On the steps of the Campidoglio, or Capitol, in Rome, there used to be a she-wolf in a cage 鈥� a living symbol of the city. These days the cage is empty, but wolf sightings are still reported in the outskirts of Rome. For three decades Luigi Boitani has studied wolf ecology, batding against the legacy of folklore, in the hope of finding a way that wolves and humans might peacefully co-exist. Laura Spinney went to Rome to find out if he has succeeded.
Where did wolves get such a bad reputation?
From Little Red Riding Hood! I have been fighting her all my life. She is the symbol of a body of information and legend that is automatically transferred from generation to generation. People absorb it without realising it, and then when you talk to them about wolves, it all comes out. That鈥檚 the only information they have to draw on, and it鈥檚 negative.
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How did you come to work with wolves?
Everything started in 1972, when I came back from a year鈥檚 study in America. Believe it or not, I wanted to study sheep on an island off the coast of Tuscany. But the World Wildlife Fund, now WWF, was more interested in wolves. At that time wolves were still being shot in Italy, and you could read newspaper articles about them coming down from the mountains in winter and eating children. In reality, wolves are in the valleys all year round and they are afraid of people. The WWF asked me to run its wolf conservation project. Back then wolves were just scientific research for me. Now my relationship with them is quite different. The more I learn about them, the more I am astonished by how they cope with humans, how they have survived millennia of persecution. My passion for them has grown with my scientific interest.
How often do you see a wolf?
Since we began using radio telemetry to track them, I see them often. But before radio collars, I had only seen a wolf three times in 30 years. The first time it was almost as if I had a premonition. It was 1973, and we were a week into our project in a forested, mountainous region of Italy called Abruzzo. We had no radio. It was sunset, and my collaborator Erik Zimen and I were driving along a small road on the Maiella mountain. We stopped the car and said to each other, why don鈥檛 we try a howl? So we howled, and immediately got an answer. A fantastic answer, very, very close. So we crawled from the road over the hill, and there we saw seven wolves playing in a valley. It was the first and last time I have seen so many wolves together in Italy.
Are they elusive animals?
Extremely. The wolf is not naturally nocturnal. If we allowed it to, it would be active by day. But the density of people in Italy means that wolves move at night 90 per cent of the time. They are extremely wary of people. They know how to move through human settlements without being seen.
You鈥檝e caught them in the act?
Once, we were tracking a she-wolf we had trapped and fitted with a radio collar. Her resting site was on the Maiella mountain above a small village called Sant鈥橢ufemia. There was no big game in Maiella, it had all been hunted, so the wolves were living off garbage and the few sheep they could steal. This wolf would come down every night to the village and walk along the main street to the garbage dump. Usually, the village was deserted at midnight. But one night she came down to find a fiesta in the street. She stopped at the edge of the village, waited until the last firework had gone off and the last person had gone to sleep, then crossed the village to the dump as usual.
Are there places in the world where wolves are unafraid of humans?
My colleague Dave Mech has a study area on Ellesmere Island, in the north-east of the Arctic archipelago, in the Canadian province of Nunavut. There is a weather station there, and people at the station have been known to feed the wolves, so they have no fear of humans. Once I went to Ellesmere and we followed them on quad bikes. It was summer, light for 24 hours, and we saw them hunting musk ox and Arctic hares. It gave us quite a different picture from the one we had pieced together using radio tracking. I was surprised by how much time they spent playing together. They love to play, not only the pups, but the adults, too.
Are wolves endangered everywhere?
They range from highly viable to highly endangered, and their conservation status ranges from full protection to concerted efforts at extermination. In Europe today, the pattern of wolf populations reflects historical attempts to exterminate them. There are none in Britain 鈥� the last one was killed in Scotland at the end of the 17th century. In central Europe, you have to go to eastern Poland to find any. They were wiped out in Scandinavia, though Sweden has a new population based on a few animals that moved in from Finland. ut they were never exterminated in the Mediterranean, and their numbers are increasing in Spain, Portugal, Italy, France and the Balkans. It鈥檚 a good trend.
As attitudes change, will the wolves adapt to a new relationship with humans?
Wolves are smart, and if we continue in this way, without scaring them, sooner or later they will learn not to fear us. Wolves are highly cultural animals. They live in packs and learn from each other. A wolf that survives a shooting learns to be afraid of people and passes on his fear to the rest of the pack. The irony is that since shooting wolves was banned in Italy, people are poisoning them instead. Poisoning does not allow for learning because there don鈥檛 tend to be any survivors. And we have indications that wolves are becoming less shy. You鈥檙e actually more likely to see a wolf in Italy now than you were in 1973, though that is partly because there are more of them.
鈥淚f a wolf came near me I would just kick him in the nose. The more you know wolves, the less you fear them鈥�
Do people fear and persecute them more as their population rises?
There is a province just south of Rome, called Frosinone, where people are now saying that the wolf population has increased enormously. Recently a wolf was killed there, poisoned, and strung from a tree. That is a typical reaction. In a village close to Florence, called Borgo San Lorenzo, wolves have been seen eating out of dog bowls. People there are scared.
Have you ever been afraid of a wolf?
Never. If a wolf came near me I would just kick him in the nose. The more you know wolves, the less you fear them. The true Abruzzo shepherds are not afraid of wolves, and they see them often. I once asked one what he would do if a wolf came near, and he replied in the strong Abruzzo dialect, 鈥淚 would whack him on the head with my stick.鈥�
Where did the fear that inspired Little Red Riding Hood come from?
Wolves are predators and they will attack humans if the conditions are right. We have good historical evidence that wolves killed many people, probably up to the 17th century when guns became widespread. People are easy prey, especially small ones. Most of the victims were young shepherds, and the most shocking stories come from the early Middle Ages. It was then that Europeans started to build villages, and to go out from those villages with their livestock. They came to see nature as a foe. The wolf became the symbol of the hostility of nature in Europe.
Is there anywhere that the wolf is considered a symbol of good?
Yes, many places, especially warrior cultures. In Bhutan, wolves are still considered the army of God sent down to punish sinners. But in general, people鈥檚 feelings about wolves are ambiguous, a mixture of fear and awe due to their efficiency as predators and the similarity of their way of life to that of humans. You can use the same adjectives to describe humans and wolves: social, hierarchical, territorial.
Now that shooting wolves is prohibited in most of Europe and elsewhere, will they begin to attack humans again?
In the last few years a couple of wolf attacks on humans have been reported in North America. Nobody has been seriously hurt, but in one case a child was sleeping in a tent and the wolf grabbed him and pulled him out of his sleeping bag. In dangerous situations the occasional non-lethal shot might be considered.
Don鈥檛 reports of attacks make it difficult to promote a positive image of the wolf?
There is no reason why wolves should not attack humans. The fact that they haven鈥檛 in the last century or two is because human ecology has changed and we now have a very different relationship. I have been protecting wolves all my life, but we need a realistic system in order to co-exist. I鈥檝e written about the need to shoot a few wolves to send a clear message to shepherds and others about where we want to save them. We can鈥檛 save them everywhere. We need a zoning system, so that people can plan their activities accordingly, be it tourism or livestock farming.
Have you persuaded others of the need for such a system?
The system has been adopted in many countries in Europe and North America. Many people are convinced this is the best way forward for wolf-human co-existence, but the conservation NGOs are generally against it. They are afraid that allowing the shooting of wolves again would increase the threat to their survival. But that鈥檚 not the case, as long as wolf removal is based on sound biological data.
What would you like to achieve before you retire?
I would like to see something that will never happen, which is that humans and wolves find a stable way to co-exist. The closest to that, though still far from being stable, is in Sweden. The Swedes have a very interesting collaboration between biologists and politicians. The scientists are well-funded and the politicians are well-informed, so decisions are based on solid data. Their wolves are fully protected. Still, wolves cross boundaries and national strategies aren鈥檛 good enough. My dream is to have stronger direction from the European Union, and we are getting closer to that. For the first time the EU is considering drafting conservation strategies based on wolf populations, not countries.
What does the wolf symbolise for you?
What I like most about the wolf is its flexibility. Being adaptable has also been my personal philosophy. I have always tried to be equally at home under a bridge or in a five star hotel; in the middle of the desert or in the heart of Manhattan. Wolves are great at that, much better than me.
