We are not raised by wolves: Decentering human exceptionalism in nature

Some of the earliest writings to which we have access introduce the myth of a human child raised by wolves. Enkidu is the “wild” friend of Gilgamesh in the eponymous Sumerian epic; Romulus and Remus of Rome are the infants who suckle from the she-wolf Lupa; and Mowgli's story has been told ever since he was conceived by Rudyard Kipling in The Jungle Book. While this wolf story might seem to imagine a friendly way of living with other-than-human beings, its contemporary uptake in media also serves as a prop for white supremacist orientations to the myth that reassert the primacy of “human” life, while always determining who counts as human. Nature, on this stage, is a savage, dangerous backdrop against which human cruelties and violence are portrayed as the “survival of the fittest.”