Humans respond in fear; we try to control the things we don’t understand, and we often destroy the things we can’t control.
That is exactly what we’ve done with the wolf.
Throughout history, humans have always struggled to coexist with the world around us.
We seem to have a natural instinct to exert control over the natural world, to go out and tame the wilderness and shape it into the world that we want to see.
But the wolf will always resist this. It cannot be tamed. It cannot be controlled. It cannot be understood by humans.
It’s a disconnect that we really struggle with.
“It’s human nature that what we don’t understand we try to control, and what we can’t control we’ll destroy. The human population almost completely destroyed the wolf population in the lower 48 just because we didn’t understand them.”
Mike Gaarde
It is our instinct as humans to control what we don’t understand. It’s their instinct as wolves to be wild.
This tension between humans and wolves isn’t just about predator control; it reveals something deeper about our need to project our expectations onto the world. We think they should be tamed or domesticated, to conform to our version of the world or be destroyed.
Wolves are strikingly close to us: they’re intelligent, social, and they remind us of dogs, our closest animal companions.
Their beauty and strength inspire admiration and fascination, and yet their independence frustrates our desire to mold them to our image.
We want to bring them closer, make them safer, and perhaps even reshape them to fit into the world we know.
But wolves are, by their nature, something we can never truly control or fully understand.
Our inability to fit wolves into our familiar structures has often made them a target.
The Disconnect That Leads to Conflict
At the heart of this struggle is a profound disconnect between the human instinct and the wolf instinct.
It is our instinct to control and organize, and it is the wolf’s instinct to remain wild, to exist outside of human influence.
While humans see an opportunity to shape and tame, wolves are a reminder that some aspects of nature will forever elude our control.
This divide is exciting for some and terrifying for others. They can be seen as a great victory of conservation or as a failure of control and domestication.
The wildness of the wolf can be perceived as an example freedom and beauty or as a threat to the structure and predictability we crave.
The story of wolves isn’t just about an animal that refuses to be tamed; it’s about our complex and often contradictory relationship with the wildness within our own world.