The strychnine hunters went crazy. Cowboys never passed a carcass on the range without poisoning it. They shot birds and painted them with poison. Farm dogs died. Children died. Anything that ate meat died. Prior to white settlement, the Great Plains was home to an incredible abundance of wildlife. Lopez estimated that between 1850 and 1900, 500 million wild animals died. Such insanity staggers the imagination.

La bestia dell'abbandono e della desolazione: raccolta di racconti riguardante la strage compiuta dai conquistatori nei confronti dei lupi, completa di "motivazioni" e conseguenze per la specie.in the wolf we have not so much an animal that we have always known as one that we have consistently imagined.” This character was really about being as honest as possible and honest about fear. You have a TV idea of how you would try to protect your family and when you’re truly desperate and scared, so we’ve really had to imagine what we would do in those moments. It’s been interesting when we’re filming as I’ve often had to stop for a moment and think what these two guys have done to Oliver and his family and I think by now you have to come through and you can’t stay frightened for all that time, so as a result you become quite dangerous. You’ve got nothing to lose if you think you’re going to die. Another draw to this project would be filming in Wales, it’s been a joy and I really adore the crews. They have been so supportive and allow me to do my best work especially when I’m doing some crazy scenes.

This role has been a challenge as you’re normally given a character and you explore who they are and how the story changes them. With this one, they go into such an extreme situation right at the beginning that they’re always in a nightmarish and extremist situation. So you don’t get to know Matilda as she might be on a day-to-day or casual basis. The Ecstasy of Gold • The Call of Ktulu • Master of Puppets • Of Wolf and Man • The Thing That Should Not Be • Fuel • The Memory Remains • No Leaf Clover • Hero of the Day • Devil's Dance • Bleeding Me • Nothing Else Matters • Until it Sleeps • For Whom the Bell Tolls • - Human • Wherever I May Roam • The Outlaw Torn • Sad But True • One • Enter Sandman • Battery Men in a speculative business like cattle ranching singled out one scapegoat for their financial losses. Hired hands were readily available and anxious to do the killing. There was a feeling that as long as someone was out killing. There was a feeling that as long as someone was out killing wolves, things were bound to get better. And the wolf had few sympathizers. The history of economic expansion in the West was characterized by the change or destruction of much that lay in its way. Dead wolves were what Manifest Destiny cost." To reduce my own review, I think he is saying despite all the modern marvels, we don’t really know ourselves, and how we treat wolves is a very clear expression of that. WOLF has something for everyone, especially those who like a great crime thriller. It's got plenty of horror, plenty of crime and a lot of action. It's got great dilemmas, interpersonal relationships and lots of twists and turns - everything that you could want. WOLF is unique because the series follows two parallel, quite deep and complex cases. It manipulates time with one storyline happening faster than the other but the two gradually catch up with each other to meet in their final culmination. Some elements are quite fantastical and theatrical which juxtaposes against the grit, gore and the action. I think audiences are really going to enjoy it.A lot of the characters never meet the Anchor-Ferrers family. We are in a very isolated part of the story. We literally shot in one location – a mansion - so the Anchor-Ferrers story, vivid and extreme though it is, is always held in the bubble of that one house. We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

When I read the scripts, I found it really hard to put them down – I wanted to get to the next episode but I was so frightened when I was reading them, I had to go upstairs and read them beside my sleeping husband because I was too scared to be sitting alone in the kitchen. I think Megan has done a brilliant job with these scripts, really skillful and it’s incredibly challenging to keep everybody's stories alive through six episodes but she has really kept us on our toes. Being able to play characters in these very extreme states was a big enticement as well. I am in a small cabin outside Fairbanks, Alaska, as I write these words. The cold sits down like iron here, and the long hours of winter darkness cause us to leave a light on most of the day. Outside, at thirty below, wood for the stove literally pops apart at the touch of the ax. I can see out across the short timber of the taiga when I am out there in the gray daylight.” But this is not why Lopez turns to other viewpoints. Native American mythology, hunters' tales, and Christian folk legend aren't inferior alternatives to science, though they are not treated as epistemological equals either. By presenting these four viewpoints on the wolf, Lopez investigates human imagination of the wolf, its social construction by these four distinct societies. With the wolf as a fixed point of reference, Lopez is able to compare and contrast the symbology and sentiment humans have historically mapped onto nature – the contrast between European and Native American cultures of course stand in stark contrast, while the contemporary viewpoint is in some ways even more distinct from its historical roots. The section on the Middle Ages was a little disappointing, in that Lopez (not a medievalist) seems to buy into popular ideas that they were a uniquely depressing, oppressive, and ignorant time, caught between the lights of Rome and the modern era. He may be right about how medieval culture in general viewed the wolf, but I am less confident that he really understands the context of the time. Still, he wrote this in 1978, when his view was more standard, I believe, and frankly medievalists are still fighting against that perception. The section of the book certainly isn’t bad: there’s a lot of good research into medieval bestiaries and other texts, and overall Lopez’s conclusions about the medieval view of wolves do help me understand the attitudes of later eras, since they are so closely linked.

The last part focuses on medieval European folk tales about wolves. Compared to Native Americans, European stories show a conspicuous absence of actual wolves, a reflection of ecology but more so of modes of production and religious politics. The medieval compendium of knowledge about natural history, the physiologus, is full of folk remedies premised in religious allegory. It makes explicit what is now a post-modern revelation for young environmentalists: our ideas about nature are social projections, not Truth (a point Lopez makes subtly by placing scientific perspectives on the same playing field as the rest). BUT I think the overriding point of the books is an observation on how humans try and fail to find their place in the world. And connected to that, what “rights” do we have over the other animals of planet Earth? Of course “rights” in itself presuppose some law that has logical outlines on who can do what to whom. This song is absolutely a metaphor. Metallica doesn't write songs for horror films, yes it is about a warewolf, but yes it also goes much deeper. Canis Lupus Linnaeus: parte introduttiva in cui si cerca di capire il lupo in un contesto sociale ed etologico, preceduto da uno sguardo alla suddivisione delle diverse razze.

These guys give us a pretty bad time but not only that, they want to be heard and they want an audience. Honey has got a captive audience in us in the scene where the wonderful Juliet Stevenson, who plays Oliver’s wife, is hanging upside down while he trots out his opera performance from the Barber of Seville. On the surface, it’s a crazy, cruel comedic scene but it reveals how, on different levels, people can be and what they want from each other.Today, the killing continues. Problem humans are using dynamite to blow up predator dens, and shooting them from planes and helicopters. They stake out dogs in heat, and then beat to death the wolves that mount them. Why? Why? Why? The Native Americans, well mostly the plains Indians and not those who were farmers, are portrayed in a pretty positive light. And he sees in them a more connected life (to the rest of the world) because they lived a hunter’s life and that allowed them to experience life a little more like a wolf would. So the traits they valued they could see in the wolf. But aside from respect for the wolf they developed a respect for the prey that they hunted. To the point hunting became a holy endeavor. One of the biggest writing challenges of this series was balancing the two crime storylines, (both of which are rich with twists and turns – one of Mo Hayder’s specialities), with enough breathing room for characterisation. I’d like to think we succeeded in doing this, though, as evidenced by the stunning cast we got on board. The roles in this series are hugely demanding and every actor brought their A game. In relation to Lucia, Matilda hasn’t really gone on the journey with her daughter to discover what it is that’s disturbing and upsetting for her, so there’s a sense of irritation and disappointment as well as love. But during the course of the series, in this very extreme situation, I think she discovers how profound her love of this daughter is and that she would indeed die for her to prevent her daughter suffering at all.