France p. 23 “The survey indicates there are two plausible modes of wild wolf attacks on humans (a) those that are rabies related and (b) more difficult to explain predatory attacks by apparently ‘healthy’ wolves… rabid wolves attacked exclusively as a lone wold in an ‘indiscriminate’ fashion, exhibiting furious behavior as an extreme manifestation of hydrophohic canine rabies. Although rarely directly fatal to adults, violent and lunging rabid wolf attacks often resulted in serious multiple mauling injuries, often to the limbs, neck and face… evenly distributed among a broad age group and gender of human victims.”
Determined predatory attacks by one or more non-diseased wolves were identified on the basis of a swift attack and disappearance, possibly later attacking elsewhere … predominately against women and children, often resulting in serious injury and death.”
p. 26 Mariceau’s 6599 recorded wolf attacks in France span five centuries, from as early as 1421 until the last documented attack by a supposed healthy wolf in 1918. A total of 3,360 human deaths are attributable to rabid wolf attacks and 3239 can be linked to non-rabid predatory wolves, around 13 victims a year, a comparatively low figure when compared with other historic causes of human mortality such as disease, poverty and conflict … wolf-dog hybrids and perhaps feral dogs similar in appearance to wolves were involved… still possible to see big feral dogs who look like wolves (and are perhaps highly interbred with wolves) around settlements in southern and eastern Europe and the Caucasus.
p. 42 Wolves seem to have become extinct in England in the 14th century… it seems likely that the specioes became extinct in Wales around the same time…the wolf survived longest in Scotland… Sutherland, where there are records from ostensibly reliable local naturalists from the first half of the 17th century. They did not survive much longer…. Thomas Pennant (1726098)… suggested that the last wolf in Scotland was killed in 1680.”
p. 50 “Wolves occasionally and accidentally strating the streets of Rome were merely driven out of the city and largely left unharmed. Similar merciful treatment and approaches to the wolf are known from Greece. It seems that throughout Indo-European territories, from India to Ireland and from Scandinavia to Italy to Greece, the wold had attained a certain degree of untouchability that barred active persecution… The most plausible reason for this is that, during pre-Christian times, the wold was of social, perhaos even religious significance, and served as a role model of highly patriarchally organised Indo-European societies.. the koryos, the adolescents… youths aged from about 8-12 to 18-19, who for a number of years (this varies considerably in space and time) lived part or all of the year outside the protection of the teuta, having only each other to help survive the wilderness. The youngsters had no or very few possessions, perhaps only light weaponry, and had to keep alive by taking what the land had to offer, even if that had to be obtained by robbery or theft from their own kin. To do this, they had to cooperate and rely on each other above all else. For this, the koryos members might have taken example from wolves and even identified with them… In terms of social behaviour, wolves are closest to humans of all wild animals…. a sort of totem for the koryos, on both an individual and a collective level, which could explain the frequent wolf-based names of early medieval elites.”
p. 106 In March 2021, The Telegraph reported that the UK government … had been instructued by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson to create a rewilding ‘task force’ to gauge appetite for returning lynx and wolf to England. Although DEFRA soon published a refutation of this claim, the response of the chief executive of the Tenant Farmers Association, George Dunn, was decisiveL “reckless in the extreme… midguided idea about returning Britain to a sort of medieval wasteland.”
p. 109 Although the conception of the early medieval period as a wolf-infested ‘Dark Age’ is not based in historical fact, contemporary cultural products that engage with this notion are indeed rooted in the past, with the perception that life during this era as a ‘waking nightmare’ enforced and ‘reinforced by selective recreations of the Middle Ages … through the lens of gothic romance’ of the 18th to 20th centuries. The wolf is ‘an instantly recognisable companion to the crumbling castles, ruined churches and dark woods of neo-medieval goth horror’ … of the animal as a creature of ‘originary wilderness’ whose presence evokes ‘a sense of the primal’ and creates an ‘atmosphere of the long-distant and the far away.”
p. 112 “the majority of the population of early medieval England lived in far closer proximity to and intimacy with the natural world than most people do today, as is evidenced by the numerous zoocentric Old English riddles recoreded in the 10th-century Exeter Book manuscript whose author(s) contemplated non-human modes of being and ways of experiencing the world by adopting the perspective of the animal… bestial speakers … often challenge their exploitation by hjumans (for exmaple, in one riddle an animals laments its death and the transformation of its skin into the pages of a book) … known today as Wild and Eadwacer, this poem is written from the point of view of an unnamed female speaker about her lover, Wuld… an amibiguous being who can be taken as both a human and an animal… he is a sympathetic character persecuted by a group of weras (men) who in fact act more ‘wolfishly’ than he.”
p. 113 “The landscape of modern-day Britain is far more justificably described as a ‘wasteland’ than that of our medieval predecessors. These people lived alongside more than 130 species which subsequently disappeared after the turn of the 16th century”
p. 124 archaezoologists and molecular geneticists suggest that the domestication of the wolf probably occurred somewhere between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago, somewhere on the Eurasian continent, perhaps in more than one location. Two predominant origin stories seek to explain how the domestication of the wold took place. The commensual scavenger hypothesis suggests that wolves essential domesticated themse,llves by invading human settlements in seach of animal remains and other waste food discarded by hunter-gatherers. Over time, tolerance of these animals by humans gave a selective advantage to bolder, less fearful wolves… the alternative account … pet keeping or corss-species adoption… provides a different narrative. This draws heavily onf anthropoological observations of pet keeping among recent hunter-gatherers, and postulates that Palaeolitic people could have been similarly inclined to capture, adopt and rear infant mammals… provided the basis for the evolution of a cooperative social system involving both species.”
p. 152 “the wolf was chased and killed by the Japanese because it, and in particular the northern variant, the Hokkaido wolf, was allegedly a threat to newly imported developments in pasture utilisation from America (horse breeding). The Japanese wolf was one of the first victims of the orientation towards the West and the modernisation of Japan.”
p. 161 “The dingo is a naturalised Australian species. The oldest archaeological dingo remains have been carbon-dated between 3000 and 3509000 years ago … genetically disctint from both dogs and wolves for at least 8,000-11,000 years… several genomic studies have identified t he New Guinea singing dog as the dingo’s closest relative, and both dingoes and NGSDs are distinct from the free-ranging dogs found in Asia.
p. 163 “dingos strongly suppress herbivores weighing 7-100kg and introduced mesopredators in some locations … and can have beneficial effects on populations of small mammals and ground-nesting birds due to release from predation by mesopredators and vegetation suppression by herbivores… whilst hybridisation between dingos and dogs does occur, it is rare and most wild dingos carry more than 75% dingo ancestry”.
p. 179 A wild male wolf lived for eight years alone on a small cluster of islands off the south end of Vancouver Island and came to be known as Takaya … one of a unique population of wolves called coastal or sea wolves that live in the coastal habitats of British Columbia and the Alexander Archipelago of Alaska… at one time the sea wolf population extended from Alaska to California.”
p. 230 The Thylacine or Tasmanian wolf (Thylacinus cynocephalus) was the sole surviving member of the Thylacinidae lineage and the largest marsupial carnivor to have existed into modern tims… 19th century … considered slow, stupid, morose and cowardly, all of which could not be further from the truth.. notable feature … was its enormous gape, at 80 degrees the largest of any mammal… undoubtedly an advantage in securing fast moving prey, such as wallabies, but it was also used as a cautionary warning if threatened. The Thylacine’s tail also set it aside from the canids, as it was not abruptly separated from the body, but gradually tapered, like that of a kangaroo.”
p, 261 Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem, Minnesota Wold predation on beavers in the GVE fluctuates in predictable ways during the ice-free season (approximately April to October). As ice cover disappears in April, beavers begin foraging on land to replenish body fat lost during winter. Wolves respond to this and kill vulnerable beavers who venture on land. Predation peaks in May when young dispersing beavers, travelling in shallow waterways and across land, are readily killed when discovered by wolves. During May, beavers constitute approximately 53% of wolf pack diets in the GVE, although this varies considerably among packs, with beaver constituting up to 88% of some packs’ diets in May. Wolf predation on beavers decreases dramatically in June and July as wolves switch to hunting vulnerable deer fawns that are born at the end of May … increases again in late summer and autumn, when beavers forage more frequently on land too stockpile food for the upcoming winter … on average 24% of Sept-Oct wolf diest… substantial pack-level difference in predation … 53% of one packs, only 6% of another pack’s diet. Interestingly beaver density was c. 50% higher in the territory of the latter pack. By late autumn, lakes, ponds and rivers are frozen over and beavers remain largely locked below the ice.”
p. 264 “Wolves choose ambush locations to counter and capitalise on the sensory abilities of beavers. Beavers, like wolves, have well-developed olfactory acilities, which is their primary mode of detecting predators. On the other hand, beavers have extremely poor eyesight and visual acuity, and are therefore incapable of detecting motionless predators when on land… wolves almost always take into account wind direction when chosing ambush locations … often wolves wait in areas with little to no visual cover, suggesting wolves understand beavers cannot visually detect motionless predators. Beavers, can, however, visually detect pursuing predators. Thus wolves generally choose ambush locations very close (<5m) to where they expect beavers to be on land”
p. 291 There are countless examples in the world of people and communities managing to coexist with wild animals, in many cases animals that are much more dangerous and much more difficult to coexist with than our world… the village of Charotar, in central Gujarat in India, where people have learned to live alongside one of nature’s most danerous predators, the crocodile. Villagers have built islands for crocodiles where they can lie in the sun. Perhaps because they know that people help them from time to time, and because they do not expect anything to be done to them, crocodiles tolerate human encroachment, and even accept it when fishermen pick up and drag the animals. The day before setting their nets, fishermen moor their boats in the lake as a warning to the predatorws. They then usually retreat to neighbouring wetlands, or densely vegetated parts of the lake, giving the fishermen space.”
p. 292 “famous example of from the Australian whaling village of Eden, where for centuries local whalers in Twofold Bay cooperated with the resident orcas when hunting baleen whales”
p. 374 Lakes district, the Helsfell Wolf, lived between 1139 and 1197.. in a timeline when wolves coexisted with humans in our landscape … the density of place name distribution reveals the ‘shadowy presence’ of wolves across the North West
p. 377 The history of Britain is of an ever-downward spiral of destruction of wild nature from the elimination of predators inconvenient to land users. This led to the judgement by the Addison Committee, the first Parliamentary Committee on National Parks, in 1931, that there was no need of the types of National Park seen in North America that gave free, unfettered space to wild nature because Britain was a “country where the fauna is practically limited to birds, insects and the smaller mammals”… in whcat would be a well-rehearsed objection since then to reinstatement of large carbivors, the Committee went on to say: “Great Britain is small, densely populated and highly developed and has relatively little land which is not already put to some economic or productive use.” In effect, the report repudiated the notion that the depauperate state of Britain’s wild nature could be reversed.”
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