s, and the first great flush of interest in what came to be known as “wildlife art.” Promoted by companies publishing “limited-edition” prints, artists like Robert Bateman produced paintings of birds and animals in photographic detail. The wildlife-print craze was short, but during its heyday (1985 to 1995), prints and their subjects became mainstream topics. Everyone, it seemed, was into it.
One of the most famous paintings of the era was Bateman’s Midnight—Black Wolf, and people gathered at parties discussing its deeper meaning and place in art history alongside Renoir. Years later, in an interview, Bateman told me wolves were his single most salable subject. Publishers pressed painters to produce more and more of them, to the point where serious artists would agree to produce another wolf painting only on the condition the publisher printed some on less salable subjects, such as wildebeest or black-footed ferrets.
Conservation groups knew that a wolf in an ad would draw donations. The wolf was fashionable, certainly, but the appeal went far beyond fashion—beyond Mowat, Bateman, et al to a deeper human combination of fear and fascination. From “Little Red Riding Hood” to Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, humans have a complex relationship with wolves as contradictory as the fact that some wolves evolved into dogs—man’s best friend—while others remained his fiercest enemy, the predator that destroys his flocks, whose fierce yellow eyes haunt his dreams.
From an imputation of cunning evil—”My, what big teeth you have, Grandma”—to the modern urban sensibility of wolves’ inherent nobility, virtually all wolf-centered anthropomorphism is ill-placed and misleading. Love ’em or hate ’em, wolves aren’t evil: they’re just wolves. Now, a wolf being a wolf can lead to all kinds of distress, from missing house cats to the destruction of sheep flocks and the eradication of entire herds of caribou. But that’s not evil. It’s simply nature. Anthropomorphism is a long and ungainly word for imputing human characteristics to animals. Through the centuries, no animal has been more subject to anthropomorphism than the wolf—both good and bad.
The problem with the anthropomorphic approach is that it leads to emotional decisions. Central to this is the undeniable fact that no animal in nature, with the possible exception of a cheetah cub, is more photogenic than the timber wolf. They are luxuriantly beautiful animals.
But let’s wax anthropomorphic for a moment. A timber wolf is like a cross between George Clooney and Hannibal Lecter—handsome and photogenic, with a single-minded, conscience-free devotion to killing and eating. A pack of timber wolves becomes one of nature’s most devastating killing machines.
In the early 1990s, when American officials were first discussing obtaining Canadian timber wolves from central British Columbia to transplant to the American mountain states, some Canadian biologists were frankly incredulous. Even the wolf lovers among them questioned whether the Americans really understood what they were getting into. It’s one thing to capture some wolves and release them into a new territory; it’s quite another to predict, much less control, what they do from there.
Human experience with transplanting species has been generally mixed, but usually unfortunate. The law of unintended consequences was created to cover such landmarks as the introduction of rabbits to Australia, fallow deer to South Africa, or wild hogs to the southern U.S. The difference between a deliberate introduction, done with the best of intentions, and a destructive “invasive species” is merely one of desirability, degree, and, often, cosmetics.
Those who promoted the reintroduction of wolves pointed out that, having been hunted to extinction in the Western states, this was a case of returning to the past, not trying something new. They also pointed out that, without predators, herbivores were overpopulating many areas and eating themselves out of house and habitat. Destruction of plant life by congregating elk was having a devastating effect on smaller animals, birds, fish—every component of an ecosystem no longer in balance.
Skeptics cautioned that the ecosystem into which the gray wolf would be transplanted was not as it had been before their forced departure. There were no wide-open spaces, no countless bison, no grizzly bears. Prairie grass was replaced by barbed wire and waving wheat, and towns dotted once-empty horizons. If the ecosystem wasn’t as it had been 200 years ago, the wolf couldn’t possibly fit in as it had 200 years ago. Conflict at every level was inevitable.
Not to worry, said the all-knowing biologists. We’ll drop them into Yellowstone Park. There are too many elk there. Lots of food. The wolves will stay. Why would they want to leave?
