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English translation of "300 hundra år av attacker på barn"
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300 Years of Wolf Attacks on Children .
Linnel and Bjerke as part of the NINA project in Norway have made thorough research of wolf victims during the centuries documented in Fear of the Wolf. Thousands of victims, both rabid and non-rabid ones, were found. As the wolf was more or less eradicated in the last two centuries most attack are of old nature and it is hard to determine the reasons. Magnus Hagelstam of Finland and myself have identified a number of well-defined, well documented cases involving children going back three hundred years.
The conventional hypothesis has been that it is primarily the lack of natural prey which prompts wolves into considering humans as a food base. I believe that this is an important factor but looking over the historical episodes of troubles with wolves another maybe even more important factor emerges. The lack of harassing and hunting wolves when they are moving in close to humans. The wolf is a very inquisitive animal always on the lookout for something to eat.
1718-20. Place: Storkyro at the northern part by the Gulf of Bothnia in Finland. At least nine people killed, mostly children. Speculations have been that a battle four year earlier with bodies in the forest has made the wolves starting to eat humans. But the time lag is too great. But this was during the time our warrior king Karl XII was fighting Russia and draining Sweden and Finland of soldiers. That is, wolf hunting was way down on the priority list.
1810-11. Place: Area annexed from France at the rivers Rein and Maas. 14 attacks on children, 11 of which were killed. This was during the Napoleon wars.
1721 to the mid-1800. Place: Carelian Isthmus. An area ceded by Sweden to Russia in 1721, and where the Russian masters prohibited all hunting. Around 40 children were killed during these years.
Around 1849-51. Place Russia. Professor S. Korytin from The Science Research department on Game and Lifestock Produktion compiled from old reports to the central government 260 adults and 110 children were killed by wolves. Rabies accounted for most of the attacks on adults but the children were mostly predatory attacks. A copy of the original Russian paper has been sent to Will Graves.
1877-81. Place: Southeastern part of Finland. The time of the Turkku (Åbo) killings. During these years around 30 children were killed and a number injured by at least four constellations of wolves. The trouble ended by simply exterminating wolves from that part of Finland with hunters from a number of places, of which the Russians were the most able.
Why did it happen? 1868 the hunting laws and the community involvement in wolf hunting was changed leading to that in practise all hunting of wolves ended.
1944-53: Place: Russia. Kirov, Oritiji and Vladimir districts. 46 attacks documented in Fear of the wolf (The NINA report from Norway). 36 killed. Again the war had taken away the men from the villages so the wolves were not harassed or hunted.
1989-1996. Place: Uttar Pradesh in India. A high number of children attacked, most of them died. Why? From being brought to near extinction by earlier campaigns the wolf subspecies on Indian continent were moved into the most protected list. That is to say hunting stopped even close to human settlements. Accusations by wolf scientists that was due to an overcrowded extremely poor area with mothers leaving their children to collect compensation pay was shown by a representative from the Indian Government to be without funding.
Of course we also have the Mark McNay report that shows that no hunting of wolves in national parks leads to habituation and attacks on humans.
No exceptions were found.
The Finnish and the India series have been totally misinterpreted in Mech and Boitanis work on Wolves.
Calle Seleborg, Likenäs, Sweden
Background and references
In Sweden and Finland the parish priests have for many hundreds of years kept books on the members of the congregation. All births, marriages and deaths are recorded as well as people moving in or out of the parish. Also in Finland and Sweden a copy of all published material including newspapers are been kept in a government institution. The information from these sources has been gathered by two researchers.
References:
Dr. Jouko Teperi, Finnish historian, in Finnish
In 1977, the Historical Society of Finland (Suomen Historiallinen Seura) published a 175 page book by the historian Dr. Jouko Teperi as #101 of the series Historical Research (Historiallisia Tutkimuksia) with the title “Wolves as a threat to people in agricultural (as opposed to wilderness) Finland in the 19th century”, (SUDET Suomen rintamaiden ihmisten uhkana 1800-luvulla), ISSN 0073-2559, ISBN 951-9254-10-2.
Mr. Antti Lappalainen, Finnish historian, in Finnish
The historian Antti Lappalainen has collected information on human victims to wolves from court and church records back to 1660 as well as newspapers from about 1830 onwards and published his findings in the book The Tracks of the Wolf, (Suden Jäljet) in 2005, ISBN 952-5118-879-9. He found 193 deaths of which 110 were child victims to predatory attacks. Of these, 69 occurred 1831-1881 – one every eighth moth over 50 years. In addition, 83 grown-ups fell victim to wolves, most of them to rabid ones. Mr. Lappalainen investigated only human victims, whereas Teperi described the broader. Mr. Lappalainen found twice as many victims as Dr. Teperi.
Mr. Michail Pavlov, member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, in Russian, download excerpts in Swedish from www.locomail.com/vargen -> wolf.pdf
In 1982 the book Volk (Wolf) by Michail Pavlov, a recognized authority on the timber wolf in the USSR, was published. A second enlarged edition was published in Moscow in 1990 by VO Agropromizdat (Agricultural Industry Publishing), ISBN 5-10-001221-8.
Mark McNay, A Case History of wolf-Human Encounters in Alaska and Canada, Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Wildlife Technical Bulletin #13, 2002.
The German incident in 1810-11 was described in an article in Wild und Hund 2004 nr 21 Based on information in “Wolfsakten” from that time.
Wildlife Institute of India, Mr. Kishan Singh Rajporuhit, in English
A report on man-eating wolves in India commissioned by the Indian government, which was published by the Swedish Academy of Sciences in the AMBIO series in March 1999. Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences)
Several of these incidents are also included in Fear of the Wolf by Linnell and Bjerke of NINA in Norway
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