Wolf Nation by Peterson Brenda

Author:Peterson, Brenda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2017-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

WHEN WE TELL STORIES about other animals, we are often really talking about ourselves. When we make villains of wolves in our stories, we are often avoiding looking into what Joseph Conrad calls “the heart of darkness” within ourselves. It’s telling and disturbing that in a country like America, whose citizens own more guns than in any other country (88.8 percent), it is endangered species like wolves that are also so often in the crosshairs.

In reading about American gun violence, it is revealing to notice the language the media uses. Media coverage of the 2016 Orlando massacre, for instance, incessantly referred to the murderer as a “lone wolf.” Even in our language we associate wolves with our own primitive violence. Not only does comparing a man who opens fire with a military-grade automatic weapon on a helpless crowd of people to a lone wolf betray our blatant prejudice against this most maligned animal; it also is not based in any biological fact. A real lone wolf has deeply diminished powers to hunt or kill. A solitary wolf must live off smaller ground prey like squirrels and rabbits. Without family for protection and alliance, the wolf endures the most endangered time of his life and will survive only half as long as the eight- to ten-year life span of wolves in the wild.

Such respected news media as the New York Times are guilty of this pejorative language, as when it wrote, “The self-declared Islamic State underscored once again its favored weapon in its war on the West: lone wolves.” The Christian Science Monitor ran a headline describing a split screen showing an ISIS fighter set to behead a prisoner and a wolf’s head with the slogan: “The West has lone muscles; Islam has lone wolves.” Every time I hear this misnomer, I cringe. I noticed that in BBC radio and other foreign reporting on the Orlando murderer, the phrase most used was “lone actor.”

Tellingly, American gun violence is the most widespread where wildlife recovery on public lands is fiercely opposed and where lethal management of wolves is usually the first, not the last option. The states most resistant to gun control are also the states where we have a long history of hunting wildlife. Four of the high gun-death states are Wyoming (number one), Alaska (four), Montana (six), and New Mexico (nine)—all states with a penchant for wolf killing. The top three states for gun-related suicides are Montana, Alaska, and Wyoming—again, states that favor wolf hunting.

How we tell stories about ourselves and other species profoundly affects our ecology and our treatment of other predators. As with the “lone wolf” stand-in for a human murderer, our very language and stories can positively or negatively affect our wildlife policies. There’s an old adage: “thrown to the wolves.” The reality is that it’s wolves who are “thrown to the people.” And those people have firearms—over 300 million guns. With all these easily accessible firearms, Americans routinely and almost daily not only exterminate wolves and other wildlife but also kill our own.

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