Who's Afraid ot the Big Bad Wolf?

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

I confess that I have been of rather mixed feelings about wolves. I mentioned during my state senate campaign last year that I hadn't formed a strong feeling about the subject. I am skeptical of some of the pro-wolf media efforts; they smack a little of bunny-hugger mentality. Alfred, Lord Tennyson's famous description of "Nature, red in tooth and claw" seems to get missed by a lot of people who fancy themselves environmentalists--and even more so by those who imagine that they can live at peace with nature--like Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend, who were both defenders of grizzly bears and grizzly bear dinner. I am also a bit skeptical of the motives for some who have commercial interests in keeping elk populations up.

Wolves, however, have traditionally been regarded as dangerous animals, both to livestock and to people. This is why so many state governments in the nineteenth century paid bounties for killing wolves. They aren't like a bunny rabbit or a fox; it's pretty clear that a wolf could be a very dangerous animal.

Anyway, this article from the April 25, 2009 National Post (one of the Canadian newspapers) has an interesting article about a guy who, after retiring from the National Security Agency, put his Russian skills to work examining the Russian literature about the wolf--and came to some startling conclusions:

Hunger will drive the wolf from the forest and into the villages is an old Russian saying that may fit here. Will Graves knows this. He is about to address this crowd, 4,000 kilometres from his home in Maryland. A linguist by training, he has spent the last 45 years studying the way people speak of wolves in Russia. There is, he says, much to learn by examining such things.
These Canadians, having heard their whole lives a story of wolves lifted from Farley Mowat's pages -- that they are relatively harmless, timid around humans and economical predators who hunt sparingly -- are growing skeptical. They had come to hear a story from a different language.
"For so long, people had the impression that wolves killed only sick, diseased, wounded or crippled animals; that they didn't kill any healthy or fit animals; that the wolves kill everything that they ate; and that wolves were not a threat to humans -- you didn't have to worry about them ever attacking you; that they're the sanitarians of nature; that they're not carrying parasites or disease," Mr. Graves says. "The impression is way out of kilter," he says.

He explains that Russians have traditionally been more fearful of wolves than North Americans--and for an interesting reason. After describing several recent attacks on humans in North America, and comparing it to the most more common problem with wolves in Russia:

Canada's benign canine is, from Siberia to the Caucasus, a feared and reviled menace: "the greatest and most dreadful scourge of humans," is how an early 20th-century edition of the Russian Table Dictionary describes wolves; in the writings of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nekrasov, Bunin and many other luminary Russian writers lurks the "ill-boding shadow of the wolf," Mr. Graves writes in his 2007 book, Wolves in Russia: Anxiety Through the Ages.

And not just because the Russians drink too much vodka!

Firearms were banned from the peasantry by the tsars and later the Soviets, fearful of insurrection. As men were conscripted away from villages during wartime, women, children and the elderly made particularly vulnerable targets.

Soviet authorities, Mr. Graves discovered, took pains to suppress news of wolf fatalities so as to avoid demands for self-defence measures. (Mowat's Never Cry Wolf -- which Dr. Geist calls "totally fallacious" in its portrayal of wolves -- was aggressively promoted in the U.S. S. R., the professor believes, to perpetuate the unworried North American perspective.) Mr. Graves translated reports from Russia's Central Statistical Committee showing that in one particularly bloody 17-year period in the late 19th century, more than 1,400 humans were eaten by wolves, and more than 750,000 cattle were lost every single year. Some were rabid; many were not.

...

Wolves are considered benign here because the plains were setttled with guns, Mr. Graves says. Here, the animals came to fear man, rather than the other way around. "If wolves are hunted they will become very shy," Mr. Graves says. "They lose that, and become more inquisitive and curious about humans if they're not shot and not hunted and that's when you potentially start getting into conflict, if the wolves lose their natural fear and hesitancy about humans." In conversation, Mr. Geist is in the habit of describing timid wolves as behaving "American" and brazen wolves as behaving "Russian." There, he says, "they sit at the edge of the forest and watch people."
That kind of flagrant behaviour, Mr. Graves tells his audience, could be starting in Alberta, the result of decades of conservationism and relaxed vigilance. Since the province compensates ranchers for livestock lost to wolf attacks, Albertans have dropped their guard, with little to gain by tangling with a hungry wolf. Across the U. S., conservationists have won laws protecting the animals from hunting. Now, several northern states, moved by farmers' concerns over increasing predation, are pushing to change them.