I live in Northern California, and one of the news items that caught my eye today was
the confirmed presence of two gray wolves in nearby Lassen County. Here in the States, over the last two decades or so, we've been slowly re-introducing wolves into the wild since they were almost driven out of the States by ranchers and hunters who didn't like the competition. When I was a kid, my family had a wolf-breed as a pet. Her mom was a full-blooded, red wolf that was found in the wild as a pup and raised in captivity, and a dad who was a half-blooded red wolf. So, when you looked at her, there was no mistaking that she was basically a wolf with a little dog in her, not the other way around. But I digress.
In the States, perhaps because we take part of our national identity from the wild and untamed image of the land from the Old West days, and perhaps also because of the Native American view of them, we revere our wolves for the most part. They feature prominently in art, movies, shows, etc in a mostly positive light, as opposed to wolves in Europe which have for the most part been driven out of the majority of countries. In European lore, wolves almost always feature as scary, terrifying monsters, creatures that need to be killed or forces of destruction. There's very little love or fondness for wolves in most European cultures.
Now, of course I am talking in broad generalizations but we almost always are when we're talking about national and cultural trends. But why are wolves, basically the same creatures on either side of the ocean, viewed so differently in North America versus Europe?