In defence of wolves

Press, 11 July 1979, Page 18

In defence of wolves

By

CHRISTOPHER WORDSWORTH

in London

Reviled and persecuted since the dawn of prehistory, the European wolf is the Dreyfus of the animal world. Rehabilitation came too late almost everywhere. In Russia, where its freeenterprise habits brand it an enemy of the people, it is poisoned like vermin and machine-gunned from lowflying aircraft. It has been saddled with every vice trom lust to cowardice in a wealth of metaphor and folklore; “Elee a vu le loup” is good French for a lost virginity, while “keeping the wolf from the door” has become a British preoccupation. Old wives’ tales still abounded 50 years ago: for instance it was widely credited that Alsatian dogs had one wolf “.row-back in every litter. And such is the wolfs power over the mind that Rider Haggard in “Nada

the Lily” could get away with wolves in wolf-less Africa. Among the non-pastoral people of North America it was a different story. So far from superstitious fear and loathing, Eskimoes and Red Indians respected the wolf as a fellow-hunter — there was a Pawnee saying that it could hear a cloud passing overhead — and appreciated its social and tribal virtues. Cherokees believed that to kill a wolf was to invite retribution from other wolves (the Chukchis of Siberia whispered to any wolf they killed that they were Russians not Eskimoes); an Eskimo who killed one abstained from sexual relations for four days. These people of course were too ignorant and too thin on the ground to indulge in war on a European scale, and thus the wolf did not acquire its reputation as corpse-feeder on *

the battlefield. It was a bad look-out for canis lupus when the Pilgrim Fathers arrived in North America with their good old witchhunters’ belief that everything pertaining to the wilderness was morally evil as well as a material threat. In a new book, “Of Wolves and Men”, Barry Holstun Lopez investigates many aspects of the relationship, from lycanthropy and the dubious “wolf-child-ren” to the latest — and frequently dishonoured — attempts to conserve the persecuted survivors. He has a poet’s eye for the rituals of nature and a I d thy contempt for naturalists who ignore indigenous experience of man-wolf symbiosis in favour of rule-of-thumb judgments which overlook the fact that as hunters and entrepreneurs wolves are the most individualist of all animal.s 0.F.N.5., Copyright.