The wolf legends demanded immediate revenge. Groups of colonists entered the forest, killed the predators, and restored their mastery over nature in a day… the legends offered a quick solution: regeneration through violence

Wolves and people were not natural enemies. The humans’ relationship with other animals established their rivalry with wolves.

They destroyed wolves for a host of pragmatic reasons: to safeguard livestock, to knit local ecosystems into global capitalist markets, to collect state-sponsored bounties, and to rid the world of beasts they considered evil, wild, corrupt, and duplicitous.

To overpower savagery one must lash out savagely. In their stories Euro-American colonists invented and broadcast a vision of wolves as threats to human safety. They then modeled their behavior on the ferocity they perceived in wolves. Thus folklore explains not only why humans destroyed wolves but why they did so with such cruel enthusiasm.

Given humans’ tendency to see themselves as the pivots around which all creatures’ lives spun, the bewildered travelers assumed the wolves were talking to them.

Instead of modifying their beliefs, institutions, politics, and property systems to fit their environment, humans enter habitats and alter them to suit their cultures.

They saluted the last wolves. Sure, they devoured property, but they did so with enthusiasm and panache. The animals had to die, but the humans felt nostalgic about their passing.

Wolves rarely attack humans, and they do not howl at the moon. (There is no record of a nonrabid wolf killing a human in North America since the arrival of Europeans.)” They are neither innate cowards nor wanton killers.

The story of wolf killing illustrates the tenacity of two Euro-American conquering devices—folklore and property. Folklore fueled wolf hatred through rituals and legends codified into motifs and transmitted by word of mouth. Wolf lore survived by being remembered and retold, while property in the form of livestock also traveled across landscapes and lifetimes.