Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 2: name is Robert Lamb, and on today's episode, I'm going
Speaker 2: to be chatting with Adam Weyman, author of Lone Wolf
Speaker 2: Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness. It's all about
Speaker 2: the European wolf. It's recent comeback in the similarities between
Speaker 2: the human and lupine worlds. Without further ado, let's jump
Speaker 2: right in. Hi Adam, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Hi, rep thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2: The new book is Lone Wolf Walking the Line between
Speaker 2: Civilization and Wilderness, released as of June third and all
Speaker 2: major formats. As you describe in the book. Your journey
Speaker 2: began in covering the possible reintroduction of wolves into Scotland.
Speaker 2: You'd written about this prior, so I thought you might
Speaker 2: walk us through this first. What happened to the wolves
Speaker 2: the British Isles and where do things stand now with
Speaker 2: 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: in the British Isles, completely eradicated. So there's a bunch
Speaker 3: of last Wolf stories. It seems that they hung on
Speaker 3: in Scotland later than anywhere else. The last definitive account
Speaker 3: for wolf in Scotland is sixteen twenty one, and that's
Speaker 3: a note for a bounty that was paid on a wolf.
Speaker 3: But it was an exception your high sum, which suggests
Speaker 3: by then that demand was already kind of outstripping supply.
Speaker 3: And then it kind of verges into myth. There's a
Speaker 3: lot of people that would like to claim they killed
Speaker 3: the last wolf, whereas actually, of course the last wolf
Speaker 3: probably lived out it's days far from many one, profoundly
Speaker 3: isolated and alone.
Speaker 2: Now you actually looked for the alleged remains of the
Speaker 2: last wharf in Scotland, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. So, like I said, it's very hard
Speaker 3: to come by. There's one story that I followed, so
Speaker 3: I began my journey in Scotland at in a state
Speaker 3: up near in Verness, where this gentleman called Paul Lister
Speaker 3: has been talking about trying to reintroduce now wolves now
Speaker 3: for about twenty years or so. And I walked across
Speaker 3: Scotland and finished it in the south of the Kengorm
Speaker 3: mountain range. And that's one of the places where the
Speaker 3: last wolf is meant to have been killed. And then,
Speaker 3: as you say, late, I said out trying to find
Speaker 3: it because it is then meant to have been stuffed
Speaker 3: and had a various journey through different collections and museums,
Speaker 3: but the actual provenance of it is now pretty hard
Speaker 3: to locate. And really, through the course of research it
Speaker 3: made me realize that this probably wasn't the last wolf
Speaker 3: at all. This wolf that was being taken around these
Speaker 3: museums in Scotland was being labeled as the last wolf
Speaker 3: in order to sell tickets, but really probably nothing of
Speaker 3: the sort.
Speaker 2: And what about the reintroduction of the wolf into Scotland
Speaker 2: or various other areas where the wolf is no longer present.
Speaker 2: Where do we currently stand with that in terms of
Speaker 2: public sentiment and even like 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 there. It's been noted in
Speaker 3: the British Isles as the most popular animal for reintroduction.
Speaker 3: But then you go and speak to people that would
Speaker 3: be actually living alongside it. Once again, we have sheep
Speaker 3: farmers in Scotland, hunters, gameskeepers, people like this, even people
Speaker 3: that live in villages in the countryside, and there's this
Speaker 3: reputation that the wolf has for better or worse, and
Speaker 3: there 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 we're not to
Speaker 3: introduce them. We'd just be talking about how we deal
Speaker 3: with them. But because we're in Ireland, we get to
Speaker 3: make these particular decisions about what we let in and
Speaker 3: realistically it's not going to happen here for a long time.
Speaker 3: It's taken about fifteen years of great debate to allow
Speaker 3: the beaver to come back, and that's broadly accepted now.
Speaker 3: But there's a lot of other species we'd see back before.
Speaker 3: Wolf is really really the pinnacle of Once wolves are back,
Speaker 3: you know, we're not really talking about the worlding anymore.
Speaker 2: It's kind of happened now. Now moving to Condon or Europe.
Speaker 2: Here the book is primarily concerned with a particular wolf, Schloats.
Speaker 2: Can you tell us about Schloats and why his particular
Speaker 2: story captured you so and serves as the driving force
Speaker 2: of your narrative?
Speaker 3: Sure, Schlutz, 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 Schloutz. I first
Speaker 3: read a little piece about Schlutz when I was doing
Speaker 3: my research on wolves in Scotland, and it was this
Speaker 3: very small article about this wolf that had been born
Speaker 3: in the south of Slovenia in twenty ten and had
Speaker 3: a GPS track and collar put on him by a
Speaker 3: biologist who was researching into wolf behavior. But of course
Speaker 3: that biologist could have no idea what this animal was
Speaker 3: going to go on to do. He was really just
Speaker 3: interested in the sort of dynamics of the how a
Speaker 3: wolf 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
Speaker 3: app Slovenia. He crossed the whole of Austria, and four
Speaker 3: months later in the spring, came into Italy and it
Speaker 3: was there that he bumped into a female wolf who
Speaker 3: was on a walkabout of her own. So somehow in
Speaker 3: there wasn't another wolf for thousands of square miles. Somehow
Speaker 3: these two wolves managed to find each other, and when
Speaker 3: they bred, they became the first wolf pack back in
Speaker 3: the Italian Alps for more than a century. So in
Speaker 3: one way, it was this remarkable love story that I
Speaker 3: was drawn to. The female wolf ended up getting called
Speaker 3: Juliet because they were very close to Verona and Romeo
Speaker 3: and Julieta still Vona's most famous couple. So I was
Speaker 3: really drawn to this incredible meeting in this love story
Speaker 3: between these two animals. But of course not everyone is
Speaker 3: quite so quite so in love with the idea of
Speaker 3: having wolves back in the mountains.
Speaker 2: Now, as you definitely discussed in the book, when we
Speaker 2: talk about wolves, there's often a lot of separating the
Speaker 2: biological reality of wolves from human mythmaking about wolves and misconceptions.
Speaker 2: Coming back to the title of a book, lone Wolf,
Speaker 2: can you remind us just what a lone wolf actually
Speaker 2: is and in comparison to maybe some of the ideas
Speaker 2: that 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 lone Wolf because I wanted to
Speaker 3: challenge this idea of what a lone wolf is. We
Speaker 3: think of a lone wolf as this kind of Clint
Speaker 3: Eastward archetype, you know, this hero riding off into the
Speaker 3: sunset who doesn't need anyone or anything, Whereas what I
Speaker 3: realized from following Schlaus is that actually a lone wolf
Speaker 3: is simply something that hasn't found what it's looking for yet.
Speaker 3: And a lone wolf is looking for the same three
Speaker 3: things that we all are. It's looking for enough land
Speaker 3: to live on, it's looking for enough food to eat,
Speaker 3: and it's looking for a mate. So and it's an
Speaker 3: incredibly vulnerable time for a wolf. There is no more
Speaker 3: vulnerable time. Wolves don't hunt well alone. They like to
Speaker 3: be part of packs, they like to have a fixed territory.
Speaker 3: They're 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 2: Now. In chronicling this journey, you sometimes write from the
Speaker 2: point of view of Slouts himself in the book, and
Speaker 2: I thought this was a lovely choice. It makes for
Speaker 2: some very poetic passages. Can you describe your process for
Speaker 2: imagining the mindset of the wolf and how this factored
Speaker 2: into your approach.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks, I toyed with it for a while and
Speaker 3: in the end it felt important. I didn't want to
Speaker 3: say that, you know, I was seeing the world as
Speaker 3: a wolf was, but I wanted in some way to
Speaker 3: sort of, however clumsily, kind of get inside Slouse's mind
Speaker 3: in a way. And there was something about following his journey.
Speaker 3: So the track and collar that you had to put
Speaker 3: on him, it gave one way point every one hundred
Speaker 3: and ninety minutes for the entire four months of his walk,
Speaker 3: And before I set off, transferred each of those waypoints
Speaker 3: onto this big stack of maps that I carried in
Speaker 3: my rucksack. And as I walked, as I followed this path,
Speaker 3: you started to get some sort of sense of how
Speaker 3: this wolf was seeing the world. 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 see a town for the first
Speaker 3: time as we come over a hill, or the other
Speaker 3: places where he turned round, because it was a mountain
Speaker 3: pass and the winter that he traveled it was incredibly snowy,
Speaker 3: and a lot of these places was 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 end of this walk, after following in
Speaker 3: his footsteps for a few months, that I had kind
Speaker 3: of earned the right to at least try and write
Speaker 3: a little bit from his from his perspective.
Speaker 2: Yeah, humans have of course long considered the wholf. We've
Speaker 2: long seen shades of them and us, and shades of
Speaker 2: us and them. So yeah, this is this is such
Speaker 2: a I guess, a long standing area of analysis and consideration, right, like, like,
Speaker 2: how are wolves like us? And how are we like
Speaker 2: the wholf?
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 hunt gather at times
Speaker 3: and decided to work together, essentially because we had this
Speaker 3: sort of understanding we both like to run after pray
Speaker 3: and tire them out, and that is the way that
Speaker 3: that is the way that they hunt, as opposed a
Speaker 3: big cat or something like that. And I think it's
Speaker 3: almost that closeness. There was a wolf behavioral scientist that
Speaker 3: I met in Austria and he said to me, either
Speaker 3: you love your brother or you hate your brother. There's
Speaker 3: nothing in between. And I think it's almost that closeness
Speaker 3: that we feel to wolves. And obviously we see that
Speaker 3: in our relationship to dogs as well, which you're essentially
Speaker 3: the same animal that we've had this incredible bond with them,
Speaker 3: But that's very easily quickly flipped into a hatred that
Speaker 3: I don't think we have for any other animal either.
Speaker 2: And that speaking of that hatred and sort of like
Speaker 2: the dark side of that bond. You write a bit
Speaker 2: in the book about Europe's three centuries of where wolf
Speaker 2: triesles and the we're a wolf panic. Can you tell
Speaker 2: us a bit about this period of time and how
Speaker 2: it matches up 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 general,
Speaker 3: 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 the wolf is the devil and
Speaker 3: the persecution that they've faced over millennia. Really ever since
Speaker 3: there's been money to pay them. There have been bounties
Speaker 3: out on wolve's heads back to sixth century BC and
Speaker 3: Athens there were bounties out on wolves. Charlemagne from about
Speaker 3: eighteen for about eight hundreds sorry in France started trying
Speaker 3: to eradicate the wolf, but it took almost a thousand years.
Speaker 3: It wasn't until nineteen twenty seven that wolves were finally
Speaker 3: gone from France. And in some ways it was in
Speaker 3: the United States where that kind of hatred of the
Speaker 3: wolf really reached another reached a pinnacle. Basically, the ways
Speaker 3: that wolves were killed they were set on fire, they
Speaker 3: were pulled apart by horses, they were beaten to death,
Speaker 3: and then paraded through town on the back of horses.
Speaker 3: The estimates of up to two million wolves were killed
Speaker 3: in the latter half of the nineteenth century in the
Speaker 3: United States, and the Native Americans saw it as a
Speaker 3: manifestation of insanity. It was said it was seen as
Speaker 3: a manifestation of insanity amongst the white settlers that were
Speaker 3: killing these animals. Yeah, and there's something you're doing this research.
Speaker 3: It really seemed to border on a hatred to wipe
Speaker 3: out that many animals, right down to the very last animal.
Speaker 3: It feels like it requires a stronger motivation than just
Speaker 3: a desire to protect one sheep. And the werewolf trials
Speaker 3: that you mentioned at the beginning of that question seemed
Speaker 3: to be one of those particular manifestations of that sort
Speaker 3: of paranoia and hate. I'm sure some of your listeners
Speaker 3: will be familiar with the witch trials, like the Salem
Speaker 3: witch Trials, and we had them a lot in Europe
Speaker 3: as well. Thousands of women were killed over several centuries,
Speaker 3: But I wasn't aware that people were actually put to
Speaker 3: death being accused of being werewolves as well. And one
Speaker 3: of the there were two towns actually in Austria that
Speaker 3: Schloutz's route passed through were places whereas late as the
Speaker 3: early eighteenth century people were being put on trial and
Speaker 3: hung for being were wolves, and quite often the accused
Speaker 3: seemed to be travelers, wanderers, beggars, people that might turn
Speaker 3: up in town. Maybe two sheep were killed that night,
Speaker 3: and the local people sided to put two and two together,
Speaker 3: and uh and and and persecute the outsider for for
Speaker 3: bringing this l upon the upon the town.
Speaker 2: I'm glad you mentioned, uh, the agricultural aspect of hatred
Speaker 2: of the wolf. I had recently read a couple of
Speaker 2: different books looking at and were wolf myths and legends
Speaker 2: and talking about how in some cases you see people
Speaker 2: trying to to date the idea of were wolve's back
Speaker 2: to our prehistoric ancestors in this time when we lived
Speaker 2: closer to the wolf, and certainly when we domesticated the wolf.
Speaker 2: But then I think the more convincing stories that I've
Speaker 2: read have have made the argument that it is this.
Speaker 2: These are ultimately agricultural era tales. These are tales of
Speaker 2: fear of the wolf and analysis of the wolf in
Speaker 2: a time when we are worried about our sheep and
Speaker 2: our herds and and UH and and our dominion over nature.
Speaker 3: I don't think that's to say that it kind of
Speaker 3: obviously it's a misguided assumption. But obviously, you know, to
Speaker 3: these people, it's not like now when you can get
Speaker 3: compensation from the state for a wolf kill on the sheep.
Speaker 3: Wolves don't kill a huge amount of livestock, but they
Speaker 3: can target certain farms and certain herds, and so someone
Speaker 3: might lose twenty of their thirty sheep, and that would
Speaker 3: have been an absolutely existential crisis three hundred years ago.
Speaker 3: That was your way of getting through the winter, that
Speaker 3: was your way of feeding your fairly large family. It
Speaker 3: 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 2: Now and my recent reading about is where Wolf. That's
Speaker 2: one of the books that I was looking at was
Speaker 2: a twenty twenty one book by Daniel Agden called The
Speaker 2: World Wolf in the Ancient World. And there's one quote
Speaker 2: in that that I keep coming back to where he
Speaker 2: says the quote wolves are in and of themselves. Where
Speaker 2: wolves already in so far that is, is that they
Speaker 2: combine the qualities of the wildest and most lawless of
Speaker 2: animals with those of civilization and humanity. And I kept
Speaker 2: coming back in that, not to just harp on like
Speaker 2: negative connotations of the wolf, but I thought this was
Speaker 2: interesting and sort of looking at the wolf as this
Speaker 2: thing that already mirrors a lot about humans, like not
Speaker 2: just potential savagery, but also how social wolves are, something
Speaker 2: that I think is sometimes very often overlooked, certainly and
Speaker 2: were wolf stories, but just in general. I was wondering
Speaker 2: if you might speak to He's touched on this already
Speaker 2: a little bit, but speak to just how social wolves
Speaker 2: are and how how like humans they are in this regard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think in some ways they're almost an aspiration
Speaker 3: or animal. You know that we're obviously genetically far closer
Speaker 3: to chimpanzees, but I think we in wolves we see
Speaker 3: qualities of as how we would like to be. You know,
Speaker 3: you go to you go to zoo and watch chimpanzees,
Speaker 3: you obviously see something in them, But to watch a
Speaker 3: wolf is to is to see how humans could be.
Speaker 3: I think, you know, wolves, wolves are excellent parents. They're
Speaker 3: one of the very few animals where the males will
Speaker 3: stick around long after the birth to look after both
Speaker 3: 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 an animal,
Speaker 3: they'd really like to come back as a wolf.
Speaker 2: You know, Yeah, that's that's interesting. Yeah, how when people
Speaker 2: think about wolves there is often this aspirational aspect of it,
Speaker 2: like they don't actually be a were wolf, but the
Speaker 2: idea of being like free like a wolf, of having
Speaker 2: the wolf is kind of like a symbolic animal in
Speaker 2: 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 got in 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 vessel, but this time
Speaker 3: it's something that's almost going to save us from ourselves
Speaker 3: rather than destroyers.
Speaker 2: In the book, you draw connections between the comeback of
Speaker 2: the wild Wolf and the refugee crisis in Europe. Can
Speaker 2: you elaborate on this for Uce 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: boat to lamproducer and then they'd straight away get taken
Speaker 3: to these settlement centers. And there was one in Licinia
Speaker 3: right up in the Apps and the middle of nowhere,
Speaker 3: completely cut off in winter, and these people that were
Speaker 3: arriving from North Africa from the Middle East were being
Speaker 3: taken to these This was 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. You know, we were
Speaker 3: here first. These people don't belong here. I don't have
Speaker 3: a problem with either wolves or migrants, but their place
Speaker 3: isn't here. And not only obviously, was that completely untrue
Speaker 3: that wolves were in these mountains long before people. And
Speaker 3: actually a lot of the Licinians are descendants of German
Speaker 3: woodcutters who moved down from Germany a few hundred years ago.
Speaker 3: There were these kind of very obvious parallels I was finding,
Speaker 3: particularly in how both in the rural places I was
Speaker 3: passing through, the migrant and the wolf are both being
Speaker 3: scapegoated by rural populations for a set of much more
Speaker 3: complicated problems, you know, and I think we see that
Speaker 3: in the rise of far right politics everywhere. The migrant
Speaker 3: is this scapegoat for this incredibly complex range of problems
Speaker 3: that are affecting countries, and the wolf seemed to stand
Speaker 3: in for that as well. So there seemed to be
Speaker 3: this affinity and yeah, kind of the importance of both
Speaker 3: the wolf and the migrant for these places. But then
Speaker 3: how it was perceived by a local population as well,
Speaker 3: And then how the refugee and the wolf were being
Speaker 3: used by far right politicians in order to inflame anger
Speaker 3: and to chase that populist vote as well.
Speaker 2: Well, I really I really appreciated how you were able
Speaker 2: to weave these themes together 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 far
Speaker 3: right parties, particularly in Austria where the FBO are now
Speaker 3: the leading party, where rather than encouraging farmers to try
Speaker 3: and coexist with the wolf, and there are proven ways
Speaker 3: to be able to co exist with wolves using dogs,
Speaker 3: using electric fences, they were almost encouraging farmers not to
Speaker 3: do that and actually to just send their flocks up
Speaker 3: into the mountains in what one biologist described to me
Speaker 3: as a state sanctioned slaughterhouse. And then when that drama happens,
Speaker 3: that would then create this space for these politicians to
Speaker 3: say that they're going to go to the European Union
Speaker 3: and go to Brussels and demand a change in law
Speaker 3: for the protection of the wolf, which actually has now
Speaker 3: recently happened so in the way that farmers protests, and
Speaker 3: I do, you know, it's worth saying that I really
Speaker 3: understand why farmers are finding it hard to live alongside
Speaker 3: these carnivores. Again, you know, there's a lot of farming
Speaker 3: is a difficult profession at the best of times. That
Speaker 3: the year that I did the walk was the driest
Speaker 3: summer in Europe for several hundred years. The price of
Speaker 3: electricity and animal feed is rocketing. Since Russia invaded Ukraine,
Speaker 3: young people are leaving for the cities. They don't want
Speaker 3: to farm anymore. And now these farmers are being asked
Speaker 3: to live alongside wolves as well. I understand the fury.
Speaker 3: And while these complex problems climate change, inflation, etc. Are
Speaker 3: hard to manage, at least with a wolf, you can
Speaker 3: go out and shoot it, albeit illegally, and feel like
Speaker 3: you have some kind of agency over your life. But
Speaker 3: rather than promoting understanding, rather than delving into the actual
Speaker 3: looking for solutions to these more complicated problems, that is
Speaker 3: the place where these far right politicians seem to be
Speaker 3: coming in and co opting their anger and turning it
Speaker 3: to their own ends. And that that's the bit that
Speaker 3: I want to challenge. Not that I don't understand why
Speaker 3: it's difficult for pharmaci live alongside wolves, but the ways
Speaker 3: that it's being politicized I think need to be addressed.
Speaker 2: Now, getting back to the topic of domestication, you touch
Speaker 2: on the history of the German shepherd dog breed, which
Speaker 2: this was all new to me. I don't know much
Speaker 2: about dog breeds, I admit. Can you talk a little
Speaker 2: bit about how the German shepherd factors into our ideas
Speaker 2: 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 Maximan 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 breed 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
Speaker 3: strength and its power and its willingness to work, and
Speaker 3: it really prefigured a lot of the kind of Nazi
Speaker 3: eugenics ideas, and the six hundred page manifesto that he
Speaker 3: wrote about the German Shepherd had a lot to say
Speaker 3: about race and about the purity of race, and very
Speaker 3: much the same way that Nazis would fetishize this kind
Speaker 3: of certain area and races as time went on and
Speaker 3: the Nazis. For the Nazis, the German shepherd was the
Speaker 3: kind of dog that they used in the death camps,
Speaker 3: that they used on the battlefield. Hit Like kept two
Speaker 3: German shepherds, one of which he named Wolf. Hitler himself
Speaker 3: was obsessed by wolf's Adolph itself is an old Germanic
Speaker 3: variation of of wolf, and from from he called the
Speaker 3: Hitler youth, his his wolf cubs. Apparently he went around
Speaker 3: whistling the Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Disney song?
Speaker 3: You know that he saw in the wolf this kind
Speaker 3: of this total animal, I suppose, this sense of this
Speaker 3: kind of unbridled violence and aggression that he wanted to
Speaker 3: breed back into a race of people that he felt
Speaker 3: had become weak and soft and powerless. So for the
Speaker 3: interesting that the Nazis were the first people in modern
Speaker 3: times to actually place environmental protection laws on the wolf,
Speaker 3: and it was it was part of this this vision
Speaker 3: of this kind of udagizing the power of the animal.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I believe you mentioned in the book that disturbingly
Speaker 2: so the Nazis environmental policies were advanced even for today.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, but it was a sense of a kind
Speaker 3: of pristine wilderness that was going to be full of
Speaker 3: this sort of race of godlike 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 2: Interesting that there was some attempt in this to sort
Speaker 2: of recreate a wolf, because I know in some generally
Speaker 2: not great movies I've seen German shepherds stand in for
Speaker 2: they'll have the part of wild wolves played by obvious
Speaker 2: German shepherds.
Speaker 3: And then it's worth mentioning 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: Communism Remus being abandoned in the wilderness and then being
Speaker 3: saved by a she wolf who suckled the twins until
Speaker 3: a shepherd took them in, and then Rominius and Remus
Speaker 3: later went on to found Rome. The wolf for the
Speaker 3: Italians has had that same strength and power, but has
Speaker 3: also been this kind of nurturing maternal influence, and Mussolini
Speaker 3: very much co opted that. Through the whole of Mussolinius
Speaker 3: fascist raisme, there was a live wolf kept in a
Speaker 3: cage in Rome that people could go and see and
Speaker 3: actually reined there in various generations of the wolf up
Speaker 3: until the nineteen seventies. There was meant to be this living,
Speaker 3: fleshy symbol of the power of Mussolini's project.
Speaker 2: Now, going back to what you said earlier, this idea
Speaker 2: of the wolf is also serving very particular human aspirations
Speaker 2: and is rather far removed from like the more boundariality
Speaker 2: of the wolf, including it's how social the animal is,
Speaker 2: how 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 stats 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 motivational speakers and
Speaker 3: toxic corners of the internet and everything else. We're still
Speaker 3: encouraged to be this idea of the alpha. But that's
Speaker 3: something because it fits very well with how we If
Speaker 3: we can say that wolves do it, then we can
Speaker 3: kind of justify doing it ourselves as well. But that
Speaker 3: is not how wolves work. A wolf pack is essentially
Speaker 3: a family in some shape or form, and the main
Speaker 3: pair of wolves will generally stay together for life, breed
Speaker 3: for life, and raise successive generations within the pack.
Speaker 2: What is your big hope for readers with this book,
Speaker 2: for them something they might take away about wolves and
Speaker 2: 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 to
Speaker 3: the UK. But I think the reason why wolves are
Speaker 3: interesting to think about, whether in a North American context
Speaker 3: or a European context, is because I think they really
Speaker 3: demand answers of us. They're almost the disruptors. You know,
Speaker 3: they 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 can
Speaker 3: we sanction risk again? Can we sanction living in a
Speaker 3: world that feels a little bit more unknown than what
Speaker 3: we might be used to? You know, it was it
Speaker 3: was tempting to me. I work as an environmental journalist,
Speaker 3: I write a lot of stories that seem quite hopeless,
Speaker 3: and it was quite tempting for me with this story
Speaker 3: to see the wolf as this kind of beacon of hope.
Speaker 3: You know, wolves are doing incredibly well in Europe again
Speaker 3: and to a lesser extent in North America. They're now
Speaker 3: listed as a species of Least Concern in Europe. It's
Speaker 3: this incredible environmental success story in a way, and it's
Speaker 3: really tempting to hang on to that as a kind
Speaker 3: of beacon of hope when when in the middle of
Speaker 3: a biodiversity crisis and a climate crisis, and you know,
Speaker 3: again that is just seeing the wolf is something that
Speaker 3: we want it to be. Of course, it doesn't really
Speaker 3: mean that the earth is healing or anything like that.
Speaker 3: But for the wolf, this is obviously a massive time
Speaker 3: of hope and success, 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 embody that and in response to times of crisis,
Speaker 3: we move, you know, and I think wolves have always
Speaker 3: embodied that that that change is inevitable, and there is
Speaker 3: this desire and this urge for life to flourish, and
Speaker 3: following Schlaus's journey across Europe has really shown me that
Speaker 3: it's you know, however much we try and put up
Speaker 3: our borders, however much we try and hem life in it,
Speaker 3: will continue to try and find a way.
Speaker 2: All right, Adam, I have one more question for you.
Speaker 2: And I realized this was this was the sillier one.
Speaker 2: But in the acknowledgments for the book you you mentioned
Speaker 2: leaning on Joel pulling h for a quote having watched
Speaker 2: every werewolf film out there so that I didn't have to.
Speaker 2: Could you give us a little a little bit about
Speaker 2: your back and forth with Joel here? What what did that?
Speaker 1: Have?
Speaker 2: This? Have this go down?
Speaker 3: He sent me. Joel he's a friend of mine. He
Speaker 3: works at the British Film Institute. We've been we've been
Speaker 3: friends for ever. He's not just watched every where wolf
Speaker 3: film going, He's watched every film going at this point.
Speaker 3: It's an incredible resource. And yeah, there's a lot of
Speaker 3: werebell films out there that there's a lot of wolf
Speaker 3: literature out there. I remember sort of going into the
Speaker 3: British Library at the beginning of this research and typing
Speaker 3: in Wolf into the library archive and being absolutely overwhelmed.
Speaker 3: My last book was about Salmon and the the literature
Speaker 3: was a lot less intimidating than it was about the wolf,
Speaker 3: and the werewolf subset of that is again is again vast.
Speaker 3: But he set me on to some of the classics
Speaker 3: which I've never seen. Ginger Snaps, I'd never seen. American
Speaker 3: werewolf in London I'd never seen, and it felt like
Speaker 3: a werewolf 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 vagrant. 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 were wolf
Speaker 3: thing touches on, that we're watching someone and we think
Speaker 3: we understand them, but actually within that there is this wild,
Speaker 3: unhinged part of them, which 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 2: Adam, well, thanks so much for taking time out of
Speaker 2: your day to chat with me here. The book again
Speaker 2: is Lone Wolf Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness.
Speaker 3: Thanks Rev, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: On all right, Thanks once more to Adam for coming
Speaker 2: on the show and chatting with me. The book again
Speaker 2: is Lone Wolf Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness,
Speaker 2: and as of June third, you'll find it in the
Speaker 2: US in all major formats. Thanks as always to the
Speaker 2: excellent JJ Passway for producing this show. And if you
Speaker 2: have any questions, episodes, suggestions, and so forth you would
Speaker 2: like to send to us. You can email us at
Speaker 2: contact It's Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
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