In Lone Wolf, the journalist recounts following a wolf’s winding journey from Slovenia to Italy.
You sometimes recount your trek from the perspective of Slavc the wolf. Why take that approach?
Something about the walk allowed me to get a sense of how Slavc navigated the landscape. There was one moment when he came right up to the perimeter fence of the airport around Ljubljana, and then suddenly he was next detected about 10 miles away. That was the farthest he had traveled between GPS fixes, which came every three hours, and it was very easy to feel that was because there were these terrifying airplanes that he never would have seen before taking off into the sky. We obviously can’t say how an animal thinks, but it seemed clear to me that his route across Europe was guided by fear of human infrastructure.
Do you see any similarities between humans and wolves?
We’re both pack animals. We’re two of the very few species on the planet that hunt prey bigger than ourselves, and that requires dividing labor and complex social structures of the kind that a pack mentality involves. We can see a lot of ourselves in wolves, but not the kind of “alpha wolf” that certain toxic parts of the internet would like us to buy into. The alpha wolf is a fairly discredited theory, and in fact, wolves are one of the few animals where males will stick around and look after both the pups and the mother long after birth. A wolf pack is essentially a family.
On your journey, you talked with both opponents and supporters of repopulating Europe’s wolf packs. What’s your stance?
I believe there is a moral obligation to think about making space for wolves again because we pushed them to the point of extinction, but there’s also an obligation to listen to people who live on the land and have legitimate concerns about protecting livestock. Unless those people are heard, I don’t think allowing wolves back can work.
You draw connections between the return of Europe’s wolves and the refugee crisis in Europe. Can you elaborate on that?
Take Lessinia Regional Park, where Slavc settled in Italy and which was used to house migrants from North Africa. The language with which the local people talked about the arrival of the wolves and the migrants living in their communities was very similar. For example, they described the wolves and migrants as unwelcome. “We were here first,” they said, which isn’t true. A lot of locals are actually descendants of German migrants who arrived in the Middle Ages, and wolves up until about 100 years ago had been there since time immemorial.
