June 23, 2026 • 37 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert chats with Adam Weymouth, author of “Lone Wolf: Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness” about the European wolf, its recent comeback and the similarities between the human and lupine world. (originally published 6/12/2025)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. We were off for the Juneteenth holiday,
so we are just a tiny bit behind in our schedule,
so we are going to run a vault episode for
you here. This is an interview episode I did last
year with author Adam Weymouth talking about his book Lone Wolf,
(00:26):
Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness. It's all about
the European Wolf, it's recent comeback and the similarities between
the human and the lupine world This one originally published
six twelve, twenty twenty five. Let's jump right in.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb, and on today's episode, I'm going
to be chatting with Adam Weyman, author of Lone Wolf
Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness. It's all about
the European Wolf, it's recent comeback, in the similarities between
the human and lupine worlds. Without further ado, let's jump
right in. Thank you, Hi Adam, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Hi Rap, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
The new book is Lone Wolf Walking the Line between
Civilization and Wilderness released as of June third and all
major formats. As you describe in the book, Your Journey
began in covering the possible reintroduction of wolves into Scotland.
You'd written about this prior, so I thought you might
walk us through this first. What happened to the wolves
(01:42):
of the British Isles and where do things stand now
with their potential reintroduction?
Speaker 3 (01:48):
And what happened to the wolves of the British Isles
is pretty much the same that happened to the wolf
across its entire range. The wolf used to be once
upon a time the most widespread terrestrial land mammal on
the planet, all across the Northern Hemisphere, from the tundra
right down to the tropics and pretty much everywhere, including
in the British Isles. They were pushed almost to extinction,
(02:09):
or in the British Iles, completely eradicated. So there's a
bunch of last wolf stories. It seems that they hung
on in Scotland later than anywhere else. The last definitive
account for wolf in Scotland is sixteen twenty one, and
that's a note for a bounty that was paid on
a wolf. But it was an exception, you high su
(02:29):
which suggests by them that demand was already kind of
outstripping supply. And then it kind of verges into myth.
There's a lot of people that would like to claim
they killed the last wolf, whereas actually, of course the
last wolf probably lived out it's days, far from any one,
profoundly isolated and alone.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Now you actually looked for the alleged remains of the
last wolf in Scotland, right.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Yeah, that's right. So it's like I said, it's very
hard to come by. There's one story that I followed.
So I began my journey in Scotland at in a
state up near in Verness where this gentleman called Paul
Lister has been talking about trying to reintroduce now wolves
now for about twenty years or so. And I walked
across Scotland and finished it in the south of the
Kangom Mountain range. And that's one of the places where
(03:16):
the last Wolf is meant to have been killed. And then,
as you say later, I said out trying to find
it because it is then meant to have been stuffed,
and had various journey through different collections and museums, but
the actual providence of it is now pretty hard to locate,
and really, through the course of the research it made
me realize that this probably wasn't the last wolf at all.
This wolf that was being taken around these museums in
(03:38):
Scotland was being labeled as the last wolf in order
to sell tickets, but really it was probably nothing of
the sort.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
And what about the reintroduction of the wolf into Scotland
or various other areas where the wolf is no longer present.
Where do we currently stand with that in terms of
public sentiment and even governmental opinion.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Well, one of the reasons that the wolf is so
good to write about is because people are incredibly passionate
about it from both sides. People love wolves or they
hate wolves, and you find very little in between. And
that's essentially where we are. It's been noted in the
British Isles as the most popular animal for reintroduction. But
then you go and speak to people that would be
actually living alongside it. Once again, we have sheep farmers
(04:23):
in Scotland, hunters, gameskeepers, people like this, even people that
live in villages in the countryside, and there's this reputation
that the wolf has for better or worse, and there
are people that are very passionately against it as well.
It's interesting because in some ways it's quite an arbitrary
decision here wolves as we're going to talk about wolves
are making this remarkable come back in Europe, and if
(04:45):
Britain was still connected by a land bridge to the
continent as it used to be a couple of hundred
thousand years ago, then there would be back. There would
be wolves back on the British Isles now, and we
wouldn't be having a debate about whether or not to
introduce them. We'd just be talking about how we deal
with them. But because we're an island, we get to
make these particular decisions about about what we let in,
(05:06):
and realistically it's not going to happen here for a
long time. It's taken about fifteen years of great debate
to allow the beaver to come back, and that's that's
broadly accepted now. But there's a lot of other species
we'd see back before. Wolf is really really the pinnacle
of Once wolves are back, you know, we're not really
(05:27):
talking about the worlding anymore. It's kind of.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Happened now now moving to Condon or Europe. Here the
book is primarily concerned with a particular wolf, Schloats. Can
you tell us about Schloats and why his particular story
captured you so and serves as the is the driving
force of your narrative?
Speaker 3 (05:49):
He sure, Schloutz, it is actually one of the interesting thing.
I mean, it's a particular Slovenian word. And even in
the other countries that Schlous ended up in, no one
can really say his name. Probably, But I first read
a little piece about Schlutz when I was doing my
research on wolves in Scotland, and it was this very
small article about this wolf that had been born in
(06:11):
the south of Slovenia in twenty ten and had a
GPS track and collar put on him by a biologist
who was researching into wolf behavior. But of course that
biologist could have no idea what this animal was going
to go on to do. He was really just interested
in the sort of dynamics of the how a wolf
maintained the territory of the pack. But the following year,
(06:33):
at the end of twenty eleven, when Schlutz is about
eighteen months old, he left his pack behind and set
off on this epic one thousand mile journey through the Apps,
he crossed Slovenia, he crossed the whole of Austria, and
four months later in the spring, came into Italy and
it was there that he bumped into a female wolf
who was on a walk about of her own. So
somehow in there wasn't another wolf for thousands of square miles.
(06:57):
Somehow these two wolves managed to find each other, and
when they bred, they became the first wolf pack back
in the Italian Apps for more than a century. So
in one way, it was this remarkable love story that
I was drawn to. The female wolf ended up getting
called Juliet because they were very close to Verona, and
Romeo and julieta still Verona's most famous couple. So I
(07:18):
was really drawn to this incredible meeting in this love
story between these two animals. But of course not everyone
is quite so quite so in love with the idea
of having wolves back in the mountains.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Now, as you definitely discussed in the book, when we
talk about wolves, there's often a lot of separating the
biological reality of wolves from human mythmaking about wolves and misconceptions.
Coming back to the title of the book, Lone Wolf,
can you remind us just what a lone wolf actually is,
and in comparison to maybe some of the ideas that
(07:50):
we have about lone wolves.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
Yeah, so I really wanted to call it lone wolf,
and we had a bit of pushback sort of an
editorial meetings and stuff. But to me, it was really
important to call it loanew because I wanted to challenge
this idea of what a lone wolf is. We think
of a lone wolf as this kind of eastward archetype,
you know, this hero riding off into the sunset who
doesn't need anyone or anything, Whereas what I realized from
(08:14):
following Schlaus is that actually a lone wolf is simply
something that hasn't found what it's looking for yet. And
a lone wolf is looking for the same three things
that we all are. It's looking for enough land to
live on, it's looking for enough food to eat, and
it's looking for a mate. So and it's an incredibly
vulnerable time for a wolf. There is no more vulnerable time.
Wolves don't hunt well alone. They like to be part
(08:34):
of packs, they like to have a fixed territory. They
are actually an incredibly conservative species, very shy, very hard
to see. So to set off on these journeys, as
a particular kind of subset of wolves are hardwired to do.
To disperse like this is an incredibly dangerous, perilous time
for them, and not a not a proud, self sufficient
(08:56):
state that they want to end up in.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Now. In chronicling this journey, you sometimes rte from the
point of view of Slouts himself in the book, and
I thought this was a lovely choice. It makes for
some very poetic passages. Can you describe your process for
imagining the mindset of the wolf and how this factored
into your approach.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Thanks. I toyed with it for a while, and in
the end it felt important. I didn't want to say that,
you know, I was seeing the world as a wolf was,
but I wanted in some way to sort of, however clumsily,
kind of get inside Slouse's mind in a way. And
there was something about following his journey. So the track
and collar that you had to put on him, it
(09:36):
gave one waypoint every one hundred and ninety minutes for
the entire four months of his walk, And before I
set off, I transferred each of those waypoints onto this
big stack of maps that I carried in my rucksack,
and as I walked, As I followed this path, you
started to get some sort of sense of how this
wolf was seeing the world's you know, on the map.
(09:57):
It might have not seemed to make sense why he'd
suddenly changed compass point and set off on a different bearing,
But then when I got to this point, I realized
that I could hear the airport, or hear a highway,
or I could you know, see a town for the
first time as we come over a hill, or the
other places where he turned round because it was a
mountain pass and the winter that he traveled, it's incredibly snowy,
(10:19):
and a lot of these places are just inaccessible, so
in some way that you couldn't get from just looking
at the data on the page. By doing this walk,
I started to sense some sort of way that the
wolf was moving through a landscape in a way, and
often looking for the easiest route as well, often following
the river or the bike path down a valley rather
than going over a mountain range. And yeah, I felt
(10:42):
by the end of this walk, after following in his
footsteps for a few months, that I'd kind of earned
the right to at least try and write a little
bit from his from his perspective.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yeah, humans have of course long considered the wholf. We've
long seen shades of them and us, and shades of
us and them. So yeah, this is this is I guess,
a long standing area of analysis and consideration, right, like,
how are wolves like us? And how are we like
the wolf?
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Yeah, we obviously go way back. The wolf is the
first animal we domesticated, it's the first animal we lived alongside.
And there are these really interesting similarities between the two
of us. We're two of the very few species on
the planet that hunt prey that are larger than ourselves.
That's unusual in the animal world. And in order to
do that, that means that you need to work together
(11:32):
as a pack. And then when you start working together
as a pack, that requires division of labor, and it
requires hierarchy, and it requires some sort of quite complex
social organization. And so in some ways there's this real
affinity between how humans work together and how wolves work together.
And I think that probably is the reason that we
(11:53):
found each other in kind of hunting gather at times
and decided to work together, essentially because we had this
sort of underst and we both like to run after
pray and tire them out, and that is the way
that that is the way that they hunt, as opposed
to a big cat or something like that. And I
think it's almost that closeness. There was a wolf behavioral
scientist that I met in Austria and he said to me,
(12:14):
either you love your brother or you hate your brother.
There's nothing in between. And I think it's almost that
closeness that we feel to wolves. And obviously we see
that in our relationship to dogs as well, which are
essentially the same animal. That we've had this incredible bond
with them, but that's very easily quickly flipped into a
hatred that I don't think we have for any other
animal either.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
And that speaking of that hatred and sort of like
the dark side of that bond. You write a bit
in the book about Europe's three centuries of werewolf trials
and the werewolf panic. Can you tell us a bit
about this period of time and how it matches up
with the timeline of the Eurasian wolf's decline.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Sure, so, yeah, to kind of to break that down
a bit, maybe I can say a bit first just
about the kind of the extermination of the wolf in
generole because we began at that point, as I was saying,
with that sort of hunter, gather a relationship to the wolf.
I think it's two hunters almost respecting each other. But
as soon as we became herders, as soon as we
(13:14):
put up fences and started to keep livestock, the wolf
became this animal that was on the other side of
the fence. Suddenly we had something that the wolf wanted,
and very quickly it flipped into the wolf being the
thief the vagabonds, and from a Christian lens, if Jesus
is the lamb, then then the wolf is the devil.
And the persecution that they've faced over millennia, really ever
(13:38):
since there's been money to pay them, there have been
bounties out on wolves heads, kind of back to sixth
century BC and Athens there were bounties out on wolves.
Charlemagne from about eighteen from about eight hundreds sorry in
France started trying to eradicate the wolf, but it took
almost a thousand years. It wasn't until nineteen twenty seven
that wolves were finally gone from France, And in some
(13:59):
ways it was in the United States where that kind
of hatred of the wolf really reached another reached a pinnacle.
Basically that the ways that wolves were killed, they were
set on fire, they were pulled apart by horses, they
were beaten to death, and then paraded through town on
the back of horses. The estimates of up to two
million wolves were killed in the latter half of the
(14:20):
nineteenth century in the United States, and then and then
and the Native Americans saw it as as a manifestation
of insanity. It was said, it was seen as a
manifestation of insanity amongst the amongst the white settlers that
were that were killing these animals, and the yeah, and
there's something you're doing this research. It really seemed to
(14:41):
border on a hatred to wipe out that many animals,
right down to the very last animal. It feels like
it requires a stronger motivation than just a desire to
protect one sheep. It and and the werewolf Charles that
you mentioned at the beginning of that question seemed to
be one of those particular manifestations of that sort of
paranoia and hate. I'm some of your listeners will be
familiar with the witch trials, like the Salem witch trials,
(15:04):
and we had them a lot in Europe. As well.
Thousands of women were killed over over several centuries, but
I wasn't aware that people were actually put to death
for being accused of being were wolves as well. And
one of the u there were two towns actually in
Austria that Schloutz's route passed through were places whereas late
(15:25):
as the early eighteenth century, people were being put on
trial and hung for being were wolves, and quite often
the accused seemed to be travelers, wanderers, beggars, people that
might turn up in town. Maybe two sheep were killed
that night, and the local people decided to put two
and two together and and persecute the outsider for bringing
(15:49):
this ill upon the town.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
I'm glad you mentioned the agricultural aspect of hatred of
the wolf. Had recently read a couple of different books
looking at and were wolf myths and legends and talking
about how in some cases you see people trying to
to date the idea of were wolve's back to our
(16:13):
prehistoric ancestors in this time when we lived closer to
the wolf, and certainly when we domesticated the wolf. But
then I think the more convincing stories that I've read
have made the argument that it is. These are ultimately
agricultural era tales. These are tales of fear of the
wolf and analysis of the wolf in a time when
(16:34):
we are worried about our sheep and our herds and
our dominion over nature.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
I don't think that's to say that it's a kind
of obviously it's a misguided assumption. But obviously, you know,
to these people, it's not like now when you can
get compensation from the state for a wolf kill on
the sheep. Wolves don't kill a huge amount of livestock,
but they can target certain farms and certain herds, and
(17:04):
so someone might lose twenty of their thirty sheep, and
that would have been an absolutely existential crisis a few hundred
years ago. That was your way of getting through the winter,
that was your way of feeding your very large family.
It would have felt horrifying to be targeted in that way.
And I can see the trials against the were wolves
and also the kind of ambulets and charms and things
(17:25):
that people tried to as some way of trying to
have dominion over nature when nature felt really outside of
one's control.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Now and my recent reading about some of these werewolf
that's one of the books that I was looking at
was a twenty twenty one book by Daniel Ogden called
The Werewolf in the Ancient World, And there's one quote
in that that I keep coming back to, where he
says the quote wolves are in and of themselves were
wolves already in so far that is, as they combine
the qualities of the wildest and most lawless of animals
(17:55):
with those of civilization and humanity. And I kept coming
back in that, not to just harp like negative connotations
of the wolf, but I thought this was interesting and
sort of looking at the wolf as this thing that
already mirrors a lot about humans, like not just potential savagery,
but also how social wolves are, something that I think
(18:16):
is sometimes very often overlooked. Certainly, and we're wolf stories,
but just in general, I was wonder if you might
speak to He's touched on this already a little bit,
but speak to just how social wolves are and how
how like humans they are in this regard.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Yeah, I think in some ways they're they're almost an
aspiration or animal. You know, they were obviously genetically far
closer to chimpanzees, but I think we in wolves we
see qualities of almost how we would like to be.
You know, you go to you go to zoom and
watch chimpanzees, you obviously see something in them, But to
watch a wolf is to is to see how humans
(18:52):
could be. I think, you know, wolves, wolves are excellent parents.
They're one of the very few animals where the males
will stick around long after the birth to look after
both the pups and the suckling mother. They are incredibly loyal,
They are courageous and resourceful, and you know, often I
(19:12):
met a lot of people, a lot of farmers on
my journey through the Apps, who absolutely detested wolves, you know,
for the burdens that they put on their lives. But
I still got this sense that if they if they
were to be reincarnated at some point in the future,
if they were going to come back as animal, they'd
really like to come back as a wolf. You know.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, how when people think about wolves,
there is often this aspirational aspect of it, like they
don't actually be a were wolf, but the idea of
being like free like a wolf, of having the wolf
is kind of like a you know, a symbolic animal
in one's mind.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
And it's worth saying we've spoken about the kind of
hatred and the hatred that we've put on them. That
adulation of the wolf is also a misconception. One of
the things that I found in this book is that
almost the hardest thing about a wolf is to see
it for what it is, which is a wolf. It
seems to be this vessel for our fears and our
hopes and our dreams, and particularly how we relate to
(20:06):
the natural world. And whilst once upon a time that
might have been this sense of destroying the wolf in
order to kind of manifest progress and civilization, now we
have all these anxieties about what we're doing to the
world and what we're doing to our futures, and once
again the wolf has become this vescl but this time
it's something that's almost going to save us from ourselves
(20:28):
rather than destroyers.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
In the book, you draw connections between the comeback of
the wild wolf and the refugee crisis in Europe. Can
you elaborate on this for us a bit?
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Yeah, in several ways. I was first drawn to this
story actually because Licinia, which is this small regional park
in Italy where Schlutz finished his journey, where he bumped
into Juliet and where they formed their first pack. It
was also a part of the Alps where a lot
of refugees who were arriving in Italy they divide by
(21:00):
to lamproducer and then they'd straight away get taken to
these settlement centers. And there was one in Licinia right
up in the Apps and the middle of nowhere, completely
cut off in winter, and these people that were arriving
from North Africa and from the Middle East were being
taken to these This is a former NATO barracks. And
a lot of the language that was being used by
(21:21):
the local people living in these mountains about the refugees
and the wolves was very similar. It you know, we
were here first. These people don't belong here. I don't
have a problem with either wolves or migrants, but their
place isn't here. And not only obviously was that completely
untrue that wolves were in these mountains long before people.
And actually a lot of the Licinians are descendants of
(21:42):
German woodcutters who moved down from Germany a few hundred
years ago. There were these kind of very obvious parallels
I was finding, particularly in how both in the rural
places I was passing through the migrant and the wolf
are both being scapegoated by rural populations for a set
of much more complicated problems, you know, and I think
(22:04):
we see that in the rise of far right politics everywhere.
The migrant is this scapegoat for this incredibly complex range
of problems that are affecting countries, and the wolf seemed
to stand in for that as well. So there seemed
to be this affinity and yeah, kind of the importance
(22:24):
of both the wolf and the migrant for these places,
but then how it was perceived by a local population
as well, and then how the refugee and the wolf
were being used by far right politicians in order to
inflame anger and to chase that populist vote as well.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Well. I really, I really appreciated how you were able
to weave these themes together in the book.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
Yeah, it felt I wasn't expecting it, to be honest,
I wasn't expecting it, but increasingly, Yeah, it seemed to
follow me wherever I went. You know that the wolf
has been one of the reasons the wolf has done
so well in Europe is because it's been protected by
the European Union for the last thirty years or fifty
years in some ways. And so it's a very short
(23:05):
distance to having a problem with the wolf to having
a problem with the European Union. And there are fire parties,
particularly in Austria where the FBO are now the leading party,
where rather than encouraging farmers to try and coexist with
the wolf, and there are proven ways to be able
to co exist with wolves using dogs, using electric fences,
(23:28):
they were almost encouraging farmers not to do that and
actually to just send their flocks up into the mountains
in what one biologist described him as a state sanctioned slaughterhouse.
And then when that drama happens, that would then create
this space for these politicians to say that they're going
to go to the European Union and go to Brussels
and demand a change in law for the protection of
(23:50):
the wolf, which actually has now recently happened, so in
the way that farmers protests, and I do you know,
it's worth saying that I really understand why farmers are
finding it hard to live alongside these carnivores. Again, you know,
there's a lot of farming is a difficult profession at
(24:11):
the best of times. That the year that I did
the walk was the driest summer in Europe for several
hundred years. The price of electricity and animal feed is rocketing.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, young people are leaving for the cities.
They don't want to farm anymore, and now these farmers
are being asked to live alongside wolves as well. I
(24:33):
understand the fury. And while these complex problems climate change, inflation, etc.
Are hard to manage, at least with a wolf you
can go out and shoot it or be it illegally
and feel like you have some kind of agency over
your life. But rather than promoting understanding, rather than delving
into the actual looking for solutions to these more complicated problems,
(24:56):
that is the place where these far right politicians seem
to be coming in and co opt to their anger
and turning it to their own ends. And that that's
the bit that I want to challenge. Not that I
don't understand why it's difficult for pharmacis live alongside wolves,
but the ways that it's being politicized I think need
to be addressed.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Now, getting back to the topic of domestication, you touch
on the history of the German shepherd dog breed, which
this was all new to me. I don't know much
about dog breeds, I admit, Can you talk a little
bit about how the German shepherd factors into our ideas
about the wolf?
Speaker 3 (25:40):
Yes, so the German Shepherd I knew none of this
either until I started to research. The German shepherd was
an early twentieth century creation by a guy called matxiwan Stefanitz,
who was a retired German cavalry officer, and he said
that he set out to basically kind of reverse engineer
a wolf to sort of feed back into a dog
(26:01):
all these qualities that he saw as kind of most
wolf like and most noble for its size and its strength,
and its power and its willingness to work. And it
really prefigured a lot of the kind of Nazi eugenics ideas,
and the six hundred page manifesto that he wrote about
the German Shepherd had a lot to say about race
(26:23):
and about the purity of race, and very much the
same way that that Nazis would fetishize this kind of
certain area and races as time went on and the Nazis.
For the Nazis, the German shepherd was the kind of
dog that they used in the death camps that they
used on the battlefield. Hitler kept two German shepherds, one
(26:44):
of which he named Wolf. Hitler himself was obsessed by
Wolf's Adolph itself is an old Germanic variation of wolf,
and from he called the Hitler youth his wolf cubs.
Apparently he went around whistling the Who's Afraid of the
Big Bad Wolf Disney song? You know that he saw
(27:07):
in the wolf this kind of this total animal I suppose,
this sense, this kind of unbridled violence and aggression that
he wanted to breed back into a race of people
that he felt had become weak and soft and powerless.
So for the interesting that the Nazis were the first
(27:29):
people in modern times to actually place environmental protection laws
on the wolf, and it was it was part of
this vision of this kind of utagizing the power of
the animal.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Yeah, I believe you mentioned in the book that disturbingly
so the Nazis environmental policies were advanced even for today. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Yeah, But it was a sense of a kind of
pristine wilderness that was going to be full of this
sort of race of god like men, you know, and
those kind of large, charismatic, tootemic animals that actually fit
very well within that sort of wider Nazi vision of
(28:13):
the world.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
Interesting that there was some attempt in this to sort
of recreate a wolf, because I know in some generally
not great movies I've seen German shepherds stand in for Wars,
they'll have the part of wild wolves played by arvious
German shepherds.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
And then it's worth mentioningly Miscellini as well, because for
Italy there was also a part important, important animal for Mussolini,
but because the founding myth of Rome has the twins
Romulus and Remus being abandoned in the wilderness and then
being saved by a she wolf who suckled the twins
(28:48):
until the shepherd took took them in, and then Romulus
and Remus later went on to found Rome. The wolf
for the Italians has had that same uh strength and power,
but has also been this kind of nurturing maternal influence,
and Mussolini very much co opted that. Through the whole
(29:09):
of Mussolini's Fascist RaiseMe. There was a live wolf kept
in a cage in Rome that people could go and
see and actually remain there in various generations of the
wolf up until the nineteen seventies, there's meant to be
this living, fleshy symbol of the power of Mussolini's project.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
Now, going back to what you said earlier, this idea
of the wolf is also serving very particular human aspirations
and is rather far removed from the more boundariality of
the wolf, including its how social the animal is, how
nurturing the animal can be, and so forth right.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Yeah, there's no more prevalent myth about the wolf than
this idea of an alpha wolf, which is now completely discredited.
The alpha wolf was created by this biologist called Rudolph Schenkel,
working in nineteen thirty four. He began his research just
across the border from Nazi Germany in Switzerland. And again
(30:07):
it's thought that in his research in many ways was
influenced by the Nazi project that was developing across the border.
And he based his study on a pack of wolves
that were kept that were drawn from all different places
and kept in a very small enclosure. And from observing
those wolves and how they were not able to disperse
(30:30):
and go out and find new territory, like Schatz was
able to how they were not able to cooperate and hunt,
but actually they were just forced into this small environment.
There was this completely artificial fighting to be the alpha.
But that is not how wolves work in the wild.
But that became the basis for understanding how wild wolves
work for the next fifty years or so. It's now
(30:53):
been completely discredited in the science, but that sense of
the alpha wolf does still persist from most devational speakers
and toxic corners of the internet and everything else. We're
still encouraged to be this idea of the alphab but
that's something because it fits very well with how we
If we can say that wolves do it, then we
can kind of justify doing it ourselves as well. But
(31:15):
that is not how wolves work. A wolf pack is
essentially a family in some shape or form, and the
main pair of wolves will generally stay together for life,
breed for life, and raise successive generations within the pack.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
What is your big hope for readers with this book,
for them something they might take away about wolves and
also maybe about humans.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
I think one of the things that I've come to
see the wolf has. As we said at the beginning,
we're a long way from reintroducing wolves to the UK,
but I think the reason why wolves are interesting to
think about whether in a North American context or a
European context, is because I think they really demand answers
of us. They're almost the the disruptors. You know, they
(32:01):
move fast and they break stuff. And if we think,
you know, we know we need to give more space
to the natural world, we know that we need to
coexist in a better way. But I think wolves really
ask us if we believe that we can or are
we just paying at service of this? Can we sanction
risk again? Can we sanction living in a world that
feels a little bit more unknown than what we might
(32:22):
be used to, You know, it was it was tempting
to me. I work as an environmental journalist. I write
a lot of stories that seem quite hopeless, and it
was quite tempting for me with this story to see
the wolf as this kind of beacon of hope. You know,
wolves are doing incredibly well in Europe again and to
a lesser extent in North America. They're now listed as
a species of Least Concern in Europe. It's this incredible
(32:44):
environmental success story in a way, and it's really tempting
to hang on to that as a kind of beacon
of hope when when in the middle of a biodiversity
crisis and a climate crisis. And you know, again that
is just seeing the wolf is something that we want
it to be. Of course, it doesn't really mean that
the earth is healing or anything like that. But but
for the wolf, this is obviously a massive time of
(33:04):
hope and success and and I think that's really interesting
to see it in that way, that there is this
incredible desire for life to thrive. I think that that's
what wolves embodied that and and and in response to
times of crisis, we move, you know, and I think
wolves have always embodied.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
That that that that.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
Change is inevitable, and there is this desire and this
urge for for for life to flourish. And following Schlaus's
journey across Europe has has really shown me that it's
you know, however much we try and put up our borders,
however much we try and hem life in it, will
continue to try and find a.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Way, right, Adam, I have one more question for you,
And I realized this was this was the sillier one,
but in the acknowledgements for the book, look, you you
mentioned leaning on Joel Puland for a quote, having watched
(34:05):
every werewolf film out there so that I didn't have
to Could you give us a little a little bit
about your back and forth with Joel here? What what
did this have? This go down?
Speaker 3 (34:16):
He sent me. Joey's a friend of mine who works
at the British Film Institute. We've been We've been friends
for ever. He he's not just watched everywhere wolf film going,
He's watched every film going at this point. It's an
incredible resource. And yeah, there's a lot of werewolf films
out there, there's a lot of wolf literature out there.
I remember sort of going into the British Library at
the beginning of this research and typing in Wolf into
the library archive and being absolutely overwhelmed. My last book
(34:39):
was about Salmon, and the literature was a lot less
intimidating than it was about the wolf, and the were
wolf subset of that is again is again vast. But
he set me on to some of the classics which
I've never seen. Gingers Naps, I'd never seen. American Werewolf
in London, I'd never seen. And but it felt like
(35:00):
a werewol would be many things to many people. It
seems to it's standing for kind of whatever our paranoia
and preoccupations are at the time. But compared to the
actual werewolf trials that I was seeing, that the ones
in films like Ginger Snaps, it's always the lover, the
best friend that seems to be possessed, whereas the werewolf
(35:21):
trials it was always the unknown, stranger, the vacant. But
it seems to lean into that. You know, it's in
the same way as when you watch a wolf in
a zoo or something like that. It looks it looks
like every dog that you know. You know, you feel
like you can understand what it's thinking because you you
sort of think you know what a dog's thinking. But
then there's this kind of unhinged element as well that
(35:45):
suddenly it will foe you and you realize you're not
watching a dog at all. You're watching this other, completely
wild thing. And I think that's what the werewolf thing
touches on, That we're watching someone and we think we
understand them, but actually within that there is this wild,
unhinged part of them. Bitch, it's not just terrifying, it's
also it's also quite thrilling, you know, But there's a
temptation in the werewolf there just to kind of let
(36:08):
go and see what happens if we, you know, run
off into the night.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Adam, well, thanks so much for taking time out of
your day to chat with me here. The book again
is Lone Wolf Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
Thanks rep, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
All right. Thanks once more to Adam for coming on
the show and chatting with me. The book again is
Lone Wolf Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness and
as of June third, you'll find it in the US
in all major formats. Thanks as always to the excellent
JJ Possway for producing this show. And if you have
any questions, episodes, suggestions, and so forth you would like
(36:46):
to send to us, you can email us at contact
That's stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
All Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you're listening to your favorite shows. M
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb. We were off for the Juneteenth holiday,
so we are just a tiny bit behind in our schedule,
so we are going to run a vault episode for
you here. This is an interview episode I did last
year with author Adam Weymouth talking about his book Lone Wolf,
(00:26):
Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness. It's all about
the European Wolf, it's recent comeback and the similarities between
the human and the lupine world This one originally published
six twelve, twenty twenty five. Let's jump right in.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb, and on today's episode, I'm going
to be chatting with Adam Weyman, author of Lone Wolf
Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness. It's all about
the European Wolf, it's recent comeback, in the similarities between
the human and lupine worlds. Without further ado, let's jump
right in. Thank you, Hi Adam, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
Hi Rap, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
The new book is Lone Wolf Walking the Line between
Civilization and Wilderness released as of June third and all
major formats. As you describe in the book, Your Journey
began in covering the possible reintroduction of wolves into Scotland.
You'd written about this prior, so I thought you might
walk us through this first. What happened to the wolves
(01:42):
of the British Isles and where do things stand now
with their potential reintroduction?
Speaker 3 (01:48):
And what happened to the wolves of the British Isles
is pretty much the same that happened to the wolf
across its entire range. The wolf used to be once
upon a time the most widespread terrestrial land mammal on
the planet, all across the Northern Hemisphere, from the tundra
right down to the tropics and pretty much everywhere, including
in the British Isles. They were pushed almost to extinction,
(02:09):
or in the British Iles, completely eradicated. So there's a
bunch of last wolf stories. It seems that they hung
on in Scotland later than anywhere else. The last definitive
account for wolf in Scotland is sixteen twenty one, and
that's a note for a bounty that was paid on
a wolf. But it was an exception, you high su
(02:29):
which suggests by them that demand was already kind of
outstripping supply. And then it kind of verges into myth.
There's a lot of people that would like to claim
they killed the last wolf, whereas actually, of course the
last wolf probably lived out it's days, far from any one,
profoundly isolated and alone.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Now you actually looked for the alleged remains of the
last wolf in Scotland, right.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Yeah, that's right. So it's like I said, it's very
hard to come by. There's one story that I followed.
So I began my journey in Scotland at in a
state up near in Verness where this gentleman called Paul
Lister has been talking about trying to reintroduce now wolves
now for about twenty years or so. And I walked
across Scotland and finished it in the south of the
Kangom Mountain range. And that's one of the places where
(03:16):
the last Wolf is meant to have been killed. And then,
as you say later, I said out trying to find
it because it is then meant to have been stuffed,
and had various journey through different collections and museums, but
the actual providence of it is now pretty hard to locate,
and really, through the course of the research it made
me realize that this probably wasn't the last wolf at all.
This wolf that was being taken around these museums in
(03:38):
Scotland was being labeled as the last wolf in order
to sell tickets, but really it was probably nothing of
the sort.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
And what about the reintroduction of the wolf into Scotland
or various other areas where the wolf is no longer present.
Where do we currently stand with that in terms of
public sentiment and even governmental opinion.
Speaker 3 (04:00):
Well, one of the reasons that the wolf is so
good to write about is because people are incredibly passionate
about it from both sides. People love wolves or they
hate wolves, and you find very little in between. And
that's essentially where we are. It's been noted in the
British Isles as the most popular animal for reintroduction. But
then you go and speak to people that would be
actually living alongside it. Once again, we have sheep farmers
(04:23):
in Scotland, hunters, gameskeepers, people like this, even people that
live in villages in the countryside, and there's this reputation
that the wolf has for better or worse, and there
are people that are very passionately against it as well.
It's interesting because in some ways it's quite an arbitrary
decision here wolves as we're going to talk about wolves
are making this remarkable come back in Europe, and if
(04:45):
Britain was still connected by a land bridge to the
continent as it used to be a couple of hundred
thousand years ago, then there would be back. There would
be wolves back on the British Isles now, and we
wouldn't be having a debate about whether or not to
introduce them. We'd just be talking about how we deal
with them. But because we're an island, we get to
make these particular decisions about about what we let in,
(05:06):
and realistically it's not going to happen here for a
long time. It's taken about fifteen years of great debate
to allow the beaver to come back, and that's that's
broadly accepted now. But there's a lot of other species
we'd see back before. Wolf is really really the pinnacle
of Once wolves are back, you know, we're not really
(05:27):
talking about the worlding anymore. It's kind of.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
Happened now now moving to Condon or Europe. Here the
book is primarily concerned with a particular wolf, Schloats. Can
you tell us about Schloats and why his particular story
captured you so and serves as the is the driving
force of your narrative?
Speaker 3 (05:49):
He sure, Schloutz, it is actually one of the interesting thing.
I mean, it's a particular Slovenian word. And even in
the other countries that Schlous ended up in, no one
can really say his name. Probably, But I first read
a little piece about Schlutz when I was doing my
research on wolves in Scotland, and it was this very
small article about this wolf that had been born in
(06:11):
the south of Slovenia in twenty ten and had a
GPS track and collar put on him by a biologist
who was researching into wolf behavior. But of course that
biologist could have no idea what this animal was going
to go on to do. He was really just interested
in the sort of dynamics of the how a wolf
maintained the territory of the pack. But the following year,
(06:33):
at the end of twenty eleven, when Schlutz is about
eighteen months old, he left his pack behind and set
off on this epic one thousand mile journey through the Apps,
he crossed Slovenia, he crossed the whole of Austria, and
four months later in the spring, came into Italy and
it was there that he bumped into a female wolf
who was on a walk about of her own. So
somehow in there wasn't another wolf for thousands of square miles.
(06:57):
Somehow these two wolves managed to find each other, and
when they bred, they became the first wolf pack back
in the Italian Apps for more than a century. So
in one way, it was this remarkable love story that
I was drawn to. The female wolf ended up getting
called Juliet because they were very close to Verona, and
Romeo and julieta still Verona's most famous couple. So I
(07:18):
was really drawn to this incredible meeting in this love
story between these two animals. But of course not everyone
is quite so quite so in love with the idea
of having wolves back in the mountains.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Now, as you definitely discussed in the book, when we
talk about wolves, there's often a lot of separating the
biological reality of wolves from human mythmaking about wolves and misconceptions.
Coming back to the title of the book, Lone Wolf,
can you remind us just what a lone wolf actually is,
and in comparison to maybe some of the ideas that
(07:50):
we have about lone wolves.
Speaker 3 (07:51):
Yeah, so I really wanted to call it lone wolf,
and we had a bit of pushback sort of an
editorial meetings and stuff. But to me, it was really
important to call it loanew because I wanted to challenge
this idea of what a lone wolf is. We think
of a lone wolf as this kind of eastward archetype,
you know, this hero riding off into the sunset who
doesn't need anyone or anything, Whereas what I realized from
(08:14):
following Schlaus is that actually a lone wolf is simply
something that hasn't found what it's looking for yet. And
a lone wolf is looking for the same three things
that we all are. It's looking for enough land to
live on, it's looking for enough food to eat, and
it's looking for a mate. So and it's an incredibly
vulnerable time for a wolf. There is no more vulnerable time.
Wolves don't hunt well alone. They like to be part
(08:34):
of packs, they like to have a fixed territory. They
are actually an incredibly conservative species, very shy, very hard
to see. So to set off on these journeys, as
a particular kind of subset of wolves are hardwired to do.
To disperse like this is an incredibly dangerous, perilous time
for them, and not a not a proud, self sufficient
(08:56):
state that they want to end up in.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Now. In chronicling this journey, you sometimes rte from the
point of view of Slouts himself in the book, and
I thought this was a lovely choice. It makes for
some very poetic passages. Can you describe your process for
imagining the mindset of the wolf and how this factored
into your approach.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Thanks. I toyed with it for a while, and in
the end it felt important. I didn't want to say that,
you know, I was seeing the world as a wolf was,
but I wanted in some way to sort of, however clumsily,
kind of get inside Slouse's mind in a way. And
there was something about following his journey. So the track
and collar that you had to put on him, it
(09:36):
gave one waypoint every one hundred and ninety minutes for
the entire four months of his walk, And before I
set off, I transferred each of those waypoints onto this
big stack of maps that I carried in my rucksack,
and as I walked, As I followed this path, you
started to get some sort of sense of how this
wolf was seeing the world's you know, on the map.
(09:57):
It might have not seemed to make sense why he'd
suddenly changed compass point and set off on a different bearing,
But then when I got to this point, I realized
that I could hear the airport, or hear a highway,
or I could you know, see a town for the
first time as we come over a hill, or the
other places where he turned round because it was a
mountain pass and the winter that he traveled, it's incredibly snowy,
(10:19):
and a lot of these places are just inaccessible, so
in some way that you couldn't get from just looking
at the data on the page. By doing this walk,
I started to sense some sort of way that the
wolf was moving through a landscape in a way, and
often looking for the easiest route as well, often following
the river or the bike path down a valley rather
than going over a mountain range. And yeah, I felt
(10:42):
by the end of this walk, after following in his
footsteps for a few months, that I'd kind of earned
the right to at least try and write a little
bit from his from his perspective.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
Yeah, humans have of course long considered the wholf. We've
long seen shades of them and us, and shades of
us and them. So yeah, this is this is I guess,
a long standing area of analysis and consideration, right, like,
how are wolves like us? And how are we like
the wolf?
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Yeah, we obviously go way back. The wolf is the
first animal we domesticated, it's the first animal we lived alongside.
And there are these really interesting similarities between the two
of us. We're two of the very few species on
the planet that hunt prey that are larger than ourselves.
That's unusual in the animal world. And in order to
do that, that means that you need to work together
(11:32):
as a pack. And then when you start working together
as a pack, that requires division of labor, and it
requires hierarchy, and it requires some sort of quite complex
social organization. And so in some ways there's this real
affinity between how humans work together and how wolves work together.
And I think that probably is the reason that we
(11:53):
found each other in kind of hunting gather at times
and decided to work together, essentially because we had this
sort of underst and we both like to run after
pray and tire them out, and that is the way
that that is the way that they hunt, as opposed
to a big cat or something like that. And I
think it's almost that closeness. There was a wolf behavioral
scientist that I met in Austria and he said to me,
(12:14):
either you love your brother or you hate your brother.
There's nothing in between. And I think it's almost that
closeness that we feel to wolves. And obviously we see
that in our relationship to dogs as well, which are
essentially the same animal. That we've had this incredible bond
with them, but that's very easily quickly flipped into a
hatred that I don't think we have for any other
animal either.
Speaker 1 (12:34):
And that speaking of that hatred and sort of like
the dark side of that bond. You write a bit
in the book about Europe's three centuries of werewolf trials
and the werewolf panic. Can you tell us a bit
about this period of time and how it matches up
with the timeline of the Eurasian wolf's decline.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Sure, so, yeah, to kind of to break that down
a bit, maybe I can say a bit first just
about the kind of the extermination of the wolf in
generole because we began at that point, as I was saying,
with that sort of hunter, gather a relationship to the wolf.
I think it's two hunters almost respecting each other. But
as soon as we became herders, as soon as we
(13:14):
put up fences and started to keep livestock, the wolf
became this animal that was on the other side of
the fence. Suddenly we had something that the wolf wanted,
and very quickly it flipped into the wolf being the
thief the vagabonds, and from a Christian lens, if Jesus
is the lamb, then then the wolf is the devil.
And the persecution that they've faced over millennia, really ever
(13:38):
since there's been money to pay them, there have been
bounties out on wolves heads, kind of back to sixth
century BC and Athens there were bounties out on wolves.
Charlemagne from about eighteen from about eight hundreds sorry in
France started trying to eradicate the wolf, but it took
almost a thousand years. It wasn't until nineteen twenty seven
that wolves were finally gone from France, And in some
(13:59):
ways it was in the United States where that kind
of hatred of the wolf really reached another reached a pinnacle.
Basically that the ways that wolves were killed, they were
set on fire, they were pulled apart by horses, they
were beaten to death, and then paraded through town on
the back of horses. The estimates of up to two
million wolves were killed in the latter half of the
(14:20):
nineteenth century in the United States, and then and then
and the Native Americans saw it as as a manifestation
of insanity. It was said, it was seen as a
manifestation of insanity amongst the amongst the white settlers that
were that were killing these animals, and the yeah, and
there's something you're doing this research. It really seemed to
(14:41):
border on a hatred to wipe out that many animals,
right down to the very last animal. It feels like
it requires a stronger motivation than just a desire to
protect one sheep. It and and the werewolf Charles that
you mentioned at the beginning of that question seemed to
be one of those particular manifestations of that sort of
paranoia and hate. I'm some of your listeners will be
familiar with the witch trials, like the Salem witch trials,
(15:04):
and we had them a lot in Europe. As well.
Thousands of women were killed over over several centuries, but
I wasn't aware that people were actually put to death
for being accused of being were wolves as well. And
one of the u there were two towns actually in
Austria that Schloutz's route passed through were places whereas late
(15:25):
as the early eighteenth century, people were being put on
trial and hung for being were wolves, and quite often
the accused seemed to be travelers, wanderers, beggars, people that
might turn up in town. Maybe two sheep were killed
that night, and the local people decided to put two
and two together and and persecute the outsider for bringing
(15:49):
this ill upon the town.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
I'm glad you mentioned the agricultural aspect of hatred of
the wolf. Had recently read a couple of different books
looking at and were wolf myths and legends and talking
about how in some cases you see people trying to
to date the idea of were wolve's back to our
(16:13):
prehistoric ancestors in this time when we lived closer to
the wolf, and certainly when we domesticated the wolf. But
then I think the more convincing stories that I've read
have made the argument that it is. These are ultimately
agricultural era tales. These are tales of fear of the
wolf and analysis of the wolf in a time when
(16:34):
we are worried about our sheep and our herds and
our dominion over nature.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
I don't think that's to say that it's a kind
of obviously it's a misguided assumption. But obviously, you know,
to these people, it's not like now when you can
get compensation from the state for a wolf kill on
the sheep. Wolves don't kill a huge amount of livestock,
but they can target certain farms and certain herds, and
(17:04):
so someone might lose twenty of their thirty sheep, and
that would have been an absolutely existential crisis a few hundred
years ago. That was your way of getting through the winter,
that was your way of feeding your very large family.
It would have felt horrifying to be targeted in that way.
And I can see the trials against the were wolves
and also the kind of ambulets and charms and things
(17:25):
that people tried to as some way of trying to
have dominion over nature when nature felt really outside of
one's control.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Now and my recent reading about some of these werewolf
that's one of the books that I was looking at
was a twenty twenty one book by Daniel Ogden called
The Werewolf in the Ancient World, And there's one quote
in that that I keep coming back to, where he
says the quote wolves are in and of themselves were
wolves already in so far that is, as they combine
the qualities of the wildest and most lawless of animals
(17:55):
with those of civilization and humanity. And I kept coming
back in that, not to just harp like negative connotations
of the wolf, but I thought this was interesting and
sort of looking at the wolf as this thing that
already mirrors a lot about humans, like not just potential savagery,
but also how social wolves are, something that I think
(18:16):
is sometimes very often overlooked. Certainly, and we're wolf stories,
but just in general, I was wonder if you might
speak to He's touched on this already a little bit,
but speak to just how social wolves are and how
how like humans they are in this regard.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
Yeah, I think in some ways they're they're almost an
aspiration or animal. You know, they were obviously genetically far
closer to chimpanzees, but I think we in wolves we
see qualities of almost how we would like to be.
You know, you go to you go to zoom and
watch chimpanzees, you obviously see something in them, But to
watch a wolf is to is to see how humans
(18:52):
could be. I think, you know, wolves, wolves are excellent parents.
They're one of the very few animals where the males
will stick around long after the birth to look after
both the pups and the suckling mother. They are incredibly loyal,
They are courageous and resourceful, and you know, often I
(19:12):
met a lot of people, a lot of farmers on
my journey through the Apps, who absolutely detested wolves, you know,
for the burdens that they put on their lives. But
I still got this sense that if they if they
were to be reincarnated at some point in the future,
if they were going to come back as animal, they'd
really like to come back as a wolf. You know.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, how when people think about wolves,
there is often this aspirational aspect of it, like they
don't actually be a were wolf, but the idea of
being like free like a wolf, of having the wolf
is kind of like a you know, a symbolic animal
in one's mind.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
And it's worth saying we've spoken about the kind of
hatred and the hatred that we've put on them. That
adulation of the wolf is also a misconception. One of
the things that I found in this book is that
almost the hardest thing about a wolf is to see
it for what it is, which is a wolf. It
seems to be this vessel for our fears and our
hopes and our dreams, and particularly how we relate to
(20:06):
the natural world. And whilst once upon a time that
might have been this sense of destroying the wolf in
order to kind of manifest progress and civilization, now we
have all these anxieties about what we're doing to the
world and what we're doing to our futures, and once
again the wolf has become this vescl but this time
it's something that's almost going to save us from ourselves
(20:28):
rather than destroyers.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
In the book, you draw connections between the comeback of
the wild wolf and the refugee crisis in Europe. Can
you elaborate on this for us a bit?
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Yeah, in several ways. I was first drawn to this
story actually because Licinia, which is this small regional park
in Italy where Schlutz finished his journey, where he bumped
into Juliet and where they formed their first pack. It
was also a part of the Alps where a lot
of refugees who were arriving in Italy they divide by
(21:00):
to lamproducer and then they'd straight away get taken to
these settlement centers. And there was one in Licinia right
up in the Apps and the middle of nowhere, completely
cut off in winter, and these people that were arriving
from North Africa and from the Middle East were being
taken to these This is a former NATO barracks. And
a lot of the language that was being used by
(21:21):
the local people living in these mountains about the refugees
and the wolves was very similar. It you know, we
were here first. These people don't belong here. I don't
have a problem with either wolves or migrants, but their
place isn't here. And not only obviously was that completely
untrue that wolves were in these mountains long before people.
And actually a lot of the Licinians are descendants of
(21:42):
German woodcutters who moved down from Germany a few hundred
years ago. There were these kind of very obvious parallels
I was finding, particularly in how both in the rural
places I was passing through the migrant and the wolf
are both being scapegoated by rural populations for a set
of much more complicated problems, you know, and I think
(22:04):
we see that in the rise of far right politics everywhere.
The migrant is this scapegoat for this incredibly complex range
of problems that are affecting countries, and the wolf seemed
to stand in for that as well. So there seemed
to be this affinity and yeah, kind of the importance
(22:24):
of both the wolf and the migrant for these places,
but then how it was perceived by a local population
as well, and then how the refugee and the wolf
were being used by far right politicians in order to
inflame anger and to chase that populist vote as well.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
Well. I really, I really appreciated how you were able
to weave these themes together in the book.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
Yeah, it felt I wasn't expecting it, to be honest,
I wasn't expecting it, but increasingly, Yeah, it seemed to
follow me wherever I went. You know that the wolf
has been one of the reasons the wolf has done
so well in Europe is because it's been protected by
the European Union for the last thirty years or fifty
years in some ways. And so it's a very short
(23:05):
distance to having a problem with the wolf to having
a problem with the European Union. And there are fire parties,
particularly in Austria where the FBO are now the leading party,
where rather than encouraging farmers to try and coexist with
the wolf, and there are proven ways to be able
to co exist with wolves using dogs, using electric fences,
(23:28):
they were almost encouraging farmers not to do that and
actually to just send their flocks up into the mountains
in what one biologist described him as a state sanctioned slaughterhouse.
And then when that drama happens, that would then create
this space for these politicians to say that they're going
to go to the European Union and go to Brussels
and demand a change in law for the protection of
(23:50):
the wolf, which actually has now recently happened, so in
the way that farmers protests, and I do you know,
it's worth saying that I really understand why farmers are
finding it hard to live alongside these carnivores. Again, you know,
there's a lot of farming is a difficult profession at
(24:11):
the best of times. That the year that I did
the walk was the driest summer in Europe for several
hundred years. The price of electricity and animal feed is rocketing.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, young people are leaving for the cities.
They don't want to farm anymore, and now these farmers
are being asked to live alongside wolves as well. I
(24:33):
understand the fury. And while these complex problems climate change, inflation, etc.
Are hard to manage, at least with a wolf you
can go out and shoot it or be it illegally
and feel like you have some kind of agency over
your life. But rather than promoting understanding, rather than delving
into the actual looking for solutions to these more complicated problems,
(24:56):
that is the place where these far right politicians seem
to be coming in and co opt to their anger
and turning it to their own ends. And that that's
the bit that I want to challenge. Not that I
don't understand why it's difficult for pharmacis live alongside wolves,
but the ways that it's being politicized I think need
to be addressed.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Now, getting back to the topic of domestication, you touch
on the history of the German shepherd dog breed, which
this was all new to me. I don't know much
about dog breeds, I admit, Can you talk a little
bit about how the German shepherd factors into our ideas
about the wolf?
Speaker 3 (25:40):
Yes, so the German Shepherd I knew none of this
either until I started to research. The German shepherd was
an early twentieth century creation by a guy called matxiwan Stefanitz,
who was a retired German cavalry officer, and he said
that he set out to basically kind of reverse engineer
a wolf to sort of feed back into a dog
(26:01):
all these qualities that he saw as kind of most
wolf like and most noble for its size and its strength,
and its power and its willingness to work. And it
really prefigured a lot of the kind of Nazi eugenics ideas,
and the six hundred page manifesto that he wrote about
the German Shepherd had a lot to say about race
(26:23):
and about the purity of race, and very much the
same way that that Nazis would fetishize this kind of
certain area and races as time went on and the Nazis.
For the Nazis, the German shepherd was the kind of
dog that they used in the death camps that they
used on the battlefield. Hitler kept two German shepherds, one
(26:44):
of which he named Wolf. Hitler himself was obsessed by
Wolf's Adolph itself is an old Germanic variation of wolf,
and from he called the Hitler youth his wolf cubs.
Apparently he went around whistling the Who's Afraid of the
Big Bad Wolf Disney song? You know that he saw
(27:07):
in the wolf this kind of this total animal I suppose,
this sense, this kind of unbridled violence and aggression that
he wanted to breed back into a race of people
that he felt had become weak and soft and powerless.
So for the interesting that the Nazis were the first
(27:29):
people in modern times to actually place environmental protection laws
on the wolf, and it was it was part of
this vision of this kind of utagizing the power of
the animal.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
Yeah, I believe you mentioned in the book that disturbingly
so the Nazis environmental policies were advanced even for today. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Yeah, But it was a sense of a kind of
pristine wilderness that was going to be full of this
sort of race of god like men, you know, and
those kind of large, charismatic, tootemic animals that actually fit
very well within that sort of wider Nazi vision of
(28:13):
the world.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
Interesting that there was some attempt in this to sort
of recreate a wolf, because I know in some generally
not great movies I've seen German shepherds stand in for Wars,
they'll have the part of wild wolves played by arvious
German shepherds.
Speaker 3 (28:28):
And then it's worth mentioningly Miscellini as well, because for
Italy there was also a part important, important animal for Mussolini,
but because the founding myth of Rome has the twins
Romulus and Remus being abandoned in the wilderness and then
being saved by a she wolf who suckled the twins
(28:48):
until the shepherd took took them in, and then Romulus
and Remus later went on to found Rome. The wolf
for the Italians has had that same uh strength and power,
but has also been this kind of nurturing maternal influence,
and Mussolini very much co opted that. Through the whole
(29:09):
of Mussolini's Fascist RaiseMe. There was a live wolf kept
in a cage in Rome that people could go and
see and actually remain there in various generations of the
wolf up until the nineteen seventies, there's meant to be
this living, fleshy symbol of the power of Mussolini's project.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
Now, going back to what you said earlier, this idea
of the wolf is also serving very particular human aspirations
and is rather far removed from the more boundariality of
the wolf, including its how social the animal is, how
nurturing the animal can be, and so forth right.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
Yeah, there's no more prevalent myth about the wolf than
this idea of an alpha wolf, which is now completely discredited.
The alpha wolf was created by this biologist called Rudolph Schenkel,
working in nineteen thirty four. He began his research just
across the border from Nazi Germany in Switzerland. And again
(30:07):
it's thought that in his research in many ways was
influenced by the Nazi project that was developing across the border.
And he based his study on a pack of wolves
that were kept that were drawn from all different places
and kept in a very small enclosure. And from observing
those wolves and how they were not able to disperse
(30:30):
and go out and find new territory, like Schatz was
able to how they were not able to cooperate and hunt,
but actually they were just forced into this small environment.
There was this completely artificial fighting to be the alpha.
But that is not how wolves work in the wild.
But that became the basis for understanding how wild wolves
work for the next fifty years or so. It's now
(30:53):
been completely discredited in the science, but that sense of
the alpha wolf does still persist from most devational speakers
and toxic corners of the internet and everything else. We're
still encouraged to be this idea of the alphab but
that's something because it fits very well with how we
If we can say that wolves do it, then we
can kind of justify doing it ourselves as well. But
(31:15):
that is not how wolves work. A wolf pack is
essentially a family in some shape or form, and the
main pair of wolves will generally stay together for life,
breed for life, and raise successive generations within the pack.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
What is your big hope for readers with this book,
for them something they might take away about wolves and
also maybe about humans.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
I think one of the things that I've come to
see the wolf has. As we said at the beginning,
we're a long way from reintroducing wolves to the UK,
but I think the reason why wolves are interesting to
think about whether in a North American context or a
European context, is because I think they really demand answers
of us. They're almost the the disruptors. You know, they
(32:01):
move fast and they break stuff. And if we think,
you know, we know we need to give more space
to the natural world, we know that we need to
coexist in a better way. But I think wolves really
ask us if we believe that we can or are
we just paying at service of this? Can we sanction
risk again? Can we sanction living in a world that
feels a little bit more unknown than what we might
(32:22):
be used to, You know, it was it was tempting
to me. I work as an environmental journalist. I write
a lot of stories that seem quite hopeless, and it
was quite tempting for me with this story to see
the wolf as this kind of beacon of hope. You know,
wolves are doing incredibly well in Europe again and to
a lesser extent in North America. They're now listed as
a species of Least Concern in Europe. It's this incredible
(32:44):
environmental success story in a way, and it's really tempting
to hang on to that as a kind of beacon
of hope when when in the middle of a biodiversity
crisis and a climate crisis. And you know, again that
is just seeing the wolf is something that we want
it to be. Of course, it doesn't really mean that
the earth is healing or anything like that. But but
for the wolf, this is obviously a massive time of
(33:04):
hope and success and and I think that's really interesting
to see it in that way, that there is this
incredible desire for life to thrive. I think that that's
what wolves embodied that and and and in response to
times of crisis, we move, you know, and I think
wolves have always embodied.
Speaker 1 (33:22):
That that that that.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
Change is inevitable, and there is this desire and this
urge for for for life to flourish. And following Schlaus's
journey across Europe has has really shown me that it's
you know, however much we try and put up our borders,
however much we try and hem life in it, will
continue to try and find a.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Way, right, Adam, I have one more question for you,
And I realized this was this was the sillier one,
but in the acknowledgements for the book, look, you you
mentioned leaning on Joel Puland for a quote, having watched
(34:05):
every werewolf film out there so that I didn't have
to Could you give us a little a little bit
about your back and forth with Joel here? What what
did this have? This go down?
Speaker 3 (34:16):
He sent me. Joey's a friend of mine who works
at the British Film Institute. We've been We've been friends
for ever. He he's not just watched everywhere wolf film going,
He's watched every film going at this point. It's an
incredible resource. And yeah, there's a lot of werewolf films
out there, there's a lot of wolf literature out there.
I remember sort of going into the British Library at
the beginning of this research and typing in Wolf into
the library archive and being absolutely overwhelmed. My last book
(34:39):
was about Salmon, and the literature was a lot less
intimidating than it was about the wolf, and the were
wolf subset of that is again is again vast. But
he set me on to some of the classics which
I've never seen. Gingers Naps, I'd never seen. American Werewolf
in London, I'd never seen. And but it felt like
(35:00):
a werewol would be many things to many people. It
seems to it's standing for kind of whatever our paranoia
and preoccupations are at the time. But compared to the
actual werewolf trials that I was seeing, that the ones
in films like Ginger Snaps, it's always the lover, the
best friend that seems to be possessed, whereas the werewolf
(35:21):
trials it was always the unknown, stranger, the vacant. But
it seems to lean into that. You know, it's in
the same way as when you watch a wolf in
a zoo or something like that. It looks it looks
like every dog that you know. You know, you feel
like you can understand what it's thinking because you you
sort of think you know what a dog's thinking. But
then there's this kind of unhinged element as well that
(35:45):
suddenly it will foe you and you realize you're not
watching a dog at all. You're watching this other, completely
wild thing. And I think that's what the werewolf thing
touches on, That we're watching someone and we think we
understand them, but actually within that there is this wild,
unhinged part of them. Bitch, it's not just terrifying, it's
also it's also quite thrilling, you know, But there's a
temptation in the werewolf there just to kind of let
(36:08):
go and see what happens if we, you know, run
off into the night.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Adam, well, thanks so much for taking time out of
your day to chat with me here. The book again
is Lone Wolf Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
Thanks rep, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (36:25):
All right. Thanks once more to Adam for coming on
the show and chatting with me. The book again is
Lone Wolf Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness and
as of June third, you'll find it in the US
in all major formats. Thanks as always to the excellent
JJ Possway for producing this show. And if you have
any questions, episodes, suggestions, and so forth you would like
(36:46):
to send to us, you can email us at contact
That's stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
All Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you're listening to your favorite shows. M
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