book review

A Perspective on the Russian Experience with Wolves

By Peter Metcalf, 7-19-08

In 1965 an American working for the National Security Agency as a Russian linguist picked up a copy of Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf. Instead of a new found appreciation for the contentious canids, as Mowat’s book generated for so many of his generation, Will Graves found the book didn’t mesh with what he knew from 14 years of reading about wolves in Russia.

“His book is fiction,” Graves said Thursday over coffee in Missoula, taking particular aim at Mowat’s claim that in the far north rodents and small game comprise substantial parts of a wolf’s diet.

Alarmed by not just Mowat’s book, but what Graves perceived to be a trend of often inaccurate and misleading pro-wolf Western literature, Graves decided to set the record straight with a book of his own. Over the next 42 years, he meticulously clipped Russian-language news reports, translated popular and scientific articles, joined preeminent Russian biologists at international conferences on wolves, and traveled and talked with Russian biologists, game managers and hunters about the Russian experience with wolves. 

His findings are collected in his recently released book, Wolves in Russia: Anxiety Through the Ages. The book chronicles the impact of wolves on ordinary Russians from the 19th century Czarist period up to the years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in an attempt to refute a number of widely-held misconceptions about wolves in North America. 

Using copious statistics and brief anecdotes gleaned primarily from government archives, newspapers and the Soviet-era magazine Hunting and Game Management, Graves catalogs stories of Russian villagers attacked or killed by wolves, extensive livestock depredations, wolf population trends and various government control programs. 

Along the way the author argues that wolves are “lustful” and “bloodthirsty,” “wanton killers” who will, under the right circumstances—such as with a flock of sheep or when teaching their young to hunt—kill excessive amounts of prey at one time. Wolves routinely kill healthy, adult animals, kill more ungulates than human hunters harvest, and drive down ungulate populations in an area to unsustainable levels. Such behavior, Graves argues, threatens the nutrition, livelihoods and economics of many Russian people and necessitates strong human intervention to bring wolf populations under control and restore a balance to nature. 

Most disconcerting for Graves, however, is the potential for far-ranging wolves to spread parasites and diseases to other wildlife. These parasites can cause ungulates and cattle to abort and are potentially harmful to people, yet few people know about this threat, Graves said. 

While such extensive information provides a unique insight into Russians experience with wolves, the book’s credibility suffers from a severe lack of context, a predilection to conjecture and a tendency to generalized conclusions from singular or unconnected examples.

Notably the book lacks mention of people who view wolves in a positive light, because, Graves told me, when he talked to such people it was obvious they didn’t know anything about wolves. Also, for a book on wolves in Russia, there is precious little substantive discussion of wolf biology or ecology. Such omissions reduce the animal and its relationship to humans from a rich complexity to a singular animosity and is highly disappointing in a book that claims to provide “just the facts.”

Still, for people looking for statistics and anecdotes to support the reality that wolves can and have harmed humans both physically and economically, Graves book will be a welcomed read. 

Graves will be signing copies of his book at Fact and Fiction in Missoula on Monday, July 21st from 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.

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