Krithika Srinivasan’s concept of re-animalization and how it can be used to help us think about multi-species justice and new ways of living in multi-species assemblages made me think about other than human agency and auto-rewilding. I want to highlight grey wolves as a great example of animals ‘auto-rewilding’ - reintroducing themselves to places where they lived previously but were driven out by humans.
Wolves are one of the animals most persecuted by humans. They’ve faced systematic campaigns to drive them out of regions and even been wiped out of entire countries, as happened in Britain. Wolf persecution went to extraordinary lengths in Britain, to the point that, in the 17th century, forests were cut down or burnt in order to hunt down the last wolves.
But Britain is by no means the only country where wolves have been persecuted. They’ve been persecuted everywhere they’re seen to conflict with human interests. The US is a good example of where wolves have faced a long, and ongoing history of persecution, particularly in cases of farmer-wolf-livestock conflict.
This persecution of wolves is based on the protection-sacrifice logic Krithika mentioned in her discussion with you. According to this logic, wolves are ‘sacrificed’ to ‘protect’ humans, and human interests. The majority of the risks of coexistence are borne by wolves while the majority of the benefits are enjoyed by humans. In putting forward her proposal of re-animalization, Krithika read a quote that might reimagine this wolf-human relationship. I was really taken by it and want to read it again:
"From a vision of a good human life premised upon insulation from the vulnerabilities inherent in living on this planet, we need to examine what it means to live as part of nature, as one among other animals... the focus would be on more equitably distributing the risks of living on the Earth so that they are not borne primarily by marginal people and nature" - Krithika Srinivasan, 2022
For the remainder of this highlight I want to talk about how Krithika’s idea of re-animalization might apply to the wolves who are reintroducing themselves to regions across Europe and the US.
According to re-animalization, in a world where wolves live alongside humans, people would need to have a greater acceptance of the associated risks, and resist the urge to kill wolves to minimize these risks. Such a commitment would reduce the burden of risk faced by wolves, and while it might increase the risks borne by humans it’s important to put this in context. The threats posed to people by wolves are minimal compared to the threat posed to wolves by people.
A report for the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research on wolf attacks on humans found that between 2002 and 2020 only 26 people, globally, were killed by wolves. Compare this to the thousands of wolves killed each year by humans: calculating the exact number is extremely difficult but at least 2000 wolves are killed every year in Kazakhstan alone. Embracing re-animalization would, however, require us to rethink how we coexist with animals which compete with our interests and conflict with our values, finding a new, or renewed, way of coexisting with animals.
This becomes all the more important when animals return to an area, either through their own or human agency, and when their numbers increase, because people are unused or unwilling to share space and resources. While ‘auto-rewilding’ is being heralded by some as a valuable expression of other-than-human agency and as contributing to biodiversity restoration, wolves’ disregard of human borders is exposing them to heightened risk.
We need new ways of approaching the mutual risks of coexistence because as wolf numbers recover and they start recolonising former territories human and wolf populations will come into contact more and more. Part of this increased contact is due to wolf mobility. Wolf territories can be extremely large, in some instances hundreds of square miles. Wolves also actively move around their territories, covering around ten miles a day and they can travel hundreds of miles when seeking new territory. This mobility means that they often cross political boundaries, like national borders in Europe and state borders in the US. For example, as wolf numbers in Europe recover, wolves are moving into Belgium from neighboring countries to recolonize their former territory which has caused concerns among farmers who are concerned for their livestock.
We might find coexistence with wolves easier if we changed our narratives about them. This would obviously require a huge shift in our collective mindsets from demonisation to appreciation of wolves. In a way it’s surprising that we don’t appreciate wolves more. In terms of social structures and support, wolf society is really quite similar to human society. They work collaboratively to hunt and to raise their pups and they have incredibly complex social structures. This means that, while they can be highly competitive with wolves from outside their own packs, prioritising their family unit over everything else, on occasion they can adopt unfamiliar wolves into their pack, building strong, loyal relationships in very similar ways to people. Changing our view of wolves, and indeed of ourselves, through re-animalisation, could help us co-exist with other animals in the Anthropocene.
With this in mind, I’d like to finish with another quote, this time from Ned Hettinger:
"Restoring to the rural landscape wolves which might eat our sheep forces us to change our grazing practices, adds to nature’s influence over our lives, and lessens our control of the situation; thus it … increases the autonomy of local nature in relation to humanity."
Want to learn more about Rewilding?
These videos might help:
Virginia Thomas is a fellow with the Animal Turn. She is also an environmental social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. Virginia is interested in people’s interactions with their environment and with other animals. Virginia’s work explores the social and ethical questions in human-animal relationships. She is currently a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘From Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals’ which examines the drivers and consequences of animal feeding. This leads on from her previous research which examined human-animal relations in the media (as part of zoonotic disease framing) and in rewilding projects (in relation to biopolitics and human-animal coexistence).
You can connect with Virginia via Twitter (@ArbitrioHumano).Learn more about our team here.