Wolves have powerful symbolic meanings for humans. They are part of the mythology that defines us: Little Red Riding Hood, Romulus and Remus, the wargs in Tolkien, Mother Wolf in The Jungle Book, Maugrim in The Chronicles of Narnia. Wolves have profound resonance for us all.
Wolves intermittently break out in the stories we tell and are told; currently they have been doing their stuff in Game of Thrones and Twilight. And as Miss Jean Brodie said, for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.
But do we really have to take the next step and fill our homes with wolves? Apparently we do. Since these entertainments entered British consciousness, there has been a great surge in demand for the wolf-iest dogs: huskies, malamutes and Saarloos.
Fair enough, if you feed them vast quantities of the right food and walk them for miles every day and build your life around their needs. Otherwise not. With the inevitability of night following day, animal welfare organisations like the Dogs Trust and Blue Cross report that wolfy dogs are being abandoned in unprecedented numbers. Battersea Cats and Dogs Home took in 66 huskies in just six months of last year. A six-day-old child was apparently mauled to death by her parents’ malamute, which takes folly to another level.
But there’s no end to our folly when it comes to animals. On fine days in ponds in certain parts of Britain you can watch red-eared terrapins emerge and bask in the sun. They came to Britain because of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This was a manufactured craze involving comic books, cartoons, toys and films and the first wave hit us in the 1990s. Many people responded by buying baby terrapins: darling little things the size of a 50p piece.
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