Tag: of wolves and men

Barry López: “Why We Should Believe in Wolf Children”

Jean Baptiste Huong, “Romain Costa”, Photo Shoot

“Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas.”

-Barry López, Of Wolves and Men

Barry Lopez, “Of Wolves and Men”

Barry Lopez, “Of Wolves and Men”, 1979, Scribner Books, 320 Pages

Of Wolves and Men reveals the uneasy interaction between wolves and civilization over the centuries, and the wolf’s prominence in our thoughts about wild creatures. Drawing on an astonishing array of literature, history, science, and mythology as well as considerable personal experience with captive and free-ranging wolves, Lopez argues for the necessity of the wolf’s preservation and envelops the reader in its sensory world, creating a compelling picture of the wolf both as real animal and as imagined by man.

Barry Holstun Lopez: “We Create Wolves”

Photographer Unknown, (The Impending Storm)

“We create wolves. The methodology of science creates a wolf just as surely as does the metaphysical vision of a native American, or the enmity of a cattle baron of the nineteenth century. It is only by convention that the first is considered enlightened observation, the second fanciful anthropomorphism, and the third agricultural necessity. Each of these visions flows, historically, from man’s never-ending struggle to come to grips with the nature of the universe.”

-Barry Holstun Lopez, “Of Wolves and Men”, 1978

Another Reflection

Photographer Unknown, (Another Reflection)

“Why we should believe in wolf children seems somehow easier to understand than the ways we distinguish between what is human and what is animal behavior. In making such distinctions we run the risk of fooling ourselves completely. We assume that the animal is entirely comprehensible and, as Henry Beston has said, has taken form on a plane beneath the one we occupy. It seems to me that this is a sure way to miss the animal and to see, instead, only another reflection of our own ideas.”

-Barry López, Of Wolves and Men