Of Animal History and Human Cruelty in the New England Tradition

Jon T. Coleman. Vicious: Wolves and Men in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. 288 pp. Notes and index. $20.00.

"The Cat doth play,
And after slay."

—The New England Primer (ca. 1741)

Among the unexpected memories of my urban childhood is an unsettling old photograph (ca. 1940) of an Irish barnyard in winter, in which an enormous, wolf-like canine hangs high in a tree like a convicted criminal, with a noose around its neck. Standing below are three men, one holding a rifle: the animal's anonymous executioners. I remember thinking it was a wolf, although I had no idea why it met this gruesome fate. What, after all, could warrant a mere dog to deserve such an elaborate ritual of human punishment? Puppies were commonly culled by hanging in early modern Britain, and the last Canis lupus sighting in Ireland took place in the eighteenth century, so this was almost certainly a dog that ran afoul of vengeful local farmers. Yet this image suggested more than mere culling. Judging from the manpower that attended the event, the violence that clearly occasioned taking the photograph, and the triumphant pose for posterity that it records, it seems that for these three men at least, to parse canines was to assert a distinction without a difference. Whatever maleficium this dog had committed—that is, whatever evil deed had been attributed to it, determining the manner of its death—this was a wolf to them. That I retained such a memory at all caught me by surprise. Wolf sightings in mid-twentieth-century Manhattan were limited to two-legged varieties, so I had forgotten (or happily repressed) this now lost representation of a fragment of the grim reality of pastoral life that was, in any event, far outside of my experience in the big city. Forgotten, that is, until I opened Jon T. Coleman's Vicious, and quickly learned that the wretched animal in my photograph may have been one of the lucky ones.

This is not a book for squeamish readers. I work on subjects in which stories of human martyrdom and torture are commonplace; nevertheless, even by these grueling standards, it seems possible that Vicious may contain too many nightmarish examples of stomach-turning word and picture images—probably more than absolutely necessary to make Coleman's case that man, not wolf, is the truly vicious animal. The problem here lies in the use of exempla in the medieval sense of the term—as anecdotal fragments to serve a moral program.

This is probably a matter of taste. Readers' responses to hunting stories detailing Euro-American cruelty to competing alpha-predators in the course of extermination efforts will vary according to first-hand knowledge of pastoral life. I'd wager few ranchers will feel shocked or dismayed. Still, Coleman details so very many nauseating animal deaths and worse, that this sometimes repetitious inventory of suffering is occasionally too punishing to absorb thoughtfully. One suspects that visceral reaction is part of the author's narrative strategy, working even on specialists concerned with the history of violence. The final chapters on the West at the turn of the twentieth century recount "executions" by federal-government-sponsored hunters of mythic "celebrity wolves" considered by nimrods, chroniclers, and frontier naturalists to be sufficiently long-lived, destructive, and elusive enough to warrant invention of nostalgic escape legends and folksy names (p. 195). Thus, Vicious finally becomes lupine martyrology.

What is more concerning is Coleman's decision to privilege the American "consensus" on cruelty toward wolves (in this instance the consensus is limited to the Puritan and Mormon migrations alone), as if such utterly common behavior were uniquely heinous. While acknowledging these practices in passing as the work of "strange people with peculiar habits," who "burned witches at the stake, disemboweled criminals, and tormented wolves for sport," Coleman does far too little to contextualize...