BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF: UNDERSTANDING THE CONNECTION AND THE CONFUSION

Sloan.

CHAPTER 1

Modern Wolf Mythology: The Things

That Everyone Knows

All trees have bark.

All dogs bark.

Therefore, all dogs are trees.

~Unknown

Everyone knows what a dog is.

Dogs are featured in our favorite television shows and movies. Our neighbors have dogs. Our friends have dogs. Our families have dogs. Dogs appear on postcards, in glossy magazines, and in books. They walk down the street each day, accompanied by their adoring owners. Our police and armed forces use dogs. Rescue workers and therapists of all kinds use dogs. A whole industry has grown up around our love of dogs, providing designer pet food, supplies, toys, and even clothing. There are dog walkers, dog day cares, dog spas, and professional groomers. Dogs occupy every corner of our lives. Everyone has seen one. Everyone knows what a dog is like.

Everyone knows what a wolf is…or do we?

Most of us think we have a pretty good idea of what a wolf is. We have seen wolves, usually in bit parts, in the movies. We have seen cartoons, photographs, and documentaries. We read about them in books and sometimes we see them in zoos.

Before we, the authors, began working with wolves, we thought we knew what wolves were, what they looked like, and basically how they lived. We have college degrees, after all, were generally interested in animals and watched documentaries on television. We had seen wolves, briefly, in zoos. Wolves looked like big dogs. They were gray, or agouti. The ones that lived in the Arctic (wherever that was) were pure white. They all had yellow eyes. It was very simple.

Working at a wildlife facility, with real wolves, radically changed our views of what a wolf is. It also changed our attitude toward the sources of the information on which we had previously relied. Prior to working at Wolf Park, we knew, through several documentaries, that wolves growl at their prey. We later found, through direct observation of many hunting wolves, that they almost never make threatening gestures, vocal or otherwise, toward prey. We also knew, from the same documentaries, that the high-ranking alpha wolves always ate first. We found, again through direct observation over a period of years, that rank does not necessarily affect eating order. The things we thought we knew about wolves were continually challenged, and often refuted outright. Hey—where did all this information that we knew come from, anyway?

The wolf through a kaleidoscope

Pick any street in your town. Take a walk down it and randomly knock on twenty doors as you go by. Ask each individual what they think about wolves or wolf hybrids. You will likely hear twenty completely different answers.

Everyone brings their own opinions to the table, based on their own unique experiences, when thinking or speaking about wolves. In your hypothetical walk down the street you may meet people who will tell you:

• Wolves make great guard dogs.

• Wolves kill hundreds of sheep in a night.

• Wolves love children.

• Wolves eat children.

• Wolves weigh five hundred pounds.

• Wolves make great pets.

• Wolves are unpredictable and may kill you.

You may meet people who had wolves as pets while they were children and loved the animals dearly. You may meet people who were attacked by someone’s pet wolf when they were children and now fear them. You may meet people whose neighbors had a wolf who ate neighborhood cats and chickens and had to be shot. You may meet people whose neighbors had a wolf who rescued a child. You may meet people who currently own wolves and use them as educational ambassador animals, taking them out to meet people to make them less fearful of wolves. And, unfortunately, you may meet people who own wolves and keep them on chains in the backyard as ferocious guard animals, defending their territory from passers by.

Likely all these different and contradictory anecdotes have some truth to them. Attacks by wolves on children have been documented just as thoroughly as the wild wolf’s natural tendency to avoid people entirely when given the chance. Wolves have been seen to hunt and kill domestic stock, but an analysis of stomach contents indicate that livestock is not their primary food source. As we will see in future chapters, wolves exhibit enough variation in behavior that it’s likely that every anecdote can find some supporting evidence somewhere. The thing to remember is that while a person may accurately describe something that actually happened once, there is a good chance that what they are describing is not necessarily the normal state of things. Just because there is one person, somewhere, who had X happen to them, there is a good chance that someone else will instead have Y (or Z or Q) happen to them in the same situation.

The baby elephant walk

The topic of wolves can be very touchy, mostly because everybody knows what a wolf is, and most people have developed very strong opinions about them. We’re not here to make people angry. Right now, we just want to describe how people learn about things. Therefore, in order to demonstrate how people can reach their wildly different conclusions about wolves, we’re not going to talk about wolves. We’re going to talk about elephants.

A baby elephant walking. Photo courtesy of Sara Goldsmith, through Flickr Creative Commons.

Imagine walking into a pet store one afternoon and finding an adorable baby elephant in the window. It’s so cute! your wife gushes as you watch the employees bottle-feed the elephant, bathe and powder it, and then put a little bow on its tail. It’s tiny and friendly and follows you anywhere you go. On an impulse, you buy it, and it goes home with you. You tell all your neighbors about your elephant and they come over to see it and coo over it and take photos of themselves with it. You take photos of your children playing with it and post them on your web site.

Your elephant is very nice while it is young. It watches television in the living room and lets the children climb on its head. It sleeps in the closet, lives on lettuce and kitchen scraps, and keeps the bushes in your front yard neatly pruned.

Because of your positive experience with your elephant, you want to show other people how awesome elephants are. You take your elephant to nearby schools and introduce it to the students. You tell the children everything you know about elephants and let them feed your elephant apples and play with it. You show them there’s nothing to be afraid of. The children all like your elephant. They give it pet names and tie bows on its tail.

Then your elephant starts to get older. It is too big for the children now and sometimes scares them. When they get scared, so does the elephant—who then defecates all over the place. It doesn’t understand doors and keeps walking right through the walls. You try to train it, but it is hard to get the animal to listen to you. It is too big to visit schools anymore. It becomes too heavy for your floor and falls through into the basement. You chain it up outside.

Chained outside, the elephant becomes lonely and starts trumpeting incessantly. It gets bigger and bigger and it’s getting more expensive to feed now. It needs hundreds of pounds of food daily and has destroyed your lawn and any vegetation it can reach. It needs heavy chains to hold it, and it is expensive to maintain, too. The children won’t play with it anymore because it gets so excited when anyone comes near that it knocks them over with its trunk. The neighbors are complaining about the noise and the smell.

One day, while you are not home, your elephant accidentally injures a neighborhood child who is trying to feed it an apple. The elephant is so excited to see the child that it knocks him over and breaks his arm. The child’s mother says the animal is vicious and attacked her child with no provocation and demands it be put down. The city investigates the situation and finds that you did not purchase the necessary permits for having an elephant and decides that the animal must be re-homed or destroyed. The animal shelter will not take an elephant, especially one that has injured a child. All the elephant rescues are full. Reluctantly, you have your elephant euthanized.

The next day, at the pet store, you see another beautiful baby elephant. Seeing how well-behaved it is, you decide the last one was defective. You tell yourself that The kids are older now. It will be different this time. And so you buy another elephant.

Thinking about this experience, what might you and other people involved say about elephants? You might say that the elephant made a great pet and was doing fine until the neighborhood kid messed things up and you were forced to put him down. Your spouse might say he got hard to handle when he got big and cost a lot of money to maintain. Your children may have completely different stories as well, depending on their relationships with the animal. Talk to the students in the schools you visited while you had the elephant and they’ll probably say that elephants make wonderful pets. After all, your elephant was cute and well-behaved, ate apples out of their hands, and you had nothing but good things to say about it while you had it at their school. Talk to your neighbors and they may complain about the noise and the smell and how the elephant got loose one day and ate an entire bed of champion rosebushes, or stepped on their Poodle. The mother of the child injured by the elephant may tell you that elephants are dangerous, that they should not be kept as pets, and that under no account should they be allowed near children. The child and the doctor who treated the child’s broken arm might agree. The elephant breeder who supplies the pet store probably has nothing but good things to say about elephants. He lives out in the country where no one minds the noise or the smell, and has a big facility to safely contain his elephants. He sends the babies away to pet stores and has never had any complaints from the stores.

The people at the local elephant rescue will likely say they are constantly dealing with people trying to surrender pet elephants after they start to cause problems. They may bemoan the actions of the breeders and pet stores, which continue to sell and promote the image of pet elephants, because elephants sell for a lot of money. An animal rights activist may tell you that elephants were simply not made to live in captivity, and there is no valid reason to keep an elephant in one’s home, regardless of the animal’s treatment, behavior, or circumstances. Alternatively, they may tell you that the only reason which is beneficial to the elephant to keep one captive is public education—not as a personal pet.

Having completed your interviews, you decide to do a little more research. You may discover that people living in rural villages in India, where villagers cooperate to train, keep, and feed elephants to do heavy work for the benefit of all, say that elephants are wonderful animals and hard workers and that it’s perfectly normal to keep one or more in their village. However, people in Africa—where wild elephants often suddenly and aggressively invade villages and steal crop stores, trample fences, and knock over houses—generally view elephants as rampaging, possibly dangerous invaders, and would never consider keeping one as a pet.

Everyone encountering an elephant, even if they all meet the same elephant, forms a unique opinion based on their own experiences. The elephant’s opinion, of course, is rarely considered in the equation, but that is a topic for another book.

Back to wolves

Now that we have gotten past the exciting part, we can start talking about wolves again. Go back and re-read the previous pages, replacing the word elephant with wolf as you go. In fact, one could replace elephant with bear, tiger, or crocodile, or even pig, chicken, cat, or dog, because the concept holds broadly true for any animal, domestic or exotic. No matter what animal is the subject of the story, everyone is going to come out of the encounter with a sometimes slightly, sometimes radically, different point of view. We’re all looking at the same elephant/bear/tiger/wolf, but you wouldn’t know that from the descriptions you hear.

Complicating the general public’s ability to form an accurate perception of wolves is the fact that most people do not actually personally encounter wolves very often. Their primary sources of information about wolves are generally the second-hand experiences they have had with wolves on television, in the movies, in books, and in talking to people (Karlsson and Sjöström, 2007). We may not even necessarily consciously gather this information. We do not need to actively be paying attention to something in order to mentally absorb it (Watanabe et al., 2001). It creeps in through the cracks, wrapped around other subjects. While we are not looking or paying attention, the impressions sit in our subconscious, waiting to reemerge once we start fishing in our brains for things related to the subject wolf.

Wolves on TV and in movies

Life imitates art more than art imitates life.

~ Oscar Wilde

People these days get a lot of their information from visual media. Unfortunately, a lot of it, especially when it relates to wolves, is inaccurate. For example, many people have seen footage in documentaries (especially older ones) of wolves hunting deer. The camera first shows the deer running, with no wolves in the shot. Then it cuts away to a close-up shot of a wolf, growling and snarling, with its teeth bared and its hackles up. The wolf looks fierce and angry, as though it is really going to get those deer. The camera switches back to show the deer running again, then the screen goes black and some growling noises are played, and in the last scene the wolves are seen eating a deer.

Wolves are not camera shy, but the language barrier makes it difficult to get the true story. Photo courtesy of Monty Sloan.

This seemed logical to us when we first saw such footage many years ago on public television documentaries. We now know, through extensive personal observation, that wolves do not growl or bare their teeth at their prey. Those signals are used for threatening other wolves. Think about it—why would wolves want to threaten the deer? It would be like a human yelling at an ice cream cone before eating it. Ice cream cones do not speak human any more than deer speak wolf. In reality, the creators of older documentaries could not find or film footage of wolves killing a deer, so instead they went out and shot footage of a deer running. Then they went somewhere else (likely a game farm which keeps captive exotic animals for photo shoots) and got footage of a wolf looking fierce, because that is what people who have not seen wolves hunt expect them to look like when they’re hunting. They spliced the footage together to make a hunt which looks good, but is almost nothing like the real thing. Even modern documentaries still employ creative editing and writing to enhance the natural behavior of wolves to make it more interesting to the viewer. The real footage of wolves in the IMAX movie Wolves is cleverly edited together to form a story. While it succeeds in entertaining the viewing public, it does not necessarily accurately reflect events which normally occur in the