Thammasat University students who are interested in biology, ecology, conservation, veterinary science, folklore, anthropology, sociology, ethology, cultural geography, philosophy, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.

Living with Wolves: Affects, Feelings and Sentiments in Human-Wolf-Coexistence is an Open Access book, available for free download at this link:

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783839474709/html

The TU Library collection includes books about different aspects of wolves.

As TU students know, there are no wolves in Thailand.

The largest canine in Thailand is the dhole or Asiatic wild dog, also sometimes called the chennai, Indian wild dog, mountain wolf, red dog, and red wolf.

It should not be mistaken for the red wolf (Canis rufus) even if it has reddish fur.

The new book is by Dr. Thorsten Gieser, who is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Koblenz, Germany.

The publisher’s description of the book explains:

With their return to Germany, wolves leave their traces in personal feelings, in the atmospheres of rural landscapes and even in the sentiments and moods that govern political arenas. Thorsten Gieser explores the role of affects, emotions, moods and atmospheres in the emerging coexistence between humans and wolves. Bridging the gap between anthropology and ethology, the author literally walks in the tracks of wolves to follow their affective agency in a more-than-human society. In nuanced analyses, he shows how wolves move, irritate and excite us, offering answers to the primary question: What does it feel like to coexist with these large predators?

Dr. Gieser’s Introduction observes that once extinct in Germany,

By the 2020–21 monitoring year, the wolf population had increased to 159 packs, thirty-eight pairs, twenty-two territorial solitary wolves and 575 confirmed pups in ten of the sixteen federal states (most of them in Saxony, Brandenburg and Lower Saxony).

Germany now has one of the largest wolf populations in Europe, and it continues to grow.

But numbers alone give an incomplete picture. Unlike the return or reintroduction of other wildlife species, such as lynx or beavers, the return of wolves seems to have a different quality. Conflicts overshadow the establishment of any kind of coexistence. Wolves enter our lives in many different ways.

Wolves are being sighted in new places all the time. Videos and pictures of wolf sightings and encounters circulate on social media. Wolves are establishing new territories. Wolves cross roads and sometimes become victims of traffic accidents. Wolves attack sheep, sometimes horses and cows, overcoming herd protection measures. Wolves are occasionally found to have been illegally killed and buried. People take to the streets to protest against the return of wolves. Public meetings and lectures about wolves are held. People visit wolf exhibitions and wolf parks. In rare cases, wolves mate with dogs and produce hybrids. Sometimes wolves are officially declared ‘problem wolves’ (after long and heated debates) because they have repeatedly killed farm animals or shown ‘unnatural’ behaviour. There are media reports that a problem wolf has been killed, or that a wolf could not be killed despite efforts to do so, because it has mysteriously disappeared or moved to a neighbouring state where the original permit for its legal ‘removal’ (killing) is not valid. Animal rights activists are suing, or threatening to sue, individual politicians or institutions for issuing such permits.

We can see that the return of wolves to Germany is full of potential and real conflicts, and it is no wonder that it has created a highly emotional situation. The parties involved accuse the other side of being too emotional, while they themselves claim to be rational and generally call for a calming of emotions and more objectivity in the debate. And yet emotions always boil up. In parliamentary debates, public speeches and street protests, actors champion their causes and express indignation or outrage. Livestock owners are frustrated and express their constant concern for their animals. Wolf critics and supporters meet online and offline and get angry or upset with each other.

On the one hand, hatred of wolves has led to illegal killings. On the other hand, wolf supporters meet the return of wolves with love and fascination. Meanwhile, most people seem just a little uneasy and don’t know what to make of this new situation. They want and need their concerns to be ‘taken seriously’, as a common phrase in Germany in recent years has gone – especially by politicians and official wolf managers.

The conflicts between humans and wolves are therefore far from being exhausted in the social scientific study of rational debates, the exchange of arguments, or in public knowledge, opinions and attitudes. There seems to be an implicit assumption shared by almost everyone involved that the conflicts can be resolved by 1) more knowledge, 2) more objective ways of dealing with it. Therefore, the role of science and scientific knowledge is paramount in the whole discourse on wolves. While there is certainly a place for studies of knowledge and attitudes in the conflicts, it is clear that they leave significant dimensions of the conflicts unexamined. This is because human-wolf coexistence is not ‘emotionally neutral’: whether coexistence or conflict, the relationship is deeply emotional. This insight, although often observed, has not yet led to a comprehensive study of the role of emotions in the human-wolf relationship. What is needed, then, is an approach that thinks through emotions in their various manifestations with a nuanced understanding. Two brief examples from my fieldwork give a preliminary idea of where such a perspective might lead. […]

This book is thus an ethnography of the affective dimensions of human-wolf coexistence in Germany at the beginning of the twenty-first century, combining perspectives from anthropology, cultural geography, philosophy, and (wolf) biology. Based on almost three years of ethnographic fieldwork, I examine in particular how wolves actively shape this coexistence and how their lives and actions directly and indirectly affect humans. These are fundamentally ecological questions – provided that ecology is understood as more than the quantitative study of energy and material exchange processes. […]

Thus, if we understand both humans and wolves as living beings mutually affecting and being affected by each other through their actions and behaviours in a common, shared lifeworld, then we must also place an ethological approach (broadly defined) alongside an ethnological/anthropological approach and combine both into an etho-ethnological approach. This would assume that humans and wolves share a common lifeworld, in hybrid communities consisting of a multiplicity of human and non-human beings, that is, in a ‘multispecies world’ or a ‘nature-culture’ in which becoming is always a becoming-with, life is always a living-together.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)