In 2012, a young wolf named Slavc loped into the Lessini Mountains of Italy, completing a 1,200-mile route from Slovenia, where he was born. This was a dangerous place for a wolf to settle. The region had been proudly wolf free since about 1860; a stone commemorates the spot where the last one was killed. Slavc, who had been outfitted with a GPS collar by Slovenian biologists, soon encountered a female of his kind, a wanderer from the south. They became a pair—the first pack Lessinia had seen in more than a century—and the vanguard of a lupine renaissance.
Within a decade, Italy would become home to 2,000 wolves in almost 20 packs. The resurgence of wolves is not strictly an Italian phenomenon. Whereas in the middle of the 20th century, wolves were nearly extinct in Europe, today, more than 20,000 roam the continent. Their howls are heard everywhere except in the countries they’d have to swim to: Malta, Cyprus, Iceland, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.
“Slavc’s journey might have been extraordinary, but more astonishing still is how rapidly the wolf has repopulated these lands, as though it has never been away,” Adam Weymouth writes in his new book, Lone Wolf, which explores what a predator’s return means to a people and a landscape that had forgotten it. Italy, Weymouth observes, “was an empty stage waiting on its protagonist—hollows that could be dens, saplings that could be marking posts, deer that could be prey.”
Weymouth is an uncommon brand of travel writer, weaving natural history with culture and politics. For his first book, Kings of the Yukon, he paddled 2,000 miles along the Yukon River in tandem with migrating king salmon, learning how this species, crucial for local livelihoods and prized commercially, shapes community identities in the Far North. In Lone Wolf, the author swaps runs of fish for a single predator. In 2022, Weymouth shouldered a rucksack to walk 1,000 miles along Slavc’s GPS trail, following the hundreds of virtual breadcrumbs that marked the wolf’s path from Slovenia to Italy. Weymouth slept in the same forests Slavc did, huffed across the same mountain passes, and traversed the same national borders. He spoke with Slovenian farmers, Austrian politicians, and Italian shepherds along the way to understand how the reemergence of wolves has troubled rural communities in the Southern Alps.
But instead of showing how, as with salmon, a species can unite people, Weymouth’s interactions document how one can divide them. Lone Wolf is much more than the story of Slavc: It is a vehicle for Weymouth to trace the fault lines splintering Europe and to examine how people respond when confronted by unwelcome change.
Polarized politics, climate change, reduced demand for dairy products, and shifting demographics are affecting regions across Italy, especially rural ones. For the people of Lessinia, the return of the wolf seems to encompass multifarious anxieties, refracting, as Weymouth writes, “the entirety of their frustration and their fear, like the sun through a magnifying glass.” From 2020 to 2021, wolves killed more than 400 farm animals. But carnivores are not the only disrupters in these areas. A drier climate means worsening conditions for grazing livestock; meanwhile, meager pay pushes younger generations down the slopes into cities such as Verona, waves of immigrants from places such as Bangladesh and North Africa are bringing new practices and norms to the countryside, and confusing European Union regulations are hobbling farmers throughout the continent. One rule, for instance, requires animals to be outdoors for at least half the year in order for a farm to qualify as organic and receive government subsidies. But if a wolf starts killing those animals, it’s almost impossible to secure a permit to cull it. As Weymouth writes, in Austria, “farmers are furious, villagers are terrified, and there is a general, all-pervasive sense throughout the country that all hell has broken loose.”
The belief that government is an obstacle, not a solution, leads to hundreds of wolves being killed illegally each year, their carcasses displayed in public spaces beheaded, strung up, or skinned, as if in “warning to other wolves or to those who support them.” Some populist politicians have promoted a narrative in which the hardworking farmer is a victim of out-of-touch urban elitists. Weymouth worries that this “serves to dramatize the situation, creating further crises” for those whose livelihood depends on finding a way to coexist with the wolves.
These predators once wreaked unequivocal havoc across Europe; from 1571 to 1920, they killed 5,400 people in France alone. Weymouth highlights specific wolves that perpetrated reigns of terror, such as the Beast of Gévaudan, an animal (or animals) that killed 113 people and wounded an additional 49 in southern France in the 1700s. Throughout the continent, farmers watched helplessly as wolves dwindled their flocks and sometimes even fed on their children. These types of stories breed an almost hereditary disdain: The wolf is, and can only ever be, an enemy. After hundreds of years of persistent persecution—one generation of farmers learning from the previous generation to poison, snare, and shoot wolves—the animals’ near disappearance around the turn of the 20th century was celebrated throughout Europe as the end of a long, bloody, and hard-won war.
Wolves did not simply stumble back into Europe in the 21st century. Their return was facilitated by the rise of environmentalism in the 1970s, and progressive laws aimed at restoring biodiversity. Improved habitat and reduced efforts to kill the animals allowed wolves to flourish. Biodiversity benefits humans as well: Extensive natural systems are more resilient to climate change, offer food security, and buffer us from the risk of zoonotic diseases such as coronaviruses. “To have a good system you have to have every part of the system,” writes Weymouth, and this includes large carnivores. Although some might argue that the reemergence of wolves in Europe portends a return to the Bad Old Days, these creatures are also a sign that we are doing something right.
Does this drive toward biodiversity inevitably result in friction between predators and people? Well, yes, Dale Miquelle, a conservation biologist and an expert on carnivores of a different stripe (tigers), told me; the key is “having effective conflict-mitigation systems in place to deal with human–large carnivore conflicts.” These might include honest communication between pro- and anti-predator groups, the investment of significant time and money to minimize clashes, and acknowledgment of the needs and concerns of everyone involved.
Weymouth outlines multiple techniques to deter wolves from targeting livestock, including encouraging farmers to shepherd flocks as they graze, training dogs to wander pastures, and building fences to keep out wolves. Examples from places such as Kenya, Belize, and China demonstrate that these adaptations are highly effective at reducing carnivore attacks. However, as Weymouth reports, for many in the Lessinia mountains and similar farming regions, adopting such practices is seen as capitulation. Farmers who build fences might be viewed as traitors, siding with outsiders who have no understanding of country ways. But the wolf’s return to Europe can be sustainable only if farmers and other inhabitants buy into the process. For that to happen, their voices need to be truly heard by politicians and conservationists. When a wolf attacked a child in Rome last year and was relocated instead of euthanized, some Italians saw this as proof that the government was prioritizing wolf lives over human ones. Conservation advocates will have to make concessions to build trust, and some wolves will have to be removed from the wild.
Finally, as Weymouth notes, the cause of conservation is hurt when advocates paint an unrealistic picture of the wolf. “Part of its rebrand in recent years has been the widely put-about assertion that a wolf, or a healthy wolf at least, would never kill a human,” he writes. Wolves are, in fact, opportunistic predators, and should never be considered harmless. Wolves do kill people, albeit rarely; in North America, they did so as recently as 2010, when a teacher was killed in southwestern Alaska.
Understanding these animals requires getting to know them, perhaps by literally following in their tracks. With so much modern wildlife science done remotely via GPS collars and satellite imagery, it’s refreshing to simply take in the landscapes and cultures of Southern Europe with Weymouth as our guide. He carefully picks at the Gordian knot linking wolves and rural communities, teases out nuances, and tells a complex story of a world in transition. “There are dramatic changes happening all across the Alps. Migration, depopulation, melting glaciers, dying forests. I have seen how people are scared of their lives changing, how they want it all to stop, and how politicians of a certain stripe continue to stoke those fears while promising that everything can stay the same,” he writes. “We are all plunging forward into an uncharted world, and the only fantasy is that we can stop it.” To observe and absorb the natural-human interface, as Weymouth does, is an art, one that would benefit those on both sides of the wolf divide.
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