When Wolves Show Mercy — What Animals Teach Us About Violence
- Amber Howard
- Oct 2
- 3 min read
If animals kill only to survive… what’s our excuse?
We love to say it’s “just human nature.”
That violence, greed, and cruelty are inevitable.
That we’re animals, after all — what do you expect?
But when we look closer at the wild, we find a different story. Not of morality, not of perfection, but of belonging.
Wolves in the Snow
A researcher once tracked a wolf pack through deep winter. One morning, the alpha had a wounded elk cornered. The pack was hungry. The elk was trembling. The ending seemed written.
But the strike never came.
The wolf held. Waited. And then stepped back. The elk stumbled away, the pack turned, howled into the cold, and moved on.
The researcher wrote one word in the margin: mercy.
But let’s be careful here: that wolf wasn’t weighing morality codes the way we do. He wasn’t calculating virtue.
He was moving inside an ecosystem.
An animal in conversation with land, hunger, snow, herd, and pack.
What looked like mercy was balance.
What looked like restraint was belonging.
The Lie of “Animal Nature”
When humans commit violence, we blame our biology:
Testosterone.
Instinct.
The reptilian brain.
But no wolf drops bombs.
No crow wages holy war.
No lion invents genocide.
Animals kill — but they kill to live. For food. For territory. To defend their young.
And when the need ends, so does the violence.
Human violence spills beyond need.
It metastasizes into abstraction.
Symbols. Borders. Flags. Gods. Profits.
We don’t just defend. We destroy — often with pride.
The Divergence
So what makes human violence different? Three fractures:
Abstraction
A wolf meets a rival.
We meet a race, a class, a heretic, a gender.
We turn others into objects.
And if we’re honest, we turn ourselves into objects too — roles, tools, machines for production. Once a being is no longer a being, harm becomes easy.
Ideology
No dolphin builds a propaganda machine.
No gorilla invents a caste.
No whale enslaves a pod.
Only humans can tell stories so powerful we’ll kill — or die — to keep them.
Disconnection
Animals live embedded in the web. They don’t have to earn belonging.
But humans — especially in the modern world — feel estranged. From the land. From our bodies. From each other.
That disconnection breeds fear.
Fear breeds domination.
Domination breeds horror.
Not Morality, But Belonging
It’s tempting to call the wolf’s pause “moral.” To read it like scripture. But wolves don’t live by right and wrong.
They live by balance.
The pack’s hunger matters.
So does the elk.
So does the herd’s survival.
So does the carrying capacity of the land.
Every choice is nested in relationship.
This is what we’ve forgotten:
Violence in the wild is not about morality. It’s about ecosystem.
About the needs of the many balancing against the desires of the one.
Meanwhile, humans have built whole cultures on the opposite idea: that the wants, needs, and desires of the individual can outweigh the whole.
Forests cut down for profit.
Rivers poisoned for convenience.
Communities discarded for empire.
But here’s the remembering:
We can still create what we want, need, and desire. That capacity has never left us.
The question is how.
When it’s done in isolation, it destroys.
When it’s done in relationship — within community, within ecosystems, within I&I — it nourishes.
Creation doesn’t have to come at the expense of life.
Creation is life.
When we remember we belong.
Mercy Older Than Us
Mercy didn’t begin with humans.
It isn’t a product of civilization or creed.
Elephants mourn together.
Bonobos soothe with touch.
Orcas teach patience.
Wolves walk away.
Mercy is not morality.
Mercy is not philosophy.
Mercy is wild.
It belongs to the whole.
It belongs to life.
I&I: All Life
When we say I&I, it doesn’t end at me and you.
It stretches into the wolf and the elk, the snow beneath their feet, the silence after the howl.
It includes the rivers and the roots, the body and the breath.
It is all life, always life.
Our horror does not come because we are animals.
It comes because we have forgotten we are.
And the way back is not through ideology, or abstraction, or control.
It is through belonging again.
Mercy isn’t human. It’s older than human.
And it’s waiting for us to remember our place in the pack,
in the web,
in I&I.
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