Throw to the wolves

The American novelist Willa Cather's 1918 novel My Ántonia contains a variation of this version: the characters Peter and Pavel are revealed to have done exactly this, and to have been driven by shunning to emigrate to Nebraska, where the novel is set.

[3] The English writer Robert Browning's 1879 poem "Ivàn Ivànovitch" uses this motif; a mother throws her children to wolves attacking her sleigh, and barely survives.

The axeman Ivàn Ivànovitch, upon hearing her tale, immediately and summarily beheads the woman, for which act he is absolved by the village priest.

[3] In "The Silent Speaker", a Nero Wolfe novel by Rex Stout, Archie Goodwin comments on a client who is willing to frame a confederate for murder by saying, “It reminds me of that old picture, there was one in our dining room out in Ohio, of the people in the sleigh throwing the baby out to the wolves that were chasing them."

P's 1974 song, "Dodenrit" ("Death Ride") [nl], his most popular, is an extensive reimagining of the story,[6] and the metaphor remains commonly understood and in current use on both sides of the Atlantic into the 21st century.