Wild Animals I Have Known

Ernest Thompson Seton

4 ideas

1. Lobo defeated through his mate Blanca

   In 1893–94, in the Currumpaw region of New Mexico, Seton was hired to kill Lobo, a wolf pack leader who had evaded poison baits and steel traps for years, reportedly by uncovering the traps or fouling them. Seton finally trapped and killed Lobo's mate Blanca, dragged her body to lay scent across a field of hidden traps, and caught Lobo as he followed her trail. Captured alive, Lobo refused food and died by the next morning, a death Seton attributes to grief. That attribution is interpretation, not observation.

2. Biography of individuals, not species averages

   Seton treats a wild animal as a person with a biography: a named individual with a history, distinctive habits, reputation and fate. Standard natural history describes 'the wolf' or 'the crow' as a typical member of a species. His approach makes visible the variation in skill, boldness and temperament that species-level description averages away. Many of the individuals, however, are admitted composites of several animals.

3. Wild survival is taught, not innate

   Seton presents animal competence as transmitted instruction. Molly the cottontail trains her son Raggylug to freeze, use briar thickets as refuge and double back on his trail. Silverspot's crow band is portrayed as having a learned vocabulary of alarm and assembly calls. Animals that miss this schooling die young. In Seton's account, a wild animal's survival skills are a culture passed down by its elders, not only a set of instincts it is born with.

4. Every wild animal's life ends in tragedy

   Seton states outright that the life of a wild animal always has a tragic end. No wild creature dies of peaceful old age; each is eventually killed by predators, accidents or humans once its strength or wits fail. Lobo is trapped, Silverspot is killed by an owl, and Molly drowns in icy water escaping a fox. The book uses these endings to argue that nature is not a gentle idyll and that the animals' struggle deserves the moral weight given to human tragedy.

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