skibum
04-26-2009, 09:21 AM
Big bad wolves?
We've been taught the wolf is harmless to humans --Will Graves disagrees
Keith Morison for National Post
As cowgirls and ranch-men meander into the Stavely Community Centre, pour a coffee, shake old, familiar hands and slap friendly backs, they talk, as usual, of business and children and weddings. And, unusually, wolves.
It is after dinner on a Friday night, and they have driven from the cattle country around here, and from hours away. They swap common stories of wolves, harassing, stressing, even eating their livestock; lurking near farms in the daylight with a fearlessness unseen before. Just the other week locals say they spotted a small pack wandering near the highway linking Stavely to Nanton. "When my grandpa was young they never saw wolves," says a Stavely man. The local MLA is here. An official from the provincial wildlife department, too. They have heard the growing worries.
Hunger will drive the wolf from the forest and into the villages is an old Russian saying that may fit here. Will Graves knows this. He is about to address this crowd, 4,000 kilometres from his home in Maryland. A linguist by training, he has spent the last 45 years studying the way people speak of wolves in Russia. There is, he says, much to learn by examining such things.
These Canadians, having heard their whole lives a story of wolves lifted from Farley Mowat's pages -- that they are relatively harmless, timid around humans and economical predators who hunt sparingly -- are growing skeptical. They had come to hear a story from a different language.
"For so long, people had the impression that wolves killed only sick, diseased, wounded or crippled animals; that they didn't kill any healthy or fit animals; that the wolves kill everything that they ate; and that wolves were not a threat to humans -- you didn't have to worry about them ever attacking you; that they're the sanitarians of nature; that they're not carrying parasites or disease," Mr. Graves says. "The impression is way out of kilter," he says.
Born in Texas, Mr. Graves began riding horseback through Mexican farmland in the '40s. Vaccinating cattle for the U. S. Department of Agriculture, which was working inside Mexico to stop epizootic diseases spreading northward, he heard locals talk of wild dogs and wolves carrying viruses such as foot and mouth disease, biting the cows, making them sick.
Though his interest in wolves was piqued, he was drafted into the Korean War, then picked by the Air Force to learn Russian, a "crypto linguist," a "collector of intelligence.".
On visits home, he says, "I went to the public library and picked up all these books on wolves, including children's books," he says. "I was really amazed that the impression they gave was wolves are absolutely not dangerous to humans; that they will never attack a human; that there has never been a case of a healthy wolf attacking humans, or even a rabid wolf attacking a human," he says. "I was stunned. All of these things were definitely not the case in Russia. And I thought, 'Wow, what's the difference here?' because I was reading about wolves attacking and killing people. A lot of people."
When North American wolf attacks do occur, disbelief seems to follow. Four years ago, 22-year-old engineering student Kenton Carnegie, working at a north Saskatchewan mining supply camp, was found dead on a wooded trail, his body half-gone. Several scientists insisted the culprits were surely bears; these kinds of wolf attacks were unheard of--despite the fact that workers reported aggressive wolves in the area and the RCMP's discovery of wolf tracks around the body. After Mr. Carnegie's parents demanded an investigation, a public inquiry determined that the man was indeed killed and eaten by healthy, non-rabid grey wolves.
Earlier this year, Gilles Blackburn, rescued after 10 days stranded in the woods after skiing out of bounds at B. C.'s Kicking Horse resort, recounted how he and his wife were stalked by wolves, to the point that Mr. Blackburn fashioned a weapon from his ski pole preparing to fend them off. When news outlets reported the account, readers accused Mr. Blackburn of making it up: he "wanted to spice up [his] story"; he may have been "hallucinating" from lack of food; there was no account of wolves attacking groups of people "in all of human history," they scoffed.
In fact, these things do happen, though such attacks remain much rarer here than in Russia. Still, in the past decade, three North Americans have been confirmed killed by wolves. "They all suffered from the misconception that wolves are harmless," says Dr. Val Geist, a professor emeritus of environmental science specializing in wolves at the University of Calgary. "It's false. And this myth has cost people their lives. And the more educated you are, the more likely you are to believe the myth." One victim, he notes, was an interpreter at an Ontario wolf reserve.
Mr. Graves' research in a place with a dramatically different history with wolves fills in gaps in our own comparatively shorter record, Professor Geist believes, a record featuring a number of uniquely American characteristics. Reading Russian folklore, news reports and written accounts of police and village priests through the Soviet experience and the Tsarist era, interviewing Kazakh hunters and reindeer herders bearing wolf scars, Mr. Graves discovered an unfamiliar creature that occupies a dark, oppressive corner of the Russian psyche. Canada's benign canine is, from Siberia to the Caucasus, a feared and reviled menace: "the greatest and most dreadful scourge of humans," is how an early 20th-century edition of the Russian Table Dictionary describes wolves; in the writings of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nekrasov, Bunin and many other luminary Russian writers lurks the "ill-boding shadow of the wolf," Mr. Graves writes in his 2007 book, Wolves in Russia: Anxiety Through the Ages.
For a peasant family, the loss of livestock to wolves could mean starvation. It was also, for centuries, common to send poor, young country children to remote grasslands to pick mushrooms and berries or graze animals, only to be snatched away, as if in fairy tales. Firearms were banned from the peasantry by the tsars and later the Soviets, fearful of insurrection. As men were conscripted away from villages during wartime, women, children and the elderly made particularly vulnerable targets.
Soviet authorities, Mr. Graves discovered, took pains to suppress news of wolf fatalities so as to avoid demands for self-defencemeasures. (Mowat's Never Cry Wolf -- which Dr. Geist calls "totally fallacious" in its portrayal of wolves -- was aggressively promoted in the U.S. S. R., the professor believes, to perpetuate the unworried North American perspective.)Mr. Graves translated reports from Russia's Central Statistical Committee showing that in one particularly bloody 17-year period in the late 19th century, more than 1,400 humans were eaten by wolves, and more than 750,000 cattle were lost every single year. Some were rabid; many were not. At times, matters became so desperate that tsars offered rich bounties, or organized special hunting units, using eagles and borzoi, hoping to drive down wolf numbers. It proved futile.
Wolves are considered benign here because the plains were setttled with guns, Mr. Graves says. Here, the animals came to fear man, rather than the other way around. "If wolves are hunted they will become very shy," Mr. Graves says. "They lose that, and become more inquisitive and curious about humans if they're not shot and not hunted and that's when you potentially start getting into conflict, if the wolves lose their natural fear and hesitancy about humans." In conversation, Mr. Geist is in the habit of describing timid wolves as behaving "American" and brazen wolves as behaving "Russian." There, he says, "they sit at the edge of the forest and watch people."
That kind of flagrant behaviour, Mr. Graves tells his audience, could be starting in Alberta, the result of decades of conservationism and relaxed vigilance. Since the province compensates ranchers for livestock lost to wolf attacks, Albertans have dropped their guard, with little to gain by tangling with a hungry wolf. Across the U. S., conservationists have won laws protecting the animals from hunting. Now, several northern states, moved by farmers' concerns over increasing predation, are pushing to change them.
The Russians have found that in addition to killing livestock, often in far greater numbers than they actually need, the animals carry transmissible parasites and diseases. "They could pose a great threat to Alberta's cow herd," Mr. Graves warns the crowd.
Other resources may eventually be at risk, too. Wolves are prolific breeders when left undisturbed; a few dozen reintroduced to Yellowstone a decade ago are up to nearly 2,000. Populations of Alberta's Woodland Caribou have been decimated by a spike in wolf numbers while area hunters report shrinking numbers of large game. Yet, Mr. Graves points out, there appears to be no political will to address this: when word leaked last year of plans for a province-backed pilot project that would try sterilizing wolves and shooting pups --a way to avoid a mass cull, as researchers tried to explain--public outrage scuppered the plan (the prominent scientist who vocally opposed it was the same who concluded Kenton Carnegie's death was bear-caused). For the time being we apparently believe such measures unnecessary, even cruel, for such a harmless creature. That Alberta's increasingly uneasy farmers, like its wolves, are beginning to think more Russian, says Mr. Graves, suggests that we may be rediscovering truths about canis lupus long ago forgotten.
klibin@nationalpost.
We've been taught the wolf is harmless to humans --Will Graves disagrees
Keith Morison for National Post
As cowgirls and ranch-men meander into the Stavely Community Centre, pour a coffee, shake old, familiar hands and slap friendly backs, they talk, as usual, of business and children and weddings. And, unusually, wolves.
It is after dinner on a Friday night, and they have driven from the cattle country around here, and from hours away. They swap common stories of wolves, harassing, stressing, even eating their livestock; lurking near farms in the daylight with a fearlessness unseen before. Just the other week locals say they spotted a small pack wandering near the highway linking Stavely to Nanton. "When my grandpa was young they never saw wolves," says a Stavely man. The local MLA is here. An official from the provincial wildlife department, too. They have heard the growing worries.
Hunger will drive the wolf from the forest and into the villages is an old Russian saying that may fit here. Will Graves knows this. He is about to address this crowd, 4,000 kilometres from his home in Maryland. A linguist by training, he has spent the last 45 years studying the way people speak of wolves in Russia. There is, he says, much to learn by examining such things.
These Canadians, having heard their whole lives a story of wolves lifted from Farley Mowat's pages -- that they are relatively harmless, timid around humans and economical predators who hunt sparingly -- are growing skeptical. They had come to hear a story from a different language.
"For so long, people had the impression that wolves killed only sick, diseased, wounded or crippled animals; that they didn't kill any healthy or fit animals; that the wolves kill everything that they ate; and that wolves were not a threat to humans -- you didn't have to worry about them ever attacking you; that they're the sanitarians of nature; that they're not carrying parasites or disease," Mr. Graves says. "The impression is way out of kilter," he says.
Born in Texas, Mr. Graves began riding horseback through Mexican farmland in the '40s. Vaccinating cattle for the U. S. Department of Agriculture, which was working inside Mexico to stop epizootic diseases spreading northward, he heard locals talk of wild dogs and wolves carrying viruses such as foot and mouth disease, biting the cows, making them sick.
Though his interest in wolves was piqued, he was drafted into the Korean War, then picked by the Air Force to learn Russian, a "crypto linguist," a "collector of intelligence.".
On visits home, he says, "I went to the public library and picked up all these books on wolves, including children's books," he says. "I was really amazed that the impression they gave was wolves are absolutely not dangerous to humans; that they will never attack a human; that there has never been a case of a healthy wolf attacking humans, or even a rabid wolf attacking a human," he says. "I was stunned. All of these things were definitely not the case in Russia. And I thought, 'Wow, what's the difference here?' because I was reading about wolves attacking and killing people. A lot of people."
When North American wolf attacks do occur, disbelief seems to follow. Four years ago, 22-year-old engineering student Kenton Carnegie, working at a north Saskatchewan mining supply camp, was found dead on a wooded trail, his body half-gone. Several scientists insisted the culprits were surely bears; these kinds of wolf attacks were unheard of--despite the fact that workers reported aggressive wolves in the area and the RCMP's discovery of wolf tracks around the body. After Mr. Carnegie's parents demanded an investigation, a public inquiry determined that the man was indeed killed and eaten by healthy, non-rabid grey wolves.
Earlier this year, Gilles Blackburn, rescued after 10 days stranded in the woods after skiing out of bounds at B. C.'s Kicking Horse resort, recounted how he and his wife were stalked by wolves, to the point that Mr. Blackburn fashioned a weapon from his ski pole preparing to fend them off. When news outlets reported the account, readers accused Mr. Blackburn of making it up: he "wanted to spice up [his] story"; he may have been "hallucinating" from lack of food; there was no account of wolves attacking groups of people "in all of human history," they scoffed.
In fact, these things do happen, though such attacks remain much rarer here than in Russia. Still, in the past decade, three North Americans have been confirmed killed by wolves. "They all suffered from the misconception that wolves are harmless," says Dr. Val Geist, a professor emeritus of environmental science specializing in wolves at the University of Calgary. "It's false. And this myth has cost people their lives. And the more educated you are, the more likely you are to believe the myth." One victim, he notes, was an interpreter at an Ontario wolf reserve.
Mr. Graves' research in a place with a dramatically different history with wolves fills in gaps in our own comparatively shorter record, Professor Geist believes, a record featuring a number of uniquely American characteristics. Reading Russian folklore, news reports and written accounts of police and village priests through the Soviet experience and the Tsarist era, interviewing Kazakh hunters and reindeer herders bearing wolf scars, Mr. Graves discovered an unfamiliar creature that occupies a dark, oppressive corner of the Russian psyche. Canada's benign canine is, from Siberia to the Caucasus, a feared and reviled menace: "the greatest and most dreadful scourge of humans," is how an early 20th-century edition of the Russian Table Dictionary describes wolves; in the writings of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nekrasov, Bunin and many other luminary Russian writers lurks the "ill-boding shadow of the wolf," Mr. Graves writes in his 2007 book, Wolves in Russia: Anxiety Through the Ages.
For a peasant family, the loss of livestock to wolves could mean starvation. It was also, for centuries, common to send poor, young country children to remote grasslands to pick mushrooms and berries or graze animals, only to be snatched away, as if in fairy tales. Firearms were banned from the peasantry by the tsars and later the Soviets, fearful of insurrection. As men were conscripted away from villages during wartime, women, children and the elderly made particularly vulnerable targets.
Soviet authorities, Mr. Graves discovered, took pains to suppress news of wolf fatalities so as to avoid demands for self-defencemeasures. (Mowat's Never Cry Wolf -- which Dr. Geist calls "totally fallacious" in its portrayal of wolves -- was aggressively promoted in the U.S. S. R., the professor believes, to perpetuate the unworried North American perspective.)Mr. Graves translated reports from Russia's Central Statistical Committee showing that in one particularly bloody 17-year period in the late 19th century, more than 1,400 humans were eaten by wolves, and more than 750,000 cattle were lost every single year. Some were rabid; many were not. At times, matters became so desperate that tsars offered rich bounties, or organized special hunting units, using eagles and borzoi, hoping to drive down wolf numbers. It proved futile.
Wolves are considered benign here because the plains were setttled with guns, Mr. Graves says. Here, the animals came to fear man, rather than the other way around. "If wolves are hunted they will become very shy," Mr. Graves says. "They lose that, and become more inquisitive and curious about humans if they're not shot and not hunted and that's when you potentially start getting into conflict, if the wolves lose their natural fear and hesitancy about humans." In conversation, Mr. Geist is in the habit of describing timid wolves as behaving "American" and brazen wolves as behaving "Russian." There, he says, "they sit at the edge of the forest and watch people."
That kind of flagrant behaviour, Mr. Graves tells his audience, could be starting in Alberta, the result of decades of conservationism and relaxed vigilance. Since the province compensates ranchers for livestock lost to wolf attacks, Albertans have dropped their guard, with little to gain by tangling with a hungry wolf. Across the U. S., conservationists have won laws protecting the animals from hunting. Now, several northern states, moved by farmers' concerns over increasing predation, are pushing to change them.
The Russians have found that in addition to killing livestock, often in far greater numbers than they actually need, the animals carry transmissible parasites and diseases. "They could pose a great threat to Alberta's cow herd," Mr. Graves warns the crowd.
Other resources may eventually be at risk, too. Wolves are prolific breeders when left undisturbed; a few dozen reintroduced to Yellowstone a decade ago are up to nearly 2,000. Populations of Alberta's Woodland Caribou have been decimated by a spike in wolf numbers while area hunters report shrinking numbers of large game. Yet, Mr. Graves points out, there appears to be no political will to address this: when word leaked last year of plans for a province-backed pilot project that would try sterilizing wolves and shooting pups --a way to avoid a mass cull, as researchers tried to explain--public outrage scuppered the plan (the prominent scientist who vocally opposed it was the same who concluded Kenton Carnegie's death was bear-caused). For the time being we apparently believe such measures unnecessary, even cruel, for such a harmless creature. That Alberta's increasingly uneasy farmers, like its wolves, are beginning to think more Russian, says Mr. Graves, suggests that we may be rediscovering truths about canis lupus long ago forgotten.
klibin@nationalpost.