'Oh! But, grandmother,
what a terrible big mouth you have!'
'All the better to eat you with!'
The fables we hear from childhood—from ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ to ‘The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids’—tend to demonize the wolf.
These representations probably stemmed from a genuine risk of wolf attacks, and served to warn children not to wander into the forests where the predators lived.
The fear persisted into adulthood and, in European cultures, led to the large-scale extermination of the species. Britain and Ireland, where bounties were put on their heads, saw wolves disappear as much as four centuries ago; the last wolf in Scotland was apparently killed in 1743. They have also been driven to near extinction in most European countries over the last century.
In contrast, wolves figured prominently in the mythology of nearly all Native American tribes, who considered it ‘good medicine’ and associated it with the qualities of courage, strength, loyalty and success at hunting.
North American tribes consider wolves, like bears, to be closely related to humans, and the origin stories of some tribes on the northwest coast, such as the Quileute and the Kwakiutl, tell of their first ancestors being transformed from wolves into men.
In Shoshone mythology, the wolf plays the role of the god of creation, while for the Anishinabe a vulpine (fox-like) character is the brother and true friend of the culture hero. Among the Pueblo tribes, wolves are considered one of the six directional guardians. Zunis carve stone wolf fetishes for protection and ascribe to them healing and hunting powers.
However, once Europeans colonized the Americas, the wolves were driven into near extinction in most of their former ranges, and continue to be highly managed and deeply feared.
In India, wolves did not feature much in folklore, nor did they come with the cultural baggage of being ‘evil’. When a wolf does appear in fable, as in the ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’ in the Panchatantra, it is only an incidental character actor in a story designed to warn against the danger of lying.
It was the British administration that, in the 19th century, began maintaining records of wolf attacks in India, though it is not clear whether there was an on-ground reason for this or whether it was just a transplant of the attitudes and beliefs prevailing among Europeans.
This snapshot (Mahesh Rangarajan et al, 2006) provides a perspective:
In 1875, more people were killed by wolves in North India than tigers. In 1876, in the Northwest provinces (current state of UP), as many as 721 lives were lost to wolves and in turn, 2825 wolves were slain for bounties. In the same year in Bihar, 185 recorded deaths occurred around Patna. In 1878, 624 people were killed in the current state of UP.
In Hazaribagh, Bihar, 115 children were killed between 1910–1915. The Britishers classified the wolf as vermin, and there was a wholesale slaughter of the animal.
As they had done in their native land, the British in India placed a bounty on the head of the wolf. As per Rangarajan:
“The British came to the Indian subcontinent with a long history of systematic campaigns to exterminate carnivores in the British Isle. The elimination of wolves in England by 1500 had given people and stock a degree of physical security. Successive governments and landowners provided rewards for killing wolves. In 17th century Ireland, the reward for a wild wolf was three pounds, comparable to that offered for the head of a rebel. This led to the extinction of the wolf in Ireland by 1770. The British thus had a historical legacy of state campaigns to eliminate large predators. This was in complete contrast to the Indian experience.”
British-era records indicate that over 2,00,000 wolves were exterminated in India during the fifty-year period 1875- to 1925 (Caveat: the records don’t distinguish between wolves and jackals and maybe even foxes or Asiatic wild dogs).
This is not to suggest that wolves have not been a problem. Again, Rangarajan provides context:
In more recent times between 1980 – 1986 , in Hazaribagh, Bihar, 122 people were killed and 100 injured. Between April 1989 to March 1995, wolves killed 92 people in southern Bihar, accounting for 23% of 390 large mammal attacks on humans in the area at that time. People later found out that five wolf packs were responsible for creating problems in 63 villages.
As recent as 1996-1997, during a 2-year period in Uttar Pradesh, wolves killed or seriously injured 74 humans, mostly children under the age of 10 years.
However, no wolf attacks have been reported in India since 2000 — and even given the above history of probable conflict with wolves, Indian attitudes have been far more tolerant than in England and Europe.
Ironically, Rudyard Kipling—whose White Man’s Burden and other writings led to George Orwell labeling him the “prophet of British imperialism” —imbibed not the British, but the Indian, attitude towards wolves. In his classic Jungle Book, which he serialized in 1900, Akela the lone wolf adopts and mentors Mowgli, and protects him from Shere Khan.
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Urban India almost never encounters the wolf. In rural areas, nocturnal raids by wolves and foxes threaten domesticated animals, but do not pose a direct danger to human lives. Thus, rural India is more preoccupied with tigers, leopards and elephants, all of which are considered to pose greater dangers to human life.
The Wolf, with its long legs, large feet and narrow but deep chest, is engineered to roam. Keen senses, powerful jaws armed with large canine teeth, and the ability to pursue prey at speeds up to 60 km per hour equip the wolf for its predatory way of life.
They survive well as lone rangers, but also hunt in packs. “For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack,” Kipling wrote in his poem The Law For The Wolves.
The grey wolf had a larger distribution than any other land mammal, once ranging over all of North America from Alaska and Arctic Canada southward to central Mexico and throughout Europe and Asia above 20° N latitude.
Wolves inhabited a wide variety of habitats, except tropical forests and the most arid deserts. They were domesticated several thousand years ago, and selective breeding has produced today’s domestic dogs, man’s favorite companion.
Wolves are where the sheep are.
The sheep that provide humans with food, wool and manure equally provide predators with an important source of food.
This is not specific just to central India. In the Himalayas, Tibetan wolves share space with nomadic pastoralists. Across Europe, Central and South Asia and in the grasslands of Mongolia, wolves, sheep and pastoralist communities have shared the same space for centuries.
Y V Jhala of the Wildlife Institute of India has studied the Indian wolf for most of his professional life. For his PhD thesis, the noted wildlife expert analyzed wolf scat (poop) from various places, with startling results: except for a few packs of wolves living in protected areas, most wolves feed entirely on livestock, mainly sheep and goats.
Jhala’s research also pinpointed the reason. A pack of up to four wolves requires approximately 75 square km of territory for survival. India’s total grasslands, including the nature reserves of the Deccan, add up to less than 2000 square km.
The math is simple: India’s grasslands cannot support more than 130-150 wolves, whereas official estimates put the wolf population between 2000-3000. Thus, over 90 per cent of wolves exist outside wildlife parks, and owe their existence to livestock and to the cultural tolerance of shepherding communities.
This sets up a dichotomy where the pastoral communities, who stand to lose their livestock, see wolves as necessary to their ecosystems. However, since much of wildlife management and conservation ideas have been adopted from the west, the managers and wildlife conservation community, see grazing as a threat to the ecosystem and people working for pastoralists see wolves as a threat. Most often none of the parties benefit.
To understand this, it is necessary to first realize that for the conservation community, ‘livestock’ and ‘grazing’ are bad words. They argue that nature should be allowed to grow wild—a line of thinking, which might apply for rainforests and other habitats, that is at its core shortsighted and non-adaptive.
In grassland ecosystems, grazing by livestock keeps woody growth in check and thus allows specific kinds of floral varieties to thrive. This biodiversity is in turn needed for the survival of distinct wildlife species—not just the wolf, but also other large grassland-dependent species such as blackbuck, chinkara and the Great Indian Bustard, all of which thrive in grazed landscapes.
Thus the symbiosis: The wolf, as apex predator of the grassland, needs the sheep; the sheep need the grass to graze on; various species need grazed grasslands to thrive in.
Unlike the wildlife conservation community, the pastoralist understands this inter-relationship, and this understanding informs his benevolent attitude to the wolf that, he claims, is actually beneficial to sheep rearing.
To understand the seeming contradiction, it is necessary to look beyond simple profit-and-loss economic models. Pastoral communities such as the Dhangars believe that the lambs lifted by predatory wolves are an offering to the gods; they argue that the proximity of wolves ensures that they maintain a stricter vigil and take better care of their flock.
The Dhangars have a folklore that is handed down through the generations:
“Once upon a time there were 3 brothers. And when it came to sharing their livestock, one of them was betrayed by the other two out of greed. The betrayed one cursed the other two brothers to roam these lands forever, and took to the forests. We are those roaming the world, and he shadows us in the form of a wolf. He keeps coming back in his wolf skin to take his share and remind us of our greed. After all, the wolf is our own brother. How can we kill or even hurt him?.” (Krupakar and Senani)
This speaks to the deep-rooted connection between the pastoralist and the wolf—a connection rooted in practicality and decorated with story and superstition. “A wolf that enters the flock from one side and exits at the other heralds good luck and health of the flock, especially if sighted on Sundays” says Mahendra, the Dhangar from Dhawalapuri. “And the health of the flock means wealth for us.”
The pastoralist’s relationship with the wolf is a bit like our relationship with roads. We know people get killed in accidents, yet the benefits accruing from roads far outweigh the dangers. Thus, we who use roads on a daily basis understand its risks and take the necessary precautions.
A recent survey indicates that pastoralists lose more sheep to diseases and accidents than they do to the wolves. To Mahendra, this finding makes sense—the size of their flocks is diminishing, he says, but wolves have nothing to do with it.
He attributes the decline to an increase in land brought under cultivation, particularly plantations since once again since the times of the British rule in India, any land that did not produce timber was considered a ‘wasteland’. And this turn reduces the grassland areas. Alongside this, he says, there is industrialization, which further depletes the land available to sheep-rearing communities. For instance, the new Special Economic Zone that has come up along their traditional migratory route has a greater impact on the Dhangars’ flocks than a hundred wolves put together.
In the face of such adversities, pastoral communities change their traditional migratory routes, shrink their flocks, alter the composition of the breed, and even graze their flock on crop residue. Increasingly, the life of the pastoralist, like that of the wolf, is a constant battle for the remnants of once-vast grasslands.
Shepherds and wildlife both require large tracts of land that are not fragmented by agriculture and industry, particularly the latter. The pastoralist and the wolf have coexisted in the past and can continue their symbiotic relationship into the future, provided human predation in the guise of development—literally, the wolf in sheep’s clothing—does not lay waste to the land forever.
There is a Maharashtrian ovi, a folk poem, which best symbolizes the relationship between pastoralist and wolf:
I wander under the clear blue sky
Here in my solitude I ponder deep
Where the valleys and hillocks lie
I am amongst my goat and sheep
And once my herd is foraging
Amidst the shades of yellow & green
I am aware of my surroundings
The swaying grass creates a radiant screen
I see the pretty tiny flowers
And numerous bees and insects buzz by
With the wind the grass sways to approve
As pollinators they are a staunch ally
A snake slithers, an eagle hovers
A chinkara sprints, a hare nibbles
The grassland that gives them food and shelter
Is also full of enigma & riddles!
Something sends my dogs on an alert
I don’t see anything but they have never lied
Suddenly his presence is felt all around
Yes, my friend, the wolf has arrived
I covered long distances in search of pastures
Overcame highways and cities on the way
As the family head I had to provide their needs
For us both, me and wolf, it was the same order of the day
In the day he will stay over his old den
When night falls he will kill and make a run
He has a family to feed too but he is not greedy
From many a sheep he needs just the one
As I start back to my hut humming a song
No ovi is complete without his mention
He keeps us on our feet, this apex predator
The grassland is complete with his inception
(- Mandar Datar, ?)
The Dhangars, nomads by tradition and inclination, empathize with the free spirit and intelligence of the wolf—and there is a lesson, a fundamental belief, in their coexistence, in the way they both cling to the last of the grasslands:
A belief in brotherhood, in the essential interconnectedness of man and nature.
