Wolf attacks on humans: summarizing the historical and contemporary evidence

The return of wolves is controversial across Europe. One of the issues behind the controversy is that people are afraid for the impact wolves will have on their personal safety. Are these concerns based on myths like Little Red Riding Hood, or are there e lements of truth in these old tales? The historical archives from across Europe contain a rich material that refers to the way people and wolves interacted in the past. The applicant has spent his PhD period working through the particularly rich archives in eastern France and has uncovered thousands of records dealing with wolf attacks on people and their livestock as well as human attempts to exterminate wolves. The goal for this scholarship period is to summarise this data collected during the candidate s PhD period with other published data from across Europe and with the modern day ecological understanding of the wolf. The idea is to integrate these diverse sources of information to explore the evolving nature of wolf ? human interactions. Concretely t he process will lead to the production of a number of inter-disciplinary scientific papers. However, the results will also help to inform the ongoing social debate about wolf conservation and help answer the basic question as to why wolves are controversi al.