Edited by: L. David Mech & Luigi Boitani
Publisher: Chicago University Press, USA, 2003, 448 pp.
ISBN: 0-226-51696-2
It was nine years in the making - but the wait was worthwhile. Twenty-two of the world’s wolf experts bring together their total of 350 person-years of experience to present a state-of-the-art summary of our knowledge about wolves.
Knowledge has grown enormously since David Mech wrote his first wolf book: "The wolf: the ecology and behavior of an endangered species" in 1970. In the intervening 33 years research from all corners of the globe has helped demystify this animal, and this book tries to bring it all together.
Chapters span everything from taxonomy, morphology, behaviour, social organisation, physiology and predator-prey relationships through genetics to the lists of parasites (several pages worth) that call a wolf’s body home.
However, most interesting for the conservationist are the last two chapters. "Wolves and humans" covers the complex wolf-human relationship in various cultures, before leading us through the various conflicts that occur with human activities like depredation on livestock, attacks on people, competition with hunters, and the way wolves end up being used as symbols in political conflicts between different groups of people. The final chapter: "Wolf conservation and recovery" by Luigi Boitani is the most thought provoking. He binds together the biology with the conflicts to address the issues of how to achieve coexistence between wolves and humans. By the time they get this far in the book, readers will hopefully have completely changed their view of wolves as a wilderness species, and realised that wolves can just about live anywhere if humans let them. Consequently, there is no single 'best-strategy' for how to manage wolves; effective wolf conservation will require a wide range of locally adapted strategies. In some areas, strict protection may be most appropriate, while in other tolerance may be promoted by allowing some forms of control and even harvest. We are also asked to change the benchmark by which we measure the success of wolf conservation strategies from maximum numbers (for example crammed into a reserve or wilderness area) to one of maximum distribution (through a range of wilderness and non-wilderness landscapes). The central message is that wolves are tolerant and flexible, but can we be the same, both in our interactions with wolves and ourselves?
This is not a coffee table book, although the two sets of colour plates do contain some of the great wolf pictures that have already inspired many. It is rather a solid, but highly readable, scientific text covering all aspects of wolf lore.
If you are seriously interested in wolves, large carnivores, wild ungulates, predator-prey processes or human-wildlife conflicts in general, either as a professional or lay-person, this book is a 'must have'.