The Big Bad Wolf is Coming to Save Our Children
How Reintroducing the Wolf will save our Children Of all the animals that have ever shared these islands with us, none has occupied the human imagination quite so persistently, nor so darkly, as the wolf. It’s howl runs through our oldest stories. Its shadow falls across folklore from the Cairngorms to the Carpathians. In the common telling, the wolf is a creature of danger, of teeth and darkness, of children snatched from paths through the forest. It is the animal that, of all animals, we feel in our bones to be a mortal threat. It is, then, a matter of some scientific consequence that this feeling is almost entirely without foundation. The purpose of this essay is not merely to correct a popular misapprehension, though that is a necessary beginning. It is to pursue a more unsettling argument: that the wolf, absent from Britain for nearly three centuries, is not simply harmless to human life, but is, on the available evidence, capable of actively protecting it. The mechanism by which ...