Put yourself in their paws: rewilding, cross-species interactions and empathy in Charlotte McConaghy’s Once There Were Wolves

Anthropocene extinction refers to an era of unprecedented biodiversity loss driven by human activity. Rewilding narratives have emerged as a genre that fictionalizes attempts to reverse this loss. Charlotte McConaghy’s Once There Were Wolves is one such narrative that thematizes contemporary rewolfing debates. Using an econarratological approach, this article examines how the novel constructs trans-species empathy through three interrelated narrative strategies: bridge characterization, animal-centered perspective-taking, and symbolic twinning. These strategies mediate access to wolf experience, ground interpretation in species-specific behavioral and ecological cues, and create cross-species parallels without erasing difference. Drawing on Fritz Breithaupt’s account of empathy as a selective and allegiance-forming process, the article shows that such narrative proximity does not produce an impartial or universally expansive empathy. Instead, the novel repeatedly prioritizes particular nonhuman animal perspectives, creating conditions in which empathy may develop into selective allegiance when competing claims emerge. The article argues that Once There Were Wolves presents trans-species empathy as both a mode of cross-species connection and a morally ambivalent form of ecological engagement, revealing the possibilities and limits of imagining nonhuman animal life through narrative form.