In Jon Coleman's history of colonial America's relationship with its native wolves, Vicious (2004), he retells the tale of the death of a wolf named by hunters ‘Old Whitey’. On the first telling, Old Whitey, on being caught in a snare, fought with such violence to escape the trap that the effort left him with patches of raw skin from torn-out fur and with bloody, broken teeth. The hunters took him alive, but the wolf, defiant, refused food and water, eventually dying of a ‘broken heart’ by the third day of his captivity. On the second telling, Old Whitey is wrested from this romanticised and anthropomorphic reading of his behaviour:

Coleman notes that histories of this inter-specific relationship have tended to cast the two main players in the guise of either good or evil, both wolf and human equally befitting the role of fearsome predator depending on the stance of the narrator, but these histories have never quite captured the complexity of their interactions. Towards this goal of understanding such a long and complex relationship, Coleman's study centres on ‘the violent interaction of three timeframes – historical, folkloric, and biological – [which] explains the longevity of wolf hatred and the brutality of wolf killing, as well as the rise of wolf popularity’.

For example, the very possibility of a second account of Whitey's capture has arisen in the development of the study of wolf behaviour, itself reflecting the growth in the biological and environmental scientific efforts to conserve rather than to conquer.