Animals, Socialism, and Continuity

Leaders and hunters in the Mongolian People’s Republic embarked on a campaign to exterminate wolves who were major threats to the livestock economy. Despite common claims of Mongolian reverence of wolves, the campaign was an intensification and professionalisation of earlier wolf-hunting efforts. Wolf extermination was closely tied up in leaders’ promotion and execution of the second collectivisation campaign (1956–60) both as an external promotion to convince herders to join and an internal measure of success. State planners monitored numbers of livestock killed by wolves and how many wolf pelts were harvested. Professional hunters produced books and participated in conferences to discuss and spread methods of hunting which they articulated as Marxist labour necessary to build socialism. After the end of socialism, centralised wolf-hunting campaigns faded away and many herders point to wolf predation as a societal ill.