BOOKS: Kinship With The Wolf

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2007:

Kinship With The Wolf
by Tanja Askani
Park Street Press (One Park St., Rochester, VT 05767), 2006.
144 pages, paperback. $19.95

The text accompanying this collection of superb portrait
photographs of wolves describes the social lives and behavior of a
family of wolves living in captivity at the Luneburger Heide Wildlife
Reserve in Germany. Author Tanja Askani gives an absorbing account
of the emotional lives of wolves, and of their complex social
structures and rituals.
Askani mentions that some wolves take an instinctive dislike
to a particular person for no apparent reason, and gives a
fascinating description of how wolf family life can give leadership
lessons to business executives. She includes a particularly
interesting chapter on the status of wolves in Europe, reviewing the
current wolf population estimates and conservation initiatives in
each nation of the European Union. Outside the EU, wolves continue
to be viciously persecuted in Norway and Russia. Even within the EU,
where wolves are nominally protected, the protections are often not
enforced.

About a third of the entire European wolf population,
estimated at about 3,000, inhabits the Carpathian mountains of
Romania. Another 800 wolves roam parts of Poland. But wolves are
hunted in both Romania and Poland–and in Finland, which has fewer
than 200 wolves.
The reputed voraciousness of wolves scarcely matches that of
the humans who are hellbent on killing them. –Chris Mercer