Wolves, Humans & Convenience

Animal Story, Blog, Deep Ecology, Ethics & Whole Community, Wolves | February 10, 2010

We lost Cindar the wolf a few hours ago, a vibrant brilliant black wolf. I can feel her still here. She didn’t want to leave. She was so scared when the vet came, but let us handle her in any way we needed – x rays, pulling fluid from her lungs, putting in an IV. This is a wolf we are talking about, allowing all this without a tranquilizer. Trusting. Sweet. Cooperative. Looking to us for help, pleading in her eyes.   The contrast between a cooperative scared creature wanting so to live, and the vicious image of wolves here in Idaho or Alaska as we shoot them for sport suggests an utter madness, the image is so far removed from the fact. Yes wolves are predators – but so are dogs and cats, and we accept the predatory instinct in them. Feral packs of dogs hunt and kill livestock and even kill humans. That doesn’t change our view of dogs, nor do we kill them for fun. Dogs come from wolves and everything we love in a dog is there in a wolf even more intensely – the love, loyalty, sweetness. But  if an animal inconveniences us, we demonize it and then feel free to do to it what we will. Wild animals are not convenient. Coyotes, grizzly bears, buffalo on grassland wanted for cows,  black bears in our backyard – not convenient. Animals that scare us – not convenient.   But that doesn’t mean we need to demonize them or not see the beauty in them or deny them the right to live. To be on this earth with us. What kind of species are we that some of us are devastated by the loss of a single wolf and others take  pleasure in killing them? How do we move ahead to become more “human” as a species, in the best sense of the word?

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