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Wilder Things: Modern Life Among the Foxes and Coyotes
I. The Vixen Every year for the 18 years we lived in our house in Waller Road the vixen used our garden to raise her cubs. We called her “the vixen,” though I suppose there must have been more than...
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11 Books (for Adults) Featuring Talking Animals
George Orwell’s Animal Farm was first published in England on August 17, 1945, which makes it 73 years old today. Orwell has seen a resurgence of popularity recently, which makes sense considering...
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The Call of the Wild: Confronting Nature and Existential Terror
This week on Literary Disco, Julia, Rider, and Tod get wild as they discuss Jack London’s classic portrait of the unforgiving and brutal life of a dog during the Klondike Gold Rush. Additionally, the...
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The Wolves of Stanislav: An Improbably True Parable for the Pandemic Age
Does an event have to be true in order to be accepted as true, or does belief in the truth of an event already make it true, even if the thing that supposedly happened did not happen? And what if, in...
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Did Dogs Choose Us?
Please don’t judge me. I am about to tell you something you may find shocking, and I am concerned you may think badly of me. When I’ve told people before, it has divided opinion. Some have been...
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Barry Lopez on the Wolf Biologist Who Changed His Life as an Environmentalist
In the fall of 1975 I read a scientific report that made me sit up straight in my chair. It was entitled “The Eskimo Hunter’s View of Wolf Ecology and Behavior” and appeared in a peer-reviewed volume...
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On the Literature of Rewilding… and the Need to Rewild Literature
We tend to sleep badly on the first night that we sleep somewhere new. Apparently, this is because somewhere in our evolutionary makeup we are playing watchman. Sleeping lightly we are alert to the...
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The Cartography of Wolves
On June 6, 1991, a mile up in the Canadian Rockies near Banff National Park, a drenching storm turned the fur of a gray wolf black. A poetic zoologist, who’d just captured this five-year-old female...
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What Our Fear of Wolves Tells Us About Ourselves
There’s a story Gramps likes to tell about one of my early visits to his farm. I must have been two or three. Toddling. We are walking toward the barn, and I am running ahead in grass already mowed to...
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The Ability to Transform: On Wolves Becoming People, and People Becoming Wolves
At the Canadian Museum of History in Quebec, there is a small ivory carving of an upright female form with a wolf head fashioned by the hands of a Tuniit craftsman, ancestor of the Inuit from the...
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