SOC301

“Men do not discover their gods, they create them. So do they also, I thought, create their animals.” -- Barry H. Lopez, Of Wolves and Men.

In chapter two of Nature’s Bounty you will read about the history of US governmental policy towards wildlife and how this policy evolved over time. In this lecture I wish to explore the “social construction” of wildlife. In discussing how animals are socially constructed and the implications of such constructions, please note that such analysis can be applied to any aspect of this course.

Our understanding of the world is socially constructed. In other words, we see the world through a particular, human, lens and our culture helps to shape the lens through which we see. Thus, Social Construction Theory emphasizes “the idea that society is actively and creatively produced by human beings. They (social constructionists) portray the world as made or invented- rather than merely given or taken for granted. Social worlds are interpretive nets woven by individuals and groups (Marshall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, 1994).”

From a social constructionist standpoint, the way we perceive, understand, behave and relate to other animals is dependent upon the entire range, of beliefs and values with which we have been brought up. To understand this better, lets take the case of wolves. Barry Lopez (1978) did a stunning comparative study of the way wolves are perceived by American biologists versus Eskimos and Indians in Alaska. No one knows why wolves do what they do, but biologists and Native Americans come up with drastically different understanding of wolves and we must realize that each view is only a partial picture, not an entire reality. As Lopez explains, “In the past twenty years biologists have given us a new wolf, one separated from folklore. But they have not found the whole truth. For example, wolves do not kill just the old, the weak, and the injured. They also kill animals in the prime of their health (Lopez, 4).” Likewise, the Native American picture of wolves is also partial and dependent upon need. “Native American perceptions of the wolf varied largely according to whether or not a tribe was agricultural. It was naturally among the hunting tribes that the wolf played the greater mythic-religious role because the wolf himself was a great hunter, not a great farmer. He was retained for a while in the mythology of agricultural tribes and regarded by them as an animal of great power and mystery, but his place there was slowly eclipsed by anthropomorphic gods of the harvest (Lopez, 102).

Lopez compares biologists and Eskimos understanding of wolves: “It is one of the oddities of our age that much of what Eskimos know about wolves- and speak about clearly in English, in twentieth-century terms- wildlife biologists are still intent on discovering. It was this fact that made me uneasy. Later, I was made even more uneasy by how much fuller the wolf was as a creature in the mind of the modern Eskimo.
“If you examine what they have to say, if you watch Eskimos hunt, you discover something about wolves; but you also discover something about men and how they envision animals. For some, the animal is only an object to be quantified; it is limited, capable of being fully understood. For others, the animal is a likeness to be compared to other animals. In the end, it is unfathomable. The view from both places- the one slightly arrogant, the other perhaps more humble- gives you an animal neither can see. When you think about it, that’s quite extraordinary: a wolf that is both substance and shadow (Lopez, 78).”

Why have we killed the wolf to near extinction? To answer this question, we must again look at ourselves and ask the question, what do we FEAR? The wolf became a scapegoat, manifesting our own fears about ourselves. The demonized wolf is indicative of our fear of the root of our own humanity-- that we ourselves are primal creatures. It is through our own self-hatred that we first hate and then kill the wolf. The wolf is constructed as the “beast,” the “enemy.” “The wolf became the symbol of what you wanted to kill- memories of man’s primitive origins in the wilderness, the remnant of his bestial nature which was all that held him back in American from building the greatest empire on the face of the earth. The wolf represented ‘a fierce, bloodsucking persecutor’ (as Roger Williams called him) of everything that was high-born in man (Lopez, 143).” Thus to transform the “wilderness” into “civilization,” we defined “good animals” versus “bad animals” and extinguished the “bad” ones-- or in otherwords, we tried to get rid of what we really hated about our selves.

Perhaps we are beginning to gain a more fuller picture of the wolf as well as other animals. The western mind continues to want to “understand” the wolf and continues to be shocked when our understanding falls short of the complexities inherent in any form of life. The recognition that exterminating predators deeply upsets the balance of the ecosystems in which they live is an important recognition, and yet the egoism through which such “discoveries” are made still haunt the western world. For, even when we recognize the importance of “biodiversity,” we still are far from “understanding” the complexities behind such diversity. Penna’s footnote regarding our current approach to wolves is quite telling in this regard:

“Today our knowledge of wolves has been increased immensely as a result of scientific research. For the last few years, the reintroduction of wolves into the national park system has been underway. The return of a large predator into a large ecosystem like Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, has resulted in some dramatic ecological changes. In the two years since their reappearance, gray wolves have killed half of the Park’s coyote population. Also, a wolf pack kills an elk every few days, leaving most of its 900-pound carcass for other predators. For every one hundred elk chased by wolves in the park about two or three are caught and killed. For example, it is not uncommon to see grizzly bears feeding simultaneously with ravens, coyotes, fox and bald and golden eagles on wolf-killed elk. The significant decline in the coyote population has caused the rodent population to increase, creating a boon for other predators, including hawks and bald eagles. As a result, overall biodiversity in Yellowstone has increased so dramatically in so short a time AS TO SURPRISE EVEN PARK SCIENTISTS AND RANGERS (my emphasis) (Penna, 90-91).

Go on to Cultural Influences on Perception
or
Go back to Wildlife

E-mail Janine Minkler at Janine.Minkler@nau.edu
Call Janine Minkler at (928) 523-7482

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