A Pas de Loup
Elephant in the Room and Other Fables, 2025
Project Team:
Rania Ghosn + El Hadi Jazairy
Kelly Koh, Monica Hutton, Habin Park, Hana Meihan Davis (Visualization)
Jabari Canada (Soundscore), Mabel Wilson (Narrator)
“A Pas de Loup” is the fifth animation in the DESIGN EARTH “Elephant in the Room” series. It follows the howling Alaskan Gray Wolf mounted in the Mammal Hall of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. — a lone wolf from the North, with hardly any howls left to hear in the lower 48 states. Told in rhyming verse, the fable moves from the Big Bad Wolf of folk tales and the killing of wildlife to raise cattle, through the museum's collections and sponsors, to the dogs of the White House, border patrols and the civil rights movement, and the rising tides of the Tidal Basin. The canny canid makes kin with Henry the African elephant and Martha the Last Passenger Pigeon to break the spell, and wakes the sleeping dogs on America's Front Lawn.
(c) 2025