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Meet the Pack
Apr. 17th, 2025 03:48 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
grrm_feedRudyard Kipling said it way back when, in THE JUNGLE BOOK, in a poem called “The Law of the Jungle.”
Now this is the Law of the Jungle — as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back —
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
Ned Stark echoed those words in A GAME OF THRONES. “When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.”
Wolves run in packs. Grey wolves, red wolves, coyotes, makes no matter… and direwolves too. Thousands of years ago, when they ruled most of North America, their prey included the megafauna of the period: giant ground sloths, horses, huge bison, bears, mammoths. Direwolves were formidable hunters, but even so, a lone wolf would have had a helluva time bringing down any of these by itself. There is evidence that direwolf packs were much, much larger than those of their modern descendants.
Colossal Biosciences has given us a pack too. A very small one, admittedly.
Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi are their names. And they are learning to howl.
That’s the two boys. I don’t believe that Khaleesi is howling yet. She is younger than her brothers, born a few months later. When I visited Colossal back in February, I had the honor of meetings Romulus and Remus and holding them in my arms, but Khaleesi had not been born yet, though I hope to make her acquaintance later.
Colossal announced the return of the direwolves last week. Since then the story has spread all over the world. Millions of people seem to be as thrilled by the news as I am.
Yes, there are nay-sayers too. I will not get into that here, the debates are raging all over the internet. I will let the scientists argue the genetics. The things that trouble me more are the people saying, “Why? We did not need a direwolf”), those arguing that god made the direwolf extinct and man has no right to undo what he has done, the movie buffs who think we’re now blundering into Jurassic Park (fine book, great movie, but no, we are not going to have packs of direwolves chasing children through Central Park)… but most of all, I am horrified by those now saying that now that we have mastered de-extinction, we don’t need the Endangered Species Act, so let’s gut that for the benefit of the oil and gas industry. (Trump and his MAGies have been trying to do this for years).
That’s coming from the right wing. From the left, we have people saying we should not be bring back extinct animals, that we should be spending our money defending living animals whose numbers are dwindling as their habitats vanish.
This is not a choice. Colossal is not trying to bring back extinct animals in lieu of defending endangered ones. They are trying to do both. And in fact they ARE doing both. Romulus and Remus and their sister are not the only miracles Ben Lamm, George Church, Beth Shapiro and their incredible team have wrought; they have also been cloning red wolves, the most severely threatened of today’s wolves. It is a matter of learning; the techniques that Colossal is pioneering will benefit both. That is how science works. There will be failures and successes, theories formulated, theories disproved. The direwolf is only the beginning. The woolly mammoth, the moa, the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger, the passenger pigeon. and a hundred other animals may follow… in time… maybe ten years, maybe a hundred.
Any of them who make it back will make the world a better place, as far as I am concerned. But we need to protect the animals we have now too. The woolly mammoth should not replace the elephant; Earth is big enough for both. We need lions and tigers and bears, yes… but we deserve dodos and moas and smilodons as well.
(And fwiw, there are no stronger supporters of the Endangered Species Act than Ben Lamm and the good folk at Colossal. Extinction is the abomination here, not de-extinction.).
