Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb. We were off for the Juneteenth holiday,
Speaker 1: so we are just a tiny bit behind in our schedule,
Speaker 1: so we are going to run a vault episode for
Speaker 1: you here. This is an interview episode I did last
Speaker 1: year with author Adam Weymouth talking about his book Lone Wolf,
Speaker 1: Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness. It's all about
Speaker 1: the European Wolf, it's recent comeback and the similarities between
Speaker 1: the human and the lupine world This one originally published
Speaker 1: six twelve, twenty twenty five. Let's jump right in.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb, and on today's episode, I'm going
Speaker 1: to be chatting with Adam Weyman, author of Lone Wolf
Speaker 1: Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness. It's all about
Speaker 1: the European Wolf, it's recent comeback, in the similarities between
Speaker 1: the human and lupine worlds. Without further ado, let's jump
Speaker 1: right in. Thank you, Hi Adam, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Hi Rap, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1: The new book is Lone Wolf Walking the Line between
Speaker 1: Civilization and Wilderness released as of June third and all
Speaker 1: major formats. As you describe in the book, Your Journey
Speaker 1: began in covering the possible reintroduction of wolves into Scotland.
Speaker 1: You'd written about this prior, so I thought you might
Speaker 1: walk us through this first. What happened to the wolves
Speaker 1: of the British Isles and where do things stand now
Speaker 1: with their potential reintroduction?
Speaker 3: And what happened to the wolves of the British Isles
Speaker 3: is pretty much the same that happened to the wolf
Speaker 3: across its entire range. The wolf used to be once
Speaker 3: upon a time the most widespread terrestrial land mammal on
Speaker 3: the planet, all across the Northern Hemisphere, from the tundra
Speaker 3: right down to the tropics and pretty much everywhere, including
Speaker 3: in the British Isles. They were pushed almost to extinction,
Speaker 3: or in the British Iles, completely eradicated. So there's a
Speaker 3: bunch of last wolf stories. It seems that they hung
Speaker 3: on in Scotland later than anywhere else. The last definitive
Speaker 3: account for wolf in Scotland is sixteen twenty one, and
Speaker 3: that's a note for a bounty that was paid on
Speaker 3: a wolf. But it was an exception, you high su
Speaker 3: which suggests by them that demand was already kind of
Speaker 3: outstripping supply. And then it kind of verges into myth.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of people that would like to claim
Speaker 3: they killed the last wolf, whereas actually, of course the
Speaker 3: last wolf probably lived out it's days, far from any one,
Speaker 3: profoundly isolated and alone.
Speaker 1: Now you actually looked for the alleged remains of the
Speaker 1: last wolf in Scotland, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. So it's like I said, it's very
Speaker 3: hard to come by. There's one story that I followed.
Speaker 3: So I began my journey in Scotland at in a
Speaker 3: state up near in Verness where this gentleman called Paul
Speaker 3: Lister has been talking about trying to reintroduce now wolves
Speaker 3: now for about twenty years or so. And I walked
Speaker 3: across Scotland and finished it in the south of the
Speaker 3: Kangom Mountain range. And that's one of the places where
Speaker 3: the last Wolf is meant to have been killed. And then,
Speaker 3: as you say later, I said out trying to find
Speaker 3: it because it is then meant to have been stuffed,
Speaker 3: and had various journey through different collections and museums, but
Speaker 3: the actual providence of it is now pretty hard to locate,
Speaker 3: and really, through the course of the research it made
Speaker 3: me realize that this probably wasn't the last wolf at all.
Speaker 3: This wolf that was being taken around these museums in
Speaker 3: Scotland was being labeled as the last wolf in order
Speaker 3: to sell tickets, but really it was probably nothing of
Speaker 3: the sort.
Speaker 1: And what about the reintroduction of the wolf into Scotland
Speaker 1: or various other areas where the wolf is no longer present.
Speaker 1: Where do we currently stand with that in terms of
Speaker 1: public sentiment and even governmental opinion.
Speaker 3: Well, one of the reasons that the wolf is so
Speaker 3: good to write about is because people are incredibly passionate
Speaker 3: about it from both sides. People love wolves or they
Speaker 3: hate wolves, and you find very little in between. And
Speaker 3: that's essentially where we are. It's been noted in the
Speaker 3: British Isles as the most popular animal for reintroduction. But
Speaker 3: then you go and speak to people that would be
Speaker 3: actually living alongside it. Once again, we have sheep farmers
Speaker 3: in Scotland, hunters, gameskeepers, people like this, even people that
Speaker 3: live in villages in the countryside, and there's this reputation
Speaker 3: that the wolf has for better or worse, and there
Speaker 3: are people that are very passionately against it as well.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because in some ways it's quite an arbitrary
Speaker 3: decision here wolves as we're going to talk about wolves
Speaker 3: are making this remarkable come back in Europe, and if
Speaker 3: Britain was still connected by a land bridge to the
Speaker 3: continent as it used to be a couple of hundred
Speaker 3: thousand years ago, then there would be back. There would
Speaker 3: be wolves back on the British Isles now, and we
Speaker 3: wouldn't be having a debate about whether or not to
Speaker 3: introduce them. We'd just be talking about how we deal
Speaker 3: with them. But because we're an island, we get to
Speaker 3: make these particular decisions about about what we let in,
Speaker 3: and realistically it's not going to happen here for a
Speaker 3: long time. It's taken about fifteen years of great debate
Speaker 3: to allow the beaver to come back, and that's that's
Speaker 3: broadly accepted now. But there's a lot of other species
Speaker 3: we'd see back before. Wolf is really really the pinnacle
Speaker 3: of Once wolves are back, you know, we're not really
Speaker 3: talking about the worlding anymore. It's kind of.
Speaker 1: Happened now now moving to Condon or Europe. Here the
Speaker 1: book is primarily concerned with a particular wolf, Schloats. Can
Speaker 1: you tell us about Schloats and why his particular story
Speaker 1: captured you so and serves as the is the driving
Speaker 1: force of your narrative?
Speaker 3: He sure, Schloutz, it is actually one of the interesting thing.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's a particular Slovenian word. And even in
Speaker 3: the other countries that Schlous ended up in, no one
Speaker 3: can really say his name. Probably, But I first read
Speaker 3: a little piece about Schlutz when I was doing my
Speaker 3: research on wolves in Scotland, and it was this very
Speaker 3: small article about this wolf that had been born in
Speaker 3: the south of Slovenia in twenty ten and had a
Speaker 3: GPS track and collar put on him by a biologist
Speaker 3: who was researching into wolf behavior. But of course that
Speaker 3: biologist could have no idea what this animal was going
Speaker 3: to go on to do. He was really just interested
Speaker 3: in the sort of dynamics of the how a wolf
Speaker 3: maintained the territory of the pack. But the following year,
Speaker 3: at the end of twenty eleven, when Schlutz is about
Speaker 3: eighteen months old, he left his pack behind and set
Speaker 3: off on this epic one thousand mile journey through the Apps,
Speaker 3: he crossed Slovenia, he crossed the whole of Austria, and
Speaker 3: four months later in the spring, came into Italy and
Speaker 3: it was there that he bumped into a female wolf
Speaker 3: who was on a walk about of her own. So
Speaker 3: somehow in there wasn't another wolf for thousands of square miles.
Speaker 3: Somehow these two wolves managed to find each other, and
Speaker 3: when they bred, they became the first wolf pack back
Speaker 3: in the Italian Apps for more than a century. So
Speaker 3: in one way, it was this remarkable love story that
Speaker 3: I was drawn to. The female wolf ended up getting
Speaker 3: called Juliet because they were very close to Verona, and
Speaker 3: Romeo and julieta still Verona's most famous couple. So I
Speaker 3: was really drawn to this incredible meeting in this love
Speaker 3: story between these two animals. But of course not everyone
Speaker 3: is quite so quite so in love with the idea
Speaker 3: of having wolves back in the mountains.
Speaker 1: Now, as you definitely discussed in the book, when we
Speaker 1: talk about wolves, there's often a lot of separating the
Speaker 1: biological reality of wolves from human mythmaking about wolves and misconceptions.
Speaker 1: Coming back to the title of the book, Lone Wolf,
Speaker 1: can you remind us just what a lone wolf actually is,
Speaker 1: and in comparison to maybe some of the ideas that
Speaker 1: we have about lone wolves.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I really wanted to call it lone wolf,
Speaker 3: and we had a bit of pushback sort of an
Speaker 3: editorial meetings and stuff. But to me, it was really
Speaker 3: important to call it loanew because I wanted to challenge
Speaker 3: this idea of what a lone wolf is. We think
Speaker 3: of a lone wolf as this kind of eastward archetype,
Speaker 3: you know, this hero riding off into the sunset who
Speaker 3: doesn't need anyone or anything, Whereas what I realized from
Speaker 3: following Schlaus is that actually a lone wolf is simply
Speaker 3: something that hasn't found what it's looking for yet. And
Speaker 3: a lone wolf is looking for the same three things
Speaker 3: that we all are. It's looking for enough land to
Speaker 3: live on, it's looking for enough food to eat, and
Speaker 3: it's looking for a mate. So and it's an incredibly
Speaker 3: vulnerable time for a wolf. There is no more vulnerable time.
Speaker 3: Wolves don't hunt well alone. They like to be part
Speaker 3: of packs, they like to have a fixed territory. They
Speaker 3: are actually an incredibly conservative species, very shy, very hard
Speaker 3: to see. So to set off on these journeys, as
Speaker 3: a particular kind of subset of wolves are hardwired to do.
Speaker 3: To disperse like this is an incredibly dangerous, perilous time
Speaker 3: for them, and not a not a proud, self sufficient
Speaker 3: state that they want to end up in.
Speaker 1: Now. In chronicling this journey, you sometimes rte from the
Speaker 1: point of view of Slouts himself in the book, and
Speaker 1: I thought this was a lovely choice. It makes for
Speaker 1: some very poetic passages. Can you describe your process for
Speaker 1: imagining the mindset of the wolf and how this factored
Speaker 1: into your approach.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Thanks. I toyed with it for a while, and in
Speaker 3: the end it felt important. I didn't want to say that,
Speaker 3: you know, I was seeing the world as a wolf was,
Speaker 3: but I wanted in some way to sort of, however clumsily,
Speaker 3: kind of get inside Slouse's mind in a way. And
Speaker 3: there was something about following his journey. So the track
Speaker 3: and collar that you had to put on him, it
Speaker 3: gave one waypoint every one hundred and ninety minutes for
Speaker 3: the entire four months of his walk, And before I
Speaker 3: set off, I transferred each of those waypoints onto this
Speaker 3: big stack of maps that I carried in my rucksack,
Speaker 3: and as I walked, As I followed this path, you
Speaker 3: started to get some sort of sense of how this
Speaker 3: wolf was seeing the world's you know, on the map.
Speaker 3: It might have not seemed to make sense why he'd
Speaker 3: suddenly changed compass point and set off on a different bearing,
Speaker 3: But then when I got to this point, I realized
Speaker 3: that I could hear the airport, or hear a highway,
Speaker 3: or I could you know, see a town for the
Speaker 3: first time as we come over a hill, or the
Speaker 3: other places where he turned round because it was a
Speaker 3: mountain pass and the winter that he traveled, it's incredibly snowy,
Speaker 3: and a lot of these places are just inaccessible, so
Speaker 3: in some way that you couldn't get from just looking
Speaker 3: at the data on the page. By doing this walk,
Speaker 3: I started to sense some sort of way that the
Speaker 3: wolf was moving through a landscape in a way, and
Speaker 3: often looking for the easiest route as well, often following
Speaker 3: the river or the bike path down a valley rather
Speaker 3: than going over a mountain range. And yeah, I felt
Speaker 3: by the end of this walk, after following in his
Speaker 3: footsteps for a few months, that I'd kind of earned
Speaker 3: the right to at least try and write a little
Speaker 3: bit from his from his perspective.
Speaker 1: Yeah, humans have of course long considered the wholf. We've
Speaker 1: long seen shades of them and us, and shades of
Speaker 1: us and them. So yeah, this is this is I guess,
Speaker 1: a long standing area of analysis and consideration, right, like,
Speaker 1: how are wolves like us? And how are we like
Speaker 1: the wolf?
Speaker 3: Yeah, we obviously go way back. The wolf is the
Speaker 3: first animal we domesticated, it's the first animal we lived alongside.
Speaker 3: And there are these really interesting similarities between the two
Speaker 3: of us. We're two of the very few species on
Speaker 3: the planet that hunt prey that are larger than ourselves.
Speaker 3: That's unusual in the animal world. And in order to
Speaker 3: do that, that means that you need to work together
Speaker 3: as a pack. And then when you start working together
Speaker 3: as a pack, that requires division of labor, and it
Speaker 3: requires hierarchy, and it requires some sort of quite complex
Speaker 3: social organization. And so in some ways there's this real
Speaker 3: affinity between how humans work together and how wolves work together.
Speaker 3: And I think that probably is the reason that we
Speaker 3: found each other in kind of hunting gather at times
Speaker 3: and decided to work together, essentially because we had this
Speaker 3: sort of underst and we both like to run after
Speaker 3: pray and tire them out, and that is the way
Speaker 3: that that is the way that they hunt, as opposed
Speaker 3: to a big cat or something like that. And I
Speaker 3: think it's almost that closeness. There was a wolf behavioral
Speaker 3: scientist that I met in Austria and he said to me,
Speaker 3: either you love your brother or you hate your brother.
Speaker 3: There's nothing in between. And I think it's almost that
Speaker 3: closeness that we feel to wolves. And obviously we see
Speaker 3: that in our relationship to dogs as well, which are
Speaker 3: essentially the same animal. That we've had this incredible bond
Speaker 3: with them, but that's very easily quickly flipped into a
Speaker 3: hatred that I don't think we have for any other
Speaker 3: animal either.
Speaker 1: And that speaking of that hatred and sort of like
Speaker 1: the dark side of that bond. You write a bit
Speaker 1: in the book about Europe's three centuries of werewolf trials
Speaker 1: and the werewolf panic. Can you tell us a bit
Speaker 1: about this period of time and how it matches up
Speaker 1: with the timeline of the Eurasian wolf's decline.
Speaker 3: Sure, so, yeah, to kind of to break that down
Speaker 3: a bit, maybe I can say a bit first just
Speaker 3: about the kind of the extermination of the wolf in
Speaker 3: generole because we began at that point, as I was saying,
Speaker 3: with that sort of hunter, gather a relationship to the wolf.
Speaker 3: I think it's two hunters almost respecting each other. But
Speaker 3: as soon as we became herders, as soon as we
Speaker 3: put up fences and started to keep livestock, the wolf
Speaker 3: became this animal that was on the other side of
Speaker 3: the fence. Suddenly we had something that the wolf wanted,
Speaker 3: and very quickly it flipped into the wolf being the
Speaker 3: thief the vagabonds, and from a Christian lens, if Jesus
Speaker 3: is the lamb, then then the wolf is the devil.
Speaker 3: And the persecution that they've faced over millennia, really ever
Speaker 3: since there's been money to pay them, there have been
Speaker 3: bounties out on wolves heads, kind of back to sixth
Speaker 3: century BC and Athens there were bounties out on wolves.
Speaker 3: Charlemagne from about eighteen from about eight hundreds sorry in
Speaker 3: France started trying to eradicate the wolf, but it took
Speaker 3: almost a thousand years. It wasn't until nineteen twenty seven
Speaker 3: that wolves were finally gone from France, And in some
Speaker 3: ways it was in the United States where that kind
Speaker 3: of hatred of the wolf really reached another reached a pinnacle.
Speaker 3: Basically that the ways that wolves were killed, they were
Speaker 3: set on fire, they were pulled apart by horses, they
Speaker 3: were beaten to death, and then paraded through town on
Speaker 3: the back of horses. The estimates of up to two
Speaker 3: million wolves were killed in the latter half of the
Speaker 3: nineteenth century in the United States, and then and then
Speaker 3: and the Native Americans saw it as as a manifestation
Speaker 3: of insanity. It was said, it was seen as a
Speaker 3: manifestation of insanity amongst the amongst the white settlers that
Speaker 3: were that were killing these animals, and the yeah, and
Speaker 3: there's something you're doing this research. It really seemed to
Speaker 3: border on a hatred to wipe out that many animals,
Speaker 3: right down to the very last animal. It feels like
Speaker 3: it requires a stronger motivation than just a desire to
Speaker 3: protect one sheep. It and and the werewolf Charles that
Speaker 3: you mentioned at the beginning of that question seemed to
Speaker 3: be one of those particular manifestations of that sort of
Speaker 3: paranoia and hate. I'm some of your listeners will be
Speaker 3: familiar with the witch trials, like the Salem witch trials,
Speaker 3: and we had them a lot in Europe. As well.
Speaker 3: Thousands of women were killed over over several centuries, but
Speaker 3: I wasn't aware that people were actually put to death
Speaker 3: for being accused of being were wolves as well. And
Speaker 3: one of the u there were two towns actually in
Speaker 3: Austria that Schloutz's route passed through were places whereas late
Speaker 3: as the early eighteenth century, people were being put on
Speaker 3: trial and hung for being were wolves, and quite often
Speaker 3: the accused seemed to be travelers, wanderers, beggars, people that
Speaker 3: might turn up in town. Maybe two sheep were killed
Speaker 3: that night, and the local people decided to put two
Speaker 3: and two together and and persecute the outsider for bringing
Speaker 3: this ill upon the town.
Speaker 1: I'm glad you mentioned the agricultural aspect of hatred of
Speaker 1: the wolf. Had recently read a couple of different books
Speaker 1: looking at and were wolf myths and legends and talking
Speaker 1: about how in some cases you see people trying to
Speaker 1: to date the idea of were wolve's back to our
Speaker 1: prehistoric ancestors in this time when we lived closer to
Speaker 1: the wolf, and certainly when we domesticated the wolf. But
Speaker 1: then I think the more convincing stories that I've read
Speaker 1: have made the argument that it is. These are ultimately
Speaker 1: agricultural era tales. These are tales of fear of the
Speaker 1: wolf and analysis of the wolf in a time when
Speaker 1: we are worried about our sheep and our herds and
Speaker 1: our dominion over nature.
Speaker 3: I don't think that's to say that it's a kind
Speaker 3: of obviously it's a misguided assumption. But obviously, you know,
Speaker 3: to these people, it's not like now when you can
Speaker 3: get compensation from the state for a wolf kill on
Speaker 3: the sheep. Wolves don't kill a huge amount of livestock,
Speaker 3: but they can target certain farms and certain herds, and
Speaker 3: so someone might lose twenty of their thirty sheep, and
Speaker 3: that would have been an absolutely existential crisis a few hundred
Speaker 3: years ago. That was your way of getting through the winter,
Speaker 3: that was your way of feeding your very large family.
Speaker 3: It would have felt horrifying to be targeted in that way.
Speaker 3: And I can see the trials against the were wolves
Speaker 3: and also the kind of ambulets and charms and things
Speaker 3: that people tried to as some way of trying to
Speaker 3: have dominion over nature when nature felt really outside of
Speaker 3: one's control.
Speaker 1: Now and my recent reading about some of these werewolf
Speaker 1: that's one of the books that I was looking at
Speaker 1: was a twenty twenty one book by Daniel Ogden called
Speaker 1: The Werewolf in the Ancient World, And there's one quote
Speaker 1: in that that I keep coming back to, where he
Speaker 1: says the quote wolves are in and of themselves were
Speaker 1: wolves already in so far that is, as they combine
Speaker 1: the qualities of the wildest and most lawless of animals
Speaker 1: with those of civilization and humanity. And I kept coming
Speaker 1: back in that, not to just harp like negative connotations
Speaker 1: of the wolf, but I thought this was interesting and
Speaker 1: sort of looking at the wolf as this thing that
Speaker 1: already mirrors a lot about humans, like not just potential savagery,
Speaker 1: but also how social wolves are, something that I think
Speaker 1: is sometimes very often overlooked. Certainly, and we're wolf stories,
Speaker 1: but just in general, I was wonder if you might
Speaker 1: speak to He's touched on this already a little bit,
Speaker 1: but speak to just how social wolves are and how
Speaker 1: how like humans they are in this regard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think in some ways they're they're almost an
Speaker 3: aspiration or animal. You know, they were obviously genetically far
Speaker 3: closer to chimpanzees, but I think we in wolves we
Speaker 3: see qualities of almost how we would like to be.
Speaker 3: You know, you go to you go to zoom and
Speaker 3: watch chimpanzees, you obviously see something in them, But to
Speaker 3: watch a wolf is to is to see how humans
Speaker 3: could be. I think, you know, wolves, wolves are excellent parents.
Speaker 3: They're one of the very few animals where the males
Speaker 3: will stick around long after the birth to look after
Speaker 3: both the pups and the suckling mother. They are incredibly loyal,
Speaker 3: They are courageous and resourceful, and you know, often I
Speaker 3: met a lot of people, a lot of farmers on
Speaker 3: my journey through the Apps, who absolutely detested wolves, you know,
Speaker 3: for the burdens that they put on their lives. But
Speaker 3: I still got this sense that if they if they
Speaker 3: were to be reincarnated at some point in the future,
Speaker 3: if they were going to come back as animal, they'd
Speaker 3: really like to come back as a wolf. You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, how when people think about wolves,
Speaker 1: there is often this aspirational aspect of it, like they
Speaker 1: don't actually be a were wolf, but the idea of
Speaker 1: being like free like a wolf, of having the wolf
Speaker 1: is kind of like a you know, a symbolic animal
Speaker 1: in one's mind.
Speaker 3: And it's worth saying we've spoken about the kind of
Speaker 3: hatred and the hatred that we've put on them. That
Speaker 3: adulation of the wolf is also a misconception. One of
Speaker 3: the things that I found in this book is that
Speaker 3: almost the hardest thing about a wolf is to see
Speaker 3: it for what it is, which is a wolf. It
Speaker 3: seems to be this vessel for our fears and our
Speaker 3: hopes and our dreams, and particularly how we relate to
Speaker 3: the natural world. And whilst once upon a time that
Speaker 3: might have been this sense of destroying the wolf in
Speaker 3: order to kind of manifest progress and civilization, now we
Speaker 3: have all these anxieties about what we're doing to the
Speaker 3: world and what we're doing to our futures, and once
Speaker 3: again the wolf has become this vescl but this time
Speaker 3: it's something that's almost going to save us from ourselves
Speaker 3: rather than destroyers.
Speaker 1: In the book, you draw connections between the comeback of
Speaker 1: the wild wolf and the refugee crisis in Europe. Can
Speaker 1: you elaborate on this for us a bit?
Speaker 3: Yeah, in several ways. I was first drawn to this
Speaker 3: story actually because Licinia, which is this small regional park
Speaker 3: in Italy where Schlutz finished his journey, where he bumped
Speaker 3: into Juliet and where they formed their first pack. It
Speaker 3: was also a part of the Alps where a lot
Speaker 3: of refugees who were arriving in Italy they divide by
Speaker 3: to lamproducer and then they'd straight away get taken to
Speaker 3: these settlement centers. And there was one in Licinia right
Speaker 3: up in the Apps and the middle of nowhere, completely
Speaker 3: cut off in winter, and these people that were arriving
Speaker 3: from North Africa and from the Middle East were being
Speaker 3: taken to these This is a former NATO barracks. And
Speaker 3: a lot of the language that was being used by
Speaker 3: the local people living in these mountains about the refugees
Speaker 3: and the wolves was very similar. It you know, we
Speaker 3: were here first. These people don't belong here. I don't
Speaker 3: have a problem with either wolves or migrants, but their
Speaker 3: place isn't here. And not only obviously was that completely
Speaker 3: untrue that wolves were in these mountains long before people.
Speaker 3: And actually a lot of the Licinians are descendants of
Speaker 3: German woodcutters who moved down from Germany a few hundred
Speaker 3: years ago. There were these kind of very obvious parallels
Speaker 3: I was finding, particularly in how both in the rural
Speaker 3: places I was passing through the migrant and the wolf
Speaker 3: are both being scapegoated by rural populations for a set
Speaker 3: of much more complicated problems, you know, and I think
Speaker 3: we see that in the rise of far right politics everywhere.
Speaker 3: The migrant is this scapegoat for this incredibly complex range
Speaker 3: of problems that are affecting countries, and the wolf seemed
Speaker 3: to stand in for that as well. So there seemed
Speaker 3: to be this affinity and yeah, kind of the importance
Speaker 3: of both the wolf and the migrant for these places,
Speaker 3: but then how it was perceived by a local population
Speaker 3: as well, and then how the refugee and the wolf
Speaker 3: were being used by far right politicians in order to
Speaker 3: inflame anger and to chase that populist vote as well.
Speaker 1: Well. I really, I really appreciated how you were able
Speaker 1: to weave these themes together in the book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it felt I wasn't expecting it, to be honest,
Speaker 3: I wasn't expecting it, but increasingly, Yeah, it seemed to
Speaker 3: follow me wherever I went. You know that the wolf
Speaker 3: has been one of the reasons the wolf has done
Speaker 3: so well in Europe is because it's been protected by
Speaker 3: the European Union for the last thirty years or fifty
Speaker 3: years in some ways. And so it's a very short
Speaker 3: distance to having a problem with the wolf to having
Speaker 3: a problem with the European Union. And there are fire parties,
Speaker 3: particularly in Austria where the FBO are now the leading party,
Speaker 3: where rather than encouraging farmers to try and coexist with
Speaker 3: the wolf, and there are proven ways to be able
Speaker 3: to co exist with wolves using dogs, using electric fences,
Speaker 3: they were almost encouraging farmers not to do that and
Speaker 3: actually to just send their flocks up into the mountains
Speaker 3: in what one biologist described him as a state sanctioned slaughterhouse.
Speaker 3: And then when that drama happens, that would then create
Speaker 3: this space for these politicians to say that they're going
Speaker 3: to go to the European Union and go to Brussels
Speaker 3: and demand a change in law for the protection of
Speaker 3: the wolf, which actually has now recently happened, so in
Speaker 3: the way that farmers protests, and I do you know,
Speaker 3: it's worth saying that I really understand why farmers are
Speaker 3: finding it hard to live alongside these carnivores. Again, you know,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of farming is a difficult profession at
Speaker 3: the best of times. That the year that I did
Speaker 3: the walk was the driest summer in Europe for several
Speaker 3: hundred years. The price of electricity and animal feed is rocketing.
Speaker 3: Since Russia invaded Ukraine, young people are leaving for the cities.
Speaker 3: They don't want to farm anymore, and now these farmers
Speaker 3: are being asked to live alongside wolves as well. I
Speaker 3: understand the fury. And while these complex problems climate change, inflation, etc.
Speaker 3: Are hard to manage, at least with a wolf you
Speaker 3: can go out and shoot it or be it illegally
Speaker 3: and feel like you have some kind of agency over
Speaker 3: your life. But rather than promoting understanding, rather than delving
Speaker 3: into the actual looking for solutions to these more complicated problems,
Speaker 3: that is the place where these far right politicians seem
Speaker 3: to be coming in and co opt to their anger
Speaker 3: and turning it to their own ends. And that that's
Speaker 3: the bit that I want to challenge. Not that I
Speaker 3: don't understand why it's difficult for pharmacis live alongside wolves,
Speaker 3: but the ways that it's being politicized I think need
Speaker 3: to be addressed.
Speaker 1: Now, getting back to the topic of domestication, you touch
Speaker 1: on the history of the German shepherd dog breed, which
Speaker 1: this was all new to me. I don't know much
Speaker 1: about dog breeds, I admit, Can you talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about how the German shepherd factors into our ideas
Speaker 1: about the wolf?
Speaker 3: Yes, so the German Shepherd I knew none of this
Speaker 3: either until I started to research. The German shepherd was
Speaker 3: an early twentieth century creation by a guy called matxiwan Stefanitz,
Speaker 3: who was a retired German cavalry officer, and he said
Speaker 3: that he set out to basically kind of reverse engineer
Speaker 3: a wolf to sort of feed back into a dog
Speaker 3: all these qualities that he saw as kind of most
Speaker 3: wolf like and most noble for its size and its strength,
Speaker 3: and its power and its willingness to work. And it
Speaker 3: really prefigured a lot of the kind of Nazi eugenics ideas,
Speaker 3: and the six hundred page manifesto that he wrote about
Speaker 3: the German Shepherd had a lot to say about race
Speaker 3: and about the purity of race, and very much the
Speaker 3: same way that that Nazis would fetishize this kind of
Speaker 3: certain area and races as time went on and the Nazis.
Speaker 3: For the Nazis, the German shepherd was the kind of
Speaker 3: dog that they used in the death camps that they
Speaker 3: used on the battlefield. Hitler kept two German shepherds, one
Speaker 3: of which he named Wolf. Hitler himself was obsessed by
Speaker 3: Wolf's Adolph itself is an old Germanic variation of wolf,
Speaker 3: and from he called the Hitler youth his wolf cubs.
Speaker 3: Apparently he went around whistling the Who's Afraid of the
Speaker 3: Big Bad Wolf Disney song? You know that he saw
Speaker 3: in the wolf this kind of this total animal I suppose,
Speaker 3: this sense, this kind of unbridled violence and aggression that
Speaker 3: he wanted to breed back into a race of people
Speaker 3: that he felt had become weak and soft and powerless.
Speaker 3: So for the interesting that the Nazis were the first
Speaker 3: people in modern times to actually place environmental protection laws
Speaker 3: on the wolf, and it was it was part of
Speaker 3: this vision of this kind of utagizing the power of
Speaker 3: the animal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I believe you mentioned in the book that disturbingly
Speaker 1: so the Nazis environmental policies were advanced even for today. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But it was a sense of a kind of
Speaker 3: pristine wilderness that was going to be full of this
Speaker 3: sort of race of god like men, you know, and
Speaker 3: those kind of large, charismatic, tootemic animals that actually fit
Speaker 3: very well within that sort of wider Nazi vision of
Speaker 3: the world.
Speaker 1: Interesting that there was some attempt in this to sort
Speaker 1: of recreate a wolf, because I know in some generally
Speaker 1: not great movies I've seen German shepherds stand in for Wars,
Speaker 1: they'll have the part of wild wolves played by arvious
Speaker 1: German shepherds.
Speaker 3: And then it's worth mentioningly Miscellini as well, because for
Speaker 3: Italy there was also a part important, important animal for Mussolini,
Speaker 3: but because the founding myth of Rome has the twins
Speaker 3: Romulus and Remus being abandoned in the wilderness and then
Speaker 3: being saved by a she wolf who suckled the twins
Speaker 3: until the shepherd took took them in, and then Romulus
Speaker 3: and Remus later went on to found Rome. The wolf
Speaker 3: for the Italians has had that same uh strength and power,
Speaker 3: but has also been this kind of nurturing maternal influence,
Speaker 3: and Mussolini very much co opted that. Through the whole
Speaker 3: of Mussolini's Fascist RaiseMe. There was a live wolf kept
Speaker 3: in a cage in Rome that people could go and
Speaker 3: see and actually remain there in various generations of the
Speaker 3: wolf up until the nineteen seventies, there's meant to be
Speaker 3: this living, fleshy symbol of the power of Mussolini's project.
Speaker 1: Now, going back to what you said earlier, this idea
Speaker 1: of the wolf is also serving very particular human aspirations
Speaker 1: and is rather far removed from the more boundariality of
Speaker 1: the wolf, including its how social the animal is, how
Speaker 1: nurturing the animal can be, and so forth right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's no more prevalent myth about the wolf than
Speaker 3: this idea of an alpha wolf, which is now completely discredited.
Speaker 3: The alpha wolf was created by this biologist called Rudolph Schenkel,
Speaker 3: working in nineteen thirty four. He began his research just
Speaker 3: across the border from Nazi Germany in Switzerland. And again
Speaker 3: it's thought that in his research in many ways was
Speaker 3: influenced by the Nazi project that was developing across the border.
Speaker 3: And he based his study on a pack of wolves
Speaker 3: that were kept that were drawn from all different places
Speaker 3: and kept in a very small enclosure. And from observing
Speaker 3: those wolves and how they were not able to disperse
Speaker 3: and go out and find new territory, like Schatz was
Speaker 3: able to how they were not able to cooperate and hunt,
Speaker 3: but actually they were just forced into this small environment.
Speaker 3: There was this completely artificial fighting to be the alpha.
Speaker 3: But that is not how wolves work in the wild.
Speaker 3: But that became the basis for understanding how wild wolves
Speaker 3: work for the next fifty years or so. It's now
Speaker 3: been completely discredited in the science, but that sense of
Speaker 3: the alpha wolf does still persist from most devational speakers
Speaker 3: and toxic corners of the internet and everything else. We're
Speaker 3: still encouraged to be this idea of the alphab but
Speaker 3: that's something because it fits very well with how we
Speaker 3: If we can say that wolves do it, then we
Speaker 3: can kind of justify doing it ourselves as well. But
Speaker 3: that is not how wolves work. A wolf pack is
Speaker 3: essentially a family in some shape or form, and the
Speaker 3: main pair of wolves will generally stay together for life,
Speaker 3: breed for life, and raise successive generations within the pack.
Speaker 1: What is your big hope for readers with this book,
Speaker 1: for them something they might take away about wolves and
Speaker 1: also maybe about humans.
Speaker 3: I think one of the things that I've come to
Speaker 3: see the wolf has. As we said at the beginning,
Speaker 3: we're a long way from reintroducing wolves to the UK,
Speaker 3: but I think the reason why wolves are interesting to
Speaker 3: think about whether in a North American context or a
Speaker 3: European context, is because I think they really demand answers
Speaker 3: of us. They're almost the the disruptors. You know, they
Speaker 3: move fast and they break stuff. And if we think,
Speaker 3: you know, we know we need to give more space
Speaker 3: to the natural world, we know that we need to
Speaker 3: coexist in a better way. But I think wolves really
Speaker 3: ask us if we believe that we can or are
Speaker 3: we just paying at service of this? Can we sanction
Speaker 3: risk again? Can we sanction living in a world that
Speaker 3: feels a little bit more unknown than what we might
Speaker 3: be used to, You know, it was it was tempting
Speaker 3: to me. I work as an environmental journalist. I write
Speaker 3: a lot of stories that seem quite hopeless, and it
Speaker 3: was quite tempting for me with this story to see
Speaker 3: the wolf as this kind of beacon of hope. You know,
Speaker 3: wolves are doing incredibly well in Europe again and to
Speaker 3: a lesser extent in North America. They're now listed as
Speaker 3: a species of Least Concern in Europe. It's this incredible
Speaker 3: environmental success story in a way, and it's really tempting
Speaker 3: to hang on to that as a kind of beacon
Speaker 3: of hope when when in the middle of a biodiversity
Speaker 3: crisis and a climate crisis. And you know, again that
Speaker 3: is just seeing the wolf is something that we want
Speaker 3: it to be. Of course, it doesn't really mean that
Speaker 3: the earth is healing or anything like that. But but
Speaker 3: for the wolf, this is obviously a massive time of
Speaker 3: hope and success and and I think that's really interesting
Speaker 3: to see it in that way, that there is this
Speaker 3: incredible desire for life to thrive. I think that that's
Speaker 3: what wolves embodied that and and and in response to
Speaker 3: times of crisis, we move, you know, and I think
Speaker 3: wolves have always embodied.
Speaker 1: That that that that.
Speaker 3: Change is inevitable, and there is this desire and this
Speaker 3: urge for for for life to flourish. And following Schlaus's
Speaker 3: journey across Europe has has really shown me that it's
Speaker 3: you know, however much we try and put up our borders,
Speaker 3: however much we try and hem life in it, will
Speaker 3: continue to try and find a.
Speaker 1: Way, right, Adam, I have one more question for you,
Speaker 1: And I realized this was this was the sillier one,
Speaker 1: but in the acknowledgements for the book, look, you you
Speaker 1: mentioned leaning on Joel Puland for a quote, having watched
Speaker 1: every werewolf film out there so that I didn't have
Speaker 1: to Could you give us a little a little bit
Speaker 1: about your back and forth with Joel here? What what
Speaker 1: did this have? This go down?
Speaker 3: He sent me. Joey's a friend of mine who works
Speaker 3: at the British Film Institute. We've been We've been friends
Speaker 3: for ever. He he's not just watched everywhere wolf film going,
Speaker 3: He's watched every film going at this point. It's an
Speaker 3: incredible resource. And yeah, there's a lot of werewolf films
Speaker 3: out there, there's a lot of wolf literature out there.
Speaker 3: I remember sort of going into the British Library at
Speaker 3: the beginning of this research and typing in Wolf into
Speaker 3: the library archive and being absolutely overwhelmed. My last book
Speaker 3: was about Salmon, and the literature was a lot less
Speaker 3: intimidating than it was about the wolf, and the were
Speaker 3: wolf subset of that is again is again vast. But
Speaker 3: he set me on to some of the classics which
Speaker 3: I've never seen. Gingers Naps, I'd never seen. American Werewolf
Speaker 3: in London, I'd never seen. And but it felt like
Speaker 3: a werewol would be many things to many people. It
Speaker 3: seems to it's standing for kind of whatever our paranoia
Speaker 3: and preoccupations are at the time. But compared to the
Speaker 3: actual werewolf trials that I was seeing, that the ones
Speaker 3: in films like Ginger Snaps, it's always the lover, the
Speaker 3: best friend that seems to be possessed, whereas the werewolf
Speaker 3: trials it was always the unknown, stranger, the vacant. But
Speaker 3: it seems to lean into that. You know, it's in
Speaker 3: the same way as when you watch a wolf in
Speaker 3: a zoo or something like that. It looks it looks
Speaker 3: like every dog that you know. You know, you feel
Speaker 3: like you can understand what it's thinking because you you
Speaker 3: sort of think you know what a dog's thinking. But
Speaker 3: then there's this kind of unhinged element as well that
Speaker 3: suddenly it will foe you and you realize you're not
Speaker 3: watching a dog at all. You're watching this other, completely
Speaker 3: wild thing. And I think that's what the werewolf thing
Speaker 3: touches on, That we're watching someone and we think we
Speaker 3: understand them, but actually within that there is this wild,
Speaker 3: unhinged part of them. Bitch, it's not just terrifying, it's
Speaker 3: also it's also quite thrilling, you know, But there's a
Speaker 3: temptation in the werewolf there just to kind of let
Speaker 3: go and see what happens if we, you know, run
Speaker 3: off into the night.
Speaker 1: Adam, well, thanks so much for taking time out of
Speaker 1: your day to chat with me here. The book again
Speaker 1: is Lone Wolf Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness.
Speaker 3: Thanks rep, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1: All right. Thanks once more to Adam for coming on
Speaker 1: the show and chatting with me. The book again is
Speaker 1: Lone Wolf Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness and
Speaker 1: as of June third, you'll find it in the US
Speaker 1: in all major formats. Thanks as always to the excellent
Speaker 1: JJ Possway for producing this show. And if you have
Speaker 1: any questions, episodes, suggestions, and so forth you would like
Speaker 1: to send to us, you can email us at contact
Speaker 1: That's stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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