Grey ghosts that helped make us what we are

THERE is something fascinating about the evolving relationship between wolves and humans.

At some time during the Palaeolithic Age, nobody knows exactly when but it might have been 20,000 years ago, a wolf cub was tamed and dogs were born.

This was a very significant moment in human evolution because they were the first of many animals to be domesticated. It happened because wolves and humans occupied the same ecological niche. The Pleistocene Mega-fauna is the name biologists give to the great herds of big game animals that roamed across Europe and Asia before the last Ice Age.

A few of these are with us today, like the red deer and the last remnants of European bison. But most species are now extinct — various species of rhinoceros and mammoth, the aurochs and the giant Irish deer.

Packs of wolves and bands of early humans roamed the landscape preying on these large animals. The wolves were more efficient than the humans because the bow and arrow hadn’t been invented and human weapons were restricted to sharpened sticks and lumps of rock. In fact there’s one theory that suggests that humans may have been subordinate predators to wolves, following them and eating the left-overs from their kills, rather like the relationship between lions and hyenas in Africa today. If this is true the relationship was over-turned when humans domesticated wolves and used them as hunting aids.

Ireland was full of wolves right up to late historic times — they persisted here far longer than in Britain. The last English wolf was probably killed in the early 1300s, the last Scottish one around 1680. The most likely date for the last Irish wolf is 1786.

What we know about the relationship between people and wolves in Ireland before the Norman invasion is based on scraps of archaeological evidence, folklore and myth and some references in the Brehon laws.

Although wolves were regularly trapped or hunted with hounds when they posed a threat to livestock, their presence seems to have been tolerated to a remarkable extent. There are records of them being kept as pets, having miraculous conversations with saints and holy men and coming to the aid of heroes. There are very few records of them attacking humans.

The arrival of the Normans had two impacts on our wolf population. The first was that the invasion sparked off a lot of battles and it’s quite clear from the historical record that wolf populations do well in wartime. The second was that the Norman knights had a passion for hunting on horseback with hounds, in a manner similar to modern day fox hunting — but a wolf is a far more exciting quarry than a fox.

Wolves seem to have done quite well here in the late medieval period. We know this by the number of Irish wolf skins that customs officers recorded coming into some British ports.

Several hundred a year throughout the 1500s, indicating a large and sustainable population. But then two bad things happened to Irish wolves. The first was increasing deforestation, which forced them into less suitable upland habitat. The second was Oliver Cromwell.

After the initial Cromwellian wars the main focus of the new wave of invaders was plantation — the settlement of Irish land by English people. But the settlers were nervous about the number of wolves roaming the countryside. They weren’t used to this because wolves had been extinct for so long in England. The response of the authorities was a determined programme to eradicate the wolves, fuelled by huge cash bounties and the employment of professional hunters. This began to take a steady toll.

There are many reports, from many different parts of the country, of the killing of the last wolf but most of these seem only to have been local extinctions.

The most likely location for the real last wolf in Ireland is Ballydarton in Co Carlow. A farmer called John Watson had been suffering sheep losses to a lone wolf with a den on Mount Leinster. In 1786 he killed it with his wolfhound. A few stray wolves or wolf/dog hybrids could have survived into the 1800s, but there’s no evidence for this.

Wolves in Ireland — a natural and cultural history is not a very big book, around 100 pages of text if you discount chapter notes and illustrations, but it contains a lot of information. Kieran Hickey is an academic, he lectures in geography at NUI Galway, and his approach is a scholarly one.

This means that some of the information in the book is difficult for an ordinary reader to access. But if you’re as interested in the subject as I am, it’s worth persevering.

On a couple of occasions he falls into a common trap. He uses data gathered on wolf ecology in North America and applies it to Irish wolves. But there’s quite a lot of evidence to suggest that the ecology of North American wolves is quite different to that of European wolves, although they are the same species.

US and Canadian wolves have access to much larger amounts of big game animals such as bison, elk and caribou. They hunt them in large packs, sometimes up to 40 or 50 animals. European wolves hunt smaller animals, the wild boar is a favourite prey and one small population in Spain seems to exist only on domestic sheep and goats, and consequently their pack size is much smaller, usually four to 10 individuals.

He does raise one very interesting idea when he speculates that the Irish wolf may have been a distinct subspecies. This would be very easy to determine with a DNA test. Unfortunately there’s no sample to test. There is no surviving scrap of Irish wolf skin, no trophy mask mounted on a wooden plaque — unless, of course, there’s some forgotten relic lying in the corner of the attic of an old house.

Please go and check your attic.

*Dick Warner’s latest television series, Waterways, The Royal Canal, continues on RTÉ 1 at 8.30 tomorrow night.