Mimicking Nature: The Wolf

The howl. The hunger. The community. The hunt. Maybe we are more alike than we believe. Maybe we have something to learn from these majestic predators.

Image view the NewScientist.com

In the book Wintering by

Katherine May

she has a chapter called “Hunger” that in January always come to the surface of my mind. If you haven’t picked up this book before please do. I am going to quote a bit from it for our newsletter today because since reading this chapter back in 2021 I have dug into rethinking the wolf and our understanding of them as humans.

I bring up wolves because this month’s full moon on the 13th is known as the wolf moon. As May points out in her book, it marks the time of year when the wolves were most likely to be pulled from their hiding in the woods to villages because of their hunger. I think it represents something we are uncomfortable with as humans in winter as well.

One of my first books I read when I dove into understand wolves and ecosystems was by Aldo Leopold who wrote Sand County Almanac. He was a hunter of wolves for conservation reasons decades before we understood conservation the way we do now. Upon shooting a wolf in New Mexico, he approached it to find a “green light leaving her eyes” as he states in the book. It set him on a course to begin to question what happens when we eliminate something from the ecosystem web and what do these animals mean to us as humans. He studied and realized that our ecosystem begins to fall like a domino effect when one species is eliminated which is what we have done with the wolf over the last centuries. We feared this animal for many reasons. The wolf is a powerful example in America and england of our complicated relationship not just with the animal but the things it represents particularly in January.

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