388. American Wolf
Rating: ☆☆☆
Recommended by: Lisa Goldberg
Author: Nate Blakeslee
Genre: Nonfiction, Animals, Nature, Science, History, Environment
320 pages, published August, 2018
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
American Wolf follows the story of Rick McIntyre, a park ranger in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone National Park, who spends all of his time studying and teaching about wolves. We also learn a great deal about the different wolf packs that inhabit Yellowstone and the legal fight to protect them.
Quotes
“Rick’s dream, though he seldom described it as such, was to someday tell a story so good that the people who heard it simply wouldn’t want to kill wolves anymore.”
“Can a wolf in the wild experience what we know as joy and happiness?” Rick said, his voice breaking noticeably. “And my answer is yes.”
“What we normally mean by ‘education,’ ” he once told a crowd of wolf advocates, is, “I want someone else to know what I know so they will have my values.” In his experience, it didn’t work that way.”
“But wolves, Rick felt, were more like humans than they were given credit for, in their tribal ways and territoriality; in their tendency to mate for life; and in the way male wolves provided food and care for their offspring, so unusual in the animal world. He loved to quote the early-twentieth-century English philosopher Carveth Read: “Man, in character, is more like a wolf… than he is any other animal.”
“By the 1920’s, the wolves had been all but eliminated from the continental United States, except for a small population in northern Minnesota and Michigan’s upper peninsula. It was a campaign unprecedented in its scope and thoroughness. One species almost completely whipped out another. The impetus for the killing was clear enough, but as Barry Lopez asked in “Of Wolves and Men”, his seminal meditation on the fraught relationship between the two species, why did the pogrom continue, even after the threat to the westerner’s way of life was essentially gone? Why did our ancestors feel they had to rout out every last wolf, and why were hunters still so eager to shoot them in the few places they remained?
There was hate, Lopez decided, but there was something else, too. Something more akin to envy. Here is an animal capable of killing a man, an animal of legendary endurance and spirit, an animal that embodies marvelous integration within its environment. This is exactly what the frustrated modern hunter would like, the noble qualities imagined, a sense of fitting into the world. The hunter wants to be the wolf.”
My Take
Well, I learned a lot about wolves after reading this book. If you have an interest in them, then I highly recommend this book. If you don’t, you still might like it.
