Portrayal of the wolf as ravenous superpredator is hyperbolic exaggeration.
May 26, 2014 by Mark Derr in Dog’s Best Friend
Last week my colleague and fellow Psychology Today blogger, Marc Bekoff, called out Animal Planet over a particularly noxious piece of myth making that purports to sound an alarm about super-predatory wolves. These ravenous creatures, we are told, have decimated their natural, wild prey—elk, deer, moose—and now must turn to livestock and even humans themselves. These wolves are stone-cold killers with razor sharp teeth who can hear your heart beating fear and terror. They are living among us and they are proliferating. In times of scarcity, they can form into super packs with hundreds of wolves and besiege whole towns.
Man-Eating Super Wolves (cost is $1.99 but save your money), the program containing these hyperbolic exaggerations, ran as part of Animal Planet’s “Monster Week.” It represents nearly all that is wrong with nature films. It is sensationalist; it has a tenuous relationship to its subject in particular and nature in general; at its best, it is misleading. Despite the presence of Gregory Erickson, a paleobiologist from Florida State University who tries to keep the narrative from spinning free of reality, this program is what in journalism is known as a one-source story, relying on the views of one man, Valerius Geist, an ethologist specializing in wild ungulates, now retired from the University of Calgary. Geist is best known for providing intellectual cover to the most extreme wolf-haters. Perhaps he is the primary on screen source because the filmmakers could find no reputable wolf biologist who shares his vision. Erickson isn’t a wolf biologist—he specializes in alligator evolution and predatory dinosaurs.
Geist’s central thesis as expressed on this program is that wolves are blood-thirsty killers who, as they have increased in numbers due to government protection, have depleted their natural, wild prey and turned to livestock and ultimately humans. According to him, they are “cunning, intelligent, relentless.” They study us in order to prey upon us. Geist thinks anyone who thinks a wolf or wolf hybrid is their friend is delusional. We must kill them before they turn on us, and when you do confront one, he says, you should always stare into its eyes and never flinch; that way you establish dominion.
The program is filled with reenactments (unlabeled as such) of the two officially recorded fatal wolf attacks on humans in North America: the first, November 8, 2005, when wolves purportedly killed Kenton Carnegie, a young university student at Points North Landing, Saskatchewan, Canada; and the second, March 8, 2010, when wolves killed Candice Berner in the village of Chignik Lake, Alaska.
This program depicts a gruesome death for Kenton Carnegie while failing in any way to reveal that questions remain. Despite an official coroner’s ruling that wolves were responsible, some experts have suggested from the start that a black bears…
Exposing the Big Game 
It is worse than distortion, the program/documentary: It is lying and fraudulent. The least bit of credible research, observation and logic depicts the opposite. The producers could have gotten the wolf hating mythology from any redneck hunter in any bar in Montana, Idaho or Wyoming. The mythology even contradicts logic. Wolves and other predators have been part of the wildlife ecology for millennium and provided a healthy balance to that ecology, a trophic cascading effect. Predator and prey have worked it out. It is man that is the superfluous, additive killer of wildlife and distortion on healthy wildlife ecology with his sport killing, i.e. Montana 2010 killed 91,000 whitetail deer, 44,000 mule deer, 19,000 antelope, 25,000 elk and hundreds of other animals. Hunters continue killing moose despite declining populations in much of the state. They kill around 1100 bears every year. Man is the bloodthirsty sport killer. The person killed in Saskatchewan was more likely killed by a black bear; and even if wolves, there was a dump nearby acting as a draw for wolves and bears. There are no documented humans killed by wolves in the USA ever though it likely happened among Native Americans over the centuries. The point is that it is so rare as to be nonexistent, not supporting the bloodthirsty man eating wolf myth. Elk herds are up 37% in Montana since 1989 (89,000) and now over 141,000. Predation on cattle is 0.002% (55 of 2.6 million in 2013); and that has been the rate (0.002%, 55 to 85 but less than 70) for years. Wolves regulate their own populations relative to available prey and even more importantly on a year to year basis in terms of wolf elbow room. Wolf packs do not tolerate much crowding by other wolf packs. Bottom line, truth versus fraudulent, lying documentary and sportsmen-rancher mythology is that wolves are not bloodthirsty man killers, are not decimating game herds nor cattle herds. When you are hearing otherwise you are hearing mythology, lies, fables, folklore. I have been shocked in recent years by how much redneck fare there is on Discovery, National Geographic, and other “animal” channels.
Another common redneck myth is the super wolf, the giant Canadian wolf introduced back into Yellowstone and ID and re-entering the USA via Glacier. The average wolf in Montana ranges from 65-85 lbs. with a few up to 105 lbs. with very few ever larger and a handful, less than 10, 130 lbs.or over anywhere in the world ever. There was a 130 lbs. MT wolf, and two wolves in the north, one in Canada and one in Alaska, weighing in at around 175 lbs. The wolf back in the USA is canis lupus or gray wolf. Southeaster red wolves are smaller as are southwestern lobo wolves. The so called timber wolf is a gray wolf located in the MN area, still gray wolf. Wolves tend to be larger as one observes more northward locations, but the arctic wolf is again small. Different wolf labels among the gray wolves have more to do with territory occupied by them than genetics. Why does the myth of the giant Canadian wolf persist? Where do rednecks get their information? You guessed it, other rednecks, sportsmen, ranchers. These groups think more from a belief system way of thinking and are very immune to science, facts or logic. They also tend to generally be very conservative– Have you read The Republican Mind? It is no accident that republican far right state legislatures are very anti-wolf as they are anti EPA, ESA, and federal government. They blame the federal government for imposing on them the wolf recovery.
Geist is a quack and a fraud and he knows it. He’s has no peer reviewed published wolf studies and the actual wolf biologists who do, say he’s a fraud as well. That’s why you see him on the wolfaphobe conspiracy theorist speaker circuit lecturing those who couldn’t cut it in college and think construction work and truck driving Is the labor of geniuses.