We are all familiar with the idea of the alpha wolf. The most toxic corners of the Internet are awash with the concept; so-called motivational speakers such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson peddle its prowess. Throw me to the wolves and I will return leading the pack—an idiom attributed to the Roman philosopher Seneca and, more recently, used as a tagline by reality-TV star Lisa Vanderpump—is one of the more popular slogans circulating online. If wolves operate like this in the wild, the thinking goes, then we can legitimize our own behavior as just part of the natural order. But, inconveniently, alpha wolves don’t exist.
It was the animal behaviorist Rudolph Schenkel who claimed that a pack of wolves is dominated by the strongest, fittest male, with his subordinates constantly vying to depose him. Working in Switzerland in the 1930s, his study group comprised up to 10 unrelated wolves, taken from different zoos and held in an enclosure measuring approximately 10 by 20 yards. Any offspring, unable to strike out for new territories as they would in the wild, were instead forced to compete with their elders. It is difficult to imagine a less natural situation, and yet Schenkel’s work became the key text for understanding pack structures in the wild.
His ideas, it has been suggested, were influenced by Fascist theory and the Nazis’ rise to power across the border in Germany. Schenkel describes the alpha’s subordinates as another “race” of wolves, as loaded a word as you could get in the 1930s. Maintaining leadership “require[d] constant self-assertion,” with the alphas dominating and subduing “the weakest members of society,” abusing them until they ceased to be “a social partner.” Schenkel painted a picture of a dog-eat-dog world that reflected the politics of the day—and in many ways still does.
Today, following more than 75 years of further painstaking fieldwork on this most elusive creature, we now know that a wild wolf pack is, essentially, a family. Usually it comprises a breeding pair, which can remain together for many years, and their offspring, oftentimes several successive litters, where older siblings help to take care of the young. Male wolves are among the very few animals who continue to look after the young long after birth. And yet, despite the fact that modern science has abandoned Schenkel’s hierarchy, the idea of the alpha has persisted.
I have spent the past three years studying the return of the wolf to Europe. Once the most widespread terrestrial animal on the planet, they were hunted almost to extinction over the course of several centuries across their entire range. Estimates for the number of wolves killed in North America alone in the second half of the 19th century range between one million and two million. Yet today—aided by protective measures and the removal of farms from their original hunting grounds—wolf populations are rebounding across both Europe and North America.
In 2022, while researching my book Lone Wolf, I walked more than a thousand miles across the Alps in the footsteps of a wolf named Slavc, who had made the same journey a decade previously. Born in Slovenia, he had been fitted with a G.P.S. collar by researchers at the University of Ljubljana. At 18 months old, Slavc left his pack behind and set out on a journey across Slovenia and Austria, swimming vast rivers, crossing six-lane highways, and climbing to mountain passes in the very depths of winter. By spring he had come to Italy, where, miraculously, he bumped into a female wolf on a walkabout of her own. They would go on to create the first pack in the Central Eastern Alps in more than a century. Today there are at least 17 packs in the region, the descendants of the original pair.
Yet everywhere that the wolf has come back, the fear and hatred have come back, too.
During my walk, I spoke with the farmers, shepherds, and hunters who are having to adjust to live alongside the wolf once more. Life in these mountainous hinterlands is already tough, with residents dealing with the effects of climate change, a cost-of-living crisis, and their young people leaving for the cities. The return of the wolf has only made things harder still. Local, populist politicians in southern Austria and the Italian Alps are chasing the rural vote by seeking to inflame that anger, making the wolf a scapegoat for a range of more complex problems, just as they have been time and time again.
The wolf has forever been a vessel for our anxieties about the natural world—and our narratives about ourselves. The wolf is not the “beast of waste and desolation,” as Theodore Roosevelt put it, nor an emblem of domineering masculinity. Human beings are creatures driven by story, but too often this blinds us to reality. The challenge remains the same as it has always been: to see the wolf for what it is, which is a wolf.
Adam Weymouth is a Kent-based journalist and author
