Wolf, Witch, Man, God
A Tribunal of Wolves
Author disclaimer: This essay contains reference to an upsetting event involving animal cruelty, the descriptions of which are minimal but may still be difficult to read/hear.
As I was not present at this event, the details added to my account of it are conjectural.
This essay flowed out through many different faces of grief. It took many turns and rewrites and I did what I could to make it as cohesive and decipherable as possible. That being said, consider this essay a portrait of the flowing river of grief, which is at no time succinct or direct, and never ends anywhere but in the spilling into the ocean of everything.
To learn more, further resources can be found at the end of this essay.
There is a serpent coiling herself around my organs. I feel her twisting into knots around my lungs and stomach. Her impeccable strength tenses and releases in undulating ripples in absolute unison with my breath. I choke down a short, stifled inhale, causing my diaphragm to contract giving her a little more space to lace her muscles ever more tightly together, little by little, tighter, tighter. I become nauseated as she holds me in her intimate embrace. The muscles in my thighs, deprived of oxygen, ache from constriction. My heart becomes a clenched fist, my shoulders creep up and bow inward like the brittle limbs of a spider’s corpse, holding herself in death. My fingernails burrow themselves into my forearms, clinging to my body lest I be swept away by the tidal waves now causing me to rock rhythmically to and fro. I’m on the bedroom floor where my knees gave out and, unable to open them, my eyes begin to burn as my head starts pounding, threatening to crack open like a dam. The sobs cross over into grisly wailing, which begins to sound less and less human. I hear myself as though I am not of myself. No longer in control of my body, I am seized. There is nothing left I can do but surrender to the entity that has now wholly taken me and wait for it to tire of its assault. A thousand visions of horrors flood and torment me; a voice hisses hatred in my ears. I remain pressed to the floor on my knees, now folded in half as in prostration, my spine curled over my body, forehead to the floor in a protective posture. I cry and wail until I taste metal. I cannot breathe and yet I cannot stop. My retinas, my veins, my skin, my very bones, every last piece of me is in pain. I feel myself being ripped apart and think, surely this is the one that takes me.
But then something happens…a new texture. It’s not sharp. It’s not searing. No, it’s cold and wet and loving, and it’s searching for me there in the obliterating darkness.
It’s a nose.
A nose belonging to a predator.
Beren, my companion in mutualism, my more-than-consanguineal kin. My friend. I feel his nose seeking a trace of me; he knows I’m still in there somewhere. Through the ringing and the hissing, a powerful snort puffs into my ear dislodging the vicious voice from its perch. She flaps around like a harpy, agitated and squawking her curses, but her talons have lost their hold on me. My muscles relax just enough for me to reach an arm out for my rescuer and without opening my eyes my quivering fingers find his thick fur.
Beren has been my attachment point to this world on numerous occasions, like so many animals before him. However, never have I shared my life with a being who has been so profoundly attuned to me. His responsiveness to the subtle changes in my breathing and to the contraction of each one of my major muscles is like that of a dog trained from puppyhood to sense an oncoming seizure in their human companion. Beren has had no such training that I know of, and the picture I just painted was not of an epileptic seizure, but a meltdown.
I’m sure I will spend more time in the future exploring in writing the realm of meltdowns, but for now one needs only to know that the term is not quite adequate for what is really happening inside someone in the clutches of one. It is, in my experience, not a matter of an autistic person having a meltdown, but of being violently taken ahold of.
Triggers are usually manifold and successive, and in my case it is often a confluence of sensory, social, somatic, and event-based incitation which eventually causes the rupture.
The first cut, and the deepest, which set this particular meltdown into motion was the reading of a horrific event. One involving a wolf and a human.
There will be no graphic reporting of the details of this event out of respect for the wolf some are now naming Theia. One need only know the irrational malice held by so many around the world towards this species in order to fill in the blanks after a headline reading ‘Wyoming man publicly tortures wolf to death’.
To say I read of this event isn’t accurate. I did not sit passively taking abstractions in through my eyes as one reads ‘the news’. No. I could feel it, the presence that flooded into my body as magma fills and takes the shape of its subterranean chamber. I was host to this presence for a week in which a variety of other events and intrusions took place before it finally exploded to the surface and before my carnivore companion offered his guardianship. My companion whose living ancestors and kin are victim to the some of the most horrific acts of cruelty enacted by humans. My companion whose ancestors entered into a precarious experiment of sympoiesis1 with my human ancestors anywhere from 15,000 to 40,000 years ago. It was an experiment that likely provided the means to our very continuity as a species, and for better or worse, led to the current epoch we’ve baptized with the at once tragic and self-enshrining name, Anthropocene -the age of man.
The demonization of wolves is thoroughly documented, and exasperated advocates and scientists have spent countless hours trying to dispel these myths. Myths of modern wolves relentlessly decimating livestock, pets, and even human children. Myths of wolves hunting deer, elk, and caribou to the brink. Myths of wolves killing for sport(an ironic one coming from humans). Myths of wolves as ravening and depraved. Myths of wolves as signifiers of evil or the devil himself. I have nothing new to contribute to the persistent effort of allaying such myths. More and more evidence shows that having the facts, the data, and scientific evidence does little in the face of deeply entrenched sentiments and beliefs. As it turns out, facts are not the theriac for feelings. There’s a quippy little phrase credited to an American conservative commentator which says “facts don’t care about your feelings”, a phrase saturated in feeling if you ask me, but the inverse also holds; feelings don’t care about your facts. I’m more interested in burrowing a little deeper beyond the subsoil of myth and exploring the parent material of mythos.
There on my bedroom floor I was curled tightly into a ball. Beren, who has retained more attributes of his wolf lineage than most domestic dog breeds, continued standing over me, solemn and vigilant. My whole environment had reduced to him, who had become an oak tree to which I clung as the ecology of my inner world began to rapidly expand. Grief has an astonishing way of taking you through the looking glass, into a psychedelic wonderland of unstable dimensions and proportions. I was sure my body had reduced to the size of an acorn, and at the same time I felt myself swell from the inside as a host of beings, grieved and needing to be grieved, entered and pressed against the inner walls of my skin. One ghost invites another.
A strange thought comes to me frequently when I reflect on these instances: how in the throes of a meltdown, if I had been alive a few decades or centuries ago, I must fit an extreme image of Freud’s hysteria, or a more dangerous explanation still, a 17th century classic case of witchcraft, the ancestor of pathologized hysteria. Today I suppress and conceal meltdowns as best I can to avoid crushing shame and horrifying any human onlookers, but there was a time, and for many people that time is still the present day, when suppressing a meltdown was, and is, a matter of survival. To be caught slipping through the manicured hedges of order can be fatal.
A witch, whether accused or a self-identified modern practitioner, is a figure which disturbs a foundational myth upon which our modern human world was built. The myth of stable boundaries.
‘Boundaries’ are a popular topic within the psychology and self-help sphere right now. My aim is not to dismiss the importance of realizing and respecting one’s own personal boundaries and those of others, the benefits of which are fairly well known at this point. But let us momentarily agitate the settled sediment a bit, perhaps clouding the envisioned safety and purity of these waters.
When I first decided to write on the tragedy of Theia, I set out upon the path of the hero’s journey. The monomyth. That monolith. I was in crisis and the crisis is the call of the quest, the gravitational pull further into disorder. The ground had cracked beneath my feet and I believed if I could trace this wound in the earth to its origin point, then somehow I would find the answer I sought. The lone hero would return with this gleaming new knowledge, a sword ablaze with justice, and the work of reconciliation with our lupine brothers and sisters could finally begin.
With great urgency, I began to dig. I frenziedly tore any book from my shelves which had even a passing mention of anything relevant. I feverishly read through over a dozen articles and studies on wolf stereotypes, myths, and relations with wolves across various cultures throughout time. I then branched off into the history of witches and women in ancient Rome, medieval Europe, and the early colonization of the Americas, for I saw a thread weaving these two stories together, inosculating the fates of wolves and women. This trail led me to the genesis of capitalism and land privatization, which led me to a point in history where the very notion of individual identity throughout Europe and the colonies began to ossify from its formerly porous, more supple nature. I strode determinately and confidently toward my perceived purpose, the path optimistically revealing itself to me with each turn. That is, until my stride turned to leery shuffling, doubt accompanied my sense of direction, and where once there was a sun-flecked trail now stood a dizzying labyrinth, dark green and beckoning. At its center, the weeping minotaur of my grief.
Grief, oh holy grief! How it had grown from Theia’s broken body. Theia, golden titan of light and prophecy, daughter of earth and sky, Gaia and Uranus, mother to sun, moon, and the dawn. As I held fast to my desperate vision, the concrete ground of answers and solutions, my grief was busily devouring each story I read while I wasn’t watching. Composting histories, animals, myths, and terror, into a fertile bed for something to take root.
Within me a snarled garden of ghosts had grown thick from the dews of Theia’s last breath, brought into the light with her final prophecy. Prophecy, prophecy, spilled silently from the bound mouth of a she-wolf into a world extinguished of her oracles.
Where, where are the oracles? Oh Cassandra! Where are you now?
I strode in with weapons wrought in Cartesian disenchantment. I came to dissect. I came to amputate an answer from the body of history. I came to unveil mystery.
But grief, oh holy grief.
Grief makes a witch of everyone. Curses spewed, bargains struck, spells cast, prayers uttered. Every gate of grief only draws one further into the labyrinth.
Where did Theia end and I begin? I now felt not only her within me, but every discarded, untamable thing. Wolves, witches, woods, worlds.
There is a common and deeply harmful misunderstanding of autism that autistic people aren’t capable of empathy. On the contrary, empathy- particularly affective hyper empathy- can be an overwhelming, and at times crushing daily experience for many autistic people. As someone who lives with this way of being, boundaries have always been gossamery to me, sometimes to my delight, and many times to my great detriment. The wonderfully mycelial writer/story weaver, Sophie Strand, once described neurodivergence as living perpetually in an altered state of consciousness, and I must agree. Sights, sounds, smells, touches, emotions, imaginal visioning- these are not merely experiences which wash over me and move on, they are each of them, a shapeshifting event. Events happening hundreds or thousands of times daily which together construct a paradigm of intensity.
When the topic of personal boundaries began to grow in popularity, so did my pervasive feeling of somehow being wrong, always out of step with the current social model.
Are you overly sensitive?
Create boundaries.
Feeling overwhelmed?
Set boundaries.
Repeatedly getting taken advantage of?
You should really get to work on those boundaries.
But what of neurological differences which mean the filters between a person and their environment are naturally more permeable? Thinner? Again, I don’t question the importance of protecting oneself where there is genuine need and ability, but what I often do question are the narrowing methods we turn to at the exclusion of all others.
Humans have built a world of barricades. From the fencing of our first domesticated crops and the penning of our first domesticated animals. To the walling off of once communal lands, and the dividing of families into smaller and smaller units all neatly confined within ever more fences and walls embedded in neighborhoods, often partitioned by race and class. Splintering, splitting, atomizing, atomizing. This was not a transition without much pain and resistance, without slips and returns, mind you. Confinement did not come easily to us. But eventually, with enough force, and enough blood, and enough myth, fences became the dream of the masses. Self containing, self replicating division.
Enter, Wolf.
The dog we do not own.
Enter, Witch.
The woman who to man does not bow.
Centuries before the the witch trials, the hammer fell upon wolves. Wolves, as well as bears and other large predators were massacred to extinction in most of Europe. A mission, it would seem, that continues today where wolves still survive. Wolves confuse a line between us and the wildness we depend on for survival, yet do everything in our power to circumvent. In his paper, A Definition for Wildness, Lawrence Cookson describes wildness, as opposed to wilderness, as “a process rather than a place”. His definition is as follows, ‘Wildness is a quality of interactive processing between organism and nature where the realities of base natures are met, allowing the construction of durable systems.’2
A wolf is clear about her underlying nature. She has no confusion about her role within her pack, and when not compromised, within her habitat. But predators do not speak in the language of property and fences, these are alien utterances to wildness.
A similar mission of erasure was later taken up to eliminate women who did not, or could not be, molded into the shape of dehumanized, unpaid, and sequestered domestic laborers under the rule of a husband in the micro-state of the home. With some exceptions, it was predominantly poor women, and especially poor elderly women, who became the target of the centuries-long terror campaign known as the witch trials. Women who still practiced long held matrilineal knowledge of medicinal herb-crafting, midwifery, and yes, even magic, required trust and collaboration with worlds beyond our scope of control and understanding. These women and their role within communities threatened the metastasizing of the newly developing power structures.
“Magic kills industry” - Francis Bacon
Both wolves and witches inhabit a shared space in the civilizational psyche. The liminal, undefined space between boundaries. Both cross this psycho-mythological edge, one which disturbs the story we began to tell about our species long ago. A story of a split.
Once upon a time, we began to feel and see ourselves as other-than. Other than stone, than mountain, than salmon, than wolf. Perhaps it was to cope with this division lest we dissolve into grief for the exile we felt that we named this other-than: greater-than. Named ourselves as chosen. As alone in our genius, and thus, alone in the world. Cookson goes on to say in his exploration of wildness that, rather than our intelligence, “an alternative view is that the most distinguishing characteristic of humans is the ability to delude ourselves. No other species operates according to scenarios, belief systems, and stories built up and closeted in their own minds, where those thoughts can remain untested but so influential.”
My belief that this story, that Theia’s story, could be neatly compacted into one crystalline grain of truth, was like my believing in the reversal of time. A negentropic event. But the destiny of this grief journey was not to escape the labyrinth, it was to cultivate an uncertain sanctuary within it. “To set out is to arrive”, as Bayo Akomolafe has said.
The moment I learned of the tragedy was the very same moment I could no longer access the origin for I had become a part of that mixed state. I had become inextricably entangled within the story, and as a result, my own story was forever changed. I trailed the wolf down paths which only forked into others. I was being drawn further and further away from honing in on the unifying theory I set out for. Instead, a confounding number of possibilities and events were tearing me into fractals and the point of decoherence was quickly reached. The more I learned, the more was hidden from me.
“As the Island of Knowledge grows, so do the shores of ignorance—the boundary between known and the unknown… Learning more about the world doesn’t lead to a point closer to a final destination —whose existence is nothing but hopeful assumption, anyways—but more questions and mysteries.”
-Marcelo Gleiser
My desire to find the point of singularity in this myth was a micro-reconstruction of a greater pattern. The same pattern found in the desire of modern western science to find its own mythical theory of everything. It is the hero’s desire for the final return from her journey. It is the Christian desire to resolve all mortal sins with a singular act of divine sacrifice. The Age of Enlightenment’s desire to forsake unbridled, unpredictable enchantment for a restrained logic of reason. It is a longing for a dissolution of boundaries through unification. A longing for order. Dare I say, it is a longing for the subsumption into the mind of an omniscient God. We long for order in a world that seems to be tearing itself apart. But what is order? It is not for me as it is for you. It is not for a human as it is for a dandelion, nor an egret, nor a fungal spore, nor a storm.
We long for order and in our longing we sever. In our feverish dissection, our categorizing and fencing of people, places, ideologies, into more and more containers, we are acting out the very fate we simultaneously rail against. Entropy.
Entropy, the trickster.
Through our boundaries, we seek to increase control: predictability. In the concept of Shannon’s Entropy, more predictability is equivalent to low entropy, while increased randomness is increased entropy. In our boundary making, our dividing, are we not creating more and more accessible micro-states, more disunion, i.e., higher entropy? The second law of thermodynamics informs us that entropy must increase in an expanding universe- except in such infinitesimally rare instances that the possibility of negentropy is rarely even considered possible. We implement our judgement of order through everything from internet algorithms to laws to land privatization, and yes, to personal boundaries, but try as we might to harness it, this concept of order remains a subjective preference of one species, of one expression of existence. With countless, and I mean untold possibilities of what order can mean to each species, let alone each individual organism, river, or stone, imposing our own order upon others has only increased disorder for others. And there is no boundary strong enough to shield us from that, for there are no closed systems and all boundaries have edges. It is within these thresholds where boundaries collide and bleed. It is here Trickster is invited. He is misunderstood, the Trickster, as is only right. Many avoid his games at all costs. Many mistake him for evil, for cruelty, for calamity. And I imagine he delights in this greatly, for the biggest mistake is believing his game can be evaded.
He whispers in riddles and paradox of alternatives and possibility and we fear his breath in our ear for his words sound to us like chaos and upheaval. But trickster is neither good nor bad, neither right nor wrong, he is not the decider of such things but the disrupter. Without him the universe slips into stagnation, and stagnation in nature means death. Through his chaos, new orders are born. For entropy is not disorder. It is uncertainty. It is possibility.
The binding of trickster, of Loki, is preordained in Norse myth. After Odin’s learning of the prophesy of his son’s doom, his wife Frigg, embarked on a desperate undertaking in gaining the promise from every being and entity, living or dead, that Baldr the most beautiful, the most beloved, Baldr the chosen, would never be brought to harm, shielded within a fortress of oaths. Who else would sniff out a hairline crack in such a stronghold but Trickster? For all boundaries have edges.
And so it was that in the unbinding of Baldr’s safeguarding, another was fated to be bound. Loki, arbiter of chaos. Bound so that the world may be free of his games, bound so that all the world may be untouched by disorder. But all boundaries have edges.
In an expanding universe, both entropic and entangled, what is a boundary?
Perhaps before following me along into this labyrinthian journey you knew nothing of a young wolf tortured to death by a man. Knew nothing of the unfeeling glass lenses held aloft in a bar to capture it happening, fed back into unfeeling eyes that watched, as so many glazed-over eyes today passively watch distant atrocities upon the safety of smooth screens. Perhaps you did not imagine yourself running alongside her, feeling her dread as she tore across the soft snow, throat burning with lungs on the verge of hemorrhaging, fleeing the roaring demon which eventually outpaced her muscled limbs with its oiled blood. Outpaced and then, with its human master at the helm, crushed her. Perhaps you did not before crawl inside of her body as she lay paralyzed on the floor of the place where the demon rider took her, a place that your animal senses could no longer make sense of. No sky, no trees, no gentle wind, no sun nor moon. The scent of something foul and sour and overwhelming filling your nose, so strong was it that it nearly drowned the scent of your own living blood leaking into places it shouldn’t be. Beyond the wild thrumming of your own heart in your ears, perhaps you did not before hear an assault of squawks and shrieks of amusement rising and falling in convergent waves spewing from the mouths of the very beings your mother and her mother taught you all your brief life to fear. Perhaps you did not before open wide your amber eyes and frantically search, with torment and terror, from face to face, though in place of eyes, you found only strange stones, glowing with cold light held before them, blinding those who may at one time have had sight to recognize and cry out against such barbarous defilement of life. Perhaps as claw like fingers dragged you again outside you did not before feel the cool winter air whisper lovingly through your fur for the final time, caressing your body as it had so many nights before when your brothers and sisters lay down all around you and together you took heavenly rest beneath a cathedral of trees. Breathing in the warm familiar scent of each other, knowing each other more deeply upon every inhale, becoming less alone with every breath as they wove into your cells, and finally, closing your eyes to scintillate stars cradled in the tideless sea above, never to open them as a wolf again.
Perhaps you had never before destabilized the boundaries of your being in such a way that allowed you to entangle your selfhood with a wolf’s.
We experience ourselves as an individual in a so-called normal state of consciousness. This individual experience of ourselves is a result of interaction with our environment. The modern world outside of our self meets us humans in a way that creates the perception of a singular state, of an individual quality. The moment we recognize our self as a self, is the moment we recognize what is seemingly not ourself, and yet our recognition of the not-self, adds to the self. In her book, The Wakeful World, Emma Restall Orr illuminates for us that, “Within the thickly woven fabric of each contextualised moment, what we are perceiving is what is creating our form.” But what if, and in fact we are made of not one, but trillions of selves? Most of whom are not human.
A first of its kind study was done in 2021 on the influence and exchange of microbiota between the skin microbiomes of wolves, humans, and dogs.3 The findings were that increased interaction between humans, dogs, and wolves in the study changed the skin microbiome of each, increasing the diversity of microbiota within each biome, and at the same time, becoming more similar to those of the other species. In other, more enchanting terms, the humans in close contact with dogs and wolves became more like dogs and wolves. All involved in the study - wolf, human, and dog - experienced an entangling of skins.
As I think and reel over the man from Wyoming and his violent contact with Theia, it brings me a faint whisper of solace to imagine this man’s skin is now haunted with traces of hers.
For all of our efforts today to re-story the human/nature divide, to re-member our story within the substratum of the earth, it is difficult to deny the feeling of a boundary between us and the scaturient, burgeoning, polyphonous land enveloping us. Our ears hear thousands of languages every day that at best, we can ascribe to greetings, warnings, and bids for affection, and at worst, we have come to tune out entirely. Our feet have grown too soft and tender to make unprotected contact with the forest floor. Our eyes pass over countless stories and omens written in the soil, upon leaves, and within the migration of clouds, never recognizing in them a voice of a different kind. Our noses have gone all but blind to riot of beings communicating through chemical florilegia.
Perhaps in our efforts towards order, we have misapprehended just how unsafe boundaries have the potential to make us. Perhaps in our longing for union and singularity, we have misapprehended just how unstable and violently explosive condensed oneness is.
And perhaps, in a universe both entropic and entangled, there is not one without the other. Having boundaries at all is a quality of separation, and separation means uncertainty. Being in union means having a radical responsibility, for what is done to one is done to all. Let us not forget that ‘bound’ carries a double meaning.
In Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse unintentionally describes this vision of entropy with stunning poeticism:
“He would like either to overcome the wolf and become wholly man or to renounce mankind and at last to live wholly a wolf’s life. It may be presumed that he has never carefully watched a real wolf. Had he done so he would have seen, perhaps, that even animals are not undivided in spirit. With them too, the well-knit beauty of the body hides a being of manifold states and strivings. The wolf too, has his abysses. The wolf, too, suffers….
Even the wolf has two, and more than two, souls in the wolf’s breast, and he who desires to be a wolf falls into the same forgetfulness as the man who sings: ‘If I could be a child once more!’ He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things…
There is, in fact, no way back either to wolf or to the child. From the very start there is no innocence and no singleness. Every created thing, even the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. It has been thrown into the muddy stream of being and may never more swim back again to its source. The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back…
The return into the All, the dissolution of painful individuation, the reunion with God means the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All.”
The binding of Loki, whose very name means to tangle, Loki the shapeshifter, Loki the entropic, was prophesied from the lips of a seeress, a witch, and in his binding- in the attempt to ensure safety and hobble disorder- the prophesy of Ragnarok, the death of the universe, was fulfilled. Let us not forget Fenrir, the leviathan wolf, son of Loki, also was bound and whose liberation at the end also was foretold.
"Tricking Fenrir into bondage, they[the gods] corner him into making the final violation of their kinship, thereby justifying his utter exclusion from their group and arguably turning him into the monster they feared he would become.”4
At the end of all things it is Fenrir, along with his own children, the wolves Skoll and Hati, hunters of sun and moon, who cast the final judgement.
Perhaps, when our binding of land and our selves from it can be fragmented no further, when the repercussions of our own violations of kinship reveal to us the web of entanglements we are inextricably woven into, it will be the ones beyond our boundaries who remind us what it truly means to be bound. And we will find at our walls, a tribunal of wolves.
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Sympoiesis is a term coined by Beth Dempster meaning, in simplistic terms, “collectively created”, as opposed to autopoiesis meaning “self created”. The feminist scholar and professor Donna J. Haraway transforms this word into meaning “making-with”, a frame through which to view each action and encounter as we move in the world. Whether we are aware and intentional within this frame or not, we are constantly making-with the world in which we are intertwined. The question is then, what kind of world are we collectively making? What would a world in which humans were deeply intentional and devoted to making-with look like? How would it look to actively bring the ocean’s needs and desires into the decision making process, knowing the decision actively makes and remakes our collective world? How do we consult the beaver in the building of dams? How might Theia be afforded a jury of her peers in the judgements passed on matters that determine her kin’s right to dignity and life?
Laurent A. F. Frantz et al. Genomic and archaeological evidence suggest a dual origin of domestic dogs. Science 352,1228-1231(2016).DOI:10.1126/science.aaf3161
L.J. Cookson, A Definition for Wildness. Ecopsychology Vol. 3 187-193 (2011).: liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/eco.2011.0028
Wetzels, S.U., Strachan, C.R., Conrady, B. et al. Wolves, dogs and humans in regular contact can mutually impact each other’s skin microbiota. Sci Rep 11, 17106 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-96160-7
Olley, K. 2021. “Co-Presence and Consumption: Eating Kin(Ship) in Old Norse Myth and Legend.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 120 (4): 490–515. muse.jhu.edu/article/837023
If you are in the United States and would like to learn more about this event and what we as citizens can do to change wildlife governance, the following is an outstanding resource:
Justice for All: Preventing Cruelty through Wildlife Governance Reform