Who's Bad?

José Luis Rodriguez - "Storybook Wolf"

If one day, you should meet me walking in the woods, you would quickly discover that I ask a lot of questions. Its just my nature and it often carries me on strange voyages of discovery. I began just like most little girls growing up, being seduced by storybook fantasies. Except that I wanted to be a queen not a princess, find a prince who was not a toad, and why would anyone kiss a slimy amphibian no matter how much it implored?

In response, my father had a Rapunzel tower built for me as an extension to our house. During my adolescence this became a blessing in disguise for my father and a regret for me, when I discovered just why young princes try to climb towers that contain young princesses. My bedroom in the house still sits at the top of this tower, though I visit it less often.

It is a commonly accepted truth that parents, in want of protecting their children, will lie to them, repeatedly. Though there is some logic in doing this regarding tragedies that the very young may have trouble comprehending. Though, why anyone would want their child to grow up a gullible creature with imbecilic beliefs in chivalrous knights who are straight and fair damsels who don't have a surgeon on speed-dial, is beyond me. It only sets them up for disaster later on in life. Discovering Santa is an ex-con, drug-dealing alcoholic on parole who couldn't get another job, is just the tip of the iceberg. Children have far more incredible imaginations anyway, they should be the ones telling grown-ups stories.

I always felt something lacking in all these nursery tales until, at a fortunately tender age my (again fortunately) sufficiently enlightened mother, empowered me with, what remains, one of my most treasured books, Roald Dahl's "Revolting Rhymes". Even my Rapunzel tower could not shelter me from the truths contained in this book. Dahl certainly did children everywhere a grand favour (out of malice or love) by unveiling the truth behind classic children's tales. This mainly involved empowering the heroines, yet also showing their less ladylike characteristics, and showing the princes, knights etc. ad nauseum, for the toad-pigs they are. My favourite revelation by far is Dahls' Little Red Riding Hood. No silly little girl to go whining for help when she comes across a big bad wolf at her grandmother's. This bad babe in red deals with her issues herself. One part in particular has travelled with me all my life, just after discovering the wolf, she consequently does a little ad lib re-scripting complementing Wolfy on his lovely fur coat, much to the wolf's annoyance:

"The small girl smiles. One eyelid flickers.

She whips a pistol from her knickers.

She aims it at the creatures head

And bang bang bang, she shoots him dead."

So, if you want the job done properly and a prize, do it yourself. Shoot the wolf, before the wolf shoots you.

A lesson photographer José Luis Rodriguez might have considered before unveiling his recent entry to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. His entry was aptly named "Storybook Wolf" and features the rare Iberian wolf jumping over a weathered farm gate. He claims he tracked the nearly extinct species, almost never seen in the wild anymore, for months for this shot. He won the prize. He lost the prize. The image was uncovered as a staged hoax, using a tame wolf from Madrid Wildlife Park called Ossian.

Jose claims innocence. So does the wolf. Perhaps Jose would have done better to shoot the wolf twice, once with a camera, then with a silenced gun. Though he might have had to auction the wolfskin coat on eBay anonymously to avoid suspicion.

Regardless, the image he shot with his camera is still captivating. Staged or not, the wolf is real, even if it is a vegan convert. Not exactly a poodle jumping through hoops, judges say a wild animal would have squeezed through the gate not jumped it. This is still one savage Lassie, with something primally sharp, focused and menacing in the wolf's eye that is very real, though perhaps the photographer's assistant was waving a chicken drumstick as bait. You can take a wolf out of the wild, but you can never take the wild or your grandmother out of a wolf. Rodriguez has been true to one aspect of the tale, that, no matter how beautiful and captivating, one should not trust a storybook, a wolf or now, a photographer. The disqualification of the photograph comes a tad late, considering thousands of books published by the BBC worldwide cannot be recalled now, ironically, the story in the book lives on.

The moral of this tale is that storybooks are lies, written to mollycoddle and control through fear, wolves will eat your granny, wear her clothes and yours too if they can sink their fangs into you, and photographers have an every increasing harem of photoshop tools seducing them.

So, if you want the truth, shoot it yourself.

"Jetset Violet"