Wolves Unmasked 🐺 Wolf Documentary 2021🐺 Wolf Rewilding

[Music] i can see him [Music] you see us do we have the right to control the world do we have a right to dominate it do other life forms matter [Music] [Music] oh [Music] i'm abby and this is pups me and my bestie this for me is where it all started pups was the catalyst for my wolf journey his love his companionship and his amazing spirit led me to where i am today i watched pups closely over the years from puppy to dog from playful to more playful as i watched him it got me thinking about his ancestors we love dogs we treasure them we welcome them we care for them [Music] so why are wolves so bad and suffer the stigma of villain why and how did this divergence and perception occur this film is the story of my search to understand the wolf without the stories the myths the historical misinformation just the wolf in its world and listening to them speak [Music] i needed some sort of context so decided to start with the history i needed to know what the origins of this wolf hatred was little bo peep had lost her sheep while out in the meadow green they wandered close by some wolves who were sly and soon by these wolves they were sealed these nasty old wolves dressed one of their kind to look like little bow feet out he did go with one thought in mind to capture the poor little sheep [Music] like many children my early influences came from stories and the wolf featured in many but it was never-ending story that captivated me more than any other story the wolf mork is terrifying but i found myself drawn to him his power is the embodiment of nature in its full glory i got used to seeing wolves in the same context the villain but it didn't scare me you're gonna get what you deserve wolf i wasn't afraid of the big bad wolf i was captivated i became slightly obsessed with werewolves it felt strange because it wasn't real and something was definitely missing so even though the wolf is maligned and portrayed as bad i didn't see it that way gary marvin is a professor of human animal studies i came across his book wolf while conducting research on the history of wolves in it he presents the latest scientific understanding of the wolf as well as its place in literature history and folklore the wolf was one of the most perhaps the most extensive land mammals in the world and so it lived all the way across the circumpolar region all the way through north america down into central parts of south america and across europe the wolf this one particular creature intercepted with a huge variety of cultures different cultures same animal or is it the same animal we don't know whether we had a symbiotic relationship with this animal ever in the british isles it's very reasonable to suppose that in in in mesolithic times you know perhaps in in the bronze age in the iron age you know when you find costumes and and engravings on artifacts of of of of people in the skins of animals with antlers that you know again there may have been there must have been some sort of titanic um um connection with the wolf it was there with seals it was there with with deer it must have been with this great enable hunter too many people you know don't realize that they were actually here before we were you know so this is a very very wise wise species they're incredibly intuitive and so it's obvious to me that we depended on the wolf for our survival there's something there that's very ancient very precious and very real when it comes to our relationship with a wolf there's been scientific evidence that you know wolf and humans early humans work together and live together and you can only imagine the benefit so wolves are excellent at picking out an animal that's vulnerable and so they would come upon a herd of let's say elk and chase the elk and pick out the one that was most vulnerable cut it out from the herd and now here's where the humans come in we had spears we had atlatls we could kill the animal from a distance so we didn't have to run the animal down the wolves did that the wolves didn't have to make the final kill and you know wolves can die making that final kill they can get kicked in the head kicked into lungs anywhere and die from trying to bring down a big animal a lot of the perception of wolves has been generated in young children by little red riding hood and out there in the literature there's an awful lot about about wolves who attack people and packs of wolves hunting down people and of course in the united states this image of the wolf is is propagated by the hunters and by the by the farmers i became interested in wolves because they had been persecuted and scapegoated by humans starting in europe a lot in england and that came over with colonizers to north america but the objective was to kill them all off and that was the policy for centuries people have um had fear of them throughout the northern hemisphere because wolves were the most widespread carnivore in that area there have been a lot of stories in literature and just generally making out that wolves are the big bad beast and something to be frightened of so how did we go from that to killing wolves well you got to flash forward about 12 000 years now we are no longer hunter and gatherers now we are starting to be agriculturalist we're tending crops we're raising livestock now when a wolf comes in and does what it does naturally which is find the easiest prey possible that prey might be one of our livestock and when that happens is taking food right out of that person's mouth that would not be allowed so instead of cooperating we became competitors and we started killing logs eight nine thousand years ago and we haven't stopped wolves have certainly been vilified um they are the most maligned creature ever you know with entire uh cultures uh demonization centered around their history so you have this whole whole rise of a kind of demonic version of what a wolf is you know a time that the church wants to protect its commercial interests and this this demon wolf that's something that's dark in our subconscious i think really starts there with the security of grasp of the catholic church and christianity and with the the the development of christianity throughout western europe what you see is that whole that fear of this idea as being a satanic thing being becoming something that's completely implanted in people's minds and indeed is still there today jesus speaks of sending out his disciples like lambs among sheep and he tells people to be aware of people coming in as false prophets in wolves clothing i think what jesus was doing preaching to the people at the time was they had sheep they knew the danger of wolves coming in and stealing their sheep they knew the problem of losing sheep jesus was a good shepherd to protect them against these wolves once jesus used that image and again it's simplifying i think that's when the wolf becomes vilified it's now not a creature following its natural habits it's now an evil creature and i think that christianity then spreading carried with it this image of the wolf as a powerful predator but an evil predator if we think about how people respond emotionally to wolves how they think about them an interesting issue is our domestic dogs have come from wolves and yet wolves as a pack do things against humans in an important sense they eat their sheep they eat their cattle etc etc in a sense a wolf is a dog gone wrong so the wolf should be man's best friend humans best friend and these are deviants now of course they existed before domesticated dogs so i think we do have the issue of um an intense personal concern for our individual dog and we don't get dogs living impacts we keep them individually so it's the far end of the wolf and its natural pack and we've selected for these to be individuals we don't want our domesticated dogs to act as a pack wolves i mean basically do just a few things they hunt they mate they raise their young and they disperse that's it everything else we put on walls we give them characteristics that don't fit because it fits with who we are as humans it's shocking to uncover the extent of persecution the wolf has been subjected complete extinction in the uk and near extinction in other countries does our hatred of wolves extend across the entire human population is our hatred justified by the level of damage they cause and is this an accurate representation of the wolf i wasn't buying this so i decided to look at other countries that have wild populations of wolves and learn more about the attitudes what's the situation for wolves in these countries and how are they managed are they still persecuted and if they return to the uk are they destined for the same date wolf could soon be taken off the endangered species list nationwide the republic of yakutia has declared a war on wolves since 2012 state officials have been resorting to killing the animals gray wolf could soon be taken off the endangered species list entirely while the gray wolf population has grown into the thousands it's still a fraction of the wolf packs that once inhabited north america well the trump administration is now working to lift endangered species protections for gray wolves in the lower 48 states this could be approved by the end of the year the iconic greg wolf will no longer be considered endangered [Music] [Music] i'd watched numerous documentaries about wolves one in particular really stood out to me medicine of the wolf by julia huffman because the attitude to helping wolves in this film was similar to my own and she's investigated hunting which i didn't fully understand i was curious to know what response she had to her film to further understand the attitudes of the public to wolves there's you know 206 million cattle in montana there's less than a thousand wolves i think i'm just going to throw out a number there i think in 2017 there were 90 issues where a wolf took a cow or a sheep okay so you got 2.6 million cattle you have less than a thousand wolves then you have 90 issues where there were you know wolf cattle or wolf sheep so you can imagine what the percentage is it's it's less than one percent of issues but if you look at publications in those areas my montana wyoming idaho if you read the stories that they publish when a wolf is killed well where a wolf is taken where a wolf is trapped etc i mean just if you did a little research and just started reading these articles those bigger numbers are never printed right so the public continues to get pushed with this propaganda right that these wolves are taking out all the livestock and these wolves are you know their problems both depredations uh on lifestyle are extremely rare especially in the overall you know view of what's killing livestock and wolves barely measure less than one percent of livestock losses in heavy wolf country there is so much conflict over wolves and it's and it drives the conversation and it's like the media just focuses on the conflict which compounds it because if all you hear about with wolves is the conflict aspects of it so a wolf kills six sheep or a wolf kills a cow and that becomes the only message that gets out to the public they think that the wolves are just decimating you know livestock hurts and that's not true there has been a problem with the kind of information that has been offered the public over the years of its propaganda in so many cases by people who really hate wolves making the general public afraid of wolves at one time you know we had somewhere between 750 000 wolves in north america and we had whittled that down this many were roaming in north america and then all of a sudden fast forward to you know we almost eradicated the wolf in the 70s in fact most people don't know that's the reason why the endangered species act was originally put in place it was originally put in place because we almost wiped the wolf out entirely it was an emergency situation when wolves were put on the endangered species list some people who are you know done extensive work about wolves and some people who are even wolf scientists and biologists believe that if we allow the public at times to hunt the wolf that somehow it's going to create a um an acceptance for the animal i can't in my mind i can't hold the two together i can't see that we need to sport hunt the wolf which means these incredibly inhumane things where we are trapping these animals and they're strangled to death and they try to chew their feet off you know and they die these horrible horrible cruel deaths how we can somehow frame that in a way that that is going to make the public want to protect wolves and care more about the wolves i'm sorry for me that doesn't add up to think of the ways that they're treated the awful thought of wolves being caught in leg hole traps and lying there in days in agony being shot and the most recent ruling by fish and wildlife in some states that you can gas or poison wolves when they've got cubs in the burrow and you can gas the burrows if i'm right and it's just shocking humans certainly hump wolves for pest control uh shepherds will shoot wolves that come near to them they'll put poison out for wolves they'll put snares out for wolves but it wolf is still a creature that is hunted um it's hunted in many areas in eastern europe um alaska allows wolf hunting and there that's for trophies so what you're looking for is a large male that you can have the skin on the floor you can have the head um on your on your wall but and that is about trophy hunting that's about you picking your wits against this predator it that goes pretty deep because that then becomes about identity you know um as a person's identity and if that identity is based on this wild west image john wayne thing of you know in order to be out in nature we've got to control every bit and we've gotta you know the predators are bad and we can show that we are in control of nature by by killing the predators that's a basic dysfunctional relationship with nature that works against them when i'm lucky enough to see a wolf in the wild that's what i consider myself to be lucky and i want to be able to see that wolf again and again and again so killing it doesn't fit into my way of thinking at all people who need to fill up some kind of void in their lives that's my opinion uh need to go out with guns they need to go out with you know atvs and they need to destroy something like the wolf to somehow feel better about who they are and there's a lot of money in that organizations that uh you know you can go and buy a license from they profit from that and so there's a big machine that's happening so to be able to prove that you are part of that western iconic uh culture do you have to hate predators especially wolves and and grizzly bears you know it's it's been such a strong myth that's been told so many times people believe that it's true that that the only way that you can have these animals out there is to kill them it was clear to me it was evident that humans came to view wolves as competitors for land livestock grazing and farming but it's barbaric to think here in the 21st century that these draconian practices need to continue as accepted and unchallenged practice i was struggling to understand how hunting could be effective for wolf conservation and management strategy the evidence seems to indicate that perhaps a lot of the time wolves are just being hunted because people enjoy hunting them so i wanted to know is hunting just something that is going to carry on regardless or are there any innovative alternatives with the aim of coexistence every state in the united states that has wolves has a wolf management plan that's been approved by the federal government that says here's how we're going to manage wolves frankly managing is another word for killing in most of these states but if you look at the basic premise behind each of these plans it is this if there's a conflict between livestock and wolves it's the wolf's fault and the wolf's got to pass i think that premise is wrong the situations around the cull i understand the principle behind what people feel that walls grow in numbers they get too big for areas they go outside of those areas and subsequently there has to be a form of management or containment the objection that i have is the way the management is done the difficulty i think comes where you don't have that sort of space where you have conflict i think wolf re-emergence can be managed so in germany they got hold of the stakeholders hunters farmers members of the public ecologists etc etc said the walls are coming back we've got to have a management plan but where we see walls emerging and what's there now the success all the failure whether wolves are going to be allowed to exist where they're going to be allowed to exist depends on the coming together of different community interests you know the basic elements of dealing with human wildlife conflict are the same it's just the species change and the ways that you can coexist with them change but not this people right the people are pretty much the same everywhere even when the cultural changes are different i'm against wolves being killed uh on principle because there is an alternative an alternative that work i don't think the kill the coal works for us it only reduces numbers but it can panic the walls into just moving to other areas for different resources that they need to repair the damage if you shoot just wolves because you think there are too many then you get a very different problem because the male and the female in a territory they play a very very important role they hunt together for red deer for instance if you shoot one of the adults then the rest of the pack can't hunt for red deer anymore and normally that means that they the pack is disintegrating and that everybody is going to search for his own food and then the adult female can easily live off road deer or whatever but the young ones they can't and they all go to sheep hunting because that's the best alternative food so what you do is you kill one adult and you get well four or five problem rules in return but people with guns can't manage deer populations in the way that a local wolf population would now in addition to obviously preying on the animals and keeping numbers down by that factor whilst living in proximity to a an apex predator the behavior of the the prey animals will change significantly so they will spend less time grazing they will spend less time breeding if they are ill or injured they are more likely to be taken out by a hunting wolf pack they keep their own population at a certain level because big territorial bulls don't allow other wolves to enter their territory so they kill each other and that's that's kind of law of the jungle if you only use killing wolves as your solution and you don't address the underlying problems that cause the livestock to be vulnerable in the first place then more wolves will move into that system and we've seen it over and over and over again it just cycles through that same conflict over and over and over livestock die wolves die livestock die wolves die i mean it's just this constant spiral of conflict wolves live on public land that's the only home left to them in the united states is public land unfortunately livestock producers get to graze their livestock on public lands at a discount it's cheaper to do it that way so if you've got wolves living on public land because that's the only place they can live and you've got livestock coming in even greater numbers on public land because it's cheaper for the producers to do it that way you're inviting conflict can wolves be managed non-lethally yes emphatically yes i would venture a guess that any major livestock producer in the u.s knows about even if they don't use they know that there are non-lethal ways to deal with keeping wolves and livestock separate and alive really simple things that don't cost a lot of money and if they do cost money there are both state agencies and private conservation agencies that will help offset the cost of using non-lethal deterrence so to my mind there's no reason in the world to kill wolves when you have all these non-lethal deterrents so the non-lethal approach to managing wolves really looks at the world through the wolves eyes it's really about just giving the wolves a sense of risk near livestock and then making sure that they have a way of avoiding livestock so the the philosophy behind the non-lethal is that we have ways that we can work with nature what we're doing is changing the situation so that they don't have an attraction to the livestock and that they have a way of peacefully coexisting with livestock operations on the landscape you know if we're in year 13 right now of the wood river wolf project we have had you know upwards of 25 000 sheep in our project area up to three or four wolf packs um some that come in and out but stable wolf packs in the project area and we lose on average four sheep a year which is nothing compared to what they have normally lost to coyotes and bears and mountain lions that have always been here and we're spending less money doing these methods than they were spending killing wolves before what we decided to do is to say let's not follow that that's clearly a failed system it's not working for anyone let's see if we can find something that works for everyone and the non-lethal coexistent strategies work for everyone most of the ranchers we work with would prefer not to have wolves on the landscape it's one more headache to them when we can show them that these methods better protect their livestock they have fewer losses and we don't have to kill wolves because these losses are so manageable they're so minimal it changes the whole dynamic over long term that's a sustainable system the attitude of people in the community just aren't changing enough to tip the balance in favor of the wolf or address the attitude of the hunting community that wolves are more valuable dead than alive wolf management is a great way to go it makes sense and it seems there's so much interest but it's taking so long i wanted to know about wolf conservation in general and whether or not that at least was [Music] progressing [Music] i'd spent quite some time following the reintroduction of walls at yellowstone national park where doug smith is the senior wildlife biologist and project leader for the yellowstone wolf project he's studied wolves for over 23 years producing numerous publications wolf conservation is thriving but i'm not optimistic and so those things are contradictory and i'll explain why you know 50 years ago we had no wolves in any place in the lower 48 the continental united states except minnesota and now we have them in idaho montana wyoming michigan wisconsin minnesota and arizona new mexico uh europe wolves have increased almost everywhere there's wolves in france i meant you know poland's filled with wolves germany's filled with wolves eastern europe has lots they've increased everywhere so why am i uh pessimistic because human attitudes have only changed a little you know not so long ago everybody hated wolves not only half of them do but it's still a human dominated planet and so where these wolves have showed up there's big management problems and people are are taking matters into their own hands and wildland which is in space which is what wolves and other wildlife need um is getting encroached upon by humans and so i i have a hard time with facsimiles of nature i want real nature and europe to me is a facsimile of nature there's what 400 million people in western europe and it's smaller the united states uh the united states has 325 million but there's big areas where there's no people and wolves can be and i'm worried about those areas because people are not accepting of it and i think there's compromise that can be had and we're pretty far away from that compromise so on one hand i'm hopeful because we've had more wilson we've ever had before i think human attitudes i used to think they could be changed by science and facts and data but i was wrong they're not humans need emotions they need stories and we need to talk about wolves in that way we need to talk about individual wolf lives and we need to indicate to people that they're not that bad and that we can live with them but we got to stop taking over everything and that's where i'm worried that we're not going to do it because people the history of people just take take take take take and the wolf is the one animal that said stop and what we do killed them and so i think we find that solution seductive so we're going to do that again i definitely think wolf conservation is is progressing and every other conservation but we've got to make sure that we learn the lessons uh indirectly as well as directly i'd like to say that i think that conservation is pretty good right now but i see it in my own opinion as an ongoing fight we've got agriculture we've got land loss we've got habitat loss we've got human expansion and unfortunately the wolf is suffering considerably at the hands of man so i'd like to say conservation is pretty good but i'd say it's an ongoing fight the aims and ambitions of wolf conservation will remain consistent because there are plenty of people that feel passionately about that particular issue things that challenge wolf conservation are public attitudes and perceptions generally speaking that there is a great deal of work to be done with regards to wolf conservation particularly when you're looking at reintroducing wolves to areas where they're currently extinct and many of the challenges are social and political in addition to being huge logistical challenges the most important area of wolf conservation is the ability to respect everything about it behaviorism isn't going to give us all the answers we need about conserving wolves neither is ecology neither is biology i think only when we begin to join these forces together respect one another's work then we'll see the results in wolf conservation so my true belief is that we need all aspects of wolf conservation by this time the evidence i was gathering began to reveal that wolf hate was just the surface for something so much bigger it was becoming apparent that wolf conservation was as much about affecting a change in attitude as well as the perception of the wolf why is it so difficult for people to change and what's the impact on wolves in the environment we've come in an industrial revolution in my opinion we've come in and we've put a price on everything and we've claimed the land and we've abused the land and our animals and now we seem to have this ownership there's more rules in europe than there have been in the last 50 years and i think that this is very important because it's just it's symbolic of how we live in this world how do we relate to other life forms are we just going to use the world as our taking and convert all the land to agriculture and farmland to raise animals or we are going to share with other creatures and animals that are really hard to live with inconvenient and he actually can detract from our economic activity are the real tests and i i don't think that it's ethical to do away with an entire species i don't think it makes the world very interesting and in the end i think it will do us in and so this the wolf is kind of a message to us to slow down to be reasonable to pull back we're not going to make it with 10 11 12 billion people on earth is that the way we want the world to be and so these are important questions about our future what the world's gonna look like and it's gonna be pretty bad and pretty unpleasant if it's just people piled on top of people we already know what that looks like india china etc wolves represent us saying stop what are we doing walls remind us of leave some things alone will for me represent a look at us but past us we are very good at measuring progress on everything that goes forward but progress is measured in what we remember what was our history what was back in time and i think to understand the connection between the two of us we have to look back at how we how we began so the wolf for me gives us a look at how we used to be how we should be to balance what is becoming an ever growing world um that's losing every day social and emotional ability with one another wolves give us a look at how that began and how we can maintain it and get it back unfortunately at this time in in our history there's so many animals that have gone extinct and and we're wiping them out at such an incredibly fast rate it's alarming to me this planet is plummeting off the edge of a precipice life is leaching from it the globe over and away that most of us simply can't even begin to appreciate it's dying 95 of the vertebrate biomass of this earth are humans and domestic animals we need wildlife you look at the world right now and we're crying for whales we're crying for elephants giraffes wolves buffalos why are we crying why are we upset about that it's that this beautiful planet that we're on we have disconnected from the world wild kingdom we've disconnected from those animals but i think these animals are crying to us you know to wake up and it's it's down to where we have just developed that outside the door is them inside the house is us and we've forgotten actually we're we're them too you know we're animals we're life forms and so we we miss the understanding that we are not apart from the environment we are the environment we're part of it [Music] my partner surprised me with a trip to wildwood escott in exeter wildwood is on a mission to re-wild certain species that are missing from the ecosystem and provide a range of opportunities that influence public perception through education and exposure to these animals [Music] they have a pack of wolves and want the public to come around to the prospect of living with wolves again [Music] the wolf is a keystone species and known as an ecological engineer when removed from an environment the food web collapses causing imbalance in species populations this is known as a trophic cascade for example without the wolf the elk's population will increase which means a higher demand on food sources such as vegetation the environment goes into decline resulting in less rodents less birds and less fish ultimately every species will suffer when the circle is incomplete thus affecting the environment as a [Music] whole rewilding is the mass restoration of both animals and plant life to an area that once perhaps had both those things rewilding is a process it's it's an approach it's how we orient ourselves to the natural world there will be a range of public benefits um as far as rewiring is concerned but there is the fact that you have an interesting landscape a landscape where other things live where you take your kid for a walk on a beach in a golden eagle you know floats six feet over your kid's head you have spectacles you have landscape where water is held and slowed and trapped perhaps by beavers that are very rich in life the question of rewilding is quite a tricky one because people have preconceptions about what rewilding means and many will assume that it simply means just letting nature get on with it that that's not the case that's not a productive approach to rewiring the british landscape is a landscape that's been entirely dominated by humans since approximately the bronze age and if you think that's not the case then just have a look at it from google earth and what you'll see are field patterns modern field patterns everywhere but underneath that even in areas of heathland you know perhaps that we consider to be remote like exmoor or power back or the new forest you know modern advances in lidar show us that those areas were all cultivated as well so the landscape has been entirely dominated entirely manipulated by people if you imagine uh wild spaces to be on a continuum so one end of the continuum you have a barren mono culture um uh with you know very low biodiversity and at the other end you have a fully rich biodiverse uh environment with all the room and and resources for a full range of animal populations the united kingdom though it looks very very green from the sky is incredibly barren basically you're looking down from the sky it looks beautiful and green but there's really nothing going on down there apart from fields and a few hedges very very barren uplands and we've got around 10 wooded uplands compared to europe which is around 30 so you can see that we're actually lacking a lot of the forest that we should have on that continuum we're closer to the the barren monoculture than we would like to be england needs rewilding in general it needs environmental rewilding it needs land usage to change and we've just about finished farming now because at the end of the day it made no money and it did tremendous ecological harm um you know with the modern drugs we have you know the effective insecticides like the ivamectins the chemicals you put on the land the stocking rates of animals you're obliged to run if you're trying to produce any kind of profit we did we did bad things this idea that we need to farm every inch of britain because we're going to starve because they're going to be u-boats in the western approaches is utter nonsense i mean everything that happens in this world for good or real is part of a global economy we live in an unusual situation in the uk don't we we don't have any large predators in our landscape and we've been living without them for an awfully long time we've become very cozy and when you think about it the largest predators in our landscape are our pets our domestic dogs you know our badgers are slightly heavier than foxes um they're on divorce i wouldn't consider them a full-on predator um so the fox is probably our biggest land predator and they weigh about i don't know six to eight kilograms they're tiny they're tiny they're smaller than my poodles and yet we can't get along with foxes we still harbour all of these lunatic ideas about their behavior and we still persecute them wholly unnecessarily we still tear them to pieces with dogs actually so the wolf is a real challenge it's a real challenge for us i think because there's a long history of mistrust a human history of mistrust not a british history of mistrust i would love to think that in my lifetime we might have an opportunity to reintroduce these animals in a controlled manner to the uk where they could actually play a very important ecological role um i fear that because of that inherent mistrust and the enormous amount of ignorance that surrounds the the species to this day very sadly that that that won't won't happen it's a pleasure to go as i have just been to places like uh yellowstone national park and grand teton where wolves have been reintroduced successfully and see them playing out that role and seeing how they have reshaped through their predatory activities that entire ecosystem it's extraordinary to be there in fact it's very disheartening to be there then to come home and look at our highly modified landscape which isn't functional where we've got way too many deer because we don't have any large predators links um and and and therefore we're never going to achieve that sort of that sort of balance um it's a pity but i think until we were ever able to win over the hearts and minds of the hunt and shooting landowning fraternity and the farmers of course um then we're going to have a hard job bringing wolves back to the uk [Music] if you're researching rewilding on the internet it won't be long before you find paul lister he's the custodian of alladale a 23 000 acre wilderness reserve he's also founder of the european nature trust his mission is to return wolves to this wilderness i wanted to talk to him about his efforts to restore the land to its native environment the role the wolf plays in this and any challenges from those opposing his plans the vision for what we have up in aladdil and we call it a reserve and not an estate we want to differentiate ourselves from places that are run under sort of a normal victorian management regime of hunting shooting fishing we consider ourselves a like a more of a nature reserve and the division has always been to create a large-scale fenced reserve i've never ever thought of um of releasing walls into a wild it's only ever been into something a 50 000 acre plus area much like dozens of game reserves in south africa so paul thinks you could combine restoring wolves in big enclosures to help control red deer to help restore the forest and then at the same time maybe create a tourism business like yellowstone you know you only have to go to yellowstone uh on most days of the year to realize just how many wolf watches there are people out trying to see wolves or panthers or bears or what have you now the the walkers the people who uh walk through the landscape don't like this but but paul thinks that could be solved i think all of what i just said is possible um you know you might start off with sterilized wolves so if they get out they won't reproduce but if you put radio colors on them that you could find them again and this would be a very controlled experiment and it might work free-ranging wolves no maybe you know scotland um in the way that paul's talking about all my research up to this point seems to be leading me to the same thing disconnection it's almost like i've been looking in all the wrong places trying to find out why people don't like wolves or why they like them so much i wanted to find out more about our disconnection with nature in general to some degree we are all subject to nature deficit disorder so and this is one other aspect that we may need to polite how being disconnected from nature is impacting our life our way of behaving our perception of things our perception of others and importantly how this is critically and dramatically in some cases impacting the new generations the more the technology is taking space and place in our lives the less we spend time outdoor the less kids grow by being dirty in the in the soil and the climbing the trees there's things like the the ingredients the pesticides the chemicals all the artificiality of life that we engage with without really much of a second thought is impacting on our connection to nature we're not connected to nature we're connected to industrialized living dealing with that is is the first process the second one uh beginning to establish some kind of a relationship with nature even at a knowledge level you know do you know what the the trees are that in the forest where you walk do you know what the insects and are in the forest that you walk in or in the field that you walk in do what kind of relationship do you have you know do you understand the biology of the natural world around you how much of it do you understand you know one of the things that was really interesting in life is somebody said to me once uh the wings of a butterfly affect the whole world well if that's the case a wolf or a bear or something gets shot that affects the world and that's exactly what's happening it works against us because we're fighting nature which is you know like trying to fight the weather right so you're you're trying to fight the sun coming up in the morning right it's it's much bigger than us we're causing dire impact back to ourselves it's very difficult to get people to understand and want to protect something unless they've actually been there and worked it out for themselves getting people out into nature and out of the out of the concrete cities is i think very important i think the biggest lesson that the wolf teaches us is balance and our world and our society is very badly out of balance and it's so out of balance that we don't know how to rebalance it i think the combination of science and tribal thinking and and tribal cultural thinking can help us rebalance that and i think our reconnection with the wolf in its natural environment can help teach us that balance is critical right now finding a way of getting back to balance is critical for our survival and for the survival of the planet and i think if we begin to understand on a deeper level our relationship with the wolf and what it can be but more importantly with the wolf's relationship to the ecology around it can be we can begin to learn that and take some of those steps and begin to educate people and use that as an example of you know the decisions that we make and the choices that we make walls can help us to understand nature in many ways i think to truly understand that we have to almost rewrite the history of the wolf rather than thinking them as co-hunters or co-protectors we need to start thinking about their social and emotional connection to us and that's the strongest of all and it's hard to see in a modern society that technologically is growing every day but when we look back to our past we look back to how we began how we formed unions with one another it was the wolf that gave us all of that there's been for some decades a new revering of the wolf the wolf is there at the center of it as a very charismatic powerful creature and i think that it's it's a very important symbol when it reappears for many people those who are pro-wolf pro-environment pro-conservation they believe that the re-emergence of the wolf is a symbol that we're turning back to a proper relationship with nature that's been destroyed by human activity as i emerged from the mythologies the misconceptions and misinformation i was definitely getting a better idea of the true nature of the wolf but this felt more like learning about the wolf as perceived by humans rather than understanding their interactions with each other their behavior apart and distinct from humans so my journey had bought me in reach of wolves but always behind bars or fences or talking to experts i needed to see them up close and personal in their own environment and with each other i went to visit the uk wolf conservation trust in reading i'd heard they were closing soon and to say farewell they were holding a talk about grey wolf conservation i thought it would be a great opportunity to learn more about the true character of the wolf so my husband and i in the 1970s sought to get a wolf cub to be able to see whether this was actually true where the wolves did have these characteristics or not because we've had wolves probably 20 in all over this period we have been able to see that it is completely untrue that wolves are very nervous of people and so therefore we've been able to through the wolf trust and people coming to see the wolves change people's perceptions about this dave meach is a wildlife biologist specializing in the study of wolves he's also the founder of the international wolf center the project that i found the most interesting and enjoyed the most was my opportunity for 25 summers to live with a pack of wolves on ellesmere island that were unafraid of me and unafraid of people in general i think that alpha term which we no longer use it implies that the wolf is within the family even aggressive so that it makes it seem like in order for the wolf to to mate and have pups and all that it has to be aggressive to all other wolves but that isn't the case all the wolf needs to do to have a pack is to find a member of the opposite sex and mate with that animal and produce offspring just like any other species has to do the idea that the wolf has to fight to get to the top in order to produce a family that is not true and i think that term has kind of made the public think the wolf is more aggressive than it really is it is a carnivore it does have to kill other animals to to eat to live but generally it is not dangerous to humans we canada for example has has had about 60 000 wolves for many many years they've never been endangered there yet people camp and hike and swim and fish and hunt and everything in canada without any danger to wolves now we have better cameras that you can film wolves at night obviously much more magnification people have been able to record wolves and back this up to show that they really are just enigmatic charismatic animals who are going about just surviving and living and they're not a menace to people as humans most of us though we don't like to admit it we do a lot of our decision making based on emotion rather than reasoning it's our job to recognize those emotions and to provide people with sufficient information to adjust their perspective with regard to the behavior of wolves and the the characteristics of wolves a short amount of experience with the the wolves will adjust uh that perception quite significantly and the more people realize that their beloved dogs are actually no different genetically or very little different from from wolves and have wolves the wolves have many of the same qualities as domestic dogs i mean they're loyal they're fantastic parents they look after their cubs they're willing to risk their lives if they can actually get to see a wolf close up there's no greater way than that in changing people's perception in coming and understanding that they are timid um charming animals that actually all dogs are related from uh i think you know thousands of people have gone away from the wolf trust here realizing that the wolves are very misunderstood i've met um wolves that have been brought up from pubs they can't be released in the wild i've been to wolves sanctuaries and when you actually meet a wolf and look into their eyes it's an extraordinary feeling character of the wolf is it's a it's a social animal has a favorable approach to its family but in order to earn a living they have to be aggressive toward prey so those characteristics are they seem like they're in opposition that is the wolf is friendly towards its pack members not aggressive towards prey but that's just because it's the way that animal has to live so it has this kind of a dualistic personality if you will when you watch wolves with their pack mates which are basically their relatives their offspring they get along very well they do end up killing other neighboring packs at times and strange wolves so they they do have that aggressive nature towards others they're competitive so i guess i would say friendly towards their own pack competitive with other packs and aggressive to pray the wolf and dog development center is a research and educational facility specializing in canine social and emotional development this is run by sean and kim ellis who together share an extensive range of knowledge and experience with wolves sean possesses unique insight into wolf behavior and family relationships this is from living with wolves in captivity i decided it was about time i went to visit sean and kim it's about being equal through being different yeah you know we they they gain their equality in their respect of one another because they respect that each personality is different but they all support one another we we've looked at the whole hierarchal up and down we see them more as a side by side and overlapped where every single personality is respected for the role in the job that it does we're too good at putting the same across everything we're trying to teach our children to be the same across the board and that's something that the wolves really teach us beautifully is to acknowledge us for our individual characters um which means our capabilities and our limitations we don't all learn the same we don't all behave the same i think in itself the the communication and the behavior isn't enough you know unless we process the same information in the same way unless we lived as a wolf it wouldn't make any difference what our sensory was and it's the same with the dogs we feel it's we don't connect with them as we should because we don't allow ourselves to but the thing that we as humans can do is we can change our behavior a wolf really can't change its behavior it's a wild animal that's what it does to survive we as humans on the other hand we have much more intelligence we have much more flexibility we have much more adaptability than wolves do and then it's up to us to realize that we're the ones that have to change and we are the ones who have to work at coexisting with wolves and of course other species as well plenty of people who will tell you they love wolves they do anything for them but i think more of those people need to be present at really important meetings regarding woes i have heard from both legislators political and public officials and committee members say with the fish and wildlife committee it is so important if they're going to get legislation passed they need to have people in the room saying i support that legislation join our efforts and that's where we can meet is on the emotional path not on the rational one right and sometimes it's completely the other way around don't take the lessons in the plastic in the ocean as being a problem in the sense of how much it is and we need to reduce that but learn the lesson beyond the plastic learn the fact that there are other lives other life forms on this world that we have to share with so i think let's learn the equality that we need to from situations like this and not just deal with the solutions to the problem but actually deal with the concept behind the problem we can't necessarily hit it straight on because it's not going to solve it battling it out in my opinion doesn't always get the good results but we need to do something we need to to make some bridges and be as negotiators and trying to take the elements that can be in common in all of those voices i think only when we begin to join these forces together respect one another's work then we'll see the results in wolf conservation so my true belief is that we need all aspects of wolf conservation um to be able to look after them to care for them to to give them the success they need but it has to come from many different forms to some degree that requires a certain amount of acceptance meaning that we need to recognize the conflicts the differences and accept that there are those differences and see how to smooth those differences down and how to facilitate a dialogue right i think if both sides of the argument can agree that sound scientific thinking can lead to uh reasonable conclusions about the questions of rewilding without being self-critical we cannot move forward right and so when we believe in some values and we strongly believe in those values and we advocate in name of those values sometimes we become blind certainly this is the time to raise the voice but also to create acceptance and openness with time we can also move together towards a common direction what needs to be done is to promote objective science-based information that is not propaganda and that's why i started the international wolf center that's its main purpose is to is to promote science-based objective information about wolves it's called seven generations you know you base a decision for now based on four generations behind you but thinking of seven generations in front meaning if i have an enemy that my tribal enemy after four generations i should let it go because i don't know what happened to start this thing and i should let it go thinking that i could have peace in seven generations if we would think along those lines we would have a better relationship with the animals let's inspire let's reveal to those that have grown up in this entrenched hunting culture that have come to believe that somehow we have domain over all of wildlife you know and to try to slowly and uh very smartly shift the paradigm these different ways of moving in the world to to educate people and to to tell stories and to create these coalitions for wolf restoration rather than wolf management and wolf recovery to be quite honest that starts in schools so i think it starts in the classroom what we need to do is to start to get some really good wildlife education into the classroom that is a really really good starting point and kids will take that information with them as they get older and then they will feed that on to friends and family and their own children so as an advocate i ask myself this question all the time how do i change that culture and what i come down to is i change it one mind at a time in the early 1920s there was a professional wolf hunter he was a wolf killer paid by the state of new mexico to reduce the wolf population this was a time in the united states when wolves were being eradicated his name was aldo leopold and he was very good at his job you know he talked about just having a really itchy trigger finger i mean this is a classic hunter right but one day he got up to a wolf he had shot and watched it die and he wrote about this and he wrote about watching the green fire die in this majestic animal's eyes and the essay that he wrote ended up being published in 1949 that book is called the sand county almanac in that book he explains why our treatment of animals at the time killing off predators was wrong and still is of course he became known as the grandfather of wildlife ecology out of leopold so his changing his mind helped to change thousands and thousands of other minds the public can help wolves by opening their mind opening their mutual respect of one another we've seen the bad side of the wolf when it comes into contact with domestic livestock communities that fear them but the wolf is simply trying to survive it needs things that maybe only our world can provide i was taught as a child by my dog rusty and he's behind me here on the shelf and he's the one who really taught me that we're part of the animal kingdom not separated from it and that we're not alone in having personalities minds and above all emotions and feeling pain and these wolves are probably even more even more sentient or perhaps not more than dogs but at least as much as and so they are capable of of mental as well as physical suffering the cubs will suffer if one or both parents are killed the parents will suffer if the cubs are killed and they suffer as much as your beloved dog i think that's a very important point to get across that thinking feeling they're sentient beings they feel fear despair and pain but they can also feel joy and compassion and altruism my wolf journey while making this film has been long confusing yet enlightening humans have masked the wolf in superstition lies in fairy tales while persecuting this animal to the brink of extinction but to what end life doesn't function as a hierarchy of superior and inferior forms it's cyclical a tree of great diversity wolves don't just represent the wilderness they are the wilderness and continue to communicate their message to let them heal the natural world and revive the earth the time has come to unmask the wolf and give them back to nature [Music] you

Channel: Animal Educate

Views: 41,239

Rating: 4.7684517 out of 5

Keywords: wolves, wolves uk, can wolves return to the uk, rewilding britain, wolf rewilding, wolf reintroduction, wolves jane goodall, wolves shaun ellis, wolves chris packham, wolves dave mech, wolves doug smith, wolf conservation, wolf vilianisation, wolves unmasked, wolves britain, wolf hunting, wolves nature, wolves humans, wildlife human conflict, wolves humans conflict, wolf managment, non lethal wolf management

Id: wrAnJJ7cEaw

Length: 79min 27sec (4767 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021