Post 1500: Reflections on the Extinct British Wolf and the Triumph of the Sheep

Illustration of a wolf in George Shaw's  
Musei Leveriani (1729)

I.

This is post 1500: a number which means nothing to me, but which many 16th-century Christians thought significant; having failed to kick off at the millennium, they figured that the end of the world might commence half-time after the time (an obscure phrase found in the Book of Revelation).

Sadly for them - but happily for the rest of us - 1500 merely marked (somewhat arbitrarily) the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Early Modern Era (though don't suggest this to Bruno (nous n'avons jamais été modernes) Latour, or he'll kick off).  

I'm not, however, going to write here of apocalyptic Christian eschatology; nor do I intend to discuss the concept of modernity. Rather, I would like to say something about the extinction of a magnificent mammal species from these islands: for 1500 is also thought to be the year in which the last wolf in England was killed ...[1]


II.

Not only were wolves once present throughout the British Isles, they were present in large numbers. And, unlike other British animals, skeletal remains suggest they were not subject to insular dwarfism (i.e., the phenomenon whereby large animals evolve a smaller body size when their range is limited due to living in restricted circumstances, such as on an island for example).

Despite being large in number and big in size, wolves were exterminated from Britain thanks to a combination of deforestation and ruthless, unrestricted hunting and trapping (for skins and for the sadistic pleasure human beings take in killing animals, including defenceless cubs). 

King Edward I (1272-1307) was not only the Hammer of the Scots, he was also the monarch who ordered the total extermination of the wolf and personally employed a wolf-hunter with instructions to begin by killing them in the counties close to the Welsh border where they were particularly numerous thanks to the density of forest [2]. 

Later kings were just as merciless when it came to the wolf question and one wonders at the reason for this lycophobia ...

That is to say, why were wolves - more than any other wild beast - so widely feared and hated (not just in Britain, but across Europe). It can't just have an economic cause, although it's true that wolves kill livestock and compete with humans for game; there's surely something else going on here to explain this murderous animosity.

Maybe, as highly intelligent and social animals who live in extended family groups, they are rather too much like us - only stronger, faster, and with bigger teeth. Maybe, as we became ever-more civilised and ovine, bleating about our righteousness and exceptionalism, we grew to resent their wild nature. Maybe we secretly desire to be a bit more ferocious - thus the centrality of the werewolf myth in European folklore. Who knows? 

III.

As readers of Pagan Magazine will recall, I've always loved wolves [3], and so naturally support their proposed reintroduction into parts of the UK.

In fact, I think we should bring back the lynx too - and maybe even release a family of brown bears into the mix; the more large carnivores prowling around the better in my view, and not simply to help control the ever-expanding numbers of deer and wild boar.

For mostly I want wolves back in the hope that they might devour a few fat sheep who understand nothing of life or death, but exist in swollen nullity. To paraphrase D. H. Lawrence, it's not the howl of the wolf that we have to fear today, but the masses of rank sheep and what he terms the egoism of the flock [4] ...


Notes

[1] Reports of wolves sighted in more rural areas of England continued until the 18th-century and they certainly hung on for an extended period in the Scottish Highlands (officially, the last wolf was shot in Perthshire, in 1680).   

[2] For those, like me, whose geography isn't great, that's the counties of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire, and Staffordshire.

[3] See issue XI: 'Ragnarok: Twilight of the Gods and the Coming of the Wolf', (1986).

[4] See D. H. Lawrence. 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 25-52. The lines I paraphrase and refer to here are on p. 43.

Of Man and Dog - A Guest Post by Catherine Brown

Penguin, 2012

I have recently read In Defence of Dogs by John Bradshaw, biologist and founder-director of the Anthrozoology Institute at the University of Bristol. The font is academically-small and intimidating. The book is good.

I will pass on its arguments as though they are true. For Bradshaw has done a great deal of research into canine behaviour and, though his findings and inferences are controversial, I have no independent reason to doubt them. In any case, whether they are true or not, they have prompted some interesting reflections in me about pooches and people.

I.

Bradshaw describes the generic mutt; for example, the village dog that one finds all over Africa. They all look roughly alike and share a common evolutionary history that made them perfectly fit for purpose. Selective breeding, however, at the hands of man over millennia, has necessarily produced dogs which are rather less fit. Unfortunately for them, dogs no longer get to choose their own sexual partners and the characteristics for which they're selected, such as utility or good looks, often don't have anything to do with ensuring their survival or improving their health.

It's little wonder therefore that veterinary science is now needed to bridge the fitness-gap that's been opened up and that animal trainers and psychologists are required to deal with dogs that are deemed suboptimal companions. Given that we don't breed certain types of dog primarily for fellowship, it's a bit rich when we complain of aggression or anxiety in our animals, as though these traits were not entirely of our own creation.

Fortunately, we humans, by contrast, resemble village dogs. Except in aristocracies, which have their own problems with fitness, we breed more or less at will, in order to be all-round, well-adapted men and women. Ease of long-distance travel has broadened our gene pools still further. Huxley's Brave New World gives us one vision as to what would happen were it otherwise. Dogs give us another. Were we to be bred by a scientific elite or an alien master race, it's perfectly feasible (and amusing to imagine) that we too might become subdivided into human equivalents of Schnauzers, Dobermans, Bichon Frises, Golden Retrievers, Boxers, Borzois and the rest.

So, in short, most dogs in the Western world are now more pedigree than mongrel; even what is called a mongrel is likely to have at least one pedigree parent or grandparent. By contrast we are for the most part comfortably and healthily mongrel. We don’t need annual vaccinations and monthly worming, as our dogs do, and we are all the better off for it.

II.

Dogs are wolves at arrested stages of development. Even the skull of a little Pekingese resembles that of the wolf foetus; it just doesn’t keep growing into the long, narrow skull of the wolf. Unlike wolves, however, dogs continue to play when they are adults, and are dependent on humans throughout their lives. They therefore never become psychologically mature and independent, as wolves do. Because of the consistency of food supply throughout the year, they are fertile all the year round, unlike wolves, which mate in winter in order to give birth in spring. But because the food that humans can spare for dogs is limited, they are smaller than wolves. They are less fussy about sexual partners than are wolves, which pair-bond, whereas dogs are promiscuous.

And so we, people, are more dog than wolf. We are smaller than earliest man because of our more herbivorous diet (we are only now re-approaching the size of early humans). We are fertile all the year round, and, although we pair-bond to a degree, we are more promiscuous than wolves are. We play, with our child toys or our adult toys, at our child games or our adult games, throughout our lives. Of course, this dogginess is unsurprising, given that we bred dogs in our own image.

Yet the wolves from which we created dogs are not today’s wolves. Since we have persecuted wolves almost to extinction, we have negatively selected those which are most distrustful of us to be the survivors. It is likely that dogs descended from wolves living around 20,000 years ago which had a mutation which enabled them to form relationships with more than one species - our own as well as their own. This mutation served them well; their numbers now dwarf those of wolves.

But, especially in the twentieth century, dog psychology has misleadingly tried to understand dogs with reference to a) modern wild wolves, which are a distrustful, persecuted minority, and b) captive wolves, which, not being able to form and dissolve their own packs, are far more agonistic and violently hierarchical than are the internally-peaceful nuclear family packs of the wild. These false reference points, combined with the false assumption that dogs are essentially wolves in dogs’ clothing, has led to the stress on dominance in dog training.

The assumptions are: every dog wants to be top dog; dogs treat humans as members of their pack; every attempt at dog dominance must be thwarted, and so on. In fact, dogs relate very differently to humans as compared to others of their own kind, and tend to be far more dependent on the former, even in households of multiple dogs. At our own best, we are dog-like in our sociability with all other members of our species, not just within our nuclear families. Where we become wolf-like, in our rivalry with and violent hostility towards other packs, is at the level of the nation. Best to keep dogs within our sights.

Finally, one of the things that makes us human (and dog-like) is our ability to interact with, and nurture, multiple species. This is apparent in the story of the evolution of dogs from wolves. The explanation that wolves were initially tolerated as scavengers in villages is not sufficient by way of explanation of the beginnings of domestication - why would wolves prefer human scraps to the far better and more plentiful food that they can hunt for themselves? Nor is the idea that humans consciously took wolves to train them for various useful purposes, such as those for which working dogs are used today, sufficient as an explanation.

The evidence is that hunter-gatherers, past and present, adopt a variety of baby animals to bring up alongside their own young, simply for the joy of the process, a delight in their cuteness, a delight in play, and, in some cases, the status that accrues from having pets. Amongst today’s Penan of Borneo, and the Huaorani of the Amazon rainforst, parrots, toucans, wild ducks, raccoons, small deer, rodents, opossums, and monkeys are all adopted. Indigenous Australians foster dingo puppies, which, when they become unmanageable adults, are simply driven away to reproduce in the wild. It is likely that the same happened with wolf puppies - and that, eventually, a few of the puppies became domesticated as well as tame, so that they consented to reproduce in a human environment, and thus were set on their course to become dogs.

This is one of the most charming things about humans that I know - that we care about the survival of species other than our own, for reasons other than utility. We delight in nurturing, cuteness, and play, will spend our limited resources on these things, and have done so for as long as we have been human.

Catherine Brown is an English literature academic who also blogs, tweets, and writes for the media. Her literary interests centre on novels and plays of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the wider cultural histories of England and Russia. Her tweets tend to be about D.H. Lawrence; her blog posts are mostly reviews of books, films, plays, and exhibitions, or reflections on politics and religion. 

Catherine appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm and I am very grateful for her kind permission to reproduce, revise and edit this text, which originally appeared on her own blog.