This article was originally published with Active History.

Last week, I wrote about my “collections” of dogs and sheep, and how humans bred farm dogs as “enlightened wolves.” I’d like to share a bit more about the history of the human-wolf relationship.

Humans have such a deep connection to wolves that they have never been able to live without the wolf in some form, whether positive or negative, imaginary or real.

Early pastoral nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples idealized canine predatory power. Wolf packs, with their strength in numbers and cooperation as a social unit, were able to survive and proliferate across the globe at the apex of the ecological food chain, rivaled only by humans. Wolf folklore was born of this recognition of the similarities between human groups and wolf packs. Ancient societies idolized and occasionally worshipped wolves as deities, powerful spirits, or companions of the gods: ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Romans, Greeks, and Persians had both positive and negative attitudes towards wolves.¹ Lycanthropy, or shape-shifting, was often associated with festivals or wolf-warrior-like initiation ceremonies in Greece, Rome, and among Germanic peoples.² The wolf played various roles in many Indigenous North American creation stories.³ Two wolves, Geri and Freki, and two ravens served as guardian-companions for the Norse God Odin; the evil wolf Fenrir ushered in the destruction of the Norse universe (Ragnarök), and his wolf offspring, Sköll and Hati, regularly chased the sun and moon across the sky.⁴ The wolf in Japan, as a type of Shinto nature spirit, “Oguchi no Magami,” the “Large-Mouthed God,” received offerings of gratitude for guarding children and for protecting peasants’ crops, which would otherwise be consumed or trampled by the Japanese deer and boar populations.⁵ Nomadic Turkic and Mongol peoples in Central Asia possessed origin mythology in which their actual ancestors were believed to have been wolves, or wolf deities who guided their tribes in times of trouble to new lands where they escaped death and lived on to become powerful empires in later centuries.⁶ The wolf is everywhere in human societies’ consciousness. In fact, humans have such a deep connection to wolves that they have never been able to live without the wolf in some form, whether positive or negative, imaginary or real.

The human transition from pagan religious understandings to monotheistic faiths – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – among peoples in some regions of the world, in combination with the shift to settled agricultural lifestyles that included raising livestock, dramatically changed attitudes towards wolves for the worse. Ancient Persia’s Zoroastrian connotation of the wolf as an instrument of the Evil Spirit Ahriman in the struggle against Ahura Mazda, the force of light and good, seeped into the later Abrahamic traditions.⁷ The result was the powerful religious metaphor of the “good shepherd” (Jesus) protecting his “flock” (congregation) from the “ravenous wolves” (false prophets or unbelievers). Biblical scriptures reflected the dangers of the wolf – that devilish predator that could prey upon your soul as well as upon your sheep.⁸

Theologians St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas shaped the doctrines of early Christendom and firmly established anthropocentrism within Christianity. They held humankind has a central place in the universe, a God-given right to dominion over nature and all of its “lesser creatures.” Other theologians and philosophers such as René Descartes contributed further to this anthropocentrism, arguing that non-human animals were merely irrational, soulless machines.⁹ A milder form of anthropocentrism does exist within Islamic thought as well, although it is mitigated by the deeply held principle of submission to God’s will, which, it has been argued, places Muslims on a closer, more equal footing with God’s other living things rather than above them.¹⁰

Together, humans’ reliance on a livestock economy and anthropocentric Christian tradition fostered intense fear and hatred of wolves and a drive to eradicate them. Beginning as early as the 13^th century, wolves were brutally hunted down, tortured, and slaughtered to near extinction in some areas of Europe; extermination of wolves also ensued with a vengeance in the UK, resulting in complete extinction.¹¹ Wolves disappeared in the 20^th century in Japan and the US.¹² Wolves were made to pay for their “crimes” and punished in the most cruel ways, whether by individual bounty hunters for hire with their traps, poisons, and weapons, or in the modern era, through state-funded agencies designed specifically for the purpose of destroying the wolf population with equally violent and disturbing methods, all of which are too barbaric and gruesome to reiterate here.¹³ Some of the last wolves who avoided or “resisted” (as rebels) being captured or slaughtered in the American West were anthropomorphized and made famous for seemingly outwitting their executioners for years, though in the end their lives were not spared.¹⁴

The wiping out of wolves had a spiritual mission to resist evil, as well as political, economic, and national intentions. The extermination of the wolf population in the English countryside (debated as occurring some time between the 13^th and early 16^th centuries) allowed England to proceed with manorial enclosures, clear land for pasturing, and become one massive sheep farm; as a result, the wool industry that underpinned the rise of the British Empire was already flourishing as early as the 14^th century.¹⁵ With Cromwell’s 17^th century English campaign in Ireland, wolves, Gaelic rebels, and Catholic priests all had bounties on their heads so that “Wolfland,” as Ireland was called, could be “de-wolfed” and similarly contribute to the capitalist enterprise of wool production.¹⁶ Scotland was soon after shorn of its wolves as well. The antipathy and hostility toward wolves born in Anglo-European Christendom was carried to the New World with a Christian desire to “tame the wilderness”; as colonial settlers arrived in North America, the Indigenous peoples, the wolves, and their primary source of food – the bison – were all elements of the frontier to be systematically exterminated to make way for industrial agriculture and livestock-raising as a backbone of the American economy.¹⁷

The antipathy and hostility toward wolves born in Anglo-European Christendom was carried to the New World with a Christian desire to “tame the wilderness.”

Unfortunately for the wolf in Japan, and despite Japan being neither a Christian country nor a sheep-raising populace with negative predilections toward wolves, a rabies outbreak in the early 18^th century alarmed the population about wild animals and dogs, and wolves began to be viewed in some areas as “man-killers.” Wolves preying upon horses in some remote areas led to initial wolf hunts in the late 18^th century. But most detrimental for the Japanese wolves, the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the country’s subsequent quest for rapid modernization of state and society in the following decades overrode any Shinto and Buddhist spiritual compassion for their previous protector.¹⁸ Modern Japan’s desire to preserve its independence through economic (and military) growth caused its leaders to look to western policies, and efforts to raise sheep (unsuccessful) and cattle (successful), promoted by foreign businessmen, encouraged the Japanese to hire American wolf hunters and completely eliminate potential predators.¹⁹ The last wolf in Japan was killed in 1905.

There are parts of the world in which societies that often still raise livestock in a nomadic or semi-nomadic way, and are not Christian, but are either animist (e.g. Mongolians) or Muslim (e.g. Türkiye and parts of the Arab Middle East and Central Asia), have managed to coexist with wolf populations. There has not been a concerted effort to kill off all wolves; these shepherds recognize wolves are predators that sometimes need to be hunted, but there is a level of acceptance of their existence and a willingness to share the land.20

The Turkic wolf mythology of the pre-modern eras resurfaced in Türkiye as a national image as early as the late 19th century to denote the courage and bravery of the Ottoman Turks during WWI.²¹ Their greatest military hero and first president of the new Turkish Republic in 1923, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was known as “Bozkurt,” or “the Gray Wolf.” The wolf grazed the pages of Turkish nationalist and ultranationalist publications as their magazine titles;²² wolf images appeared on Turkish stamps, currency, and company logos.²³ The Turkish ultranationalist “Grey Wolves” (Bozkurtlar or Ülkücüler) have a wolf as their hand signal and iconography.²⁴ 

Overall, human attitudes toward the wolf have slowly returned to a more positive view. In the mid-twentieth century wolves started to regain a good portion of respect, admiration, and sympathy from humans, after centuries of demonization and extermination.  In 1973 the Endangered Species Act became law in the US; gray wolves were placed on the endangered species list in 1974. There have been subsequent releases of wolves into the wild, and a resurgence of the use of livestock guardian dogs, llamas, and donkeys to protect herds, but legal battles between pro-wolf environmentalists and conservationists on the one side and many ranchers (who lose livestock and have to be compensated) and hunters (who see wolves as their competitors for game) on the other, are on-going; as a result, the gray wolf has bounced on and off the endangered list in the past few years. Environmentalists argue the wolf has restored balance to the natural world by decreasing the deforestation effects caused by recent overpopulation of deer and elk, and so the wolf has become emblematic of the environmental struggle to combat climate change.

The wolf has gained a pervasive presence in branding, advertising, and design. People now pay to attend an evening “wolf howl” in some of the national parks in North America with thriving wolf packs. The wolf is, quite literally, everywhere: in our minds, in our history, and in our future. Humans cannot relinquish this attachment to wolves.

Feature Image: “Wolf” by Dennis from Atlanta is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Notes

¹ Billie Jean Collins (ed.), A History of the Animal in the Ancient Near East (Leiden: Brill, 2002); Ingvild Saelid Gilhus, Animals, Gods and Humans: Changing Attitudes to Animals in Greek, Roman and Early Christian Ideas (NY: Routledge, 2006); Cristina Mazzoni, She-Wolf: The Story of a Roman Icon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Samra Azarnouche et Grenet F. (2010), “Thaumaturgie sogdienne: nouvelle édition et commentaire du texte p.3”, Studia Iranica 39: 64-65.

² See Michael P. Speidel, Ancient Germanic Warriors: Warrior Styles from Trajan’s Column to Icelandic Sagas (London: Routledge, 2004); Montague Summers, The Werewolf in Lore and Legend (NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2003).

³ “Manabush and his Brother,” on Menominee Oral Tradition, http://www.mpm.edu/content/wirp/ICW-138 , Milwaukee Public Museum; Wollert, “Wolves in Native American Culture,” https://www.wolfsongalaska.org/chorus/node/179 .

⁴ Daniel McCoy, The Viking Spirit: An Introduction to Norse Mythology and Religion (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016).

⁵ Brett L. Walker, Lost Wolves of Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005).

⁶ Renée Worringer,“Shepherd’s Enemy or Asina, Böri, Börte Cino, and Bozkurt?: Wolf as Menace, Wolf as Mythical,” Society & Animals (2016), 1-18.

⁷ See Mahnaz Moazami, “Evil Animals in the Zoroastrian Religion,” History of Religions 44:4(May 2005), 300-319.

⁸ Malcolm Drew Donalson, The History of the Wolf in Western Civilization: From Antiquity to the Middle Ages (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2006).

⁹ For a different perspective on Christian thought concerning non-human animals, see Rod Preece and David Fraser, “The Status of Animals in Biblical and Christian Thought: A Study in Colliding Values,” Society & Animals 8:3 (2000), 245-263.  

¹⁰ Sarra Tlili, Animals in the Qur’an (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

¹¹ See Aleksander Pluskowski, Wolves and the Wilderness in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006).

¹² Rick McIntyre (ed.), War Against the Wolf: America’s Campaign to Exterminate the Wolf (MN: Voyageur Press, 1995); Walker, Lost Wolves of Japan…

¹³ Jon T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Stephanie Rutherford, Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin: Wolves and the Making of Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022); Michael J. Robinson, Predatory Bureaucracy: The Extermination of Wolves and the Transformation of the West (University Press of Colorado, 2005).

¹⁴ Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (NY: Basic Books, 2017).

¹⁵ Robert Winder, The Last Wolf: The Hidden Springs of Englishness (Great Britain: Abacus, 2017).

¹⁶ Kieran Hickey, Wolves in Ireland: A Natural and Cultural History (Portland: Four Courts Press, 2011).

¹⁷ See Coleman, Vicious….

¹⁸ See Walker, Lost Wolves of Japan.

¹⁹ John Knight, “On the Extinction of the Japanese Wolf,” Asian Folklore Studies 56:1(1997), 129-159.

²⁰ Natasha Fijn, Living with Herds: Human-Animal Coexistence in Mongolia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Bernard Charlier, “Two Temporalities of the Mongolian Wolf Hunter,” in L. Filipovic & K.M. Jaszczolt (eds.), Space and Time in Languages and Culture (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2012), 21-141.

²¹ Isa Özkan, “Ergenekon Destani Hakkinda,” Türk Yurdu 265(Eylül 2009), 45; Güldeniz Kibris, “Creating Turkishness: An Examination of Turkish Nationalism Through Gök-Börü.”(MA Thesis, Sabanci University, Istanbul, 2005), 35.

²² Jacob M. Landau, “Ultra-nationalist Literature in the Turkish Republic: A Note on the Novels of Huseyin Nihal Atsiz,” Middle Eastern Studies 39:2(April 2003), 204-210.

²³ Altan Deliorman, Türk Kültüründe Bozkurt (Istanbul: Bayrak Basim/Yayim/Tanitim, 2009); Günay Göksu Özdogan, “Turan”dan “Bozkurt”a: Tek Parti Döneminde Türkçülük (1931-1946) (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 2001).

²⁴ Martin A. Lee, The Beast Awakens: Fascism’s Resurgence from Hitler’s Spymasters to Today’s Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists (New York: Routledge, 2000).

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Renée Worringer

Renée Worringer is a Professor of Islamic & Middle East History at the University of Guelph. Her previous publications include Ottomans imagining Japan: East, Middle East, and Non-Western Modernity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and A Short History of the Ottoman Empire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020). She is currently working on a book about wolf folklore, sheep, and herding dogs in human history.

Latest posts by Renée Worringer (see all)

• Wolves in the Human Imagination, Wolves in Human Histories - January 15, 2025
• Herding with My “Enlightened Wolves” - December 10, 2024