This recent article from German magazine Spiegel encapsulates everything problematic about the relationship between humans and wolves.  The Eastern Germany state of Saxony has experienced depopulation as people shift towards the cities with the poor economic climate.  And, perhaps coincidentally perhaps not, wolves have been gradually repopulating that area of Europe.

There is quite a lot of fear regarding the return of wolves to Germany, as you can see from the article's first paragraphs.  The mayor of a small town in Saxony is constantly taking calls from "agitated citizens" phoning to report wolf sightings.

Later in the article we learn that two sheep have been killed, although wolves were never positively identified as the attackers.  One young wolf crept into a town and allowed itself to be fed a sausage, but the wolf was later shown to be almost completely blind (and habituated to humans).  Beyond that, I don't see any reason for the fear.  But has mere logic ever stopped anyone from being afraid of anything, ever?  No.

As a wolf conservationist points out, buried deep in the article, only nine wolf attacks have been directed at people in Germany over the last 50 years.  Of those, five of the wolves were rabid, and the remaining four were wolves which had been living at a dump and had become accustomed to people.

Just to put those numbers into perspective, every year about 37,000 Germans are killed by cancer, 9,000 are killed by traffic accidents, and 125,000 are killed by heart disease.

Nevertheless, the wolf is being seen as a great threat.

Germany is of course the world's leading exporter of terrifying fairy tales in which wolves kill people.  Many of these tales reflect a generalized anxiety about the wilderness, and a fear of The Other.  Compounded by a series of unusually harsh winters in the Victorian era (the "Little Ice Age") in which wolves, driven nearly to starvation, did resort to attacking unwary travelers.

In the year 2010?  I am just going to lay it out there: wolves are not a serious threat.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the German countryside is free of canine threat.  In fact, feral dog packs are a serious problem in rural areas.  Feral dog packs are more than willing to mob and attack people and livestock, and many parts of the world are experiencing a feral dog crisis, including Russia's cities and the United States' deteriorating urban cores.

When the inevitable reports of attacks surface, will you trust the attackees to correctly report on whether the attackers were wolves or feral dogs?  If you ask anyone, they will tell you that they are absolutely able to tell the difference between a wolf and a dog. 

But time after time we have learned how ridiculously unreliable witness accounts can be.  An issue which the Spiegel article itself points out, closing as it does with a report of a wolf on the side of the road which turned out to be an elderly toothless German shepherd.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user Tambako the Jaguar