June 12, 2025 • 36 mins
In this NEW 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.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
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. Hi Adam, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Hi, rep thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
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
(00:59):
the British Isles and where do things stand now with
their potential reintroduction?
Speaker 3 (01:05):
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
(01:27):
in the British Isles, 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 your high sum, which suggests
(01:48):
by then 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 many one, profoundly
isolated and alone.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Now you actually looked for the alleged remains of the
last wharf in Scotland, right.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Yeah, that's right. So, 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 Kengorm
(02:30):
mountain range. And that's one of the places where the
last wolf is meant to have been killed. And then,
as you say, late, I said out trying to find
it because it is then meant to have been stuffed
and had a various journey through different collections and museums,
but the actual provenance of it is now pretty hard
to locate. And really, through the course of research it
(02:51):
made me realize that this probably wasn't the last wolf
at all. This wolf that was being taken around these
museums in Scotland was being labeled as the last wolf
in order to sell tickets, but really probably nothing of
the sort.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
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 like governmental opinion.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
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 there. 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
(03:40):
farmers 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
(04:00):
are making this remarkable come back in Europe, and if
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 we're not to
introduce them. We'd just be talking about how we deal
with them. But because we're in Ireland, we get to
make these particular decisions about what we let in and
(04:25):
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 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 talking about the worlding anymore.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
It's kind of 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 driving force
of your narrative?
Speaker 3 (05:06):
Sure, Schlutz, 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 Schloutz. 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
(05:28):
in 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,
(05:50):
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
app 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 walkabout of her own. So somehow in
(06:12):
there wasn't another wolf for thousands of square miles. Somehow
these two wolves managed to find each other, and when
they bred, they became the first wolf pack back in
the Italian Alps 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 Vona's most famous couple. So I was
(06:36):
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 2 (06:46):
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 a book, lone Wolf,
can you remind us just what a lone wolf actually
is and in comparison to maybe some of the ideas
(07:07):
that we have about lone wolves.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
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 lone Wolf because I wanted to
challenge this idea of what a lone wolf is. We
think of a lone wolf as this kind of Clint
Eastward archetype, you know, this hero riding off into the
sunset who doesn't need anyone or anything, Whereas what I
(07:31):
realized from 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
(07:51):
be part of packs, they like to have a fixed territory.
They're 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
(08:14):
state that they want to end up in.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Now. In chronicling this journey, you sometimes write 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 3 (08:33):
Yeah, 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 gave one way point every one hundred
(08:55):
and ninety minutes for the entire four months of his walk,
And before I set off, 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. You know, on the map,
it might have not seemed to make sense why he'd
(09:16):
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 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 was incredibly snowy,
(09:36):
and a lot of these places was 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
(09:59):
by the end end of this walk, after following in
his footsteps for a few months, that I had kind
of earned the right to at least try and write
a little bit from his from his perspective.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
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 such
a I guess, a long standing area of analysis and consideration, right, like, like,
how are wolves like us? And how are we like
the wholf?
Speaker 3 (10:28):
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
(10:50):
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
(11:10):
found each other in kind of hunt gather at times
and decided to work together, essentially because we had this
sort of understanding 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 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, either
(11:31):
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 you're 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 2 (11:51):
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 where wolf
triesles and the we're a wolf 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 (12:08):
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 general,
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
(12:31):
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 the wolf is the devil and
the persecution that they've faced over millennia. Really ever since
(12:56):
there's been money to pay them. There have been bounties
out on wolve's heads back to sixth century BC and
Athens there were bounties out on wolves. Charlemagne from about
eighteen for 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 ways it was in
(13:17):
the United States where that kind of hatred of the
wolf really reached another reached a pinnacle. Basically, 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 nineteenth century in the
(13:39):
United States, and the Native Americans saw it as a
manifestation of insanity. It was said it was seen as
a manifestation of insanity amongst the white settlers that were
killing these animals. Yeah, and there's something you're doing this research.
It really seemed to border on a hatred to wipe
(14:00):
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. And the werewolf trials
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 sure some of your listeners
will be familiar with the witch trials, like the Salem
(14:20):
witch Trials, and we had them a lot in Europe
as well. Thousands of women were killed over several centuries,
But I wasn't aware that people were actually put to
death being accused of being werewolves as well. And one
of the there were two towns actually in Austria that
Schloutz's route passed through were places whereas late as the
(14:43):
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 sided to put two and two together,
and uh and and and persecute the outsider for for
(15:06):
bringing this l upon the upon the town.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
I'm glad you mentioned, uh, the agricultural aspect of hatred
of the wolf. I 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
(15:30):
to our 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 have made the argument that it is this.
These are ultimately agricultural era tales. These are tales of
fear of the wolf and analysis of the wolf in
a time when we are worried about our sheep and
(15:54):
our herds and and UH and and our dominion over nature.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
I don't think that's to say that it 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 so someone
(16:22):
might lose twenty of their thirty sheep, and that would
have been an absolutely existential crisis three hundred years ago.
That was your way of getting through the winter, that
was your way of feeding your fairly 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
that people tried to as some way of trying to
(16:46):
have dominion over nature when nature felt really outside of
one's control.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Now and my recent reading about is where Wolf. That's
one of the books that I was looking at was
a twenty twenty one book by Daniel Agden called The
World Wolf 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. Where
wolves already in so far that is, is that they
combine the qualities of the wildest and most lawless of
(17:12):
animals with those of civilization and humanity. And I kept
coming back in that, not to just harp on 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
(17:33):
that I think is sometimes very often overlooked, certainly and
were wolf stories, but just in general. I was wondering
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 (17:48):
Yeah, I think in some ways they're almost an aspiration
or animal. You know that we're obviously genetically far closer
to chimpanzees, but I think we in wolves we see
qualities of as how we would like to be. You know,
you go to you go to zoo and watch chimpanzees,
you obviously see something in them, But to watch a
wolf is to is to see how humans could be.
(18:10):
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
met a lot of people, a lot of farmers on
(18:32):
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 an animal,
they'd really like to come back as a wolf.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
You know, Yeah, that's 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 symbolic animal in
one's mind.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
And it's worth saying we've spoken about the kind of
hatred and the hatred that we've got in 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
(19:24):
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 vessel, but this time
it's something that's almost going to save us from ourselves
(19:45):
rather than destroyers.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
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 Uce a bit?
Speaker 3 (19:55):
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
(20:17):
boat 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 from the Middle East were being
taken to these This was a former NATO barracks, and
(20:37):
a lot of the language that was being used by
the local people living in these mountains about the refugees
and the wolves was very similar. 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 German
(21:00):
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
(21:20):
complicated problems, you know, and I think 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 of both
(21:42):
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 2 (21:56):
Well, I really I really appreciated how you were able
to weave these themes together book.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
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
(22:22):
distance to having a problem with the wolf to having
a problem with the European Union. And there are far
right 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,
(22:43):
using electric fences, 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 to me
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
(23:07):
for the protection of 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 the best of times. That
(23:30):
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 understand the fury.
(23:52):
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, albeit 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, that is
(24:14):
the place where these far right politicians seem to be
coming in and co opting 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 pharmaci live alongside wolves, but the ways
that it's being politicized I think need to be addressed.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
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 (24:58):
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 Maximan 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 breed back into a dog
(25:19):
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
(25:39):
about race and about the purity of race, and very
much the same way 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. Hit Like kept two
(26:01):
German shepherds, one of which he named Wolf. Hitler himself
was obsessed by wolf's Adolph itself is an old Germanic
variation of of wolf, and from from he called the
Hitler youth, his his wolf cubs. Apparently he went around
whistling the Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Disney song?
(26:22):
You know that he saw in the wolf this kind
of this total animal, I suppose, this sense of 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
(26:45):
interesting that the Nazis were the first people in modern
times to actually place environmental protection laws on the wolf,
and it was it was part of this this vision
of this kind of udagizing the power of the animal.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Yeah. I believe you mentioned in the book that disturbingly
so the Nazis environmental policies were advanced even for today.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Yeah. Yeah, but it was a sense of a kind
of pristine wilderness that was going to be full of
this sort of race of godlike men, you know, and
those kind of large, charismatic, tootemic animals that actually fit
very well within that sort of wider Nazi vision of
(27:30):
the world.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
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
they'll have the part of wild wolves played by obvious
German shepherds.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
And then it's worth mentioning 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
Communism Remus being abandoned in the wilderness and then being
saved by a she wolf who suckled the twins until
(28:05):
a shepherd took them in, and then Rominius and Remus
later went on to found Rome. The wolf for the
Italians has had that same strength and power, but has
also been this kind of nurturing maternal influence, and Mussolini
very much co opted that. Through the whole of Mussolinius
(28:28):
fascist raisme, there was a live wolf kept in a
cage in Rome that people could go and see and
actually reined there in various generations of the wolf up
until the nineteen seventies. There was meant to be this living,
fleshy symbol of the power of Mussolini's project.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
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 like the more boundariality
of the wolf, including it's how social the animal is,
how nurturing the animal can be, and so forth right.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
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
(29:24):
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
(29:48):
and go out and find new territory like stats 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
(30:11):
been completely discredited in the science, but that sense of
the alpha wolf does still persist from motivational speakers and
toxic corners of the internet and everything else. We're still
encouraged to be this idea of the alpha. 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 that
(30:33):
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 2 (30:49):
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 (30:56):
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 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 disruptors. You know,
(31:18):
they 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 can
we sanction risk again? Can we sanction living in a
world that feels a little bit more unknown than what
(31:39):
we might 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
(32:00):
this incredible 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 for the wolf, this is obviously a massive time
(32:21):
of hope and success, 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 embody that and in response to times of crisis,
we move, you know, and I think wolves have always
embodied that that that change is inevitable, and there is
(32:44):
this desire and this urge for life to flourish, and
following Schlaus's journey across Europe 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 way.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
All right, Adam, I have one more question for you.
And I realized this was this was the sillier one.
But in the acknowledgments for the book you you mentioned
leaning on Joel pulling h for a quote having watched
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 that?
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Have?
Speaker 2 (33:31):
This? Have this go down?
Speaker 3 (33:32):
He sent me. Joel he's a friend of mine. He
works at the British Film Institute. We've been we've been
friends for ever. He's not just watched every where wolf
film going, He's watched every film going at this point.
It's an incredible resource. And yeah, there's a lot of
werebell films out there that 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.
(33:55):
My last book was about Salmon and the the literature
was a lot less intimidating than it was about the wolf,
and the werewolf subset of that is again is again vast.
But he set me on to some of the classics
which I've never seen. Ginger Snaps, I'd never seen. American
werewolf in London I'd never seen, and it felt like
(34:18):
a werewolf 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
(34:38):
trials it was always the unknown, stranger, the vagrant. 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
(35:03):
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 were wolf
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, which 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
(35:25):
go and see what happens if we, you know, run
off into the night.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
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 (35:37):
Thanks Rev, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
On 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 Passway for producing this show. And if you
(36:00):
have any questions, episodes, suggestions, and so forth you would
like to send to us. You can email us at
contact It's Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
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. Hi Adam, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Hi, rep thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
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
(00:59):
the British Isles and where do things stand now with
their potential reintroduction?
Speaker 3 (01:05):
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
(01:27):
in the British Isles, 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 your high sum, which suggests
(01:48):
by then 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 many one, profoundly
isolated and alone.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Now you actually looked for the alleged remains of the
last wharf in Scotland, right.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Yeah, that's right. So, 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 Kengorm
(02:30):
mountain range. And that's one of the places where the
last wolf is meant to have been killed. And then,
as you say, late, I said out trying to find
it because it is then meant to have been stuffed
and had a various journey through different collections and museums,
but the actual provenance of it is now pretty hard
to locate. And really, through the course of research it
(02:51):
made me realize that this probably wasn't the last wolf
at all. This wolf that was being taken around these
museums in Scotland was being labeled as the last wolf
in order to sell tickets, but really probably nothing of
the sort.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
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 like governmental opinion.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
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 there. 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
(03:40):
farmers 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
(04:00):
are making this remarkable come back in Europe, and if
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 we're not to
introduce them. We'd just be talking about how we deal
with them. But because we're in Ireland, we get to
make these particular decisions about what we let in and
(04:25):
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 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 talking about the worlding anymore.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
It's kind of 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 driving force
of your narrative?
Speaker 3 (05:06):
Sure, Schlutz, 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 Schloutz. 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
(05:28):
in 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,
(05:50):
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
app 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 walkabout of her own. So somehow in
(06:12):
there wasn't another wolf for thousands of square miles. Somehow
these two wolves managed to find each other, and when
they bred, they became the first wolf pack back in
the Italian Alps 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 Vona's most famous couple. So I was
(06:36):
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 2 (06:46):
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 a book, lone Wolf,
can you remind us just what a lone wolf actually
is and in comparison to maybe some of the ideas
(07:07):
that we have about lone wolves.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
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 lone Wolf because I wanted to
challenge this idea of what a lone wolf is. We
think of a lone wolf as this kind of Clint
Eastward archetype, you know, this hero riding off into the
sunset who doesn't need anyone or anything, Whereas what I
(07:31):
realized from 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
(07:51):
be part of packs, they like to have a fixed territory.
They're 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
(08:14):
state that they want to end up in.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
Now. In chronicling this journey, you sometimes write 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 3 (08:33):
Yeah, 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 gave one way point every one hundred
(08:55):
and ninety minutes for the entire four months of his walk,
And before I set off, 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. You know, on the map,
it might have not seemed to make sense why he'd
(09:16):
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 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 was incredibly snowy,
(09:36):
and a lot of these places was 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
(09:59):
by the end end of this walk, after following in
his footsteps for a few months, that I had kind
of earned the right to at least try and write
a little bit from his from his perspective.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
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 such
a I guess, a long standing area of analysis and consideration, right, like, like,
how are wolves like us? And how are we like
the wholf?
Speaker 3 (10:28):
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
(10:50):
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
(11:10):
found each other in kind of hunt gather at times
and decided to work together, essentially because we had this
sort of understanding 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 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, either
(11:31):
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 you're 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 2 (11:51):
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 where wolf
triesles and the we're a wolf 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 (12:08):
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 general,
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
(12:31):
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 the wolf is the devil and
the persecution that they've faced over millennia. Really ever since
(12:56):
there's been money to pay them. There have been bounties
out on wolve's heads back to sixth century BC and
Athens there were bounties out on wolves. Charlemagne from about
eighteen for 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 ways it was in
(13:17):
the United States where that kind of hatred of the
wolf really reached another reached a pinnacle. Basically, 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 nineteenth century in the
(13:39):
United States, and the Native Americans saw it as a
manifestation of insanity. It was said it was seen as
a manifestation of insanity amongst the white settlers that were
killing these animals. Yeah, and there's something you're doing this research.
It really seemed to border on a hatred to wipe
(14:00):
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. And the werewolf trials
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 sure some of your listeners
will be familiar with the witch trials, like the Salem
(14:20):
witch Trials, and we had them a lot in Europe
as well. Thousands of women were killed over several centuries,
But I wasn't aware that people were actually put to
death being accused of being werewolves as well. And one
of the there were two towns actually in Austria that
Schloutz's route passed through were places whereas late as the
(14:43):
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 sided to put two and two together,
and uh and and and persecute the outsider for for
(15:06):
bringing this l upon the upon the town.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
I'm glad you mentioned, uh, the agricultural aspect of hatred
of the wolf. I 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
(15:30):
to our 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 have made the argument that it is this.
These are ultimately agricultural era tales. These are tales of
fear of the wolf and analysis of the wolf in
a time when we are worried about our sheep and
(15:54):
our herds and and UH and and our dominion over nature.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
I don't think that's to say that it 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 so someone
(16:22):
might lose twenty of their thirty sheep, and that would
have been an absolutely existential crisis three hundred years ago.
That was your way of getting through the winter, that
was your way of feeding your fairly 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
that people tried to as some way of trying to
(16:46):
have dominion over nature when nature felt really outside of
one's control.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Now and my recent reading about is where Wolf. That's
one of the books that I was looking at was
a twenty twenty one book by Daniel Agden called The
World Wolf 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. Where
wolves already in so far that is, is that they
combine the qualities of the wildest and most lawless of
(17:12):
animals with those of civilization and humanity. And I kept
coming back in that, not to just harp on 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
(17:33):
that I think is sometimes very often overlooked, certainly and
were wolf stories, but just in general. I was wondering
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 (17:48):
Yeah, I think in some ways they're almost an aspiration
or animal. You know that we're obviously genetically far closer
to chimpanzees, but I think we in wolves we see
qualities of as how we would like to be. You know,
you go to you go to zoo and watch chimpanzees,
you obviously see something in them, But to watch a
wolf is to is to see how humans could be.
(18:10):
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
met a lot of people, a lot of farmers on
(18:32):
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 an animal,
they'd really like to come back as a wolf.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
You know, Yeah, that's 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 symbolic animal in
one's mind.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
And it's worth saying we've spoken about the kind of
hatred and the hatred that we've got in 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
(19:24):
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 vessel, but this time
it's something that's almost going to save us from ourselves
(19:45):
rather than destroyers.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
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 Uce a bit?
Speaker 3 (19:55):
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
(20:17):
boat 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 from the Middle East were being
taken to these This was a former NATO barracks, and
(20:37):
a lot of the language that was being used by
the local people living in these mountains about the refugees
and the wolves was very similar. 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 German
(21:00):
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
(21:20):
complicated problems, you know, and I think 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 of both
(21:42):
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 2 (21:56):
Well, I really I really appreciated how you were able
to weave these themes together book.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
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
(22:22):
distance to having a problem with the wolf to having
a problem with the European Union. And there are far
right 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,
(22:43):
using electric fences, 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 to me
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
(23:07):
for the protection of 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 the best of times. That
(23:30):
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 understand the fury.
(23:52):
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, albeit 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, that is
(24:14):
the place where these far right politicians seem to be
coming in and co opting 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 pharmaci live alongside wolves, but the ways
that it's being politicized I think need to be addressed.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
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 (24:58):
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 Maximan 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 breed back into a dog
(25:19):
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
(25:39):
about race and about the purity of race, and very
much the same way 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. Hit Like kept two
(26:01):
German shepherds, one of which he named Wolf. Hitler himself
was obsessed by wolf's Adolph itself is an old Germanic
variation of of wolf, and from from he called the
Hitler youth, his his wolf cubs. Apparently he went around
whistling the Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Disney song?
(26:22):
You know that he saw in the wolf this kind
of this total animal, I suppose, this sense of 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
(26:45):
interesting that the Nazis were the first people in modern
times to actually place environmental protection laws on the wolf,
and it was it was part of this this vision
of this kind of udagizing the power of the animal.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Yeah. I believe you mentioned in the book that disturbingly
so the Nazis environmental policies were advanced even for today.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
Yeah. Yeah, but it was a sense of a kind
of pristine wilderness that was going to be full of
this sort of race of godlike men, you know, and
those kind of large, charismatic, tootemic animals that actually fit
very well within that sort of wider Nazi vision of
(27:30):
the world.
Speaker 2 (27:31):
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
they'll have the part of wild wolves played by obvious
German shepherds.
Speaker 3 (27:45):
And then it's worth mentioning 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
Communism Remus being abandoned in the wilderness and then being
saved by a she wolf who suckled the twins until
(28:05):
a shepherd took them in, and then Rominius and Remus
later went on to found Rome. The wolf for the
Italians has had that same strength and power, but has
also been this kind of nurturing maternal influence, and Mussolini
very much co opted that. Through the whole of Mussolinius
(28:28):
fascist raisme, there was a live wolf kept in a
cage in Rome that people could go and see and
actually reined there in various generations of the wolf up
until the nineteen seventies. There was meant to be this living,
fleshy symbol of the power of Mussolini's project.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
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 like the more boundariality
of the wolf, including it's how social the animal is,
how nurturing the animal can be, and so forth right.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
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
(29:24):
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
(29:48):
and go out and find new territory like stats 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
(30:11):
been completely discredited in the science, but that sense of
the alpha wolf does still persist from motivational speakers and
toxic corners of the internet and everything else. We're still
encouraged to be this idea of the alpha. 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 that
(30:33):
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 2 (30:49):
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 (30:56):
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 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 disruptors. You know,
(31:18):
they 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 can
we sanction risk again? Can we sanction living in a
world that feels a little bit more unknown than what
(31:39):
we might 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
(32:00):
this incredible 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 for the wolf, this is obviously a massive time
(32:21):
of hope and success, 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 embody that and in response to times of crisis,
we move, you know, and I think wolves have always
embodied that that that change is inevitable, and there is
(32:44):
this desire and this urge for life to flourish, and
following Schlaus's journey across Europe 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 way.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
All right, Adam, I have one more question for you.
And I realized this was this was the sillier one.
But in the acknowledgments for the book you you mentioned
leaning on Joel pulling h for a quote having watched
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 that?
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Have?
Speaker 2 (33:31):
This? Have this go down?
Speaker 3 (33:32):
He sent me. Joel he's a friend of mine. He
works at the British Film Institute. We've been we've been
friends for ever. He's not just watched every where wolf
film going, He's watched every film going at this point.
It's an incredible resource. And yeah, there's a lot of
werebell films out there that 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.
(33:55):
My last book was about Salmon and the the literature
was a lot less intimidating than it was about the wolf,
and the werewolf subset of that is again is again vast.
But he set me on to some of the classics
which I've never seen. Ginger Snaps, I'd never seen. American
werewolf in London I'd never seen, and it felt like
(34:18):
a werewolf 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
(34:38):
trials it was always the unknown, stranger, the vagrant. 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
(35:03):
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 were wolf
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, which 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
(35:25):
go and see what happens if we, you know, run
off into the night.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
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 (35:37):
Thanks Rev, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (35:38):
On 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 Passway for producing this show. And if you
(36:00):
have any questions, episodes, suggestions, and so forth you would
like to send to us. You can email us at
contact It's Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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