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The “Last Wolf”

Less than three kilometers from my home stands a peculiar monument. To get there, one need only walk along a path that starts where two streams meet and ascends gently through a small stand of forest. Just at the tree line, where the sloping grasslands meet a border formed of ash, birch, beech, and oak, there stands a massive rock upon which a brass plate is mounted.

The plate reads:

An dieser stelle wurde am 24 April 1892 durch Herren Edward Wolff aus Luxemburg der letze Wolf auf Luxemburgischen boden erlegt.

(English: At this place, on the 24th of April 1892, Mr. Edward Wolff from Luxembourg killed the last wolf in Luxembourg.)

The sign also states at the bottom that it was erected by the St. Hubert Club, a hunting society named for the Catholic saint of hunting.

Wolves are fascinating animals, one of the few in our modern age to still be shrouded in mythic meaning and stories. They appear still in many idioms of our speech (“a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” “lone wolf,” and “hungry like a wolf,” among many others) and even as a verb (“he wolfed down that steak”), and form the core of many surviving fables (“the boy who cried wolf,” for instance, as well as the countless stories about werewolves in Europe). Perhaps no other animal exists so strongly in our speech and consciousness while simultaneously being pushed further and further towards the edge of extinction.

For most of human existence, we have engaged in relationships with small herds of animals, “domesticating” them (bringing them within the realm of the domus, that is, home), raising, caring for them, feeding them or guiding them to food, and protecting them from predators such as wolves. Sheep and goats, for example, are thought to have been domesticated some 10,500 years ago at roughly the same time. Cows (originally an animal called the aurochs) were domesticated later, between 8000 and 10,000 years ago, and chickens even more recently. (1)

Domesticating animals is a slow process, and one that changes both the animal and the humans who domesticate it. Animals who become domesticated begin to rely on their humans the same way that the humans rely on them. Domesticated cows, for instance, become less aggressive than their wild counterparts, meaning they must rely on humans for safety against predators. For the human, the steady and reliable source of food (milk or meat) that the cow gives shapes their activities and way of thinking about the world. They begin to settle in place, and have more time for contemplation and to build, and also begin to include the animals they raise as part of their relationship to place.

Wolves have always represented a threat to that relationship, as well as a threat to both humans and other animals. Wolves are deeply intelligent and stealthy hunters, and except in the first two months after a female has given birth, typically hunt in mated pairs or even packs. (2)

Wolves can make very short work of animals, often killing more animals than they can immediately eat. This isn’t “greed,” but rather a kind of future planning, since wolves (like other canines, and also carrion birds) can eat rotting flesh without becoming sick. Especially during the winter—when the corpse of the animals they kill freeze—wolves have been known to return to the same animal to eat weeks later.

While fascinating to us perhaps, the hunting ability and habits of wolves have always been a source of fear and frustration for humans. A family keeping a small herd of sheep could lose them all to just one pair of wolves, a catastrophe if they were relying on those animals for wool, milk (preserved as cheese), and food to get them through a cold winter.

Apex Predators and Keystone Species

The wolf, then, has always been a bane to humans, at least as far as our ability to eat has been concerned. Yet at the very same time, the wolf has also been the lynchpin of natural balance in the places they roam, ensuring in a different way that humans can survive at all.

Wolves are what are called “apex predators,” which is a crucial position in any ecosystem. An apex predator—which is classified by biologists as a “keystone species”—exerts a regulating and balancing effect on the ecosystem of which they are a part.

To be an apex predator, an animal must have no other natural predators and be at the “top of the food chain.” Wolves have no natural predators, meaning that nothing kills and eats them. They, on the other hand, eat animals which eat other things: for instance, herbivores such as deer which eat grasses and leaves; or omnivores such as boar which eat plants and animals; and other carnivores, such as snakes and other predators like lynx.

Being at the apex of the food chain means that a wolf’s presence determines the behaviors and survivability of all other parts of the ecosystem, including plants. For example, by eating deer and other herbivores, wolves have a positive effect on the growth and survival of forests. Herbivores will strip a forest or field bare of saplings and other fragile new plants, and eventually over-consume their own environment and die of starvation. By reducing the population of such herbivores, wolves ensure both that plant life can continue to grow and expand, while also preventing starvation crises in the plant-eaters they hunt.

Wolves also have a beneficial relationship not just to plants but also to other animals, insects, birds, and plants. When a wolf kills a large animal, they rarely are able to eat all of the beast, leaving what is left for smaller beings who themselves cannot hunt such animals. In fact, a wolf-kill is a massive feast—birds, rodents, insects, and other mammals all soon arrive to dine at the table the wolf has laid out for them. Their digestion and subsequent defecation of the wolf’s prey then feeds the earth below them and the plants which need those nutrients.

This relationship isn’t just beneficial, but also sometimes even mutual. Ravens and their kin learn quickly that the presence of a wolf means eventual food for them, and will often fly and caw around potential prey. Wolves in turn learn to hunt where the ravens gather, using their presence as a guide to animals they might not have easily found otherwise.

So, while to humans the wolf can seem a nuisance and competitor, to the rest of nature, the wolf is the key to their long-term survival, because they balance and regulate the entire system.

They even regulate themselves. Wolves have a particular ability to respond to population and food pressure by limiting their own reproduction. That is, they will have less pups and even kill off other wolves (including their own offspring, as well as members of rival packs) when the pressure they are putting on the ecosystem starts to move from beneficial to destructive. (3)

Extinctions

The wolf in many ways stands as the opposite of what modern humans do to the ecosystems we live within. As I write this, I am watching a small herd of dairy cattle graze on the meadows behind my home. Those meadows, centuries ago, were once great forests full of ancient oaks. Early Christian missionaries who traveled through this land to convert the pagan Celtic peoples that lived here complained of the forests being so thick that they blotted out the sun, yet now there are very few dense forests left.

All but a few hundred of the oldest oaks in this land were felled to build churches and large city houses, or floated down river to be used for the building of ships for commerce and conquest. The land they cleared became grazing land for cattle, whose constant hunger prevents seedlings from the remaining trees sprouting up into forests again.

It was because of these cattle that Edward Wolff killed the last wolf of Luxembourg. That wolf, and its deceased kin, threatened the herds here, herds of cattle which mean wealth to their owners

It’s doubtful that Mr. Wolff, or anyone else at that time, knew the wolf he had killed was the last. In fact, the monument built to commemorate the event wasn’t raised at that spot until four decades later, forty years during which no one had seen wolves nor signs of their presence again.

The same no doubt was the case in other lands where the wolves were killed off, just as it was for the last ancestor of these cattle, the aurochs. That animal, a larger and hairier version of an ox, went extinct in most of Europe in the middle ages but survived in the thick forests of what is now Poland until 1627, the year the last reported sighting of the animal occurred.4

Extinction events such as these were rare for most of human history, partially because there were never enough humans to completely exterminate all members of a species. Towards the beginning of the 1600’s in Europe, however, such events occurred even more frequently. While in Britain and Ireland bears and lynx went extinct sometime in the 700’s, they were both eradicated from much of Europe in the 1800’s. They have begun to come back, but other animals, however, are gone for good. Several species of bison (called wisent) have gone extinct in the last century, as well as a type of elk, several species of ibex (mountain goats), hares, mice, and even a kind of European tiger (the Caspian tiger).

Over the last 100 years alone, 543 species of terrestrial vertebrates (reptiles, birds, and mammals) have gone extinct worldwide, a rate of disappearance that would have historically occurred over a period of 10,000 years. That is, the rate of extinction is occurring one thousand times faster for such beings now.

This increase is due primarily to human activity and expansion. As we take up more and more space each year, cutting down forests and fields, damming, diverting, and even draining rivers, and laying down concrete and asphalt across the earth for our cars and cities, there is less and less space for other beings to survive.

This is not the only cause of these deaths, either. The toxic poisons our modern industrial production releases kills off insects, fish, and birds at alarming rates, and of course in some cases we have hunted them to extinction.

Industrial “Food” Production

The relationship we have in the modern age to the animal world, just like our relationship to the body, to land, and to natural rhythms of time, is one of alienation. Especially for people who live in cities, these other beings which live on the earth with us are rarely seen except in digital representation.

A place this alienation occurs particularly is with the animals we eat. Those who live in cities rarely ever encounter a cow or chicken except on their dinner plates, and thus it becomes easy for us to divorce the living being from the flesh we consume. This alienation is especially made more profound through industrial food manufacture and production, where often the flesh of those beings is processed by machines into forms that would be unrecognizable to people even a hundred years ago.

The way those animals are raised would be even more unrecognizable. Especially in the United States, cow, pigs, and chickens live in settings that look much more like factories than the pastoral landscapes humans raised them in ever since they were domesticated.

Rather than meadows where they can graze, they are often kept in small pens without much room to move. Hens often are kept in “battery” conditions, in which they are stuck in rows of cages to “discharge” (the old meaning of battery, as in an “artillery discharge”) their eggs onto conveyer belts. From there, the eggs are either processed for sale or, if fertilized, incubated. Male chicks that hatch are usually crushed to death and ground up in machines, while the females are then allowed to grow larger and put into cages just as their mothers were, either to lay more eggs as if they were machines or to be killed for meat.

Such details often make those who learn of this treatment choose to avoid meat or animal foods (such as milk and eggs) completely, an understandable decision. Others might try to buy “ethically-raised” meats instead, which in cities often cost prohibitively more than the factory-farmed versions and are not always truly different.

Where I live, most of the animal foods that are available are raised in conditions closer to pre-modern times. As I mentioned, the cows behind my house graze on open pasture, and they are milked in a small dairy nearby. The beef and pork available in the butchers here is from cows and pigs raised out of doors, living on open land. Most of the eggs I consume come from our neighbors, whose hens roam their very large backyard with impunity.5

From my experience being this close to what I eat, I have found that my relationship both to food and the animals I eat for food has changed. When I am in the kitchen cooking beef for dinner, my eyes are often glancing out upon animals from which beef comes. The same goes for when I drink milk or eat cheese, just as I often hear the nearby hens in the morning when I eat eggs for breakfast.

Thus, these animals are constantly in my consciousness, rather than being separated from the “products” of their existence that I consume. This fact makes me more likely to eat some things (I eat more dairy, beef, and eggs than I did when I lived in cities), but also less likely to eat other things (for instance, I eat less pork than I did before because there are no pigs nearby). It also means I rarely ever eat “processed” meats, since they feel too alienating to me now (and anyway never taste as good.)

From kin, to servant, to product

The modern idea of an animal being a “product” is the core of the modern alienation of humans from the animal world, as well as our alienation from the plant world. This idea has its roots in capitalism and the mechanistic worldview, but there is a core ideological problem that it addresses which we must look at if we are to understand the pagan and animist worldview again.

That problem is that of cannibalism.

Something that many anthropologists who have worked to understand animist views of the world have repeatedly noticed is that such peoples see all living non-human things as kin, as ancestors, and as inspirited beings. The deer that is hunted for food is not just an animal separate from humans, but rather a being related to them. The same is said for plants, who often are seen as “mothers” or “fathers,” beings with familial and parental roles in relationship to humans.

To kill and eat such a relative, then, is to kill and eat a part of your family, something that is otherwise forbidden and considered a profound crime when done to humans. So, for animist, pagan peoples, a sacred taboo needed constantly to be violated just to survive.

For such peoples, the response to this violation was not to pretend that animals and plants were somehow “less” than humans or were created to serve (as with the monotheist solution, in which a singular god declares he has made all the world for the use of humans), but rather to be in constant reciprocal relationship with those beings.

Rituals of gratitude and placation were performed for the animals that were killed: sometimes as simple as a prayer of thanks, sometimes much more elaborate. These rituals also manifested and maintained a commitment of obligation to these other beings, a declaration or acknowledgment of responsibility to the plants and animals that humans relied upon.

To take the life of a deer or a tree, then, was to enter into a relationship where the human became responsible for making sure other deer and other trees thrived. It also meant a responsibility to honor the life of the being killed, by using the body of a tree or a deer in a way that did not insult the being whose life was taken.

We can see immediately how much this worldview inherently stands against the overt destruction of nature. If the life of each tree in a forest that is felled needs to be honored—both in the act of killing and also in the uses of those trees—than cutting down an entire forest or over-hunting an animal so that it risks extinction is an impossible thing to justify.

Such a worldview also puts the rest of the living world always in the consciousness of the humans who rely upon them. Since they are family, and since they are owed obligation because their human kin have killed them, humans must ensure they are healthy, safe, and able to survive.

This kind of relationship then is much closer to the wolf’s relationship to the ecosystem than that of our current relationship. The wolf takes life, yes, but by doing so increases the life of others and even ensures the health and survival of the animal herds which it has culled. The wolf also self-regulates, controlling its own reproductive habits when it is in danger of taking too much from the ecosystem and thus harming everything, including wolves themselves.6

The Great Oak

In most discussions about pagan and animist relationship to the natural world, the focus is often on plants, on their healing properties and uses. That is why I have instead started with animals and animist relationships to them as kin. Starting there instead, we can then look at the plant world not as a storehouse of healing and magical ingredients but instead as a living world to which we have the same obligation as we do to animals.

Outside my window stands an ancient oak, four times the height of the two-story house in which I am living. It has lived likely at least 400 years, possibly up to 600, and it’s rare to see such an oak of its size and age where I live.

The word Druid is thought to come from doire, an old gaelic word that meant both oak and wisdom. It isn’t too difficult to understand why a group of nature priests would be associated with such a tree, since they stand as a keystone of many ecosystems the same way that a wolf does.

An ancient oak drops thousands of acorns every year, an abundant source of food for animals and birds that remains viable throughout the winter when no other food is available. Thus, a single oak stands like a kind of massive village bazaar, where crows, ravens, wild boars, squirrels, woodpeckers, mice, and many other beings congregate to find food. Many of those same beings make their homes in the massive branches of an oak, which are strong and whose leaves remain longer in the autumn than many other trees.

As one of the strongest and tallest trees that grow in any forest, oaks also help protect other trees from high winds and storms. The ancient European association of oaks with gods of thunder (Thor, for example) is immediately obvious when one considers that oaks are not only more likely to be hit by lightning rather than the shorter and shorter-living other species of trees, but are also more likely to survive such a strike.

Because the oak is so vital to the life of everything around it, to cut down an oak in pagan societies was an act much more profound than to cut down other such trees. Even an oak of average age would have been known not just by a person’s grandparents, but by their grandparents’ grandparents. That is, an oak was a being that had spanned generations and even entire societies and civilizations, something known to your ancestors and thus a door (another root word associated with the word Druid) connecting the past and the present.

This is why oaks were often put to sacred use when they fell or were killed. A lightning-struck oak became a ritual site for Celtic and Germanic peoples, often also becoming the place where laws and tribal decisions were made and discussed. The wood from felled oaks was used for shrines and temples, a ritual use continued by the later Catholic church in the construction of cathedrals.

With the forced conversions of people to Christian monotheism, oaks lost much of their sacred sense and became used more often for houses. This was not an immediate process, however, especially in Frankish and other Germanic lands. Missionaries were ordered to cut down the Dunor’s Oaks (the sacred oak trees dedicated to Thor) in order to force the conversion of peoples, the same way the Christians destroyed indigenous shrines, temples, and sacred sites throughout Africa and the Americas.

Ancient oaks are now quite rare in Europe, not just because of their uses in houses7 but later in their use in the construction of ships. Ireland and Scotland, two lands renowned for their long expanses of grassy hills, were once covered in such oaks which were felled to build the ships of imperial conquest. Many European countries now have a registry of their oldest oaks to protect them, since there are so few left. (8)

Treating oaks as a product rather than sacred kin has led to even more problems than just the absence of ancient trees. The demand for oak wood that could no longer be sated by local oaks led to felling of mediterranean oaks, especially from Turkey. With those oaks came the eggs of a particular caterpillar, the Oak Processionary Spinner, which is now a yearly plague from which I have personally suffered.

The Oak Processionary Spinner is a moth. When they are caterpillars, they ‘process’ (as in “procession”) in long lines from one oak to the next, feeding off the leaves before spinning their cocoons. In their native lands, the Oak Processionary Spinner is preyed upon by a few species of birds and a beetle which lives entirely off of such caterpillars, but none of these beings can survive so far north. Thus, the caterpillars have no predator to keep them in check, and are able to quickly overtake an entire forest.

Here in the Ardennes, where the problem is the worst, in the months of June, July, and August we know to avoid the forests, a really bitter reality for someone who practices druidry. The reason is that the Oak Processionary Spinner is covered in thousands of tiny hairs which break off easily in the wind and can float long distances. These hairs contain a toxin which, when it touches the skin of a human or animal, can cause a potentially fatal allergic reaction. Worse, the hairs are easily inhaled, causing an even faster reaction that can stop a person’s ability to breathe within minutes.

Last year, three Oak Processionary Spinners landed on my neck while I was hiking in the woods. Within hours, my entire body was covered in hives. My skin and body felt like it was on fire, and even with emergency medications I suffered pain for the ten days after they touched me.

Just as the absence of the wolf in many places has put entire ecosystems out of balance, our changed relationship to the oak—no longer kin but now merely product—has created a problem for which there is no solution that will not cause more harm. Natural predators of the Oak Processionary Spinner cannot survive this far north, and no pesticides exist that will not also kill off native insects and the birds that eat them. Thus, oaks become further endangered (several nearby oaks have been killed by them) and humans suffer directly.

These are the inevitable consequences of a worldview in which plants and animals are not seen as kin but rather as external, alienated ‘products’ or problems to be dealt with. The much larger consequence, of course, is global climate change, caused by our relentless thirst for energy to power our devices, fuel our machines, and produce our products. In our ravenous consumption we have destroyed the keystones of many ecosystems, chased out the apex predators and felled the sacred trees, leaving less and less space for our kin to survive.

This ultimately endangers us, too, but this seems besides the point. Often times the only way to convince modern people that something is a problem is to show that it affects them, yet this only reproduces the imbalanced relationship we have to the rest of the world. The animist, pagan relationship saw everything as mutual relation and obligation, whereas this way of thinking about the world is inherently selfish and human-centric.

Becoming Kin Again

I suspect the only way out of these crises we have created is to return to this pagan sense of relationship. Many environmentalists have come to the conclusion that in fact none of the damage that is already done can be undone, and I suspect they are right. That being said, it is still possible to return to that pagan kinship now to avoid creating even more crises, and perhaps that crises we’ve already caused will be necessary guides for that return.

Returning to that relationship starts with a return to relationship with pagan time, with the land, and with the body. When we see time as natural rhythms rather than machine logic, this teaches us to look for other natural rhythms. When we understand the land as being part of us while also having its own character and spirit that manifests through us, we learn to hear what it needs and wants, not just what humans need and want. When we become bodies again, rather than people with bodies, we learn to see the rest of the living world as also body, rather than alienated ideas and symbols

One of the easiest ways after this to return to this sense of kinship with plants and animals is to just begin treating them like kin. Gardening is a great way to build this kind of relationship, because in gardening you enter into a reciprocal relationship with the plants you tend. Growing simple plants like herbs and lettuces can help bring to consciousness the relationship between what the plant needs, what it gives you, and what you give it.

Besides merely tasting much better, it is much more difficult to treat a plant as a “product” when you have grown it yourself rather than bought it at a store. Seeding it, watering it, fertilizing it, and caring for it up to the point that it dies is being in relationship with it in a way that would be much more recognizable to our pagan ancestors than throwing it into a shopping cart.

A particularly profound way to build the sense of reciprocity with the plants you grow is to compost. Composting turns ‘waste’ (food scraps, old paper, etc) into rich soil which feeds the life of new plants in a way chemical fertilizers only mimic. While not always an option for those who live in cities or apartments, a small composting bin can create what gardeners often call “black gold” in a short matter of months. Also, by using the leftover food scraps towards a purpose, this can change your relationship to food itself, giving you a sense of how much you consume and how much less needs to be used.

Building this kinship relationship to animals can include raising chickens or other animals, but something as simple as caring for a pet does the same thing. Pets are already seen as family members for most people, and so this is a great starting place to learn to extend that sense of kinship outwards to other animals, as well.

One thing that I personally found helpful while living in a city in a home where I could not have pets, was to give attention to specific animals on my walks through the city. I quickly developed a relationship to crows, one both I and my best friend became known for because we were often followed by groups of them wherever we went.

This happened because we began feeding him. He had first noticed that they had an affinity for raw peanuts still in the shell, a food they could grab with their beaks and easily fly away with, and also a food that they could get at with less competition (neither the pigeons nor gulls they competed with could easily open the shells).

As is quite renowned, crows and other corvids (magpies, ravens, rooks, and jays) are deeply intelligent and have a peculiarly keen memory for human faces. They are also able to communicate this knowledge to others, so that a human who attacks a crow will later find themselves harassed other crows. The same occurs when a human is kind to them—they spread the word quite quickly. So, for years, I would know when my best friend was about to arrive at my house because I would hear the crows who accompanied him, just as he would hear them as I approached his home. (9)

This kinds of relationship does not require you to have a special affinity or magical trait, only a consistent act of conscious attention. As with looking at the moon, merely including the animal world as something you consider as part of your world opens up these kinds of relationships quite quickly. I have a friend for whom bees seem to be particularly fond, landing on her and never stinging her, while ignoring all the other humans around her. She has always liked bees, always tried to save them when she sees them in trouble, always avoided killing them whenever possible, and they seem to recognize her as kin just as she recognizes them as kin.

While the horrible destruction of climate change resulting from how we have treated the environment is a ready source of despair, I think of her relationship to bees, my relationship to ravens and crows, and the strong relationship many people I admire have to other plants and animals and cannot be depressed for very long. It’s of course urgent that we return to this pagan way of relating to our kin, but most of all it’s both utterly possible and a source of profound joy available to all.

Rhyd Wildermuth

Rhyd is a druid, a theorist, and a writer. He is the director of publishing for Ritona a.s.b.l. //Gods&Radicals Press. He lives in the Ardennes and writes at From The Forests of Arduinna.

NOTES

There is quite a lot of scientific debate about this, actually, since it doesn’t appear chickens were domesticated for eggs until only a few thousand years ago. Before that, they had ritual significance to many peoples and were used as sacrifice and in sacred “cock-fighting” rituals.
Groups are typically between 2 to six wolves, with the “dominant” two being the parents. However, in places where there is a lot of prey available, packs can sometimes be up to 30 wolves, not all related.
This sort of behavior—while unseemly to many moderns—can be seen easily in “outdoor” cats and dogs also, as well as rats and other rodents who are kept in small cages. A mother who senses she will be unable to feed her entire litter of kittens or pups may kill some of the weakest or even an entire litter, rather than letting them all starve.
The King of Poland had a ceremonial drinking horn made from that auroch’s horn, which still exists.
Such a situation is not available to most people in cities, nor even all people living in rural areas
Questions of population control for humans are extremely fraught. It should be noted that for wolves and other animals which self-regulate, it is the mothers who often make those decisions. Giving more control to human women over their own reproductive choices is probably the only way to ensure any decisions about population are made in freedom, rather than through authoritarian pressure (as in China).
I’ve been in many, many houses and apartments built over 500 years ago, and the oak beams which held them up when they were built still hold them up now.
When the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burned down, a crisis ensued because there were no known unprotected oaks of the needed size to rebuild it.
There are many, many stories in newspapers about corvids “returning the favor” to people who give them food, leaving shiny objects—including found jewelry and coins—at the homes and windowsills of people who feed them.

Being Pagan: Of Oak and Wolf