Some states have instructed scientists to reduce wolf numbers, others to reintroduce wolves. Recently in the US, wolf management seems to be driven less by science and more by the lupus-entities of nonscientists in decision-making positions. Some days I succeed and other days I fail. I have to regularly remind myself that the truth about wolves lies separate from the things they symbolize in my mind. But scientists aren’t immune to lup-entities. Wolf research pursues knowledge about the gray wolf, leaving as many of the lupus-entities behind as possible. Science is also an iterative process, where previous work is constantly being checked and adjusted as it strives to get closer to the truth. It seeks to understand the truth without bias. Science is the opposing force to the lup-entity. Often that symbolism was communicated in a way that looked like facts, but distorted and cherry-picked to fit the symbol, to support the individual lup-entity. As wolf populations began to naturally recover and wolves were reintroduced in several Western states, people’s lup-entities intensified and, as the internet and instant, accessible, crowd-sourced communications grew exponentially, suddenly we all had an outlet to express our lup-entities to the world, and to hear what the wolf meant to everyone else. In the 1970s wolf management seemed to shift away from symbolism wolf biologists dedicated their careers to better understanding not only the species but also their roles and impacts on ecosystems. Those making the decisions about how many wolves there should be and where they should be eliminated or protected were certainly influenced by how they viewed wolves: by their own wolf-identity. Gray wolf ( Canis lupus) management in the US, starting with European colonization prior to the country’s independence, was tainted by the human penchant toward wolf symbolism. ![]() All of a sudden wolves, the animals, find themselves in the middle of a human identity battle. And, as humans often do, we seek out those who think and identify the same way we do, and we see people who think or feel differently as opponents. Those symbols, for many people, inform their identities how someone feels about wolves becomes part of who they are as a person. This ease with which humans are able to replace the wolf, the animal, with symbols – freedom, family, wildness, failure, oppression – has made management of wolves more complicated and more contentious than for any other species in the US. In the complex Homo sapiens brain, a wolf is so rarely just a wolf. Take a walk through any museum and you will find an image of or reference to wolves on a shocking number of artifacts, portrayed both in a positive and negative light. To the first European colonizers of North America, wolves represented a “howling wilderness” that needed to be tamed. Nunamiut people describe the wolf as part of the universe where some things are known and other things are hidden. The Secret History of the Mongols states that Chinggis Khan (~1160–1227) was born from a blue wolf and a fallow doe, with the blue wolf symbolizing the heavenly masculine spirituality, the Eternal Sky. ![]() In the Middle Ages Europeans called famine, and anything else that made their lives more difficult, “the wolf”. ![]() In the Inferno from his Divine Comedy, Dante (~1265–1321) used wolves to represent greed and fraud. Wolves have always slipped easily into the part of the human brain that processes symbols and metaphors.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |