In this talk I will offer a preliminary examination of the history of the relationship between wolves and humans. The history of the wolf in Mongolia provides an opportunity to disentangle the many competing factors used to explain human, environmental, and animal relations in Mongolia and globally. According to common wisdom, wolves play a sacred and revered role for Mongolians. This is in contrast to the rest of the world’s antagonistic relationship with the wolf, especially the American extermination of the wolf. However, a closer examination shows Mongolians most often portrayed wolves as objects of hatred, scorn, and as threats to lives and livelihood. Wolves are portrayed in an array of roles, from a monstrous predator, to greedy exploiter, to hunted fugitives. During the socialist period of Mongolia, wolf hunting became Marxist labor necessary to modernize the herding economy and build socialism. Although ultimately unsuccessful, socialist Mongolian wolf extermination campaigns showed similar tactics, professionalism, and businesslike violence reminiscent of wolf extermination projects in North America.
In this talk, I will use a combination of sources, including a close reading of literary sources, data from socialist government documents, hunters’ handbooks, and visual sources to examine how socialist era attitudes and policies to wolves compare with earlier periods of Mongolian history. This project is part of my larger dissertation research on the environmental and animal history of collectivization in socialist Mongolia.
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