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Paper long abstract:

Scholarship on the relationship between humans and wolves in Mongolia often emphasize the special and sacred role wolves play. This is often then contrasted to the rest of the world's antagonistic relation with the wolf, especially the American extermination campaigns. However, a closer examination shows that throughout history Mongolians most often portrayed wolves as objects of hatred, scorn, and as threats to lives and livelihood. Wolves are portrayed in an array of roles, from a monstrous predator, to greedy exploiter, to hunted fugitives.

In this talk, I will use a combination of sources, including a close reading of literary sources, data from socialist government documents, hunters' handbooks, and visual sources to examine how socialist era attitudes and policies to wolves compare with earlier periods of Mongolian history. During the socialist period of Mongolia, wolf hunting became Marxist labor necessary to modernize the herding economy and build socialism. Although ultimately unsuccessful, socialist Mongolian wolf extermination campaigns showed similar tactics, professionalism, and businesslike violence reminiscent of wolf extermination projects in North America. This project is part of my larger dissertation research on the environmental and animal history of collectivization in socialist Mongolia.

Many scholars point to modernization, Christianity, and capitalism to explain violent and exploitative relationship with animals, particularly predators. Socialist Mongolia, as a formerly Buddhist but explicitly atheist country, offers an important case study of human-animal relations in a non-Western context. Mongolia's socialist era centralized command economy also provides a contrast to current religiously open individual herding households who are the source of contemporary studies of Mongolia. The history of the wolf in Mongolia provides an opportunity to disentangle the many competing factors used to explain human-animal relations in Central Eurasia and globally.