Wolves

The Wolves are among the animals killed by Japanese soldiers at the Hsin-ching zoo in August 1945, when the approaching Soviet army and the disintegration of Manchukuo turn the zoo into a site of wartime command. Their destruction is both a concrete act ordered by the military and part of a larger contrast: the soldiers can decide the fate of animals confined in cages, even as the army’s own position is collapsing and its power over the wider city is failing.

Identity and Setting

The Wolves belong to the group of zoo animals targeted because they could pose a danger to human beings. The order to shoot the zoo’s dangerous animals comes amid the expected arrival of Soviet forces in Hsin-ching. The Kwantung Army has been depleted by the wider war; its equipment and experienced troops are largely gone, and the collapse of Manchukuo is described as imminent. Against that background, the soldiers’ mission at the zoo is an act of control carried out in a situation where their larger military control is slipping away.

The Killing at the Zoo

Nutmeg’s vision presents Japanese soldiers moving through the zoo and shooting animals under an officer’s command. The Wolves are among those killed, along with the tigers, leopards, and bears. The soldiers’ action is part of a methodical operation, not an isolated encounter: the officer gives orders, the men carry them out, and the animal deaths are treated as one task within the military’s final preparations in the city.

The decision to spare the elephants makes the Wolves’ fate more sharply defined. Once the soldiers confront the elephants, the lieutenant judges them too large for the rifles to handle and removes them from the killing order. The men are relieved. The contrast does not imply that the Wolves are less alive or less worthy of survival; it shows how the animals’ fates depend on the practical judgments and commands of the people holding weapons. The same operation that ends the lives of several kinds of animals leaves others in their cages.

Aftermath and the Veterinarian

The following morning, the veterinarian recognizes the absence of the zoo’s tigers, leopards, Wolves, and bears as the consequence of the previous day’s killing. The memory is difficult to assimilate: the events seem dreamlike after a night’s sleep, but the lingering effect of the rifle fire confirms their reality. The elephants’ calls offer relief because they survived. The veterinarian regards the lieutenant’s decision to spare them as evidence of ordinary human sensitivity, contrasting it with the unquestioning obedience he has encountered among other young officers.

The loss also changes the practical demands of the zoo. Caring for large carnivores required substantial effort and involved danger; with them gone, the veterinarian cannot suppress his relief that he has been spared that work, even as he feels the loss represented by their empty cages. He continues tending the remaining animals, assisted by two Chinese boys sent by former Chinese workers who no longer appear themselves. The massacre therefore leaves both an ethical and a material aftermath: absent animals, altered work, and a zoo whose human caretakers must continue under a rapidly changing political order.

Narrative Significance

The Wolves’ deaths place animal life within the machinery of wartime decisions. They are not agents of the human conflict, yet their confinement makes them directly vulnerable to an order justified by human safety. The episode refuses to make the animals’ survival a matter of abstract symbolism alone: it records a military decision that kills some animals and spares others, and follows the consequences into the veterinarian’s next day of work.

The massacre also unsettles the presumed hierarchy between battlefield violence and violence toward animals. The lieutenant observes that killing people on a battlefield can seem easier than killing animals in cages, despite the danger soldiers face in combat. In the setting of Manchukuo’s impending collapse, the Wolves’ deaths expose a grim imbalance: military authority remains capable of deciding the lives of captive animals even while it cannot prevent the political and military order around the zoo from coming apart.