Germán Vergara is an environmental historian in Georgia Tech’s School of History and Sociology. His forthcoming chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Global Animal History examines animal agency — the ability to learn and adapt — in wild wolves.
By tracing wolves’ history across centuries, cultures, and continents, Vergara reveals how human attitudes towards the animals have changed over time and how the wolves, in turn, have altered their behavior to protect themselves.
This dynamic isn’t unique to wolves. A recent University of Rhode Island study found that a third of the mammal species they observed changed their activity patterns in response to human presence.
“Not only are animals shaped by us, they also respond to our actions,” Vergara said. “They adapt to them, sometimes really successfully, and those actions in turn shape how humans behave.”
Sixteenth-Century Mexican Wolf
Source: Kim Richter and Alicia Maria Houtrouw, eds., Digital Florentine Codex/Códice Florentino Digital: Book 11: Which Is a Forest, Garden, and Orchard of the Mexican Language (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2023), fol. 5.
What is Animal Agency?
Biologists, ecologists, and other hard scientists were once wary of the ability to study animal minds, Vergara explained. But that has changed in recent years, with an increasing amount of research on the way mammals, fish, and birds develop shared cultures.
“The more scientists study different species, the more they realize that they have all these learned behaviors that are transmitted the same way that humans transmit human culture — by learning and showing their offspring how to do things,” Vergara said.
“Now it’s common among environmental historians to think that nature, including animals, has agency. It doesn’t mean that it’s conscious agency, it doesn’t mean that nature has will, but it does have agency in the sense that it shapes history — human history.”
The Push and Pull Between Humans and Wolves
For example, Vergara’s chapter covers how ranching spread across the United States and the resulting habitat destruction reduced the populations of wolves’ prey. They started hunting livestock instead, leading to a coordinated response from farmers, ranchers, and local organizations to exterminate them.
However, when people set out steel traps and poisoned livestock carcasses to kill the wolves that came back to them, the wolves changed their behavior in response. They stopped returning to past kills and became more nocturnal to avoid humans, even passing the habits down to their offspring.
But even these remarkable responses are not enough for wolves to protect themselves in the face of profound human intervention, Vergara said. Their populations declined precipitously in the United States, almost disappearing completely before efforts began to protect them.
And that decline, in turn, affects humans. Fewer wolves mean more of the animals they naturally hunt, such as deer, which overpopulate, decimate plant populations, and change entire ecosystems.
‘A Healthy Dose of Humility’
For Vergara, the wolves’ story raises the question of exactly where animal agency ends. He grapples with what extinction says about nature’s limits of survival when it comes to human impacts.
Organisms such as cyanobacteria and ancient plants have caused mass extinctions in the past. However, humans are particularly effective at exterminating other species, with even small populations eradicating animals in preindustrial times. Now, modern capitalism and globalization have sped up the process to a scale and speed never before seen, he said.
“Looking at the larger extinction trends happening today, it’s difficult to sugarcoat the consequences,” he said. “Environmental historians try not to tell stories of just decline, but so far, this mostly is one.”
However, acknowledging animal agency and granting nature a greater role in our shared story can help us see that humans are not the sole drivers of global and planetary history.
“We’ve been around for a very, very short period of time, and we will not be here eventually. So, this push toward decentering humans is a healthy dose of humility,” Vergara said. “Yes, we are a particularly powerful, and often noxious, species, but we’re not the only ones shaping Earth’s history.”
