The fable came down from Aesop, allegedly; variations of it have been told for over two thousand years. A shepherd boy, alone but for his flock, raised the alarm. “Wolf!” he cried. The herdsmen and the villagers, or whoever it was who heard him call, came running. But there was no wolf nearby. The boy had made it up. Did he feel sheepish when his deception was revealed? Perhaps not, because after some time had passed, with still only sheep for company, the boy cried out once more. “Wolf! Wolf!” As before, his neighbors hurried to help; and as before, they found the flock unbothered.
Then came the wolf.
“Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!” cried the boy again. Because he had tried his community’s trust once too often, no one believed in his earnest cries. No one came to his aid. The ravenous wolf made a meal of the sheep, as a hungry predator is wont to do.
Samuel Croxall, Anglican chaplain to England’s King George I, published his interpretation of Aesop’s fable in 1722. “When we are alarmed with imaginary Dangers… till the Cry grows quite stale and threadbare, how can it be expected we should know when to guard ourselves against real ones?”[i] According to Croxall, false alarms make shabby society. Liars wear out neighbors’ kindness until there are holes in the fabric that would otherwise cloak a community when winter comes. Later translators explained the moral in simpler terms. “There is no believing a liar, even when he speaks the truth,” George Fyler Townsend wrote in 1867.[ii] Laura Gibbs, who published her version of Aesop at the beginning of the 21st century, stressed just deserts. “The story shows that this is how liars are rewarded.”[iii] The flock was collateral, its loss a consequence of the shepherd boy’s lies. Children raised on this fable might hesitate—they might ruminate, even—before fibbing. I did, when I was a kid.
People have told and retold the story of the lying shepherd boy for millennia. While Aesop’s fable endures, its lesson has worn thin, tattered by time and overuse. What lesson should a child of 2025 take from the fable of the boy who cried wolf? And what of those who are grown? What wisdom remains for we who believe—sincerely—that words matter?
Today, known liars are rewarded with promotion to highest office. Social media platforms spread disinformation for profit. Investors throw money at generative AI, which exhausts environmental resources to produce sentences that are a statistically likely arrangement of words—fabrications that are authoritative in tone, but often false, and only ever veracious by chance.
These modern myths, these latter-day lies, are weaving us a shroud. The story of the boy who cried wolf is more urgent than ever. And threadbare though it is, there’s warmth in Aesop’s fable yet. I can mend it, I think, if I borrow material from other myths, if I patch it with cognate legends.
Author’s photo
In the spring of 2025, Texas-based Colossal Biosciences made a fabulous proclamation: after a planetary absence of more than 10,000 years, the dire wolf, Aenocyon dirus, lived again.[iv] Colossal’s charismatic canids howled in promotional videos. Their thick white coats gleamed in the pages of glossy magazines. They were recognizable as dire wolves because they resembled CGI creatures popularized by a certain HBO fantasy show.[v] But critics disputed their “dire” nature. Paleontologists, philosophers, and other skeptics emphasized the eternal fact of extinction and the circumstances of the animals’ existence—their technoscientific origins, their multispecies upbringing, the absence of an appropriate Pleistocene ecosystem to welcome them. These wolves are Canis lupus revised.
To achieve its debated de-extinction, Colossal scientists extracted DNA from ancient specimens to reconstruct an extinct paleogenome. They located “ideal” living genome donors at a wolf sanctuary, selecting “gray wolves with undetectable amounts of domestic dog ancestry.”[vi] They extracted cells to be cultured, cloned, and edited; used CRISPR gene-editing technology to make a score of targeted changes across 14 gray wolf genes (a wolf has around 19,000 genes, all told); controlled for the animal’s size, coat color, and strength; implanted the engineered embryos in surrogate hound dogs; and allowed, for a time, nature to take its course.[vii]
Two male pups arrived on October 1, 2024, via planned cesarean section: identical twins born of different wombs to the same technoscience. Initially, the pups nursed from the more “maternal” surrogate, but that Canis familiaris soon became “too attentive,” in the estimation of Colossal’s Animal Operations Team. They removed the hound after only a few days, before the pups could even open their eyes to see her. The surrogate’s attentions were “disrupting the pups’ regular… schedules,” the team explained. This, I suspect, was a half-truth. Colossal’s tacit ambition is to manufacture wonders of the postmodern world. Their wolves must be seen to be distinct from extant canids: unique from the gray wolves with whom they share most of their genetic identity; separate from the domestic dogs who gestated them. Perhaps this overly familiar hound was expressing a bit too much of her domesticated wisdom to the impressionable infants… In any case, Animal Operations staff took the surrogate’s place. Cradled in the arms of Colossal staff, the newborns—white as imagined Ice Age snow—fed from bottles. They nursed thus until they were weaned at eight weeks of age.[viii]
Colossal brought its dire wolves into being through genetic design. The company has, similarly, engineered their lives. Today, the yearlings live together (with a younger female dire wolf) on a 2,000-acre ecological preserve, its precise whereabouts a secret. Veterinary staff, assisted by a fleet of drones and cameras, monitors their health and development. The wolves stalk and play in their expansive preserve, which measures about one-quarter of the territory of a wild gray wolf. Because no mother taught them to hunt, Colossal keeps them well fed on venison, liver treats, bones, and rabbits entire. Still growing, they are on track to surpass the largest Canis lupus.[ix]
In the autumn of 2025, Colossal presented its dire wolves with a birthday cake of beef pâté, created by a Silicon Valley-based luxury dog bakery from “human grade, organic ingredients” approved by the Animal Husbandry Team. From the comfort of my couch, I watched the twins gently lick and nibble at the cake’s embellishments—white wolves a-howling at a harvest moon. I watched them compete over the choicest chunks of mashed meat. I winced, just a bit, as their teeth tore through the miniature agar wolves, technoscientific canine on organic (albeit inanimate) canine.[x]
Since the initial announcement of the wolves’ existence, Colossal PR has howled to investors and social media followers of the successful de-extinction. The company’s website declares that Colossal is “proud to return the dire wolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem.”[xi] Yet this claim is premature. For these wolves, in their controlled existence, are not fulfilling their namesake’s erstwhile ecological role as apex predator. And precisely because they are not fulfilling the role of ecological proxy, their existence does not satisfy the definition of or the motivation for de-extinction as defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Species Survival Commission.[xii]
Colossal has, nonetheless, continued to fashion the legend. “Species are ultimately a human construct,” an unnamed company spokesperson barked at critics. “Other scientists have a right to disagree and call them whatever they want to call them,” the spokesperson continued, privileging scientists’ expertise exclusively. “We have been using the concept of functional de-extinction from the beginning, and that is what Colossal achieved. Those are the facts and nothing has changed… [these] are the first dire wolves to walk the Earth in 12,000 years.”[xiii]
What are the consequences of crying dire wolf?
For one, investors are excited. So, too, is the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, whose department oversees implementation of the Endangered Species Act. “Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal,” Doug Burgum said to associates in the wake of the de-extinction announcement. “You want dodos? Bring ‘em back.”[xiv] There is worry, among conservationists and those who share their mission, that de-extinction will draw resources away from animals and ecosystems that dearly need intervention. The suggestion that extinction can be undone (which it cannot) will have consequences for species surviving, still, on the precipice of non-existence.[xv]
Coincident with Colossal’s media offensive, Republican officials introduced legislation in both House and Senate committees to remove gray wolves from the list of animals protected by the Endangered Species Act. At the same time, Burgum’s Interior maneuvered to roll back endangered species protections, seeking to redefine “harm” so as to allow for habitat destruction, a pre-existing agenda emboldened by the fabulous promises of de-extinction.[xvi] Colossal’s wolves are debatably dire; the situation, however, is inarguably so. This so-called de-extinction is proof enough of concept. It is a legend that legislators can use to excuse deregulation. It is a myth that may make way for the legal injury of animals already imperiled.
Though the dire wolf evolved in the Americas, Colossal’s wolfish mythmaking centers a different place and a different past entirely. Colossal named its twins for the fabled founders of Rome—Romulus and Remus—humans who owed their lives to the care of a wolf.
As the legend goes, the rightful King of Alba Longa was deposed by his brother. The usurper ordered all those with competing claims to the throne put to death, including his brother’s twin grandsons. Lackeys left the infant heirs to die on the bank of the Tiber, but the river god spared them, a she-wolf nursed them, and a shepherd adopted them. As boys, Romulus and Remus tended flocks. They grew to be leaders in their community. When learned their true identity, they took vengeance on the usurper and restored their grandfather as king. Then, they set about establishing their own kingdom. But they disagreed about which of the region’s seven hills was best for their purpose. An augury contest grew heated and Romulus (or one of his supporters) killed Remus. It was Romulus who established Rome on the Palatine Hill around 753 BCE—at which time the Americas’ dire wolves were already extinct, already fossilized.[xvii]
The decision to locate the first modern “dire” wolves in a mythic Mediterranean past, if only nominally, insists upon the value of that legend over other more material histories. It is an origin story engineered, not unlike lupine Romulus and Remus themselves.
Colossal designed its “dire” wolves with fur white as snow. The twins’ coloration is their most striking and their most controversial attribute, because there is no scientific consensus as to what shade, or shades, real dire wolves would have been. The color of a gray wolf (despite what its common name suggests) varies across the species. Even the hue of an individual animal is, often, variegated. Some wolves wear a coat of dark smoke, others of sand or cinnamon, streaked with other earthen tones. Colossal scientists modified gray wolf genes to express a specific and unalloyed color. Light fur, the company attests on its website, is evidenced in the dire wolf’s genome. “Our analysis… revealed that they were stunning, with likely light, nearly-white coats.”[xviii]
And yet, because Colossal has not published that analysis and because the study’s preprint (which has yet to endure peer review) includes no mention of pigmentation at all, paleontologists and other experts remain unconvinced. Dr. Emily Lindsey, a paleontologist who works at the La Brea Tar Pits where over 4,000 dire wolves have been unearthed, allows that white dire wolves may have existed in “the northernmost parts of their range where there was ice and snow.” But variation in coloration is to be expected. “Dire wolf fossils are found from Canada all the way down through coastal Ecuador and Peru,” Lindsey explains, “where white animals would stick out like a sore thumb, making it very difficult for them to hunt.”[xix]
“Candidly,” a Colossal spokesperson admitted, “we didn’t expect people to be so interested in the coat coloration question.”[xx]
“Candidly.” From the Latin for pure, for white.
The de-extinct dire wolves are white as the ice sheets that once crowned the continent of North America. Or is this pelage—permit me to ask—actually white as marble?
When I look at photographs of Romulus and Remus, I’m reminded of Classical statuary, the cream-colored sculptures that are iconic of Greek and Roman antiquity. But this, scholars have established, is only because the statues have been stripped of their authentic polychromatic pigmentation. Over the centuries, environmental conditions caused the original, vibrant coloring to fade and to flake. In some cases, antiquarians actively scrubbed away any pigment that remained to reveal the bare, unblemished marble beneath. The modern representation of a gleaming white ancient world is, in large part, by design. And it’s a lie.[xxi] Look no further than Aesop, who may have had (though scholars have disagreed on this point for nearly a thousand years) African origins.[xxii]
So, what does it mean to name one “dire” wolf for a fratricidal founder of a now-fallen empire, the other for his slain brother? Names do not determine destiny; still, I wonder, does this narrative hint at the potential for a tragic turn? The existence of Romulus and Remus may prove fatal for their immediate genetic relations, the gray wolves that could be cut off from Endangered Species Act protections if the ruling party, boosted by improvident techno-optimism, achieves its agenda.
“Wolf!” cries the chorus of skeptics. There are wolves in our woods, still. “Think of the wolf!” Extant beings deserve protection.
“Wolf!” The cry catches in my throat. Is there evidence enough that harm is imminent? If I cry out too soon, if I speak too often, will I wear out the warning? Perhaps. But, take it from the gray wolf himself: there is good reason to cry.
Wolves are social predators that live and roam and hunt in groups. The “lone wolf” is usually only alone temporarily, ever in the process of finding his way back to his kind. With barks and howls, wolves communicate across vast territories to coordinate a hunt, to raise an alarm. It’s with a howl that a lost wolf locates his pack.[xxiii]
Put more simply—wolves cry out to connect with a community. They cry out to survive.
This may be why shepherd boys cry wolf, too.
Wolves cry out to connect with a community. They cry out to survive.
Colossal has leashed its engineered wolves to manufactured myths of a snow-white past, one far more recent than and geographically distant from the dire wolf’s deep lineage in the Americas. The company has written its own neoclassical fable of novel technology to valorize the contested work of de-extinction and, perhaps, charm an investor class—the “wannabe Caesars”—who fixate on Classical antiquity.[xxiv]
How often do you think about the Roman Empire?[xxv]
I studied Classics a glacial age ago. I spent my hours under a blanket of oratory and epic. I kept company with historians and politicians and poets long gone, along with an oh-so-small community of scholars who likewise valued the work of translation. We knew the ancients lied to us, on occasion, with enchanting hexameters of imperial propaganda and other entertaining myths. We knew not to trust wholly in their stories. Still, we listened. A sentence, sometimes a single word, could occupy us for an afternoon. What did he mean… really? A fragment could animate weeks of conversation. What was it that she wanted to say? This community, bound by words, traversed time and space oblivious to the limits of human existence. We didn’t need novel technology to resurrect the dead; we had a lexicon.
If myths from the ancient Mediterranean are what Colossal privileges, then Aesop, the fabulist, would like a word. He lived it is said a century after Romulus and Remus perhaps on the Aegean island of Samos. Classical sources attestthat Aesop travelled to mainland Greece on behalf of a king to consult with the oracle at Delphi, she who uttered prophecies that were divinely inspired by the god Apollo.[xxvi] Standing before the oracle at Delphi, waiting for Apollo’s words, Aesop may have noticed a bronze wolf above the altar.[xxvii] Olympian Apollo, lord of light and truth, had many appellations. Bright one. Healer. Prophet. He was also known, in some times and in some places, as Apollo Lykeios. Apollo the Wolf.[xxviii]
In Homer’s Iliad, Apollo is wolf-born.[xxix] Elsewhere he is wolf-slayer. In Seven Against Thebes, a tragedy by Aeschylus, the chorus implores, “Apollo, lord of the wolf, be a wolf to the enemy force…”[xxx] Apollo—wolf king and killer alike—was regarded as patron and protector of shepherds.[xxxi]
Imagine Aesop, after his audience with the oracle, the bronze wolf still in his mind’s eye. Maybe as he was returning to his lodgings, he saw some shepherds in the fields. Maybe he heard some herdsmen singing a song for their god. Maybe the story of the boy who cried wolf came to him then and there.
It didn’t… Aesop’s visit to Delphi doesn’t hold up under scrutiny of the scant ancient sources. But, oh, what if it did? What if the moral of Aesop’s fable has been misunderstood for millennia? Let’s follow that thread.
Consider the tale once more. A shepherd boy, alone but for his flock… “Wolf!” he cried. What if he wasn’t raising the alarm but calling out to Apollo Lykeios, his patron? What if he was lonely there with his sheep, gregarious creatures but not great conversationalists. Here is one who felt forsaken, who cried for his god and was surprised to find his neighbors rush to his side, glad for their company though perhaps unable to express it. The sheep never showed him how. But he knew now how to call the human community back to him. “Wolf! Wolf!” What if this was all just a big misunderstanding?
“…this is how liars are rewarded.”
And if the boy wasn’t a liar? If he just wanted some company? Read with Aesop’s own legendary life in mind, the fable becomes a tragedy of miscommunication, a reminder that “words make worlds.”[xxxii]
Meaning can be lost in translation and meaning can be misconstrued. But sometimes, the meaning of a word is re-engineered—harm, for instance, and dire—with catastrophic results. Categories like species may well be human constructs, that’s why Colossal had to search for gray wolves without detectable dog DNA, yet there are life-and-death consequences should a word or a category lose meaning entirely. A sly re-reading of the boy who cried wolf asks us to question the stories we think we know, to look for the worlds within a single word, to do this work in community. This holds true even if the shepherd boy was lying because it matters not if “wolf” is uttered in fear or jest or nihilistic abandon. We must listen and try, together, to understand.
People (like wolves) are pack animals. Every interpretation of the fable agrees on this point. We need one another to survive. How can a canid become a dire wolf without its own kind to guide it? How can a boy left on his lonesome learn how to be human? Isolation is our end. Aesop’s is a fable for the flock.
[i] Samuel Croxall, “The Shepherd’s Boy,” in Fables of Aesop, and Others (Evert Duyckinck, 1813 [1722]), 157-8.
[ii] George Fyler Townsend, “The Shepherd’s Boy and the Wolf,” in Three Hundred Aesop’s Fables (George Routledge and Sons, 1867), 38.
[iii] Laura, Gibbs, Aesop’s Fables (Oxford University Press, 2002), 78.
[iv] Angela R. Perri and Kieren J. Mitchell et al., “Dire Wolves Were the Last of an Ancient New World Canid Lineage,” Nature 591 (March 4, 2021); Gregory L. Ledman et al., “On the Ancestry and Evolution of the Extinct Dire Wolf, bioRxiv preprint, April 11, 2025.
[v] Colossal has played up this connection. The third dire wolf, a female born in January 2025, was named Khaleesi, a reference to George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series in which dire wolves are companions and protectors of House Stark. “Khaleesi,” is a Dothraki title for the wife of the “Khal,” or leader. It is shorthand for Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, the Unburt, Queen of the Andals and the First Men, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons, etc, etc… Though Martin’s series, with HBO’s Game of Thrones, introduced dire wolves into popular imagination, this particular name is puzzling. The character of Khaleesi has no connection to dire wolves.
[vi] Jeffrey Kluger, “The Return of the Dire Wolf,” Time (May 12, 2025), 54-8.
[vii] “Dire Wolf Science,” Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences, https://colossal.com/direwolf/science/. Accessed June 5, 2025
[viii] Jeffrey Kluger, “The Return of the Dire Wolf,” Time (May 12, 2025), 54-8.
[ix] Moná Thomas, “Dire Wolves Brought Back from Extinction Celebrate Their 1st Birthday with Doggy Cake and Music Video,” October 1, 2025, https://people.com/de-extinct-dire-wolves-celebrate-first-birthday-with-doggy-cake-music-video-11822208.
[x] Colossal Biosciences, “The Dire Wolves Got a Birthday Cake,” YouTube, October 16, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJvPwbwjCLQ
[xi] “Dire Wolf,” Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences, https://colossal.com/direwolf/. Accessed June 4, 2025.
[xii] IUCN Species Survival Commission, “IUCN SSC Guiding Principles on Creating Proxies of Extinct Species for Conservation Benefit,” IUCN, 2016, https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/Rep-2016-009.pdf; “Philosophers On the Science & Ethics of Resurrecting Extinct Species,” Daily Nous, June 2, 2025, https://dailynous.com/2025/06/02/philosophers-on-the-science-ethics-of-resurrecting-extinct-species/#persinger.
[xiii] Michael Le Page, “Colossal Scientist Now Admits They Haven’t Really Made Dire Wolves,” New Scientist, May 22, 2025.
[xiv] Burgum, Doug (@SecretaryBurgum), “The mission of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service…” X, April 7, 2025, https://x.com/SecretaryBurgum/status/1909345951069651032?lang=en.
[xv] “Philosophers On the Science & Ethics of Resurrecting Extinct Species,” Daily Nous, June 2, 2025, https://dailynous.com/2025/06/02/philosophers-on-the-science-ethics-of-resurrecting-extinct-species/; Claudio Campagna, Daniel Guevara, and Bernard Le Boeuf, “De-Scenting Extinction: The Promise of De-Extinction May Hasten Continuing Extinctions,” Hastings Center Report (July-August 2017), S51, https://doi.org/10.1002/hast.752.
[xvi] Chris D’Angelo, Roque Planas, and Jimmy Tobias, “Trump’s Interior Secretary Has Close Ties to the De-Extinction Company He Promotes,” Public Domain, May 3, 2025.
[xvii] The story of Romulus and Remus was set down many centuries after they existed, if they did exist at all. (In some accounts, Remus lived to tell the tale.) Ashleigh Imus, “Myth of Romulus and Remus,” EBSCO Research Starters, 2023, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/myth-romulus-and-remus.
[xviii] “Dire Wolf Biology,” Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences, https://colossal.com/direwolf/biology/. Accessed November 10, 2025.
[xix] “Colossal Responses to the La Brea Tar Pits,” r/deextinction, April 2025, https://www.reddit.com/r/deextinction/comments/1jzz3vk/colossal_responses_to_the_la_brea_tar_pits_team/.
[xx] “Colossal Responses to the La Brea Tar Pits,” r/deextinction, April 2025, https://www.reddit.com/r/deextinction/comments/1jzz3vk/colossal_responses_to_the_la_brea_tar_pits_team/.
[xxi] Margaret Talbot, “The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture,” The New Yorker, October 22, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture.
[xxii] Justin David Strong, “Aesop,” in The Literary Encyclopedia, October 3, 2023, https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=41.
[xxiii] Fred H. Harrington and Cheryl S. Asa, “Wolf Communication,” in Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, edited by L. David Mech and Luigi Boitani (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 66-103.
[xxiv] Elda María Román, “Why Are Tech Billionaires So Obsessed with the Roman Empire?” Electric Literature, July 22, 2025, https://electricliterature.com/why-are-tech-billionaires-so-obsessed-with-the-roman-empire/.
[xxv] Dominic James, “How Often Do You Think about the Roman Empire? TikTok Trend Exposed the Way We Gender History,” The Conversation, October 2, 2023, https://theconversation.com/how-often-do-you-think-about-the-roman-empire-tiktok-trend-exposed-the-way-we-gender-history-214425.
[xxvi] Plutarch, trans. by several hands and revised by William W. Goodwin. “De sera numinis vindicta,” Plutarch’s Morals (Little, Brown, and Company, 1874).
[xxvii] Pausanias, an English Translation by W.H.S. Jones and H.A. Ormerod, Description of Greece. (Harvard University Press, 1918), Book 10, Chapter 14, Section 7.
[xxviii] In Greek, “lyk” is the root word for wolf, for light, and for Lycia, a place in Asia Minor where Apollo’s mother Leto was revered. Apollo is linked to all three.
[xxix] Homer, translated by A. T. Murray, The Iliad (Harvard University Press, 1924), Book IV, Line 100.
[xxx] Aeschylus, translated by Herbert Weir Smyth, Seven Against Thebes (Harvard University Press, 1926), Lines 144-7.
[xxxi] Daniel Gerhenson, “Apollo the Wolf-God,” Journal of Indo-European Studies, Monograph No. 8 (Institute for the Study of Man, 1991).
[xxxii] Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive? (Penguin Random House, 2025), 22.
