Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and on today's episode, I'm going to be chatting with Adam Weyman, author of Lone Wolf Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness. It's all about the European wolf. It's recent comeback in the similarities between the human and lupine worlds. Without further ado, let's jump right in. Hi Adam, Welcome to the show.
Hi, rep thanks for having me on.
The new book is Lone Wolf Walking the Line between Civilization and Wilderness, released as of June third and all major formats. As you describe in the book. Your journey began in covering the possible reintroduction of wolves into Scotland. You'd written about this prior, so I thought you might walk us through this first. What happened to the wolves the British Isles and where do things stand now with their potential reintroduction?
And what happened to the wolves of the British Isles is pretty much the same that happened to the wolf across its entire range. The wolf used to be, once upon a time, the most widespread terrestrial land mammal on the planet, all across the northern hemisphere, from the tundra right down to the tropics and pretty much everywhere, including in the British Isles. They were pushed almost to extinction in the British Isles, completely eradicated. So there's a bunch
of last Wolf stories. It seems that they hung on in Scotland later than anywhere else. The last definitive account for wolf in Scotland is sixteen twenty one, and that's a note for a bounty that was paid on a wolf. But it was an exception your high sum, which suggests by then that demand was already kind of outstripping supply.
And then it kind of verges into myth. There's a lot of people that would like to claim they killed the last wolf, whereas actually, of course the last wolf probably lived out it's days far from many one, profoundly isolated and alone.
Now you actually looked for the alleged remains of the last wharf in Scotland, right.
Yeah, that's right. So, like I said, it's very hard to come by. There's one story that I followed, so I began my journey in Scotland at in a state up near in Verness, where this gentleman called Paul Lister has been talking about trying to reintroduce now wolves now for about twenty years or so. And I walked across Scotland and finished it in the south of the Kengorm mountain range. And that's one of the places where the
last wolf is meant to have been killed. And then, as you say, late, I said out trying to find it because it is then meant to have been stuffed and had a various journey through different collections and museums, but the actual provenance of it is now pretty hard to locate. And really, through the course of research it made me realize that this probably wasn't the last wolf
at all. This wolf that was being taken around these museums in Scotland was being labeled as the last wolf in order to sell tickets, but really probably nothing of the sort.
And what about the reintroduction of the wolf into Scotland or various other areas where the wolf is no longer present. Where do we currently stand with that in terms of public sentiment and even like governmental opinion.
Well, one of the reasons that the wolf is so good to write about is because people are incredibly passionate about it from both sides. People love wolves or they hate wolves, and you find very little in between, and that's essentially where we are there. It's been noted in the British Isles as the most popular animal for reintroduction. But then you go and speak to people that would
be actually living alongside it. Once again, we have sheep farmers in Scotland, hunters, gameskeepers, people like this, even people that live in villages in the countryside, and there's this reputation that the wolf has for better or worse, and there are people that are very passionately against it as well. It's interesting because in some ways it's quite an arbitrary
decision here wolves. As we're going to talk about wolves are making this remarkable come back in Europe, and if Britain was still connected by a land bridge to the continent as it used to be a couple of hundred thousand years ago, then there would be back. There would be wolves back on the British Isles now, and we wouldn't be having a debate about whether we're not to introduce them. We'd just be talking about how we deal
with them. But because we're in Ireland, we get to make these particular decisions about what we let in and realistically it's not going to happen here for a long time. It's taken about fifteen years of great debate to allow the beaver to come back, and that's broadly accepted now. But there's a lot of other species we'd see back before. Wolf is really really the pinnacle of Once wolves are back, you know, we're not really talking about the worlding anymore.
It's kind of happened now. Now moving to Condon or Europe. Here the book is primarily concerned with a particular wolf, Schloats. Can you tell us about Schloats and why his particular story captured you so and serves as the driving force of your narrative?
Sure, Schlutz, it is actually one of the interesting thing. I mean, it's a particular Slovenian word. And even in the other countries that Schlous ended up in, no one can really say his name, probably but Schloutz. I first read a little piece about Schlutz when I was doing my research on wolves in Scotland, and it was this very small article about this wolf that had been born in the south of Slovenia in twenty ten and had a GPS track and collar put on him by a
biologist who was researching into wolf behavior. But of course that biologist could have no idea what this animal was going to go on to do. He was really just interested in the sort of dynamics of the how a wolf maintained the territory of the pack. But the following year, at the end of twenty eleven, when Schlutz is about eighteen months old, he left his pack behind and set off on this epic one thousand mile journey through the
app Slovenia. He crossed the whole of Austria, and four months later in the spring, came into Italy and it was there that he bumped into a female wolf who was on a walkabout of her own. So somehow in there wasn't another wolf for thousands of square miles. Somehow these two wolves managed to find each other, and when they bred, they became the first wolf pack back in the Italian Alps for more than a century. So in one way, it was this remarkable love story that I
was drawn to. The female wolf ended up getting called Juliet because they were very close to Verona and Romeo and Julieta still Vona's most famous couple. So I was really drawn to this incredible meeting in this love story between these two animals. But of course not everyone is quite so quite so in love with the idea of having wolves back in the mountains.
Now, as you definitely discussed in the book, when we talk about wolves, there's often a lot of separating the biological reality of wolves from human mythmaking about wolves and misconceptions. Coming back to the title of a book, lone Wolf, can you remind us just what a lone wolf actually is and in comparison to maybe some of the ideas that we have about lone wolves.
Yeah, so I really wanted to call it lone Wolf, and we had a bit of pushback sort of an editorial meetings and stuff, But to me, it was really important to call it lone Wolf because I wanted to
challenge this idea of what a lone wolf is. We think of a lone wolf as this kind of Clint Eastward archetype, you know, this hero riding off into the sunset who doesn't need anyone or anything, Whereas what I realized from following Schlaus is that actually a lone wolf is simply something that hasn't found what it's looking for yet. And a lone wolf is looking for the same three things that we all are. It's looking for enough land to live on, it's looking for enough food to eat,
and it's looking for a mate. So and it's an incredibly vulnerable time for a wolf. There is no more vulnerable time. Wolves don't hunt well alone. They like to be part of packs, they like to have a fixed territory. They're actually an incredibly conservative species, very shy, very hard
to see. So to set off on these journeys as a particular kind of subset of wolves are hardwired to do, to disperse like this is an incredibly dangerous, perilous time for them, and not a not a proud, self sufficient state that they want to end up in.
Now. In chronicling this journey, you sometimes write from the point of view of Slouts himself in the book, and I thought this was a lovely choice. It makes for some very poetic passages. Can you describe your process for imagining the mindset of the wolf and how this factored into your approach.
Yeah, thanks, I toyed with it for a while and in the end it felt important. I didn't want to say that, you know, I was seeing the world as a wolf was, but I wanted in some way to sort of, however clumsily, kind of get inside Slouse's mind in a way. And there was something about following his journey.
So the track and collar that you had to put on him, it gave one way point every one hundred and ninety minutes for the entire four months of his walk, And before I set off, transferred each of those waypoints onto this big stack of maps that I carried in my rucksack. And as I walked, as I followed this path, you started to get some sort of sense of how
this wolf was seeing the world. You know, on the map, it might have not seemed to make sense why he'd suddenly changed compass point and set off on a different bearing.
But then when I got to this point, I realized that I could hear the airport, or hear a highway, or I could you see a town for the first time as we come over a hill, or the other places where he turned round, because it was a mountain pass and the winter that he traveled it was incredibly snowy, and a lot of these places was just inaccessible, so in some way that you couldn't get from just looking
at the data on the page. By doing this walk, I started to sense some sort of way that the wolf was moving through a landscape in a way, and often looking for the easiest route as well, often following the river or the bike path down a valley rather than going over a mountain range. And yeah, I felt by the end end of this walk, after following in his footsteps for a few months, that I had kind of earned the right to at least try and write a little bit from his from his perspective.
Yeah, humans have of course long considered the wholf. We've long seen shades of them and us, and shades of us and them. So yeah, this is this is such a I guess, a long standing area of analysis and consideration, right, like, like, how are wolves like us? And how are we like the wholf?
Yeah, we obviously go way back. The wolf is the first animal we domesticated, it's the first animal we lived alongside. And there are these really interesting similarities between the two of us. We're two of the very few species on the planet that hunt prey that are larger than ourselves. That's unusual in the animal world, and in order to do that, that means that you need to work together
as a pack. And then when you start working together as a pack, that requires division of labor, and it requires hierarchy, and it requires some sort of quite complex social organization. And so in some ways there's this real affinity between how humans work together and how wolves work together.
And I think that probably is the reason that we found each other in kind of hunt gather at times and decided to work together, essentially because we had this sort of understanding we both like to run after pray and tire them out, and that is the way that that is the way that they hunt, as opposed a big cat or something like that. And I think it's almost that closeness. There was a wolf behavioral scientist that I met in Austria and he said to me, either
you love your brother or you hate your brother. There's nothing in between. And I think it's almost that closeness that we feel to wolves. And obviously we see that in our relationship to dogs as well, which you're essentially the same animal that we've had this incredible bond with them, But that's very easily quickly flipped into a hatred that I don't think we have for any other animal either.
And that speaking of that hatred and sort of like the dark side of that bond. You write a bit in the book about Europe's three centuries of where wolf triesles and the we're a wolf panic. Can you tell us a bit about this period of time and how it matches up with the timeline of the Eurasian wolf's decline.
Sure, so, yeah, to kind of to break that down a bit, maybe I can say a bit first just about the kind of the extermination of the wolf in general, because we began at that point, as I was saying, with that sort of hunter gather a relationship to the wolf. I think it's two hunters almost respecting each other. But as soon as we became herders, as soon as we put up fences and started to keep livestock, the wolf became this animal that was on the other side of
the fence. Suddenly we had something that the wolf wanted, and very quickly it flipped into the wolf being the thief the vagabonds. And from a Christian lens, if Jesus is the lamb, then the wolf is the devil and the persecution that they've faced over millennia. Really ever since there's been money to pay them. There have been bounties out on wolve's heads back to sixth century BC and
Athens there were bounties out on wolves. Charlemagne from about eighteen for about eight hundreds sorry in France started trying to eradicate the wolf, but it took almost a thousand years. It wasn't until nineteen twenty seven that wolves were finally gone from France. And in some ways it was in the United States where that kind of hatred of the
wolf really reached another reached a pinnacle. Basically, the ways that wolves were killed they were set on fire, they were pulled apart by horses, they were beaten to death, and then paraded through town on the back of horses. The estimates of up to two million wolves were killed in the latter half of the nineteenth century in the United States, and the Native Americans saw it as a
manifestation of insanity. It was said it was seen as a manifestation of insanity amongst the white settlers that were killing these animals. Yeah, and there's something you're doing this research. It really seemed to border on a hatred to wipe out that many animals, right down to the very last animal. It feels like it requires a stronger motivation than just
a desire to protect one sheep. And the werewolf trials that you mentioned at the beginning of that question seemed to be one of those particular manifestations of that sort of paranoia and hate. I'm sure some of your listeners will be familiar with the witch trials, like the Salem witch Trials, and we had them a lot in Europe as well. Thousands of women were killed over several centuries, But I wasn't aware that people were actually put to
death being accused of being werewolves as well. And one of the there were two towns actually in Austria that Schloutz's route passed through were places whereas late as the early eighteenth century people were being put on trial and hung for being were wolves, and quite often the accused seemed to be travelers, wanderers, beggars, people that might turn
up in town. Maybe two sheep were killed that night, and the local people sided to put two and two together, and uh and and and persecute the outsider for for bringing this l upon the upon the town.
I'm glad you mentioned, uh, the agricultural aspect of hatred of the wolf. I had recently read a couple of different books looking at and were wolf myths and legends and talking about how in some cases you see people trying to to date the idea of were wolve's back to our prehistoric ancestors in this time when we lived closer to the wolf, and certainly when we domesticated the wolf. But then I think the more convincing stories that I've read have have made the argument that it is this.
These are ultimately agricultural era tales. These are tales of fear of the wolf and analysis of the wolf in a time when we are worried about our sheep and our herds and and UH and and our dominion over nature.
I don't think that's to say that it kind of obviously it's a misguided assumption. But obviously, you know, to these people, it's not like now when you can get compensation from the state for a wolf kill on the sheep. Wolves don't kill a huge amount of livestock, but they can target certain farms and certain herds, and so someone might lose twenty of their thirty sheep, and that would have been an absolutely existential crisis three hundred years ago.
That was your way of getting through the winter, that was your way of feeding your fairly large family. It would have felt horrifying to be targeted in that way. And I can see the trials against the were wolves and also the kind of ambulets and charms and things that people tried to as some way of trying to have dominion over nature when nature felt really outside of one's control.
Now and my recent reading about is where Wolf. That's one of the books that I was looking at was a twenty twenty one book by Daniel Agden called The World Wolf in the Ancient World. And there's one quote in that that I keep coming back to where he says the quote wolves are in and of themselves. Where wolves already in so far that is, is that they combine the qualities of the wildest and most lawless of
animals with those of civilization and humanity. And I kept coming back in that, not to just harp on like negative connotations of the wolf, but I thought this was interesting and sort of looking at the wolf as this thing that already mirrors a lot about humans, like not just potential savagery, but also how social wolves are, something that I think is sometimes very often overlooked, certainly and
were wolf stories, but just in general. I was wondering if you might speak to He's touched on this already a little bit, but speak to just how social wolves are and how how like humans they are in this regard.
Yeah, I think in some ways they're almost an aspiration or animal. You know that we're obviously genetically far closer to chimpanzees, but I think we in wolves we see qualities of as how we would like to be. You know, you go to you go to zoo and watch chimpanzees, you obviously see something in them, But to watch a wolf is to is to see how humans could be.
I think, you know, wolves, wolves are excellent parents. They're one of the very few animals where the males will stick around long after the birth to look after both the pups and the suckling mother. They are incredibly loyal, They are courageous and resourceful, and you know, often I met a lot of people, a lot of farmers on my journey through the Apps who absolutely detested wolves, you know,
for the burdens that they put on their lives. But I still got this sense that if they if they were to be reincarnated at some point in the future, if they were going to come back as an animal, they'd really like to come back as a wolf.
You know, Yeah, that's that's interesting. Yeah, how when people think about wolves there is often this aspirational aspect of it, like they don't actually be a were wolf, but the idea of being like free like a wolf, of having the wolf is kind of like a symbolic animal in one's mind.
And it's worth saying we've spoken about the kind of hatred and the hatred that we've got in them, that adulation of the wolf is also a misconception. One of the things that I found in this book is that almost the hardest thing about a wolf is to see it for what it is, which is a wolf. It seems to be this vessel for our fears and our hopes and our dreams, and particularly how we relate to
the natural world. And whilst once upon a time that might have been this sense of destroying the wolf in order to kind of manifest progress and civilization, now we have all these anxieties about what we're doing to the world and what we're doing to our futures, and once again the wolf has become this vessel, but this time it's something that's almost going to save us from ourselves rather than destroyers.
In the book, you draw connections between the comeback of the wild Wolf and the refugee crisis in Europe. Can you elaborate on this for Uce a bit?
Yeah, in several ways. I was first drawn to this story actually because Licinia, which is this small regional park in Italy where Schlutz finished his journey, where he bumped into Juliet and where they formed their first pack. It was also a part of the Alps where a lot of refugees who were arriving in Italy they divide by boat to lamproducer and then they'd straight away get taken
to these settlement centers. And there was one in Licinia right up in the Apps and the middle of nowhere, completely cut off in winter, and these people that were arriving from North Africa from the Middle East were being taken to these This was a former NATO barracks, and a lot of the language that was being used by the local people living in these mountains about the refugees and the wolves was very similar. You know, we were
here first. These people don't belong here. I don't have a problem with either wolves or migrants, but their place isn't here. And not only obviously, was that completely untrue that wolves were in these mountains long before people. And actually a lot of the Licinians are descendants of German woodcutters who moved down from Germany a few hundred years ago.
There were these kind of very obvious parallels I was finding, particularly in how both in the rural places I was passing through, the migrant and the wolf are both being scapegoated by rural populations for a set of much more complicated problems, you know, and I think we see that in the rise of far right politics everywhere. The migrant is this scapegoat for this incredibly complex range of problems that are affecting countries, and the wolf seemed to stand
in for that as well. So there seemed to be this affinity and yeah, kind of the importance of both the wolf and the migrant for these places. But then how it was perceived by a local population as well, And then how the refugee and the wolf were being used by far right politicians in order to inflame anger and to chase that populist vote as well.
Well, I really I really appreciated how you were able to weave these themes together book.
Yeah, it felt I wasn't expecting it, to be honest, I wasn't expecting it, but increasingly, Yeah, it seemed to follow me wherever I went. You know that the wolf has been One of the reasons the wolf has done so well in Europe is because it's been protected by the European Union for the last thirty years or fifty years in some ways, and so it's a very short distance to having a problem with the wolf to having
a problem with the European Union. And there are far right parties, particularly in Austria where the FBO are now the leading party, where rather than encouraging farmers to try and coexist with the wolf, and there are proven ways to be able to co exist with wolves using dogs, using electric fences, they were almost encouraging farmers not to do that and actually to just send their flocks up into the mountains in what one biologist described to me
as a state sanctioned slaughterhouse. And then when that drama happens, that would then create this space for these politicians to say that they're going to go to the European Union and go to Brussels and demand a change in law for the protection of the wolf, which actually has now recently happened so in the way that farmers protests, and I do, you know, it's worth saying that I really understand why farmers are finding it hard to live alongside
these carnivores. Again, you know, there's a lot of farming is a difficult profession at the best of times. That the year that I did the walk was the driest summer in Europe for several hundred years. The price of electricity and animal feed is rocketing. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, young people are leaving for the cities. They don't want to farm anymore. And now these farmers are being asked to live alongside wolves as well. I understand the fury.
And while these complex problems climate change, inflation, etc. Are hard to manage, at least with a wolf, you can go out and shoot it, albeit illegally, and feel like you have some kind of agency over your life. But rather than promoting understanding, rather than delving into the actual looking for solutions to these more complicated problems, that is the place where these far right politicians seem to be coming in and co opting their anger and turning it
to their own ends. And that that's the bit that I want to challenge. Not that I don't understand why it's difficult for pharmaci live alongside wolves, but the ways that it's being politicized I think need to be addressed.
Now, getting back to the topic of domestication, you touch on the history of the German shepherd dog breed, which this was all new to me. I don't know much about dog breeds, I admit. Can you talk a little bit about how the German shepherd factors into our ideas about the wolf.
Yes, so the German shepherd I knew none of this
either until I started to research. The German shepherd was an early twentieth century creation by a guy called Maximan Stefanitz, who was a retired German cavalry officer, and he said that he set out to basically kind of reverse engineer a wolf, to sort of breed back into a dog all these qualities that he saw as kind of most wolf like and most noble for its size and its strength and its power and its willingness to work, and it really prefigured a lot of the kind of Nazi
eugenics ideas, and the six hundred page manifesto that he wrote about the German Shepherd had a lot to say about race and about the purity of race, and very much the same way that Nazis would fetishize this kind of certain area and races as time went on and the Nazis. For the Nazis, the German shepherd was the kind of dog that they used in the death camps, that they used on the battlefield. Hit Like kept two
German shepherds, one of which he named Wolf. Hitler himself was obsessed by wolf's Adolph itself is an old Germanic variation of of wolf, and from from he called the Hitler youth, his his wolf cubs. Apparently he went around whistling the Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Disney song? You know that he saw in the wolf this kind of this total animal, I suppose, this sense of this kind of unbridled violence and aggression that he wanted to breed back into a race of people that he felt
had become weak and soft and powerless. So for the interesting that the Nazis were the first people in modern times to actually place environmental protection laws on the wolf, and it was it was part of this this vision of this kind of udagizing the power of the animal.
Yeah. I believe you mentioned in the book that disturbingly so the Nazis environmental policies were advanced even for today.
Yeah. Yeah, but it was a sense of a kind of pristine wilderness that was going to be full of this sort of race of godlike men, you know, and those kind of large, charismatic, tootemic animals that actually fit very well within that sort of wider Nazi vision of the world.
Interesting that there was some attempt in this to sort of recreate a wolf, because I know in some generally not great movies I've seen German shepherds stand in for they'll have the part of wild wolves played by obvious German shepherds.
And then it's worth mentioning Miscellini as well, because for Italy there was also a part important important animal for Mussolini. But because the founding myth of Rome has the twins Communism Remus being abandoned in the wilderness and then being saved by a she wolf who suckled the twins until a shepherd took them in, and then Rominius and Remus
later went on to found Rome. The wolf for the Italians has had that same strength and power, but has also been this kind of nurturing maternal influence, and Mussolini very much co opted that. Through the whole of Mussolinius fascist raisme, there was a live wolf kept in a cage in Rome that people could go and see and actually reined there in various generations of the wolf up until the nineteen seventies. There was meant to be this living, fleshy symbol of the power of Mussolini's project.
Now, going back to what you said earlier, this idea of the wolf is also serving very particular human aspirations and is rather far removed from like the more boundariality of the wolf, including it's how social the animal is, how nurturing the animal can be, and so forth right.
Yeah, there's no more prevalent myth about the wolf than this idea of an alpha wolf, which is now completely discredited. The alpha wolf was created by this biologist called Rudolph Schenkel, working in nineteen thirty four. He began his research just across the border from Nazi Germany in Switzerland. And again it's thought that in his research in many ways was influenced by the Nazi project that was developing across the border.
And he based his study on a pack of wolves that were kept that were drawn from all different places and kept in a very small enclosure. And from observing those wolves and how they were not able to disperse and go out and find new territory like stats was able to how they were not able to cooperate and hunt, but actually they were just forced into this small environment. There was this completely artificial fighting to be the alpha. But that is not how wolves work in the wild.
But that became the basis for understanding how wild wolves work for the next fifty years or so. It's now been completely discredited in the science, but that sense of the alpha wolf does still persist from motivational speakers and toxic corners of the internet and everything else. We're still encouraged to be this idea of the alpha. But that's something because it fits very well with how we If we can say that wolves do it, then we can kind of justify doing it ourselves as well. But that
is not how wolves work. A wolf pack is essentially a family in some shape or form, and the main pair of wolves will generally stay together for life, breed for life, and raise successive generations within the pack.
What is your big hope for readers with this book, for them something they might take away about wolves and also maybe about humans.
I think one of the things that I've come to see the wolf has. As we said at the beginning, we're a long way from reintroducing wolves to the to the UK. But I think the reason why wolves are interesting to think about, whether in a North American context or a European context, is because I think they really demand answers of us. They're almost the disruptors. You know,
they move fast and they break stuff. And if we think, you know, we know we need to give more space to the natural world, we know that we need to coexist in a better way. But I think wolves really ask us if we believe that we can or are we just paying at service of this? Can we can we sanction risk again? Can we sanction living in a world that feels a little bit more unknown than what we might be used to? You know, it was it
was tempting to me. I work as an environmental journalist, I write a lot of stories that seem quite hopeless, and it was quite tempting for me with this story to see the wolf as this kind of beacon of hope. You know, wolves are doing incredibly well in Europe again and to a lesser extent in North America. They're now
listed as a species of Least Concern in Europe. It's this incredible environmental success story in a way, and it's really tempting to hang on to that as a kind of beacon of hope when when in the middle of a biodiversity crisis and a climate crisis, and you know, again that is just seeing the wolf is something that we want it to be. Of course, it doesn't really mean that the earth is healing or anything like that.
But for the wolf, this is obviously a massive time of hope and success, and I think that's really interesting to see it in that way, that there is this
incredible desire for life to thrive. I think that that's what wolves embody that and in response to times of crisis, we move, you know, and I think wolves have always embodied that that that change is inevitable, and there is this desire and this urge for life to flourish, and following Schlaus's journey across Europe has really shown me that it's you know, however much we try and put up our borders, however much we try and hem life in it, will continue to try and find a way.
All right, Adam, I have one more question for you. And I realized this was this was the sillier one. But in the acknowledgments for the book you you mentioned leaning on Joel pulling h for a quote having watched every werewolf film out there so that I didn't have to. Could you give us a little a little bit about your back and forth with Joel here? What what did that?
Have?
This? Have this go down?
He sent me. Joel he's a friend of mine. He works at the British Film Institute. We've been we've been friends for ever. He's not just watched every where wolf film going, He's watched every film going at this point. It's an incredible resource. And yeah, there's a lot of werebell films out there that there's a lot of wolf
literature out there. I remember sort of going into the British Library at the beginning of this research and typing in Wolf into the library archive and being absolutely overwhelmed. My last book was about Salmon and the the literature was a lot less intimidating than it was about the wolf, and the werewolf subset of that is again is again vast. But he set me on to some of the classics
which I've never seen. Ginger Snaps, I'd never seen. American werewolf in London I'd never seen, and it felt like a werewolf would be many things to many people. It seems to it's standing for kind of whatever our paranoia and preoccupations are at the time. But compared to the actual werewolf trials that I was seeing, that the ones in films like Ginger Snaps, it's always the lover, the best friend that seems to be possessed, whereas the werewolf
trials it was always the unknown, stranger, the vagrant. But it seems to lean into that. You know, it's in the same way as when you watch a wolf in a zoo or something like that. It looks it looks like every dog that you know. You know, you feel like you can understand what it's thinking because you you
sort of think you know what a dog's thinking. But then there's this kind of unhinged element as well, that suddenly it will foe you and you realize you're not watching a dog at all, You're watching this other, completely
wild thing. And I think that's what the were wolf thing touches on, that we're watching someone and we think we understand them, but actually within that there is this wild, unhinged part of them, which it's not just terrifying, it's also it's also quite thrilling, you know, But there's a temptation in the werewolf there just to kind of let go and see what happens if we, you know, run off into the night.
Adam, well, thanks so much for taking time out of your day to chat with me here. The book again is Lone Wolf Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness.
Thanks Rev, thanks for having me.
On all right, Thanks once more to Adam for coming on the show and chatting with me. The book again is Lone Wolf Walking the Line between Civilization and Wildness, and as of June third, you'll find it in the US in all major formats. Thanks as always to the excellent JJ Passway for producing this show. And if you have any questions, episodes, suggestions, and so forth you would like to send to us. You can email us at contact It's Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.