What Big Teeth You Have

Two centuries ago, wolves were among the world’s most widely distributed mammals and roamed almost the whole of North America. The United States alone had somewhere between 250,000 and two million. Today a mere 18,000 or so reside in the land of liberty — about two-thirds of them in Alaska. In Canada, with the largest wolf population of any country, only around 60,000 are left. This number has stabilized in recent years, but questions remain: Why were wolves targeted for extermination in the first place, and how do we account for their contemporary reappraisal? The so-called wolf lady Stephanie Rutherford, who teaches in the School of the Environment at Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario, seeks answers in Villain, Vermin, Icon, Kin.

As its title would suggest, this book — which took Rutherford a decade to complete — argues that since Europeans first arrived in the Americas, wolves have been variously imagined as evil, irksome, and almost sacred. The...