The Lost Wolves of Japan (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books) in Nature Calls

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The Lost Wolves of Japan (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)

Brett Walker

Why we're reading this: Though somewhat scholarly, this is an excellent book about the intersection of humans and wolves, of prog…more
[close] Though somewhat scholarly, this is an excellent book about the intersection of humans and wolves, of progress and nature.

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Aug 20, 2013 Rick Lamplugh rated it really liked it

The human drive to take territory from wolves, to annihilate these competitors, and to create wolf haters is crystalized in Brett Walker's The Lost Wolves of Japan.

The story begins around 1600. Then, the Japanese regarded wolves as deities, worshipped them at shrines, even left ceremonial dishes of red beans and rice next to wolf dens. The country had no large scale livestock industry and farmers saw the wolf as an ecological partner: the wolves killed the boars and deer that ate grain crops.

Du The human drive to take territory from wolves, to annihilate these competitors, and to create wolf haters is crystalized in Brett Walker's The Lost Wolves of Japan.

The story begins around 1600. Then, the Japanese regarded wolves as deities, worshipped them at shrines, even left ceremonial dishes of red beans and rice next to wolf dens. The country had no large scale livestock industry and farmers saw the wolf as an ecological partner: the wolves killed the boars and deer that ate grain crops.

During the 1700s, the reverence for wolves dimmed as the human population swelled, encroached on wolf territory, and fostered human-wolf conflict. Some rabid wolves killed humans; and all of a sudden there was a bounty on wolves and the stirring of wolf hatred.

In 1868 the Japanese government decided to stoke that stirring into a squall when it began to modernize the country鈥檚 economy. At that time, modernization meant developing scientific agriculture and raising livestock on huge, new ranches, as Americans had done so successfully. Those ranches would be carved out of wolf territory. Wolves had to go.

In 1873 the Japanese government hired Edwin Dun, a rancher from Ohio, to help create the livestock industry and eradicate wolves. Dun went to work on the northern tip of Japan, on undeveloped Hokkaido, an island just a bit smaller than Ireland. When Dun stepped off the boat with starter herds, about fifty head of cattle and a hundred sheep, the development of the livestock industry and the government鈥檚 campaign to re-categorize wolves as evil predators began.

Once wolves were viewed as 鈥渘oxious animals鈥� instead of sacred deities, the next step was easy. Dun was, after all, a veteran American rancher. He knew how to eliminate wolves: bounties and strychnine.

The Japanese kept records of the rampage: By 1881, 406 wolves had been killed. By 1905, wolves were extinct. It took only thirty-two years鈥攍ess than the average life span of a citizen鈥攆or the Japanese to go from worshipping wolves at shrines to wiping them out with strychnine. The key was for the Japanese government to shift the cultural perception of the wolf from deity to demon.
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