The wolf had an insatiable curiosity and an insistent playfulness. She got into everything. “She could turn on the faucet in the kitchen just to play. She’d spin the lazy susan on the kitchen table just to make things fly. She’d play hockey with a flattened coffee can on the iced driveway—and play it with the wolf-dog hybrid. She’d invent games.
“The hybrid, though, could communicate fully with humans.” When Frank was building things inside the animals’ enclosure, the wolf would nip at his backside or tug his pant leg and dart off as if inviting Frank to play. When he failed to give chase, she would grab a tool or a box of nails and run off with it. “All I had to do was give the wolf a dominating look and give the hybrid a look as if to say, ‘Okay, it’s your job. Go over and take care of this problem.’ He’d go over and grab the wolf by the neck and neck-pin her.”
Above all, the wolf seemed smarter. “Our kenneling facility and outdoor compound were separated by a door that required two distinct operations to unlatch,” says Frank. “First the handle had to be pushed toward the door, and then it had to be rotated. Our malamute watched us perform this task several times a day for six years and never did learn to do it himself; our wolf-malamute hybrid was able to unlatch the door himself after watching us for only two weeks; and our older female wolf learned the task after watching the hybrid once. Furthermore, she did not use the same technique: the hybrid used his muzzle, and the wolf used her paws.
“We have a lot of other sorts of evidence of the cognitive process,” says Frank. “Little wolf puppies, instead of manipulating an object, look at it, study it, and then do the right thing. You have to hypothesize that the animal did its trial and error internally. Never did we see the dog puppies do the same thing.” If dogs solved the puzzles Frank posed them, they did so after extensive pawing, tugging, and prodding of the puzzle objects—after going through a process of trial and error.
On the other hand, one of Frank’s students had tried for six months to teach the wolf to heel and sit on command, but the wolf never acquired the behavior. The hybrid watched Frank put the malamute through his obedience routines for six days and, without any training himself, obeyed the commands as reliably as the dog.
Frank was intrigued by the differences between wolves and dogs. He had read John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller’s 1965 study, Genetics and the Social Behavior of Dogs, which established standards for assessing the mental qualities of dogs. The tests consisted of mazes, mechanical puzzles, barriers around which dogs had to navigate to reach dishes of food, and other trials. Scott and Fuller had speculated about what wolves might be capable of, but never tested them. Frank thought it was worth trying. Says Frank, “We thought we should find that dogs are very trainable but not very good at solving complex problems, and that wolves should not be very trainable but very good at solving complex problems.”
To test his hypothesis, Frank and his coworkers acquired four wolf pups from a Minnesota game park and reared them in close contact with people. At the age of six weeks, he subjected them to a series of tests. The first of these was a test of insight, in which a pup and a bowl of food were separated by a plywood barrier with a wire-mesh window, so the pup could see and smell the food. The test was designed to see how long it took a pup to discover that it couldn’t get the food directly, but had, instead, to run around the barrier. If Frank saw a wolf suddenly change its strategy by reversing direction and going straight to the food, he took that to be evidence that the wolf had restructured the problem in its mind—or, in other words, displayed insight. He compared his results with Scott and Fuller’s results with dogs in the same test, and found wolves were far more adept at getting to the food. They less often reversed direction in a single trial or stopped to sniff along the way. Frank concluded from a wide range of tests that wolves were capable of “abstractness, flexibility, complexity, foresight, mental representation, and insight into rudimentary means-ends relationships.”
Dogs, however, did better on tests that required instruction. Frank designed tests in which dogs and wolves were graded on how they reacted to flashing lights or whistles that had no cause-and-effect connection with the desired response. “When a light flashed, they’d be required to turn right, and they couldn’t. The dogs could. When we started working with the dogs, they did it right. They were cuing on the behavior of the lab assistants.” But wolves didn’t seem to read the lab assistants’ clues. Says Frank, “Wolves, unlike dogs, have great difficulty associating a to-be-learned behavior with a wholly arbitrary one.”
Frank concluded, “Dogs did better than wolves on all the training tasks, and wolves did better than dogs on all the problem tasks.” The explanation seemed clear: “Intelligence is the capacity to adapt to changes in one’s environment. What defines intelligence depends on the environment one is in. There really is a qualitative difference between the natural environment and the human environment.” A wolf can see the mechanical relationship—say, of a fallen tree resting precariously against a boulder in the forest, and so will stay away from it. “For the dog, the principal environmental feature is the human being. In a human environment, the means-ends relationships are invisible. What could be more magical to a dog than an elevator? You get on and push a button, and it goes up. There is no way to visualize what actions will lead to what consequences. Also, in the man-made environment, those things that control the environment are not within a dog’s reach: they are intended for animals with human height and fingers. It’s much more advantageous to develop a very keen understanding of human behavior and to communicate wishes to a human, because the human is the most important feature of the environment, and we give a lot of visual and auditory cues.” Evolution hasn’t honed the dog’s problem-solving skills, just its people-reading skills.
Domestication, Frank explains, selects for infantile qualities such as docility and dependence, and turns animals into infantile forms of their wild ancestors, since the infantile form is more trainable than the adult form. “Much of the character of the wolf capacity to process information seems to be a feature of the adult,” he says. You can see the difference dramatically if you mix wolves and dogs. “Ben Ginsburg, of the University of Chicago, said, when you introduce a dog to a bunch of wolves, you might expect the wolves to kill it. But in fact they treat it as a juvenile. If you want a real thumbnail sketch of the difference between wolves and dogs, it is that the wolf is the adult form. That is it. The dog is a juvenile wolf. The wolf demands dignity and respect; the dog you treat as a child.”
There is much evidence that domestication physically changes the brains of animals. Darwin noticed that the brains of domestic rabbits are smaller than those of wild rabbits. A German scholar in the 1920s held that, on the average, domestic forms had brains 30 percent smaller than those of their wild ancestors. Brain-size reduction has been shown in rats, mice, rabbits, pigs, sheep, llamas, and domestic cats. German researchers found the brains of wolves to be as much as 29 percent bigger than the brains of dogs. Brain size, though, is not in itself a very reliable indicator of intelligence, and, at least in mammals, tends to correlate closely with body size. Some researchers believe that, if one scales the size of the brain to the size of the body, the shrinkage associated with domestication becomes insignificant. But there are structural differences between the brains of wild and domestic forms. In 1973, German researchers compared the brains of poodle dogs with those of wolves and found that the wolf brains were not just larger, but larger in particular regions. The wolf brains were 40 percent larger in the hippocampal region, which guides and regulates emotional reactions, aggression, and motivation, a finding that is consistent with the fact that domestication selects for gentleness and tractability. Some areas of the brain may also have a greater density of nerve cells—a difference that has been confirmed in comparisons of the brains of wild and domestic forms of cat.
What might these structural differences mean to the relative intelligence of wolves and dogs? Many people believe wolves have po
wers dogs don’t have, including faculties we generally regard as extrasensory.
Elizabeth Andrews, who worked with captive wolves at a Washington State wolf park, speaks of a “strange intelligence in the wolves.” She lived an hour’s drive away from the wolf park, and arrived at a different time each day, but whenever she arrived the owner was standing at the door, expecting her. He told her that the wolves had begun to howl fifteen minutes before she arrived, and they would howl in such a way that he knew it was she, and not her husband, though they drove the same car.
Dr. Michael Fox tells of a captive wolf released two hundred miles from its home in Alaska that made a beeline almost two hundred miles back to its cage. He believes that dogs also have such abilities. There was a veterinarian’s dog, Fox says, that would stand waiting at the window for his master to come home exactly fifteen minutes before his arrival, even though the veterinarian returned at different hours on different days. The veterinarian’s wife concluded that the dog got up and started waiting at exactly the moment the veterinarian closed his clinic and started walking home. Fox calls the phenomenon “psi”—for “psychic”—“trailing.” He confesses, “There’s no logical or mechanistic explanation for it,” but adds, “One of my theories is that animals that are capable of doing this are attuned to the pathosphere, a feeling realm of awareness.”
No one has yet demonstrated these psychic abilities empirically. It may be that we want the wolves to lead us into new dimensions in intelligence, and that the stories tell more about our wishes than they do about the abilities of wolves. Or it may be that a wolf’s senses are acute enough to account for the wolf’s apparent clairvoyance. The 1973 German study also found that wolf brains were larger in areas that dealt with sense impressions. It is in the area of sensory perception that wolf abilities are really remarkable.
All wolf watchers eventually remark about how observant and curious wolves are. Lois Crisler watched a female wolf wade back and forth in a brook for ten minutes, “looking down as if it were a live thing,” lifting her paw and touching the water. When the creeks froze and Crisler’s young wolves saw their first ice, they became so absorbed in it that they spent the morning at an overflow pond by a brook, “looking down at the ice, rearing back and drumming on it.” David Mech gives another example: “In 1991, on Ellesmere Island, I’d been watching wolves for weeks on end and had a certain type of big heavy parka and a wool hat on. Suddenly, the weather turned warm—the temperature went up to fifty degrees. I changed my clothes, and I was in the same position on the four-wheeler. You’d think the fact that I had a different jacket or a different hat on wouldn’t make a difference. But they were very shy and wary. They wouldn’t come up within ten feet of me.” When he put his old parka and hat on, the wolves immediately resumed their confident familiarity.
Sometimes, the wolves’ curiosity posed problems for Mech. “They’re so curious you don’t want them coming around your tent, because they’ll chew up the tent. Chewing is curiosity in wolves. They only have their paws or their mouths to work with, and can’t really explore the upper corner of the tent with their paws, so they explore it with their mouths.” One day, Mech looked back at his campsite to see that the wolves were at the tent, and one of them had his head inside the drawstring window. “He had his head in the tent, and he was jerking on the sleeping bag, pulling it out. He looked just like he was gutting a moose.”
Mech sees simple reasons for their watchfulness. “They are keyed in to judging subtle differences in prey. If they attack something too strong and healthy, they could get killed. If they don’t attack the ones that are vulnerable, they could starve.” So there is an evolutionary premium on being able to read and analyze small details quickly.
The sense humans rely most upon is vision. We know only a little about how visually adept wolves are; we have little idea how their brains organize what they see. Laboratory studies have shown that wolves can distinguish red, yellow, blue, and green. The visual receptors of a dog’s eye are 95 percent rods, an adaptation to night vision. Dogs lack the fovea, the area of the retina which in the human eye is densely packed with receptor cells, so dogs and wolves may not see the very sharp outlines and fine details that humans see.
Still, wolves rely heavily upon what they see. They communicate with elaborate and complex visual signals, reading each other’s eyes, ears, and mouths, and their faces are designed to emphasize emotional content. Lips are black and often contrast with white or light colors on their muzzles, which make their mouths more expressive. Their bright-yellow eyes are set off by black eyelids, and frequently light patches around the eye areas draw attention to the eyes. The yellow eye color contrasts sharply with the black pupil, and changes in the size of the pupils indicate changes in mood. Wolves also read important messages in each other’s body postures. A threatening wolf puts its ears up, purses its mouth, or snarls, perhaps even showing teeth; it stands tall, so that its body seems larger and more powerful; its tail rises. A submissive wolf cowers, or shrinks, to seem smaller; its ears go back; it grins submissively, tail tucked between its legs.
Wolves process what they see with remarkable quickness and precision. Standing outside an enclosure near Ely, Minnesota, a young man edges closer to two captive wolves. Jedediah, the male wolf in the compound, comes over and stands sideways, showing his full size and power, and growls. He paces along the fence, challenging all the visitors, and turns so that his side is flat against the fence. His head and tail up, he makes eye contact with each person on the other side of the fence as he passes. And he growls a deep, throaty, serious threat. He fixes his gaze hard on the young man, who has gotten down to eye level and has stupidly sought to challenge him. The wolf growls fiercely, stands taller—on the very tips of his toes—and challenges more stiffly. The wolf’s owner patiently explains, “Eye contact is reserved for the alpha.” The visitor doesn’t take the hint, and keeps on his witless challenge, but then, without really knowing why, grows uncomfortable and steps back a fraction of an inch. Suddenly, the wolf brisks off to patrol the rest of the fence. His perception of the victory is so instantaneous and uncelebrated that it is hardly noticeable.
The wolf trots over to his owner, stands on his hind legs, and licks her mouth. His ears go back. His tail goes down. He rolls over submissively. She explains that he is testing her, just as he tested the visitor. He is looking for any sign of weakness, and he does this every time she comes into the pen, so she stays out if she’s feeling tired or weak. It’s not just that the wolf can overpower her, but that he reads her much faster and more accurately than she ever will read him.
Wolves read the postures of their prey with similar quickness and fluency. They bluff charges to get an animal to reveal its vulnerability, and if they see that a moose is strong and healthy, they move on. Rolf Peterson tells of a wolf who was skilled at reading moose on Isle Royale. “A female alpha in the East Pack was in charge of the pack for eleven years. She went through four mates, and may have been in on the kills of five hundred moose, which means she probably tested more than ten thousand moose. Once the pack of eleven were walking down the lake ice. There were two moose browsing on the shore. She took one look at them, and paid no more attention.” While she recognized immediately that the moose were invulnerable, four youngsters didn’t, and they took off running after the moose. “She just sat down on the ice, waited for all of them to have their fling, and when they came panting back, she got up and led off at the front of the line.”
Wolves probably read the landscape with the same fluency. Dispersing wolves tend to turn up in exactly the same locations where people have seen wolves before, years and even decades apart. Dispersing from Russia into Finland, wolves have used the very routes wolves used fifty years before. Wolves moving south from Canada into Montana turn up in exactly the same spots wolves were seen decades ago. John Weaver, after several years studying the wolves of Jasper National Park in Canada, suggests that wolves have inborn search images that enable them to
recognize habitat productive of moose, deer, or elk. They might be responding to the scent and shape of trees, the aroma of soil fungi, the texture of rock and dirt underfoot, the faint odors of mice and squirrels on the grass.
The wolf’s deeper engagement with the world must owe something to its capacity to read its setting through several senses at once. Some people have suggested that much of the wolf’s uncanny perceptiveness is due to an extremely keen sense of hearing. Roy McBride, who trapped wolves for Mexican ranchers in the 1960s and ’70s, recalls two captive Mexican wolves on a Chihuahua ranch where he was trapping. After observing that the captive wolves were fed only tortillas and beans, he began to bring them coyotes, bobcats, and javelinas caught unintentionally in his traps. The wolves began to distinguish McBride from the host of cowboys and fence builders that came and went on the ranch. Says McBride, “The cowboys told me that, long before I would arrive in the afternoon, the wolves would begin to pace excitedly, and after perhaps twenty minutes the ranch dogs would also detect my approach and begin to bark.” McBride left the ranch and returned six months later; long before his arrival, the wolves were up and pacing and wagging their tails. McBride attributes their awareness to their sense of smell, but it is just as possible that they heard his vehicle. No one has yet tested the auditory powers of wolves, but they probably hear better than dogs—and dogs can hear sounds at forty kilohertz, about double the upper range of human hearing. Coyotes have been shown to hear sounds above eighty kilohertz; wolves could have equal or greater abilities.
The wolf’s sense of smell may be its most acute sense. The sense of smell in other creatures has always been a difficult thing for humans to appraise, in part because ours is feeble compared with that of other animals, and in part because olfaction is rooted in the deeper core of the brain, which also presides over emotions, and not in the neocortex, which governs both vision and reason. Odors can arouse fear or nostalgia or courage. As rational creatures, we defer to our eyes as the supreme judges of truth, and often belittle or deny what our noses tell us. The wolf, however, has a sense of smell that challenges our imaginations. By presenting dogs with odorants in ever-smaller dilutions and testing their responses, researchers have shown that dogs are at least ten thousand times more sensitive than humans. Paul Joslin says that preliminary experiments conducted with dogs at Wolf Haven show dogs may perceive odorants in one-hundred-thousandth the concentration at which humans can smell them. They can also recognize much finer nuances of scent than humans can discern. Dogs can distinguish by smell between human twins, and detect the odor of six-week-old human fingerprints on glass slides.
The Company of Wolves Page 17