A while back, I watched the video for the movie The Gray. In that movie, Liam Neeson played the part of an oil rig worker who had crashed in the wilderness, forcing him to flee from a vicious pack of wolves who proceeded to pick the workers off one by one (including a female stewardess on the plane).
Conservationists working to save the wolf have succeeded all too well, by publishing beautiful calendars which portray wolves in benign ways that make viewers mistakenly conclude that wolves are misunderstood and persecuted animals. But watch this National Geographic video and notice that Arctic wolves are more than capable of hunting down musk oxen, one of the largest species of animals in the arctic. These ARE NOT dogs, and as the Liam Neeson character observes, they do not eat nuts and berries.
It's true that early settlers were so afraid of wolves that they hunted wolves to the point of near extinction in this nation and elsewhere. But there was a reason those settlers were afraid of wolves, and it came from primal memories of a time when human beings were constantly being threatened by wolves in terms of survival. Wolves are efficient killing machines, but they are not too bright, because other canines figured out long ago that it made sense to make nice to human beings, and to accept the offer of a nice warm spot by the fire. Wolves value their independence, even though their insistence on independence has made them a threatened species in many parts of the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment