Vulnerability--not hunger, not anger, and certainly not spite--is the key to predator-prey relationships. The skill and viciousness of the hunter matters less than the size, speed, strength, health, and ferocity of the hunted. Vulnerability explains why large predators tend to kill the old, young, and sick members of prey populations. Predators eat the mild and weak because those are the animals they can catch and kill.

When they sank their teeth into cows, goats, pigs, and sheep, wolves committed sins unimaginable to them.

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.

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.

Urban Americans lost the tactile experience of raising food. They neither heard the squeals, nor smelled he offal, nor saw the blood, nor tasted the rage when predators swallowed a cherished investment.