Reviewing the many conflicts concerning wolves in Europe and North America, we learn that negative attitudes towards their presence stem from misguided notions about the animal. Ostensibly, these notions can be traced back to images of the wolf as ‘the devil's companion’ in bygone times or the ‘Big Bad Wolf ‘ in fairy tales (Van Maanen, Chapter 1 in this volume).

However, research has shown that conflicts over wolf conservation and management are entangled in contemporary social conflicts at a more fundamental level, related to urban–rural tensions, socio-cultural disparities, and phenomena such as anti-elitism and populism (Arnds 2021; Krange et al 2022). Clearly, there are economic and other material consequences fuelled by wolf presence. Therefore, we must ask if and how the historical images of the animal influence current debates, and try to assess the role of these images as drivers of ongoing social conflicts over wolf protection.

This requires an examination of contemporary social imageries, and for that purpose we have used the theory of social representations (Moscovici 1984, 1988, 2008). The aim of the approach is to probe ‘societal thinking’ through studying how people use common sense as a knowledge base for understanding new or disturbing phenomena in everyday life (Moscovici 1984, 14). Since everyday life unfolds in specific material and historical environments, we must ask what happens to the image of the wolf in the current socio-political context. This entails a shift in focus from analyses of historical texts or folklore to analysing how images of new or disturbing phenomena are constructed and circulated in everyday communication (Wagner and Hayes 2005).

Social representations are interpretations of the world that arise in social or cultural groups with complex and inherently symbolic meanings specific to those groups. They encompass longstanding, broadly shared images, categories and labels as well as group-specific opinions and ideas about contested issues that are not only relevant in a socio-economic situation, but also reflective of the strategic interests of the group that holds them (Howarth 2006). To study them we must ‘distil’ their actual significance. Among the many analytical tools that can be derived from the theory of social representations, we concentrate on the so-called structural approach and the distinction between the core and the periphery of a social representation (Abric 1993; Flament 1989) (Fig 13.1).