“Rottweiler slipped his lead near school,” was the first hysterical headline. “Rottweiler on the loose after ESCAPING from owner near Middleton family home,” was another, as Rover, a much-loved 12-year-old pet, roamed a few miles from a village with distant royal connections.
“Armed police were scrambled to track down the beast and a primary school was placed on lockdown,” reported the Sun.
Schoolchildren were told to stay indoors. Pet owners were urged to bring their cats and dogs inside. A police officer was posted outside a primary school gate to make sure the children got into school safely and the gate was secure.
This wasn’t quite the media’s view of real events unfolding in Berkshire on Thursday. It’s all true, except that instead of Rover the rottweiler, the venerable animal roaming free was a wolf called Torak.
Before I take my four-year-old son for a walk in the woods, he often asks: “Are there wolves?” I gently explain that we drove wolves to extinction in Britain many centuries ago and avoid scaring him with statistics. He should be asking about rottweilers, bull terriers or even jack russells: 78 people died of domestic dog bites in the 25 years to 2015 in England and Wales.
In the US, no human deaths were linked to wolves for the entire 20th century, while two deaths have been attributed to wolf attacks this century. In 2016 alone, 31 Americans died after being attacked by domestic dogs.
In a world with so few wolves, perhaps a better guide to the risk they pose is a scientific study in which humans approached wolves 125 times in Scandinavia. Researchers found no occasions of aggressive behaviour: on 123 occasions, the wolves ran away; on the other two, an alpha female exhibited harmless “defensive” behaviour near her pups.
But facts or rational thinking makes little impression upon our emotional and deeply engrained estrangement from wild animals. And we are more estranged from the wolf than from any other wild animal.
The wolf suffers from a terrible paradox: the hoary old horror stories have outlived the wolf in most of western Europe. We have no experience of living alongside the real animal for centuries but we’re still transfixed by vivid stories of its salivating phantom.
My son’s fear of the wolf has been created by a pack of fairytales both ancient and modern. Countless picture books rework Little Red Riding Hood or the Boy Who Cried Wolf; many contemporary storybook wolves are comically rubbish at being scary but the wolf is still a spectre in popular culture, from Disney’s Frozen to Beauty and the Beast. The wolf is mostly intended as a metaphor for dangerous strangers but being simple, literal folk, we just end up being scared of wolves.
Incredibly, across Europe, the wolf is defying our prejudice and living increasingly successfully alongside us. Wolves only returned to Germany at the start of the century but there are now 60 packs, totalling between 150 and 160 adult wolves. Last winter, Denmark welcomed its first wolf pack for more than two centuries. Wolves have been sighted in the Netherlands, northern France and even Luxembourg. This month, a wolf returned to Belgium, the last continental European country without wild wolves.
From there, it’s an easy trot to the Channel tunnel. Rewilders want to give wolves a helping hand and reintroduce them into the Scottish Highlands. But wolves would be equally happy in the home counties: in parts of Germany they live in suburban areas with a higher human population density than Cambridge or Newcastle.
We pride ourselves on living in a society more tolerant than ever of human difference, but this magnanimity does not extend to other species we cannot tightly control. A wild wolf in Britain would not last a day. Germany may be leading the way in reintegrating people with wolves, with education programmes in local schools attempting to combat centuries of prejudice, but even so, five German wolves were illegally killed in the year to April 2017. And even in phlegmatic Finland, wolf hatred spills into social media, mostly in towns where wolves have only just returned after a century’s absence.
At least the tale of Torak had a happy ending. After meandering through a field of untroubled sheep (unlike the 15,000 killed by domestic dogs in 2016), Torak was found, meekly accepted a lead and was returned to his wildlife sanctuary. There he must stay. For his own safety, not ours.
