S5E8: Wolf Rewilding - Rethinking Risk and Coexistence

Virginia tells us how grey wolves are reclaiming territories across Europe and North America through a process known as auto-rewilding—autonomously returning to lands from which humans once drove them out. This powerful expression of nonhuman agency challenges our conventional approach to wildlife management and invites us to reconsider what coexistence means in the Anthropocene.

Recorded: 22 November 2023 

 Featured: 

• S6E8: Re-Animalization with Krithika Srinivasan on The Animal Turn
• Re-animalising wellbeing: Multispecies justice after development by Krithika Srinivasan
• Respecting Nature’s Autonomy in Relationship with Humanity by Ned Hettinger

Virginia Thomas is an environmental social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. She is interested in people’s interactions with their environment and with other animals. Virginia’s work explores the social and ethical questions in human-animal relationships. She is currently a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘From Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals’ which examines the drivers and consequences of animal feeding. This leads on from her previous research which examined human-animal relations in the media (as part of zoonotic disease framing) and in rewilding projects (in relation to biopolitics and human-animal coexistence). You can connect with Virginia via Twitter (@ArbitrioHumano).

Credits:

• Claudia Hirtenfelder, executive producer, editor and co-host 
• Virginia Thomas, script write, narrator and co-host
• Rebecca Shen, content producer and designer (logo and episode artwork)
• Gordon Clarke, bed music composer
• Sound clips taken from: BBC Sound Effects, We Animals Media, NBC News Story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PbsuGGWUrM 
• Learn more about the team here. 

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A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Animals and Politics
• 1:37 Grey Wolves and Auto-Rewilding
• 4:11 Rethinking Risk Distribution with Wolves
• 6:30 Wolf Mobility and Border Crossing
• 8:40 Changing Our Narrative About Wolves
• 10:26 Discussion on Control and Persecution
• 12:09 Episode Conclusion

Transcript

Siobhan O'Sullivan: 0:01

This is another iRaw podcast. We podcast to make the world a better place for animals.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 0:16

Welcome back to season five of the Animal Highlights, where we're focused on animals and politics. All the content from this season has been extracted from season six of the Animal Turn podcast, which is a season of the same name Animals and Politics. If you listen to the Animal Turn, you'll know that I often bring up this concept time and again. When I spoke to Krithika Sarvasan about this idea of re-animalization, I found it very difficult to kind of get my head around and really grasp what it is. But I think something profound and important is going on there, and I think Virginia did too.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 0:52

So Virginia tried to think a little bit about this idea of re-animalization by also thinking about rewilding efforts. So in this highlight, virginia talks about the auto-rewilding of wolves and how humans can better cohabit with them by reconceptualizing risk and the ways in which risk is distributed. Hello, hello, hello, virginia, welcome back to the Animal Highlight. Hello, good to be here. Welcome back to the Animal Highlight. Hello, good to be here. So this conversation with Krithika was a tough conversation, but it was a really enjoyable conversation.

Virginia Thomas: 1:32

I enjoy reading her work a whole bunch, so I'm curious to hear which animal we're going to be focusing on with regards to re-animalization no-transcript made me think about other than human agency and auto rewilding, and I want to highlight grey wolves as a great example of animals auto rewilding, reintroducing themselves to places where they lived previously but were driven out by humans.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 2:17

Oh, interesting, I actually just saw an article this morning on LinkedIn about killing practices in Poland. Anyway, I'm sorry, you keep going, so it's definitely a hot issue right now, I think.

Virginia Thomas: 2:29

Yeah, and this is the point. Wolves are one of the animals most persecuted by humans. They've faced systematic campaigns to drive them out of regions and even been wiped out of entire countries, as happened in Britain. Wolf persecution went to extraordinary lengths in Britain, to the point that in the 17th century, forests were cut down or burnt in order to hunt down the last wolves. But Britain's by no means the only country where wolves have been persecuted. They've been persecuted everywhere they're seen to conflict with human interests. The US is a good example of where wolves have faced a long and ongoing history of persecution, particularly in cases of farm or wolf livestock conflict.

Virginia Thomas: 3:13

This persecution of wolves is based on the protection-sacrifice logic Krithika mentioned in her discussion with you. According to this logic, wolves are sacrificed to protect humans and human interests. The majority of the risks of coexistence are borne by wolves, while the majority of the benefits are enjoyed by humans. In putting forward her proposal of re-animalization, krithika read a quote that might reimagine this wolf-human relationship. I was really taken by it and I want to read it again. So she says from a vision of a good human life premised upon insulation from the vulnerabilities inherent in living on this planet, we need to examine what it means to live as part of nature, as one among other animals. The focus would be on more equitably distributing the risks of living on earth, so that they are not born primarily by marginal people and nature. So for the remainder of this highlight, I want to talk about how Kritiker's idea of reanimization might apply to the wolves who are reintroducing themselves to regions across Europe and the US, according to reanimalisation, in a world where wolves live alongside humans, people would need to have a greater acceptance of the associated risks and resist the urge to kill wolves to minimise these risks. Such a commitment would reduce the burden of risk faced by wolves and, while it might increase the risk borne by humans it's important to put this in context the threats posed to people by wolves are minimal compared to the threats posed to wolves by people. A report for the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research on wolf attacks on humans found that between 2002 and 2020, only 26 people globally were killed by wolves. Compare this to the thousands of wolves killed each year by humans. Calculating the exact number is extremely difficult, but at least 2,000 wolves are killed every year in Kazakhstan alone.

Virginia Thomas: 5:33

Embracing re-animalization would, however, require us to rethink how we coexist with animals which compete with our interests and conflict with our values, finding a new or renewed way of coexisting. This becomes all the more important when animals return to an area, either through their own or human agency, and their numbers increase because people are unused or unwilling to share space and resources. While auto rewilding is being heralded by some as a valuable expression of other than human agency and as contributing to biodiversity restoration, wolves disregard of human borders is exposing them to heightened risk. We need new ways of approaching the mutual risks of coexistence because, as wolf numbers recover and they start recolonising former territories, human and wolf populations will come into contact more and more. Part of this increased contact is due to wolf mobility. Wolf territories can be extremely large, in some instances hundreds of square miles. Wolves also actively move around their territories, covering around 10 miles a day, and they can travel hundreds of miles when seeking new territory. This mobility means that they often cross political boundaries, like national borders in Europe and state borders in the US, for example. As wolf numbers in Europe recover, wolves are moving into Belgium from neighbouring countries to recolonise their former territory, which has caused concern among farmers who are concerned for their livestock.

Virginia Thomas: 7:13

We might find coexistence with wolves easier if we changed our narrative about them. This would obviously require a huge shift in our collective mindsets from demonisation to appreciation of wolves. In a way, it's surprising that we don't appreciate wolves more In terms of social structures and support. Wolf society is really quite similar to human society. They work collaboratively to hunt and to raise their pups, and they have incredibly complex social structures. This means that while they can be highly competitive with wolves from outside their own packs, prioritising their family unit over everything else, on occasion they can adopt unfamiliar wolves into their pack, building strong, loyal relationships in very similar ways to people. Changing our view of wolves, and indeed of ourselves, through re-animalisation could help us coexist with other animals in the Anthropocene. With this in mind, I'd like to finish with another quote, this time from Ned Hettinger. Restoring to the rural landscape wolves, which might eat our sheep, forces us to change our grazing practices, adds to nature's influence over our lives and lessens our control of the situation. Thus it increases the autonomy of local nature in relation to humanity.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 8:39

Wonderful. I really do think that so much of this is about control and the willingness to concede and release control and stop trying to control everything. And I think the you know your example of wolves is happening. I mean, I was blown away 2000 wolves a year in Kazakhstan, Like I thought wolves were in some critical danger in many places and the idea that you can just be killing 2000 a year and it's not even noteworthy or makes you know every now and then you see like wolf deaths coming up in the news. So obviously it's happening at much larger scales than what we or at least myself, what I'm aware of, but they're 2 000 a year. For how many years? Like how many wolves are we killing in one country?

Virginia Thomas: 9:15

and yeah, we're just so intolerant of other species, and and particularly of species like the wolf, that we're seen as a threat to us, a direct threat to our safety, and then a direct threat to our live, our livelihoods really, and our livestock, which I think. I think we do take to another level with the wolf as well.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 9:40

I mean, we do it with large predators, you see it's interesting though, because as you were talking, I was thinking, you know, this combination of control and intolerance makes me think of rats actually, Because I think when you think about persecuted animals and rats have come up several times in the animal highlight, rats are, I would argue, probably one of the most, if not the most, persecuted animal in terms of like wolves. They also seem to feature a lot in like mythology. They're often associated with disease and risk, but unlike wolves, rats are kind of in cities, and I think maybe contact is part of this as well. Right, you've got control and tolerance and contact, because it seems to be that most of the conflict with wolves is happening at what I guess Haraway would call contact zones or conflict zones, which I know some have called them, which is that interface. You know, raising of sheep, et cetera is an interface, a connection, a meeting point for wolves and humans and of course, also for the sheep themselves.

Virginia Thomas: 10:39

Anyway, I'm going down my own rabbit hole there, but the sharing of risks happens at a whole host of scales, from the city to just across borders, nations, etc well, and and I think your use of contact zones is really interesting and that because that's what auto-rewilding is kind of bringing up is we're coming into contact with animals more, or they're coming into contact with us because they're recolonizing former territory and we've encroached on their habitat so much that they're often finding themselves, if not in cities, at least on, and that idea of cohabiting which Krithika was talking about is really wrapped up in that, I think.

Claudia Hirtenfelder: 11:24

Yeah, because I think it's Dinesh. I could be mistaken, but I think it's Dinesh Wadiwal who calls them conflict zones. You know these spaces because there is a lot of fighting and there's often a lot of violence at these zones, which is quite clear in this case of wolves, but maybe it's a it's. You know, the re-animalization is like a considered attempt to move from a conflict zone to a contact zone where our meeting doesn't have to be this violence and the risks, like you've said, the risks and burdens of of meeting one another should be more evenly distributed but massively complicated issue. I enjoy talking to Krithika. The concept is hard to get around, but I think it's really a valuable one to sit and dwell with. So thank you for giving me something to think of. Thank you so much to Virginia Thomas for being an incredible co-host and to Rebecca Shen for her work on the logo and all the artwork done with the Animal Highlight. The show was edited and produced by myself. This is the Animal Highlight, with me, claudia Hüttenfelder for more great iRule podcasts, visit iRulePodcom.

Siobhan O'Sullivan: 12:49

that's i-r-o-a-r-p-o-dcom.