Lone Wolf, with Adam Weymouth
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and on today's episode, I'm going to be chatting with Adam Wehman, author of Lone Wolf, Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness. It's all about the European wolf, its recent comeback, and the similarities between the human and lupine worlds. Without further ado, let's jump right in. Hi, Adam. Welcome to the show. Hi, Rob. Thanks for having me on.

The new book is Lone Wolf, Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wilderness, released as of June 3rd in all major formats. As you describe in the book, your journey began in covering the possible reintroduction of wolves into Scotland. You'd written about this prior, so I thought you might walk us through this first. What happened to the wolves of the British Isles, and where do things stand now with their potential reintroduction?

And what happened to the wolves of the British Isles is pretty much the same that happened to the wolf across its entire range. The wolf used to be, once upon a time, the most widespread terrestrial land mammal on the planet, all across the Northern Hemisphere, from the tundra right down to the tropics. And pretty much everywhere, including in the British Isles, they were pushed almost to extinction or in the British Isles, completely eradicated.

So there's a bunch of last wolf stories. It seems that they hung on in Scotland later than anywhere else. The last definitive account for a wolf in Scotland is 1621. And that's a note for a bounty that was paid on a wolf. And it was an exceptionally high sum, which suggests by then that demand was already kind of outstripping supply.

And then it kind of verges into myth. There's a lot of people that would like to claim they killed the last wolf, whereas actually, of course, the last wolf probably lived out its days far from anyone, profoundly isolated and alone. Now, you actually looked for the alleged remains of the last wolf in Scotland, right? Yeah, that's right. So it's like I say, it's very hard to come by. There's one story that I followed. So I began my journey in Scotland in

at an estate up near Inverness where this gentleman called Paul Lister has been talking about trying to reintroduce wolves now for about 20 years or so. And I walked across Scotland and finished it in the south of the Cairngorm mountain range. And that's one of the places where the last wolf is meant to have been killed. And then as you say, I set out trying to find it because it is then meant to have been stuffed and

had a various journey through different collections and museums, but the actual provenance of it is now pretty hard to locate. And really through the course of the research, it made me realize that this probably wasn't the last wolf at all. This wolf that was being taken around these museums in Scotland was being labeled as the last wolf in order to sell tickets, but really it was probably nothing of the sort. And what about the reintroduction of the wolf into Scotland or various other areas where

where the wolf is no longer present. Where do we currently stand with that in terms of public sentiment and even governmental opinion? Well, one of the reasons that the wolf is so good to write about is because people are incredibly passionate about it from both sides. People love wolves or they hate wolves. You find very little in between. And that's essentially where we are. It's been noted in the British Isles as the most popular animal for reintroduction, but then you go and speak to people that would be

alongside it once again. We have sheep farmers in Scotland, hunters, games keepers, people like this, even people that live in villages in the countryside and there's this reputation that the wolf has for

for better or worse. And there are people that are very passionately against it as well. It's interesting because in some ways it's quite an arbitrary decision here. As we're going to talk about, wolves are making this remarkable comeback in Europe. And if Britain was still connected by a land bridge to the continent, as it used to be a couple of hundred thousand years ago, then there would be wolves back on the British Isles now. And we wouldn't be having a debate about whether or not to introduce them. We'd just be talking about how we deal with them.

But because we're an island, we get to make these particular decisions about what we let in. And realistically, it's not going to happen here for a long time. It's taken about 15 years of great debate to allow the beaver to come back. And that's broadly accepted now. But there's a lot of other species we'd see back before. Wolf is really, really the pinnacle of once wolves are back. We're not really talking about rewilding anymore. It's kind of happened.

Now moving to continental Europe here, the book is primarily concerned with a particular wolf, Schlotz. Can you tell us about Schlotz and why his particular story captured you so and serves as the driving force of your narrative here? Sure. Schlotz, it is actually a

It's a particular Slovenian word and even in the other countries that slous ended up in, no one can really say his name properly. I first read a little piece about slous when I was doing my research on wolves in Scotland. It was this very small article about this wolf that had been born in the south of Slovenia in 2010 and had a GPS tracking collar put on him by a biologist who was researching into wolf behavior.

But of course, that biologist could have no idea what this animal was going to go on to do. He was really just interested in the sort of dynamics of how a wolf maintained the territory of the pack. But the following year, at the end of 2011, when Schlaups was about 18 months old, he left his pack behind and set off on this epic 1,000-mile journey through the Alps. He crossed Slovenia, he crossed the whole of Austria, and four months later in the spring came into Italy.

And it was there that he bumped into a female wolf who was on a walkabout of her own. So somehow, there wasn't another wolf for thousands of square miles. Somehow these two wolves managed to find each other. And when they bred, they became the first wolf pack back in the Italian Alps for more than a century. So in one way, it was this remarkable love story that I was drawn to. The female wolf ended up getting called Juliet because they were very close to Verona and Romeo and Juliet are still Verona's most famous couple.

So I was really drawn to this incredible meeting and this love story between these two animals. But of course, not everyone is quite so in love with the idea of having wolves back in the Alps Mountains.

Now, as you definitely discuss in the book, when we talk about wolves, there's often a lot of separating the biological reality of wolves from human myth-making about wolves and misconceptions. Coming back to the title of the book, Lone Wolf, can you remind us just what a lone wolf actually is in comparison to maybe some of the ideas that we have about lone wolf?

Yeah, so I really wanted to call it Lone Wolf. And we had a bit of pushback sort of in editorial meetings and stuff. But to me, it was really important to call it Lone Wolf because I wanted to challenge this idea of what a lone wolf is. We think of a lone wolf as this kind of Clint Eastwood archetype, you know, this hero riding off into the sunset who doesn't need anyone or anything. Whereas what I realized from following Schlaus is that actually a lone wolf is simply something that hasn't found what it's looking for yet.

And a lone wolf is looking for the same three things that we all are. It's looking for enough land to live on. It's looking for enough food to eat. And it's looking for a mate. And so and it's an incredibly vulnerable time for a wolf. There is no more vulnerable time. Wolves don't hunt well alone. They like to be part of packs. They like to have a fixed territory. They're actually an incredibly conservative species, very shy, very hard to see.

So to set off on these journeys as a particular kind of subset of wolves are hardwired to do, to disperse like this, is an incredibly dangerous, perilous time for them and not a...

not a proud self-sufficient state that they want to end up in now in chronicling uh this journey you sometimes write from the point of view of slouts himself in the book and i thought this was a lovely choice and makes for some very poetic passages can you describe your process for imagining the mindset of the wolf and and how this factored into your approach yeah thanks i i i toyed with it for a while and in the end it felt important you know i i didn't want to say that you

I was seeing the world as a wolf was, but I wanted in some way to, however clumsily, kind of get inside Schlaus's mind in a way. And there was something about following his journey. So the tracking collar that he had put on him, it gave one waypoint every 190 minutes for the entire four months of his walk. And before I set off, I transferred each of those waypoints onto this big stack of maps that I carried in my rucksack.

And as I walked, as I followed this path, you started to get some sort of sense of how this wolf was seeing the world. On the map, it might have not seemed to make sense why he'd suddenly changed compass point and set off on a different bearing. But then when I got to this point, I realized that I could hear the airport or hear a highway or I could see a town for the first time as we come over a hill.

Or there were other places where he turned round because it was a mountain pass and the winter that he traveled, it was incredibly snowy and a lot of these places were just inaccessible. So in some way that you couldn't get from just looking at the data on the page, by doing this walk, I started to sense some sort of way that the wolf was moving through a landscape in a way. And often looking for the easiest route as well, often following the river or the bike path down a valley rather than going over a mountain range. And, uh,

Yeah, I felt by the end of this walk after following in his footsteps for a few months that I'd kind of earned the right to at least try and write a little bit from his perspective. Yeah, humans have of course long considered the wolf. We've long seen shades of them in us and shades of us in them. So yeah, this is such a, I guess, a long-standing area of analysis and consideration, right? Like how are wolves like us?

And how are we like the wolf? Yeah, we obviously go way back. The wolf is the first animal we domesticated. It's the first animal we lived alongside. And there are these really interesting similarities between the two of us. We're two of the very few species on the planet that hunt prey that are larger than ourselves. That's unusual in the animal world. And in order to do that, that means that you need to work together as a pack. And then when you start working together as a pack,

that requires division of labor and it requires hierarchy and it requires some sort of quite complex social organization. And so in some ways, there's this real affinity between how humans work together and how wolves work together. And I think that probably is the reason that we found each other in kind of hunter-gatherer times and decided to work together essentially.

because we had this sort of understanding. We both like to run after prey and tire them out, and that is the way that they hunt as opposed to a big cat or something like that. And I think it's almost that closeness. There was a wolf behavioral scientist that I met in Austria, and he said to me, either you love your brother or you hate your brother. There's nothing in between. And I think it's almost that closeness that we feel to wolves. And obviously we see that in our relationship to dogs as well, which are essentially the same animal.

that we've had this incredible bond with them, but that's very easily quickly flipped into

a hatred that I don't think we have for any other animal either. And that speaking of that hatred and sort of like the dark side of that bond, you write a bit in the book about Europe's three centuries of werewolf trials and the werewolf panic. Can you tell us a bit about this period of time and how it matches up with the timeline of the Eurasian wolf's decline? Sure. So yeah, to kind of to, to,

Break that down a bit. Maybe I can say a bit first just about the kind of extermination of the wolf in general. Because we began at that point, as I was saying, with that sort of hunter-gatherer relationship to the wolf. I think it's two hunters almost respecting each other. But as soon as we became herders, as soon as we put up fences and started to keep livestock, the wolf became this animal that was on the other side of the fence. Suddenly we had something that the wolf wanted. And very quickly it flipped into the wolf being...

The thief, the vagabond, and from a Christian lens, if Jesus is the lamb, then the wolf is the devil. And the persecution that they've faced over millennia, really, ever since there's been money to pay them, there have been bounties out on wolves' heads, kind of back to 6th century BC in Athens, there were bounties out on wolves' heads.

Charlemagne from about 800 in France started trying to eradicate the wolf, but it took almost a thousand years. It wasn't until 1927 that wolves were finally gone from France. In some ways, it was in the United States where that kind of hatred of the wolf really reached a pinnacle. Basically, the ways that wolves were killed, they were set on fire, they were pulled apart by horses, they were beaten to death.

and then paraded through town on the back of horses. There's estimates of up to 2 million wolves were killed in the latter half of the 19th century in the United States. And the Native Americans saw it as a manifestation of insanity. It was said that it was seen as a manifestation of insanity amongst the white settlers that were killing these animals. And

Yeah, and there's something doing this research, it really seemed to border on a hatred to wipe out that many animals right down to the very last animal. It feels like it requires a stronger motivation than just a desire to protect one sheep. And the werewolf trials that you mentioned at the beginning of that question seem to be one of those particular manifestations of that sort of paranoia and hate. I'm sure some of your listeners will be familiar with the witch trials like the Salem witch trials and

We had them a lot in Europe as well. Thousands of women were killed over several centuries. But I wasn't aware that people were actually put to death for being accused of being werewolves as well. And one of the two towns actually in Austria that Schlautz's route passed through were places where as late as the early 18th century, people were being put on trial and hung for being werewolves.

And quite often the accused seem to be travelers, wanderers, beggars, people that might turn up in town. Maybe two sheep were killed that night and the local people decided to put two and two together and persecute the outsider for bringing this ill upon them.

upon the town i'm glad you mentioned uh yeah the agricultural aspect of um of hatred of the wolf i had recently read a couple of different books looking at werewolf myths and legends and talking about how in some cases you see people trying to um to date the idea of werewolves back to our prehistoric ancestors in this time when we lived

closer to the wolf and certainly when we domesticated the wolf. But then I think the more convincing stories that I've read have made the argument that these are ultimately agricultural era tales. These are tales of fear of the wolf

and analysis of the wolf in a time when we are worried about our sheep and our herds and our dominion over nature. I don't think that's to say that it's a kind of, obviously, it's a misguided assumption. But obviously, you know, to these people, it's not like now when you can get compensation from the state for a wolf kill on a sheep.

Wolves don't kill a huge amount of livestock, but they can target certain farms and certain herds. And so someone might lose 20 of their 30 sheep and that would have been an absolutely existential crisis. 300 years ago, that was your way of getting through the winter. That was your way of feeding your fairly large family.

it would have felt horrifying to to be targeted in that way and i can see the trials against the werewolves and also the kind of amulets and charms and things that people tried to as as some way of trying to have dominion over nature when when nature felt really outside of one's control now in my recent reading about some of these werewolf myths one of the books that i was looking at was a 2021 book by daniel ogden called the the werewolf in the ancient world and

There's one quote in that that I keep coming back to where he says that, quote, wolves are in and of themselves werewolves already. And so far, that is, is that they combine the qualities of the wildest and most lawless of animals with those of civilization and humanity. And I kept coming back to that, not to just harp on like negative connotations of the wolf, but I thought this was this was interesting and sort of looking at the wolf as this thing that already mirrors a lot about.

humans, like not just potential savagery, but also how social wolves are. Something that I think is sometimes very often overlooked, certainly in werewolf stories, but

But just in general, I was wondering if you might speak to, you touched on this already a little bit, but speak to just how social wolves are and how like humans they are in this regard. Yeah, I think in some ways they're almost an aspirational animal. They're obviously genetically far closer to chimpanzees.

But I think in wolves, we see qualities of almost how we would like to be. You go to a zoo and watch chimpanzees, you obviously see something in them. But to watch a wolf is to see how humans could be. I think wolves are excellent parents. They're one of the very few animals where the males will stick around long after the birth to look after both the pups and the suckling mother. They are incredibly loyal. They are...

and courageous and resourceful. And, you know, often I met a lot of people, a lot of farmers on my journey through the Alps who absolutely detested wolves, you know, for the burdens that they put on their lives. But I still got this sense that if they were to be reincarnated at some point in the future, if they were going to come back as an animal, they'd really like to come back as a wolf, you know. Yeah.

Yeah, that's interesting. When people think about wolves, there is often this aspirational aspect of it. They don't want to actually be a werewolf, but the idea of being free like a wolf, of having the wolf as kind of like a symbolic animal in one's mind. And it's worth saying, we've spoken about the kind of hatred and the hatred that we've put on them. That

of the wolf is also a misconception. One of the things that I found in this book is that almost the hardest thing about a wolf is to see it for what it is, which is a wolf. It seems to be this vessel for our fears and our hopes and our dreams and particularly how we relate to the natural world. And whilst once upon a time that might have been this sense of destroying the wolf in order to kind of manifest progress and civilization,

Now we have all these anxieties about what we're doing to the world and what we're doing to our futures. And once again, the wolf has become this vessel, but this time it's something that's almost going to save us from ourselves rather than destroy us. In the book, you draw connections between the comeback of the wild wolf and the refugee crisis in Europe. Can you elaborate on this for us a bit? Yeah, in several ways. I was first drawn to this story actually because...

Licinia, which is this small regional park in Italy where Schloutz finished his journey, where he bumped into Juliet and where they formed their first pack. It was also a part of the Alps where a lot of refugees who were arriving in Italy, they'd arrive by boat to Lampedusa and then they'd straight away get taken to these settlement centres. And there was one in Licinia, right up in the Alps in the middle of nowhere, completely cut off in winter.

And these people that were arriving from North Africa, from the Middle East, were being taken to this former NATO barracks. And a lot of the language that was being used by the local people living in these mountains about the refugees and the wolves was very similar. It was, you know, we were here first. These people don't belong here. I don't have a problem with either wolves or migrants, but their place isn't here.

And not only obviously was that completely untrue that wolves were in these mountains long before people, and actually a lot of the Licinians are descendants of German woodcutters who moved down from Germany a few hundred years ago,

there were these kind of very obvious parallels I was finding, particularly in how both in the rural places I was passing through, the migrant and the wolf are both being scapegoated by rural populations for a set of much more complicated problems. And I think we see that in the rise of far-right politics. Everywhere the migrant is this scapegoat for this incredibly complex range of problems that are affecting countries everywhere.

And the wolf seemed to stand in for that as well. So there seemed to be this affinity and yeah, kind of the importance of both the wolf and the migrant for these places, but then how it was perceived by a local population as well. And then how,

the refugee and the wolf were being used by far-right politicians in order to inflame anger and to chase that populist vote as well. Well, I really appreciated how you were able to weave these themes together in the book. Yeah, I wasn't expecting it, to be honest. I wasn't expecting it, but increasingly, yeah, it seemed to follow me wherever I went. The wolf

has been one of the reasons the wolf has done so well in europe is because it's been protected by the european union for the last 30 years or 50 years in some ways and so it's a very short distance to having a problem with the wolf to having a problem with the european union and there are far-right parties particularly in austria where the fpo are now the leading party um where rather than encouraging farmers to try and coexist with the wolf

And there are proven ways to be able to coexist with wolves, using dogs, using electric fences. They were almost encouraging farmers not to do that and actually to just send their flocks up into the mountains in what one biologist described to me as a state-sanctioned slaughterhouse. And then when that drama happens, that would then create this space for these politicians to say that they're going to go to the European Union, go to Brussels and demand a change in policy.

for the protection of the wolf, which actually has now recently happened. So in the way that farmers protest, and I do, you know, it's worth saying that I...

I really understand why farmers are finding it hard to live alongside these carnivores again. Farming is a difficult profession at the best of times. The year that I did the walk was the driest summer in Europe for several hundred years. The price of electricity and animal feed is rocketing since Russia invaded Ukraine.

Young people are leaving for the cities. They don't want to farm anymore. And now these farmers are being asked to live alongside wolves as well. I understand the fury. And while these complex problems, climate change, inflation, etc., are hard to manage, at least with a wolf, you can go out and shoot it, albeit illegally, and feel like you have some kind of agency over your life.

But rather than promoting understanding, rather than delving into the actual, you know, looking for solutions to these more complicated problems, that is the place where these far-right politicians seem to be coming in and co-opting that anger and turning it to their own ends. And that's the bit that I want to challenge. Not that I don't understand why it's difficult for farmers to live alongside wolves, but the ways that it's being politicised, I think, need to be addressed.

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Now, getting back to the topic of domestication, you touch on the history of the German Shepherd dog breed, which this was all new to me. I don't know much about dog breeds, I admit. Can you talk a little bit about how the German Shepherd factors into our ideas about the wolf? Yes. So the German Shepherd, I knew none of this either until I started to research

The German Shepherd was an early 20th century creation by a guy called Max von Stephanitz, who was a retired German cavalry officer. And he said that he set out to basically kind of reverse engineer a wolf to sort of breed back into a dog. All these qualities that he saw as kind of most wolf-like and most noble for its size and its strength and its power and its willingness to work.

And it really prefigured a lot of the kind of Nazi eugenics ideas. And the 600-page manifesto that he wrote about the German shepherd had a lot to say about race and about the purity of race and in very much the same way that Nazis would fetishize this kind of certain Aryan races.

As time went on, for the Nazis, the German shepherd was the kind of dog that they used in the death camps, that they used on the battlefield. Hitler kept two German shepherds, one of which he named Wolf.

Hitler himself was obsessed by wolves. Adolf itself is an old Germanic variation of wolf and he called the Hitler youth his wolf cubs. Apparently he went around whistling the Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf Disney song. He saw in the wolf this kind of

totem animal, I suppose, this sense of this kind of unbridled violence and aggression that he wanted to breed back into a race of people that he felt had become weak and soft and powerless. So for the

Interestingly, the Nazis were the first people in modern times to actually place environmental protection laws on the wolf. And it was part of this vision of this kind of eulogizing the power of the animal. Yeah, I believe you mentioned in the book that, disturbingly so, the Nazis' environmental policies were advanced even for today. Yeah, but it was a sense of a kind of pristine...

wilderness that was going to be full of this sort of race of godlike men, you know, and those kind of large, charismatic, totemic animals that actually fit very well within that sort of wider Nazi vision of the world.

Interesting that there was some attempt in this to sort of recreate a wolf because I know in some generally not great movies, I've seen German Shepherds stand in for wolves. They'll have the part of wild wolves played by obvious German Shepherds. And then it's worth mentioning Mussolini as well because for Italy, there was also an important animal for Mussolini, but

Because the founding myth of Rome has the twins, Romulus and Remus, being abandoned in the wilderness and then being saved by a she-wolf who suckled the twins until the shepherds took them in. And then Romulus and Remus later went on to found Rome. The wolf for the Italians has had that same...

strength and power but has also been this kind of nurturing maternal influence and Mussolini very much co-opted that through the whole of Mussolini's fascist regime there was a live wolf kept in a cage in Rome that people could go and see and it actually remained there in various places

generations of the wolf up until the 1970s. There's meant to be this living, fleshy symbol of the power of Mussolini's project. Now, going back to what you said earlier, this idea of the wolf is also serving very particular human aspirations and is rather far removed from the more balanced reality of the wolf, including how social the animal is, how nurturing the animal can be, and so forth, right?

Yeah, there's no more prevalent myth about the wolf than this idea of an alpha wolf, which is now completely discredited. The alpha wolf was created by this biologist called Rudolf Schenkel. Working in 1934, he began his research just across the border from Nazi Germany in Switzerland. And again, it's thought that his research in many ways was influenced by the Nazi project that was developing across the border.

And he based his study on a pack of wolves that were kept, that were drawn from all different places and kept in a very small enclosure. And from observing those wolves...

and how they were not able to disperse and go out and find new territory like schlatz was able to how they were not able to cooperate and hunt but actually they were just forced into this small environment there was this completely artificial fighting to to be the alpha but that is not how wolves work in the wild but that became the the basis for understanding how wild wolves work

for the next 50 years or so. It's now been completely discredited in the science, but that sense of the alpha wolf does still persist.

from motivational speakers and toxic corners of the internet and everything else. We're still encouraged to be this idea of the alpha, but that's something because it fits very well with how we... If we can say that wolves do it, then we can kind of justify doing it ourselves as well. But that is not how wolves work. A wolf pack is essentially a family in some shape or form. And the main pair of wolves will generally...

stay together for life, breed for life and raise successive generations within the pack. What is your big hope for readers with this book? Something they might take away about wolves and also maybe about humans? I think one of the things that I've come to see the wolf as, as we said at the beginning, we're a long way from reintroducing wolves to the UK.

But I think the reason why wolves are interesting to think about, whether in a North American context or a European context, is because I think they really demand answers of us. They're almost the disruptors. They move fast and they break stuff. And we know we need to give more space to the natural world. We know that we need to coexist in a better way. But I think wolves really ask us if we believe that we can.

Or are we just paying lip service to this? Can we sanction risk again? Can we sanction living in a world that feels a little bit more unknown than what we might be used to? It was tempting to me. I work as an environmental journalist. I write a lot of stories that seem quite hopeless. And it was quite tempting for me with this story to see the wolf as this kind of beacon of hope. Wolves are doing incredibly well in Europe again and to a lesser extent in North America.

They're now listed as a species of least concern in Europe. It's this incredible environmental success story in a way. And it's really tempting to hang on to that as a kind of beacon of hope when in the middle of a biodiversity crisis and a climate crisis. And again, that is just seeing the wolf as something that we want it to be. Of course, it doesn't really mean that the earth is healing or anything like that. But for the wolf, this is obviously a massive time of hope and success and

And I think that's really interesting to see it in that way that there is this incredible desire for life to thrive. I think that that's what wolves embody that. And, and, and in response to times of crisis, we move, you know, and I think wolves have always embodied that, that, that, that change is inevitable. And there is this desire and this urge for, for, for life to flourish and,

And following Schlaus' journey across Europe has really shown me that it's, you know, however much we try and put up our borders, however much we try and hem life in, it will continue to try and find a way. There are places on Earth where science and mystery collide. And Skinwalker Ranch is one of the most fascinating examples.

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All right, Adam, I have one more question for you. And I realize this one's this one's a sillier one. But in the acknowledgments for the book, you you mentioned leaning on Joel Pullen for, quote, having watched every werewolf film out there so that I didn't have to. Could you give us a little a little bit about your back and forth with Joel here? What what did that have this have this go down?

he sent me Joel he's a friend of mine he works at the British Film Institute we've been friends forever he's not just watched every werewolf film going he's watched every film going at this point he's an incredible resource and

Yeah, there's a lot of werewolf films out there. There's a lot of wolf literature out there. I remember going into the British Library at the beginning of this research and typing in wolf into the library archive and being absolutely overwhelmed. My last book was about salmon and the literature was a lot less intimidating than it was about the wolf.

The werewolf subset of that is again vast. But he set me on to some of the classics, which I'd never seen. Ginger Snaps, I'd never seen. American Werewolf in London, I'd never seen. And it felt like a werewolf could be many things to many people. It seems to stand in for kind of whatever our paranoia and preoccupations are at the time.

But compared to the actual werewolf trials that I was seeing, the ones in films like Ginger Snaps, it's always the lover, the best friend that seems to be possessed. Whereas the werewolf trials, it was always the unknown stranger, the vagrant. But it seems to lean into that. It's in the same way as when you watch a wolf die.

in a zoo or something like that, it looks like every dog that you know. You feel like you can understand what it's thinking because you sort of think you know what a dog's thinking. But then there's this kind of

unhinged element as well that suddenly it will throw you and you realize you're not watching a dog at all you're watching this other completely wild thing and I think that's what the werewolf thing touches on we're watching someone and we think we understand them but actually within that there is this wild unhinged part of them which is not just terrifying it's also quite thrilling you know but there's a temptation in the werewolf there just to kind of let go and see what happens if we you know

run off into the night adam well thanks so much for taking uh time out of your day to chat with me here uh the book again is lone wolf walking the line between civilization and wildness thanks rob thanks for having me on all right thanks once more to adam for coming on the show and chatting with me the book again is lone wolf walking the line between civilization and wildness and as of june 3rd you'll find it in the u.s in all major formats

Thanks, as always, to the excellent J.J. Possway for producing this show. And if you have any questions, episodes, suggestions, and so forth you would like to send to us, you can email us at contact at StuffToBlowYourMind.com. Stuff To Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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