THE NEW IMPROVED BEAST

THE VAMPIRE'S WEAK SISTER
Laurel and Hardy, peanut butter and jelly, vampires and werewolves. Though linked in the popular imagination to their more famous bloodsucking peers, werewolves have always been the less popular half of the duo. People don't respond to the savage inner beast the way they do to sexy, cosmopolitan immortals.

Sure, wolves have a certain sexiness. An aggressively amorous man is still called a wolf, and just imagine why the wolf wanted Little Red Riding Hood. But the werewolf's big problem is that wolves just don't scare us any more. The modern city-dweller never hears "ar-rooooo!" unless he lives near a fraternity house. People in cities have bigger anxieties. When crazy cultists can fill your subway car with nerve gas or blow up your airplane, who worries about wolves?

Today our main worry about wolves is that there aren't enough of them. Wolves are, or were, the chief predators of many ecosystems around the world. People have hunted them to the brink of extinction in many regions, and in those places nature's system has broken down. Now scientists have begun careful programs to reintroduce wolves into some areas, such as a highly publicized and controversial effort in Yellowstone Park.

Treat wolves as monsters? Yeah, and then you can scare people with the spotted owl or the snail darter.

"Some Bavarian peasants, having caught a wolf one evening, tied it to a post by the tail and went to bed. The next morning nothing was there! Greatly perplexed, they consulted the local priest, who told them that their captive was undoubtedly a werewolf and had resumed its human form during the night. `The next time that you take a wolf,' the good man said, `see that you chain it by the leg, and in the morning you will find a Lutheran.'"
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary