Return of the Wolf

Paula Wild

Description

Wolves were once common throughout North America and Eurasia. But by the early twentieth century, bounties and organized hunts had drastically reduced their numbers. Today, the wolf is returning to its ancestral territories, and the “coywolf”—a smaller, bolder wolf-coyote hybrid—is becoming more common. In Return of the Wolf, author Paula Wild gathers first-hand accounts of encounters with wolves and consults with wildlife experts for suggestions on how minimize conflict, respond to aggressive wolves and coexist with the apex predator.

Wild explores the latest theories on how wolves became dogs, the evolving strategies to prevent livestock predation, and why Eurasian wolves seem more aggressive toward humans than their North American cousins. She also addresses the many misconceptions about wolves: for example, that they howl when hungry, kill for pleasure and always live in packs. What is true is that a wolf possesses a howl as unique as a human fingerprint and can trot eight kilometres per hour for most of the day or night in search of prey while using earth’s magnetic field to find its way. Some scientists consider wolves’ complex social structures and family bonds closer to humans’ than those of primates.

In a skillful blend of natural history, Indigenous stories and interviews with scientists and conservationists, Wild examines our evolving relationship with wolves and how society’s attitudes affect the populations, behaviour and conservation of wolves today. As a highly social, intelligent animal, the wolf is proving adept at navigating the challenges of an ever-changing landscape. But their fate remains uncertain. Wolves are adapting to humans; can humans adapt to wolves?

Informations

• Publié par: Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
• Date de parution: 13 octobre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781771622073
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

Return of the Wolf
Return of the Wolf
Conflict & Coexistence
Paula Wild
Copyright © 2018 Paula Wild

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca , 1-800-893-5777, [e-mail] .

Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC , V 0 N 2 H 0
www.douglas-mcintyre.com

Edited by Pam Robertson
Indexed by Allie Turner
Jacket design by Anna Comfort O’Keeffe
Text design by Shed Simas / Onça Design
Printed and bound in Canada
Printed on FSC -certified stock
Endsheets: Wolf track at Howse River Flats, Banff National Park. Photo by Shutterstock/Autumn Sky Photography
Title page photo by Paula Wild. Photo on page vi by Dan Stahler, US National Park Service. Photo on page viii by John Cavers.

Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $ 153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Wild, Paula, author
Return of the wolf : conflict and coexistence / Paula Wild.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77162-206-6 (hardcover).-- ISBN 978-1-77162-207-3 ( HTML )
1. Human-wolf encounters. 2. Wolves—Social aspects. 3. Wolves—Effect of human beings on. 4. Wolves—Folklore. 5. Wolves—Ecology. I. Title.
QL 737. C 22 W 55 2018 599.773 C 2018-903821-7
C 2018-903822-5
To my brother, Doug, and sisters, Kelly and Kim, the best packmates a human could ask for.
Contents The Wolf at the Door 1 The Big Bad Wolf of the Old World 10 Good and Evil in the New World 21 The Life of a Wolf 42 The Eaters and the Eaten 65 Coywolves and Wolf-dogs 90 Wolf Wars 120 Wolf Watchers 141 A Myth as Big as a Mountain 160 A Perfect Storm 189 Living with Wolves 216 Chasing the Moon 235 Appendix: Wolf Safety Checklist 243 Selected Sources 247 Acknowledgments 253 Index 255 Photos I
The study of wolves is actually one of discovering how the human mind works. — Valerius Geist
Chapter 1 The Wolf at the Door Their ears are like radar. They can smell a man from three to four kilometres away. And their eyes … they can see through everything. — Ion Maksimovic in Wolf Hunter
At first glance I thought it was a German shepherd. The colouring was just about right but the extraordinarily long legs ended in huge paws, the muzzle was long and blocky, and the head seemed too large for the slender body. It was beautiful and totally still. The dead wolf lay in the back of Gordie Boyd’s pickup. Boyd had been hired by the British Columbia government to trap and kill wolves on northern Vancouver Island. He had told me about the carcass and I’d asked to see it. Even so, I wasn’t prepared for the fascination I felt at my first close-up view of a wild wolf, and my confusion about why it had to die.
I never dreamt that thirty years later, just down the road, I’d be sitting within a few steps of a young white wolf. It lay on the grass, head on front paws, staring at me intently. Barely daring to breathe, I returned its gaze. Minutes passed, then— poof! —it disappeared. It felt like the wolf had stared straight into my soul, and I wondered what it had seen there.
Seconds later, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. I turned my head and there, on the side of the deck, was the white wolf. As silent as fog, it was creeping up behind me.
Nahanni isn’t a purebred wolf, but pretty darn close. His owner, Gary Allan, who operates the education and advocacy program Who Speaks for Wolf, figures Nahanni’s DNA is 95 per cent or more Canis lupus (grey wolf). Weighing in at 23 kilograms (51 lbs), Nahanni is an Arctic wolf, and Allan says they have a reputation for being particularly wary of humans. Nahanni definitely fit that profile. Of the two four-month-old high-content wolf-dogs I met at Allan’s in August 2014, Nahanni always kept his distance, yet was the one that watched me the most closely. On my first visit, every time I went into the house, he jumped up on the deck to sniff the spot where I’d been sitting. Once he squatted to leave a small brown turd at the former site of my derrière. A sign of welcome or a warning to stay out of his territory? At the time, I had no way to determine the nature of his calling card.
Nahanni, a high-content wolf-dog, is four months old in this photo. He gets his white coat from his Arctic wolf ancestry and, like many wolves and high-content wolf-dogs, is wary around humans, especially strangers. Photo by Paula Wild
While researching my previous book, The Cougar , I came across some intriguing information about wolves and knew I wanted to write about them. I’d spent a day at Cougar Mountain Zoo observing the fluid body movements of three young cougars and the ways they related to each other and zoo visitors. I was after something more with wolves. I wanted to watch the way their muscles tensed and relaxed; touch coarse hair; peer at big teeth; and observe pack dynamics. To do all that meant interacting with captive animals. Allan’s four almost-wolves were perfect: they were of varied ages and degrees of familiarity with humans, and close enough that I could visit numerous times.
I’ve often wondered how people and wolves initially related to each other and when those first encounters took place. Recent estimations of the appearance of early humans and wolflike canids indicate that some version of human and wolf may have shared the landscape for one to nearly three million years. While those dates are speculative, a set of foot and paw prints confirms that a wolf and a child, estimated to be a boy around eight years old, explored the same cavern long ago.
Rediscovered in 1994, the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave is located on a limestone cliff above an old riverbed about a two-hour drive northwest of Marseille in southern France. Although there are other caves in the area, Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc is by far the largest—and, more importantly, contains hundreds of some of the oldest known and best preserved figurative cave paintings in the world. These ancient illustrations depict at least thirteen species of animals, as well as two partial human bodies. Fossilized bones and skulls of a variety of ungulates and predators litter the soft, claylike floor, which retains the impressions of human and animal tracks, as well as what are believed to be cave bear sleeping areas. Radiocarbon dating taken from prehistoric hearths and smoke residue from torches places the oldest art and mammal remains at approximately 30,000 years old.
The foot and paw prints of the young child and wolf are pressed into the dusty floor in a smoke-smudged chamber of the cave. According to “Dog Story,” an August 2011 article in the New Yorker , the tracks of the child and wolf are side by side with their strides evenly matched. Near the end of the documentary film Cave of Forgotten Dreams , the narrator wonders if the wolf was stalking the child, if the two were walking together as companions or if the prints were made thousands of years apart.
Although there is much we don’t know or understand about wolves in the past, there are also many misconceptions about their behaviour today. A few are that they howl when hungry, kill for pleasure and always live in packs. A huge fallacy is that healthy North American wolves do not pose any danger to humans. While those beliefs are not true, science continues to reveal intriguing information about the canids. For instance, each wolf has a distinct howl that is as unique as a human fingerprint and those in northern climates have temperature regulation systems that prevent their toes from freezing. Wolves can trot at around eight kilometres (five miles) an hour for much of the day or night in search of prey and, along with birds, worms and other creatures, use the earth’s magnetic field to find their way. Some contemporary scientists believe that wolves’ complex social structures and intimate family bonds are more humanlike than those of any other mammal, including primates. New data and concepts are important but so are the misconceptions, as a great deal of how people relate to wolves has nothing to do with science at all.
Mystical and mysterious, the wolf has influenced the culture, art and legends of human societies since early times. Perhaps more than any other animal, it has become embedded in the human psyche, even affecting our language. A wolfish grin , wolfed down his food and keep the wolf from the door are common phrases, joined in more modern times by lone wolf to indicate a solitary terrorist. But there is no single vision of the carnivore. Depending on the time and place, it has been portrayed as ruthless and evil or a majestic icon of the wilderness. And, although few people ever see this elusive creature in the wild, its photograph has graced countless calendars, and generations of parents have coaxed children to bed with promises to read “The Three Little Pigs” or listen to Peter and the Wolf .
In Japan, where wolves are now extinct, farmers created shrines to worship the canids and took f