But as Barry Lopez asked in Of Wolves and Men, his seminal meditation on the fraught relationship between the two species, why did the pogrom continue even after the threat to the westerner’s way of life was essentially gone? Why did our ancestors feel they had to root out every last wolf, and why were hunters still so eager to shoot them in the few places they remained? There was hate, Lopez decided, but there was something else, too—something more akin to envy:
