Wolves have had little say in the structuring of their relationships with humans. Rather, people have treated wolves as blank slates on which they have written human hopes, dreams and nightmares. The grey wolf's scientific name, Canis lupus, combining simply the Latin words for ‘dog’ and ‘wolf’ is hardly large enough to encompass the story of Little Red Riding Hood, the purported saving of the ecosystem of Yellowstone National Park, hair-raising stories of werewolves and what one author has termed the ‘wolf-shaped hole in Britain’ (p. 378). Yet this book stretches to encompass all of these wolf stories as well as many, many more, as evidenced by the fact that the book is dedicated to a German wolf that was shot inadvertently, and the opening poem is titled ‘Trophic Cascade’.
The editors position the book as exploring the recovery of wolves in all its different dimensions, framing the history of human–wolf relationships with the observation that no other species has polarized human opinion more than the wolf, the largest of extant wild canids. This polarization is documented throughout human history in its varied manifestations: from children's literature to museums and zoos, from folklore and traditional narratives told by first nations to the gaze of the modern-day eco-tourist. In his foreword, Luigi Boitani, perhaps the dean of European wolf studies, lays out the book's most helpful framing as to why wolves occupy their unique position in human thought. Firstly, they can adapt easily to live near people, and secondly, both wolves and humans are highly social animals, with all the implications that such a lifestyle entails. Unfortunately, neither Boitani nor other authors examine in any depth the differences between European, South Asian, North Asian and North American wolves with respect to their biology, the history of their interactions with people and the resulting social attitudes. Instead, the book focuses mostly on the European wolf, with rich detailing of history, folklore and the recolonization of landscapes by dispersing wolves.
In this edited volume of 32 contributions by 46 authors, the chapters span a broad range of perspectives, from Thomas Gable, lead for the Voyageurs Wolf Project, and Carol Alexander, a wildlife photographer who documented a lone sea-wolf's life for 6 years, to Elizabeth Marshall, a writer who specializes in the cultural and historical representation of wolves, and Chris Powici, a poet and essayist. The authors are predominantly European, with many from the UK, but there are a few outliers who cover Australian ‘wolves’ (i.e. dingoes), thylacines, the missing wolves of Japan and coywolves. There are data-heavy pieces on the movements of Norwegian wolves, contributions of whimsy and longing related to the absence of wolves, analyses of why Aesop's wolf tale was not translated into Japanese, photo essays on wolves and post-modern discussions of the white Europeans’ capture and exploitation of the image of wolves.
What is not in the book is much detail about wolf biology. There are a few pieces such as a wolf–beaver chapter, a short, obligatory piece on Yellowstone wolves and a couple of others focused on wolf recolonization and interactions with livestock and herders. This seems an odd choice by the editors as excellent work has been done on European wolves, particularly in Italy, with a fascinating body of work on wolf–dog hybrids. Instead, this book is about humans and what they think about wolves: the cosmically destructive wolf of Norse mythology, Christianity's evil wolf threatening the lamb of God, the lycanthropy of the epic poem Gilgamesh, the Nazi adoption of wolves into their ideology, with Hitler regarded as their pack leader, and the wolf as champion of nature as featured on contemporary t-shirts.
This richness and variety of contributions does not necessarily sit comfortably in one book. Though all about wolves—or at least focused on wolfishness—there are few themes or coherent cross-chapter links. The reader is asked to digest information across very different topics, set immediately adjacent to one another. The only dominant theme is the UK-centred longing to have wolves back and to mourn the wolves that were killed in the quest to eradicate the species from the British Isles.
In some cultures, wolves are shape shifters, appearing as humans, as attested by Medieval accounts of wolves killed by villagers and dressed as humans before being strung up for public display. As this demonstrates, the separation between wolves and humans is not always clear to humans—though it is most likely quite clear from the wolf's perspective. Who knows what wolves want out of their relationships with humans? That much is certain, as this interesting, idiosyncratic book makes abundantly clear: humans want many, many things from wolves. To some, they are cherished symbols of the wild and of properly functioning ecosystems, whereas to others they are despised livestock predators and a symbol of government overreach. Yet wolves themselves are neither good nor bad, they just have the misfortune to have projected onto them a world of human ideas, interpretations and perspectives.
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