by Wayne Pacelle with Merritt Clifton
(Adapted and expanded from “The Persistence of the Myth of the Big Bad Wolf,” distributed by Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy on August 11, 2026.)
On August 4, 2026, Senator Ron Johnson, a three-term Republican from Wisconsin, stood at his desk in the ornate U.S. Senate chamber and told a story about wolves perhaps older than our republic.
The origins of the myth of the big bad wolf can be traced to unusual and memorable historical events. The history, however, some of it better documented and more easily accessible than the mythologizers realize, has been substantially embellished in the retelling.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Some supposed history never happened
Some of the supposed history never happened at all. The real history of note, with the myth of the big bad wolf as a case in point, is how we came to believe accounts that simply had no truth to them.
Meanwhile back in the U.S. Senate, without ranting or raving, but also without citing specific examples, Senator Ron Johnson suggested that wolves menace game populations, eat livestock, and cause children to scurry away from school bus stops.
Then Johnson asked the Senate to pass the so-called “Pet & Livestock Protection Act” — already approved in the House by a narrow margin, 211–204, co-sponsored by Representative Tom Tiffany, also a Republican from Wisconsin.
Johnson was a hair’s breadth away from sending the “Pet & Livestock Protection Act” to President Trump for his signature.
Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, stood in the breach. Deciding which rare creatures live under the shield of the Endangered Species Act, Booker noted, is not a job for politicians, who may be under the sway of Farm Bureau or the trophy hunting lobby. It is a job for wildlife scientists, hewing to the conservation standards in the law, with their work, too, subject to judicial review.
Booker’s objection blocked the anti-wolf bill.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Wolf myths and wolf realities
The narrative special interest groups proffered about wolves was more myth than fact, more supposition than science, more Jaws than David Attenborough documentary.
I know it’s a myth, because I have stood where the truth lives. I lived with wild wolves.
During a summer in college, I spent more than three months in the wilds of Isle Royale National Park, whose rocky shores are buffeted by the swells of Lake Superior.
There are no permanent settlements on Isle Royale, a 210-square-mile World Heritage Site. Isle Royale National Park is closed for half the year, when the wildlife has the run of the place. And even though its shimmering aspens and white birches, its rocky ridgelines, and crystalline inland lakes together compose a breathtaking landscape, it draws fewer visitors than any other U.S. national park. It is that remote.
(Esther Mechler photo)
Nights camping alone
There are a minor cluster of National Park Service buildings and a rustic commercial hotel at Rock Harbor, and a smaller set of log cabin buildings on the other end of the island. But that is about it for the human footprint. No matter where you roam, you find wildness.
I spent days on backcountry patrols and plenty of nights camping alone, with the moon and the heavens forming a dazzling ceiling that speckled the trees and lakes with light.
Three wolf packs stalked their territories, collectively covering every inch of the island.
I never worried about a wolf attack. Not for a second.
The black flies, the mosquitoes, and the ticks were the animals who gave me anxiety. I had a few thoughts that I might spook a moose and stir a charge by a 1,200-pound bull or a riled-up 800-pound mama. Fortunately the giant cervids typically ignored me, focused on swallowing up leafy greens as they waded in the island’s bogs.
Recycled historical fiction
There have been a handful of documented wolf attacks in North America, but no verified record of a healthy wild wolf killing a person in the Lower 48 states of the U.S. in at least the last 138 years––and much of what is cited about wild wolves killing people in the U.S., even in pioneer times, turns out on close examination to be much recycled historical fiction, typically based on wolf incidents which may have occurred as long ago and far away as the earliest known version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” transcribed in 11th century Belgium.
So, when Senator Johnson read his script from the Farm Bureau about Wisconsin children waiting at bus stops and suggesting that wolves are something they should fear, it was more storytelling than reality.
A child at a school bus stop is at far greater jeopardy from reckless drivers, feral dog packs, or emotionally troubled people. School bus accidents kill 20-30 children per year. Total injuries to school children from wild wolves, since the introduction of school buses, total zero.
Wolves make people safer
The irony is that wolves make Wisconsinites safer.
A peer-reviewed study done in Wisconsin, “Wolves make roadways safer, generating large economic returns to predator conservation,” published on May 24, 2021 by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the arrival of wolves in a county was associated with about a 24% reduction in deer-vehicle collisions, with the economic benefits of fewer collisions dwarfing the costs of verified wolf predation on livestock.
Deer-vehicle collisions declined 24% in Wisconsin counties where wolves returned. The reduction saves an estimated $10.9 million annually from avoided crashes—63 times the cost of verified wolf attacks on livestock.
Think about that for a moment. The animal being presented as a threat to Wisconsin families helps protect those families from collisions between speeding vehicles and animals in the road.
Chronic wasting disease
Wolves keep deer, elk, and moose populations in check, and that phenomenon has been studied longer at Isle Royale than in any other place. Wolves are the bioengineers whose hunting keeps ecosystems humming.
That matters even more in the 37 states and four Canadian provinces struggling with chronic wasting disease, CWD for short, a fatal neurological disease afflicting deer and elk, considered a long-term threat to the survival of deer and elk in abundance across North America.
In northern Wisconsin, where there are wolves, there is almost no CWD in deer. Wolves read the vulnerability in afflicted animals, kill them much more rapidly and less painfully than CWD itself does, and leave the uninfected animals to thrive.
(Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources photos)
Where wolves have been purged, CWD is pandemic
In southern Wisconsin, where wolves have been purged, CWD is pandemic. CWD-infected deer, or “zombie deer” as they are known, may be a human health threat to hunters who consume the animals. The human variant of CWD is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, always fatal to infected people, just as it is in deer and elk.
Northern and central Wisconsin forest counties, home to about 1,226 wolves in 336 packs, show near-zero CWD positives. Southern farmland without wolves has much higher CWD rates, reaching up to 50% of adult bucks in core counties.
Why would Wisconsin officials want fewer wolves when stable wolf populations check the spread of this deadly disease? Keep the deer herd healthy? Keep the deer hunting economy alive and well? Allow the collection of organic meat from animals who have never known confinement?
State and federal authorities provide compensation for farmers and ranchers who lose sheep or calves to wolves. And the most successful farmers and ranchers deploy nonlethal methods to deter wolves, whether guard dogs, or night penning, or fladry [hanging plastic flags, as at used car lots], or lights to deter the wolves.
Wolf mythmaking has had a long run
Fear of wolves, as it happens, traces back mostly to the “Old Country” in Europe and Asia, from which the ancestors of most Americans came, kept alive by cases like that of “James Smith,” a man who may never have lived, let alone become a victim of wolves.
Wolves on March 8, 2010 did kill and partially eat special education teacher Candace Berner, 32, a 4’11” weightlifter and boxer who was on a solo training run near Chignik, Alaska, in preparation to compete in a marathon.
Widely reported at the time, including by ANIMALS 24-7, was that Berner was the first human fatality from a wild wolf attack in the U.S. since March 4, 1910, when a man named James Smith shot five wolves near Waterloo, Iowa, but was killed by the rest of the pack.
According to Wikipedia as of March 2010, “Wolves attacked him whilst he was alone in a wood, waiting for the return of his brother. When the latter returned he found his brother’s bones. In the center of a circle of five dead wolves, was an empty repeating rifle, showing that he had been overpowered before he could reload his weapon.”
The report of the “James Smith” wolf attack, however, was removed from Wikipedia at some point after 2010. The footnote, #48, now documents a wolf attack in Russia.
Evolution of the story
Tracing reports of the “James Smith” wolf attack through NewspaperArchive.com, as ANIMALS 24-7 has now done, reveals that almost the same account, word for word, was distributed by Associated Press and published on March 4, 1910 by The New York Times, the very date on which Smith was said to have been killed.
However, in the Associated Press and New York Times versions the location was changed to “Ally, Missouri,” an unincorporated hamlet then actually called “Allery Spring,” known today as Alley Spring. Further, the date of the attack was said to have been “yesterday.”
But “James Smith,” if he ever lived, could not have died “yesterday,” since the Associated Press and New York Times versions, with the sole exception of the addition of that one word, are identical to an account published on March 11, 1909 by the Royal Center Record, of Boone Township, Cass County, Indiana.
Maybe happened in 1888
Stripping out the name “James Smith,” searching on the other key words and phrases in the Royal Center Record version, leads eventually to one much more detailed version that might have happened about seven miles from Fergus Falls, Minnesota, in 1888, involving men named William Emory, said to have killed five wolves and survived, despite the loss of a hand, and August Mellock, said to have killed six or seven wolves before being killed himself.
“The remains of Mellock were taken to Fergus Falls, where they were buried. The carcasses of twelve wolves were secured,” the account states.
“The bounty on their scalps and the value of their skins will suffice to pay Emory’s doctor’s bills,” the article adds. “These wolves have been a constant menace to farmers, having carried off a large amount of stock, and on several occasions have chased children.
“This is probably the last pack in this section, which was formerly overrun with them, and the farmers will raise a purse for the injured man, who has succeeded in ridding the neighborhood of them.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
Or maybe did not
But there are reasons for skepticism, beginning with the first sentence of the story, asserting that “The facts have just been made public of an occurrence which would not have been believed possible by the residents of the neighboring towns,” supposedly the same neighboring towns where the wolves were “a constant menace to farmers” and had “chased children.”
Syndicated from Minneapolis on December 25, 1888, the account is squarely in the tradition of Christmas ghost stories, at the time still as much a staple of Christmas celebrations as Santa Claus.
Perhaps the existence of Emory and Mellock can be affirmed by local historians. William Emory, however, was and is a fairly common name, while Mellock seems to have left no other easily verifiable trace of himself.
(Beth Clifton collage)
“Unknown African-American”
Further, the Emory and Mellock story closely parallels that of “Unknown African American, male,” who as of 2010 was said by Wikipedia to have been killed by wolves in 1830, in “Kentucky, near the Ohio border.”
According to that account, also now removed from Wikipedia as unverified, “While traveling through a heavily forested area, two African Americans were attacked by a pack of wolves. Using their axes, they attempted to fight off the wolves. Both men were knocked to the ground and severely wounded. One man was killed. The other dropped his axe and escaped up a tree. There he spent the night. The next morning the man climbed down from the tree. The bones of his friend lay scattered on the snow. Three wolves lay dead.”
These are all of the essential elements of the Emory/Mellock story, except for the name of the alleged victim, the location, and the number of wolves killed.
And African-Americans were not then called African-Americans.
Wolves became “a menace in Iowa” 26 years after the last wolves were seen
Despite the paucity of verification of any of the dozens of recitations of essentially the same story from at least 1830 to 1910, the myth of the big bad wolf was amplified across two full pages by the Iowa Register & Farmer on December 1, 1911, in an editorial article, “Wolves Becoming a Menace in Iowa,” published 26 years after the last verified presence of wolves in Iowa to whip up enthusiasm for the federal wolf eradication effort that eventually extirpated wolves from almost the whole of the Lower 48.
Significantly, though, “Wolves Becoming a Menace in Iowa” made no mention of the “James Smith” attack, which as of 2010 was said to have occurred in Iowa less than two years earlier.
Neither did “Wolves Becoming a Menace in Iowa” mention any other specific harm done by wolves to humans.
Indeed, wolves had already been extirpated from Iowa by 1885, though some were reported in Missouri as recently as 1950.
Endangered Species Act: shield for wolves
Congress enacted the Endangered Species Act in 1973 in response to mass killing driven by bloodlust, commerce, and myth-driven prejudice.
The combination of human appetites and technology was devastating to hundreds of species. Wolves were poisoned, trapped, and shot down to small remnant populations in northeastern Minnesota and on Isle Royale by the 1970s.
The Endangered Species Act turned that around. But within the last decade, less than 20 years after wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park and the northern Rocky Mountains, the states of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming have revived official persecution of wolves. Hunting with packs of dogs. Steel-jawed traps. Night hunting. Even the return of bounties.
Wolf hatred is escalating
And wolf hatred is also escalating in Washington, Oregon, Colorado, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, Senator Ron Johnson’s state: everywhere, in short, where either gray wolves or Mexican wolves, their smaller cousins, are making a modest recovery.
Cory Booker put the brakes on expanding the killing.
He asked other senators not only to honor the code of mercy but to read the science and heed the law and dispense with the myth-making.
Wolves are indeed a threat to livestock, especially in places where their natural prey––deer and elk––have been depleted by hunting and habitat change driven by drought.
(See “Where’s the beef?” California wolves ask. “It’s what’s for dinner.”)
(Beth Clifton collage)
One would also be foolish to deny that wolves, like any other animals, can be dangerous when cornered, or when defending their young, or when––especially like bears––habituated to human feeding.
But the myth-making when it comes to wolves is enduring.
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Interesting article. Thank you for sharing this information with us.
Fear mongering is the usual default that the sportsmen/ranching community and their lobbyists rely upon. And many of our policymakers fail to research past the claims, unfortunately – or prefer not to.
In Australia, governments and farmers pretend that native dingoes are just ‘wild dogs’ to shoot them. The privately-funded Invasive Species Council seeks to collar endangered native dingoes against their welfare, and also pushes 1080 poisoning which kills cats, dingo pups and small natives in excruciating agony. My friend has a half-dingo – walking with her other dog, when both were younger, she couldn’t find one. It was up a tree – she later read that dingoes have retractable claws. We so need to protect these special native animals. To stop the fear and myths. Thank you Wayne, Merritt and Beth.
I wish Cory Booker would run for President. He would have my vote and I would fight for him. He is a man of honor.
People are SO BAD and SO RIDICULOUS at lying it’s a wonder anyone believes them, with such a complete lack of science and facts to support the nonsense they spout. It’s all hyper emotional, terroristic scaring that just defies logic.
I’m sick of stupid people not letting wildlife just live and be left alone. They evolved for a reason. It is OUR OWN inability to live with anything – any species, even each other – that is destroying everything.