You've probably heard this story before.

Once upon a time, there were three little pigs.

Each pig is building a house.

The first one builds a house from straw.

The second one sticks, and the third one from bricks.

Why do these three similar seeming pigs use such different building materials?

The original story doesn't tell us why.

If you had to guess, you might imagine that cost is a factor, and who knows, maybe supply

chain issues.

It could also be that the three pigs have different risk preferences.

Because a house isn't just for sleeping in, it's also protection against you know who.

The three little pigs is an English fairy tale, which was later turned into a short animated

film produced by Walt Disney.

But the big bad wolf also shows up in German folktales, like Little Red Riding Hood from

the Brothers Grimm, and in the Russian musical story Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prakofiev,

and centuries earlier too, in one of Asop's fables, the boy who cried wolf.

All these fictional wolves have something in common.

They want to eat you and ruin the things you treasure.

How accurate is that view of wolves?

Well, I don't know about fairy tales, but I know that the colonial history of wolves

in the United States would suggest that at that time wolves were really problematic.

Jennifer Rainer is a natural resource economist at Wesleyan University.

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