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Dire wolves are back. Or so claims the US biotech company Colossal Biosciences. In April this year it announced the birth of three grey wolf pups whose DNA had been genetically edited to more closely resemble the extinct megafauna. Such massive creatures have not roamed the Earth for millennia. Yet if the experience of their smaller relatives is anything to go by, they wouldn’t receive a warm welcome.
In Europe, attitudes towards wolves are as complex as ever. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s, Eastern Europe’s grey wolves spread west. Helped by sympathetic EU conservation laws, they recolonised nations from which they’d been long absent. But livestock farmers have since pushed back, and last December grey wolves’ protected status was downgraded. It is now easier to kill wolves than at any time in the last 45 years. In the UK, where natural repopulation is prevented by the sea, political support for wolf reintroduction is decidedly lukewarm. It’s all well and good “as long as it’s not in my constituency”, is how one sympathetic MP put it to me recently.
Wading deep into this fray is Adam Weymouth’s new book Lone Wolf. His mission: sniffing out the extent of anti-wolf sentiment in Europe’s rural hinterlands. His method: tracing the GPS-logged footsteps of Slavc, a Slovenian-born wolf who became the first to breed in Italy in over a century.
Through interviews with farmers and conservationists along the way, Weymouth hears first-hand about the gory trauma of discovering dead livestock, as well as the steps some farmers are taking to make peace with this ancient foe. “Beautiful as it is here,” he writes of the depopulated Slovenian countryside, “these are hard lives in hard places, and the wolf has only made things harder still.”
Such creature-led explorations of our relationship to Nature are not new territory for Weymouth. In his first book, Kings of the Yukon, the Scotland-based journalist canoed through Alaska, following the world’s longest salmon run – and reaped numerous literary awards for his effort. Now the wolf is his guide.
At first, this animal-led framing left me sceptical: would Weymouth’s midlife walkabout get bogged down in overly romanticised and introspective terrain? The quote on the back cover suggested it might: “A lone wolf does not intend to remain as a lone wolf; it has simply not yet found what it is looking for.” Having recently given birth when I began reading, a scenic Alpine hike was a journalistic indulgence I could only dream of.
Yet as the story moved across its mountain passes, my envy was replaced with gratitude. This is a profound book, and both Weymouth and Slavc are beguiling companions (the former as winningly open as the latter is mysterious). Together they walk their readers to a more informed and thus more empathetic place. Solvitur ambulando – it is solved by walking – indeed.
At a time when war, the climate crisis, mass immigration and economic woe are all braying at the political door, Weymouth’s journey is a reminder that our often-divisive animal instincts can also be a route back to the ties that bind: the search for home, food and a mate. Lone wolves are not the staunch, unencumbered outsiders that popular culture often depicts, Weymouth argues. They’ve simply not yet found their tribe. Likewise, wolf packs are not held under the grip of a single, strong-man alpha. They’re families that shift and react.
Nestled between these humanist reflections are factual jewels. I’d no idea that a wolf in Mongolia had, in a single year, walked the same distance as London to Delhi. Or that a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, carried by wolves, actually makes them 46 times more likely to lead their packs.
In ecological terms, the positive effects of wolves might not be as straightforward as some narratives suggest, Weymouth notes. The recovery of Yellowstone’s biodiversity after wolf reintroduction has now been attributed, at least in part, to other important factors, such as beaver return. But alongside their ecosystem services, Weymouth identifies a cultural value in the wolf’s presence. While he’s following Slavc, he asks: “Because I desperately want to think of him as a beacon of hope in fragile times … if we can learn to live with that which was once reviled, might we not find similar compassion elsewhere?”
If I started with envy of Weymouth’s wolfish freedom to roam, I ended his book with resolve – to one day take my own new ‘pup’ on a similar, animal-led journey. One that will hopefully open his eyes to some of the other people, places and creatures he’s lucky enough to share this Earth with. And one that will teach him to indulge wanderlust as a lust for deeper understanding – of the otherness that lies both without and within.
Lone Wolf: Walking the Faultlines of Europe by Adam Weymouth. Hutchinson Heinemann, 2025. ISBN: 1529151945
