The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  The hybrid Earl Hurst shot in Oregon was probably just such an animal. Near Helena, Montana, several released wolf hybrids have been shot by ranchers after killing sheep or cows. Two different “wolf packs” in Idaho hung around campsites and ate food out of bowls before they were recognized as hybrids. In Glacier National Park in 1992, two Tennessee residents were caught by park officials trying to release their hybrids into the wild. Because the released animals didn’t know how to hunt, they hung around the campgrounds.

  Terry Jenkins regularly hears of hybrids turned loose in the mountains of California. There were tales of wolves in the Warner Mountains after a private wolf-hybrid refuge near Susanville shut down. A man crossing the Sierra Nevada with his dog one winter told Jenkins that a wolf walked into his camp to pay them a visit. Repeated reports of sightings and howlings have come from the vicinity of Ice House, in El Dorado County.

  Once a hybrid is turned loose in a setting that might support dispersing wolves, it becomes difficult to say what kind of animal is there. In 1992, an animal thought to be a wolf was hanging around the town of Glacier, Washington. It walked into an empty swimming pool that John Almack of the Washington Department of Game had baited with fish, and Almack went into the pool and darted it. He was reluctant to declare it a hybrid, because wolves were believed to be dispersing into the area, and rarity gave value to even a faint hope. So, after X-raying and measuring it, he put a radio collar on it, drove it into the back country, and released it. Immediately, it homed back to the housing area where it had been caught.

  Carter Niemeyer, who traps wolves known to have killed livestock as an Animal Damage Control trapper in Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota, heard about Almack’s wolf. Sent out to look at the animal, he found it so tame that he could take a twenty-minute video of it. “That was about as wolf as a poodle was,” says Niemeyer. “The animal was walking down the street. I was just astonished that anyone would collar an animal like that.” The Fish and Wildlife Service authorized recapture of the hybrid. The service’s agent Jeff Haas persuaded some people to walk their dog into a tennis court, and the hybrid followed it in. Haas simply picked up the animal, put it in his truck, and drove away. Niemeyer traced it back to a woman who claimed she had sold it to another person who let it get away. It now resides in Wolf Haven.

  The behavior of the modern hybrids poses questions about what kinds of animals have been responsible for attacks on humans in the past. For example, the most celebrated human-killing wolves of Europe were a pair of wolves collectively called “The Beast of Gévaudan,” which appeared in France in 1764 and began killing women and children. Though King Louis XV put out a reward of 6,000 livres for whoever killed the beast, the animals eluded hunters until 1767. In that time, they were said to have taken the lives of more than sixty women and children. When hunters finally killed them, they proved to be enormous animals. One weighed 130 pounds, nearly twice the weight of a typical French wolf. The colors of their coats—one had a reddish tinge, the other a white patch on its throat—were characteristic of dogs, rather than wolves. And the beasts attacked people by biting at their faces, a behavior that suggested either rabid wolves or domestic dogs, though none of the victims contracted rabies. The evidence strongly suggests that the beasts were hybrids.

  Hybrids might also account for many of the attacks on livestock that have been blamed on wolves. In the American West, ranch dogs run free, and there are many accounts of ranch dogs and wolves mating. The resulting offspring might, like modern hybrids, lack the caution of wolves. The reports of federal wolf trappers early in this century indicate that they frequently caught cattle-killing hybrids on New Mexican ranches. J. Stokley Ligon’s 1924 report on the Predatory Animal and Rodent Control program in New Mexico declared that “in more than 75 per cent of the cases investigation disclosed the fact that dogs or coyotes and in some cases hybrids, wolf dogs, were the offenders.” There were several well-documented cases of hybrids attacking livestock in Montana in the 1980s. And today, Ralph Opp, of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, reports that in a recent six-month period there were six different packs of wolf hybrids attacking livestock in Klamath County.

  The possibility that there are hybrids running loose in the West bedevils plans to reintroduce wolves into places from which they have been eradicated. Reintroduction hinges on the premise that there are no wolves remaining in the wild. If people begin seeing hybrids in the woods, reintroduction may be stalled until it is clear what those animals are. If the animals seen are truly wolves, they enjoy the protections of the Endangered Species Act. But if they turn out to be hybrids and they mate with wild wolves, the resulting offspring are not protected, and managers will be unable to tell which wolves are pure and which are not. In southeastern Australia, all the wild dingos appear to be dog-dingo hybrids. Something similar could happen to wolves in North America.

  The presence of hybrids in these areas hurts efforts to persuade ranchers and hunters that they have little to fear from wolf-reintroduction efforts. Sheep and cattle killings or attacks on children by hybrids will be blamed on wolves when, in fact, the wolves in the neighborhood may be innocent. Says Lockwood of people who keep or release hybrids, “These people think they somehow are undoing the Little Red Riding Hood syndrome through the keeping of hybrids, but ultimately it backfires.”

  Because there are so many problems with wolf hybrids, there has been a movement to regulate their breeding and keeping. Nine states forbid the ownership of wolves or first-generation wolf hybrids, and a dozen more require permits or licensing for wolf hybrids or animals that might be taken for wolves. On top of that, an increasing number of cities and counties are outlawing or restricting ownership of wolf hybrids.

  In California, ownership of wolves or first-generation crosses requires permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and from the California Department of Fish and Game; hybrids other than first-generation crosses with wolves are considered dogs. The law requires every dog owner to vaccinate for rabies and license the animal before it is four months old. However, though the U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved specific vaccines for use with dogs, cats, horses, and ferrets, it has no approved vaccine for wolves: the USDA regards dogs and wolves as different creatures and will not assume that a vaccine effective in dogs will also be effective in wolves. Before approving rabies vaccine for an animal, the USDA requires tests in which at least thirty subject animals are injected with live rabies virus, tested for at least a three-year period, then challenged with the disease for another three-year period. No such testing has been completed on wolves—a test was undertaken at Auburn University but was discontinued when funding ran out. Wolf hybrids fall through the cracks in the law: hybrids must, as dogs, be licensed, and rabies vaccination is part of the licensing process; but, technically, they cannot be licensed, because they cannot be vaccinated for rabies.

  Many are vaccinated and licensed anyway. But if a wolf hybrid bites a human, the bite may not be treated as a dog bite. If a cat or dog bites a human, California law requires the animal to undergo a ten-day quarantine, during which a rabies-infected dog or cat will usually shed rabies virus in its saliva or otherwise show symptoms of infection. But no one knows whether a wolf will demonstrate infection in the same short time; bats and skunks, for instance, have been known to take more than ten days to shed the virus. So wild animals that bite humans are generally euthanized and their brains dissected and tested for rabies. Exceptions are made for exhibited and rare wild animals, which may undergo a thirty-day quarantine, but in such cases the human victim will have to undergo treatment for rabies. Unvaccinated dogs or cats exposed to rabid wild animals undergo six-month quarantines at the owner’s expense. If a wolf hybrid bites a human, whether or not it has been vaccinated, the animal-control authorities can require either a six-month quarantine at the owner’s expense or sacrifice of the animal for testing. In most other states, if a hybrid bites somebody, the animal must be sacrificed a
nd the head presented to the state diagnostic lab for rabies testing.

  The American Veterinary Medical Association does not recommend that wolf hybrids be vaccinated, fearing that vaccination will give owners a false sense of security. Many veterinarians won’t immunize a hybrid without having the owner sign a release stating he won’t hold the vet responsible should the vaccine not work. Companies manufacturing the vaccine say they have no liability if a veterinarian uses the vaccine in ways other than described in their product literature, and the literature does not recommend vaccination of wolves. The AVMA warns that a veterinarian who immunizes a wolf hybrid may have no insurance coverage in the event that the animal contracts rabies.

  California requires the owner of a first-generation hybrid to have a permit and to build adequate fencing to keep the animal confined. Increasingly, however, counties and municipalities, seeing that the state has been unable to check whether permit holders have the required fencing, are moving to restrict or outlaw the ownership of hybrids.

  Enforcing all these laws poses difficult problems. Once a hybrid owner finds that his pet may be killed or subjected to a six-month quarantine, he may suddenly decide to identify the animal as a dog. A Stanislaus County animal-control officer says that, twice when he has picked up animals identified as hybrids by owners, he told the owners he was going to quarantine their pets for fourteen days, and suddenly “the animals were no longer wolf hybrids.” The animal-control officer fears being sued by an owner if he sacrifices an animal that has been represented as a hybrid and the owner changes his story—or by a bite victim if the owner registers a pet as a malamute and after the bite says he told the registering officer it was a wolf-malamute hybrid.

  Few health-department officials or animal-control officers can distinguish wolf hybrids from dogs. It takes a trained taxonomist to judge from skull measurements, and a first-generation hybrid’s skull may fit in either category. Eye color is no indication, since wolves, malamutes, red Siberian huskies, and weimeraners all have yellow eyes. There is as yet no test of DNA to distinguish definitively between wolves and dogs. When there was great concern over pit-bull attacks, a private company tried to develop a genetic test with which to identify pit bulls and failed.

  Dr. Robert Wayne is trying to develop such a test for wolves, but it is a tricky business. Since dogs were bred out of wolf blood lines less than twenty thousand years ago, the genes of dogs and wolves have not diverged much. Dogs were domesticated several times in history, and each domestication presents its own lineage, so a marker present in one dog may not be present in all dogs. Wayne will have to find the DNA sequences that are shared by dogs but not by wolves. Geneticist John Paul Scott believes all the differences we see between dogs and wolves could be accounted for by about twelve mutations. Finding pieces of those twelve fragments of DNA in the immense genome of the dog may be like finding a bottle drifting on the Pacific Ocean. At best, Wayne hopes to come up with combinations that give statistical likelihoods. He will look at the frequency of various gene sequences. “If this one is in 95 percent of dogs and 5 percent of wolves, it gives us a good indication. In the end, what we want to make is a probabilistic statement. We can say an individual, if it has this distribution, is a wolf, say, all but one in a million chances.”

  Without such a test, identifying hybrids is more an art than a science. One of the leading artists is Monty Sloan, a wolf-behavior specialist at Wolf Park in Indiana. Young, slightly built, and bearded, Sloan started working with wolves at the San Francisco Zoo in 1984, and has worked at Wolf Park since 1988. He does not look anyone straight in the eye. “I think it’s something I derived from working with wolves,” he explains. “If the wolf doesn’t know you, eye contact will result in aggression or fear. I get much more novel responses from dogs and hybrids because I don’t look at them until they come over. With wolves and wolf hybrids, you often have to kneel down to get them to come over to you.”

  Sloan has made a study of differences between wolves and hybrids and has often been called in to judge whether an animal is a wolf or a dog. He says the judgment is seldom simple. “I can’t say this animal has wolf in it or this animal doesn’t have wolf in it. Anything less than 25 percent wolf will not look wolflike. Very high wolf-content hybrids will tend to be so wolflike in characteristics that you can’t tell any dog content. I look at general body build, behavioral characteristics, how they act to a novel person, how they carry themselves. Wolves are very narrow-chested. Hybrids have shorter legs. The back won’t be straight across.” Microscopic examination usually reveals four bands of color on an individual wolf hair, but only three on a dog’s. A hybrid will have pointed ears, whereas a wolf’s are more rounded, and the hybrid’s ears will be thinner: when the light is behind them, a little pink shows through. Sloan looks also at the animal’s behavior. For example, an adult wolf, he says, will roll over in playful submission in front of a pup, but a dog will not necessarily do that.

  He seldom finds one distinctive quality. “It’s a blend—you can’t point to any single characteristic. A lot of the things I see are subtleties. I can’t even say what I’m seeing.”

  Other students of the art look for different qualities. Terry Jenkins sees fur inside the ears, cheek tufts, or dense underfur on the legs in winter as wolf traits. The claws of wolves and wolf hybrids are bigger in diameter than dog claws; Jenkins looks especially at the way an animal moves. “Wolves have fluid movements. Often I’ve been struck, when seeing a high-percentage wolf walking on a leash, that it was a big cat. The movement is classically smooth.” But none of these traits, she concedes, is definitive.

  While we argue over the nature of individual animals, the hybrid population continues to grow. Hybrids pose enormous challenges, but few of us have the resources to cope with them. When we release them into the wild, we confound the nature of wolves and challenge our own understanding of nature. We threaten the integrity of ecosystems. We even confound the nature of the dog.

  Says Randall Lockwood: “I think we have spent fifteen to twenty thousand years transforming the wolf, through the process of domestication, into an animal that for the most part can live safely, happily, and humanely in human homes. In producing and proliferating wolf hybrids, we take a big step backwards. We are undoing what we have worked twenty thousand years to do.”

  14

  LOOKING FOR SPIRIT

  Our interest in wolves expresses the hunger of our imaginations. For many, science is too narrow a view, and wolves are as much spiritual as biological. They say that, to understand wolves, we must go beyond what we can see into realms of spirit. Much of the literature of wolves urges us to hark back to what native Americans said about the animals. A number of people suggest that, if we could but regard the wolf as native Americans did, we would take it to our hearts, see it clearly, and recognize higher powers that stitch us to the cosmos.

  Ethnographic studies suggest that native North Americans held wolves in high regard. Plains Indians, particularly, acknowledged a high degree of similarity between humans and wolves, and they celebrated the likenesses in wolf-clan totems, wolf-warrior societies, and hunting techniques that consciously imitated wolf behavior. Modern Eskimos express deep respect for the wolves they see. Might we find new spiritual realms by talking with other cultures about how they live with wolves?

  Fort Chipewyan is an Indian village notched into the spruce-forested southwest shore of Lake Athabaska, in northern Alberta. To the west of town is the Peace-Athabaska Delta, a broad, marshy, river-braided plain that stretches for hundreds of miles. The delta forms where the Peace and Athabaska rivers back up against the granitic mass of the Canadian shield. When spring snowmelt comes to the Rocky Mountains, the rivers flood over this plain, producing a watery environment that is home to beaver, muskrat, millions of ducks and geese, the northernmost subspecies of bison, and the largest documented packs of gray wolves in North America.

  Today, Fort Chipewyan is a miscellany of low trailers and aluminum-side
d houses with steeply pitched roofs. On a knoll at the east end of town is the new Fort Chipewyan Lodge, a prominent, two-story cedar-sided structure overlooking the lake. Those who can afford it, and many who can’t, drive up there on weekends to drink in its bar. On the west end of town, also on a knoll, is the 150-year-old Catholic mission, a rambling, red-roofed, wood-frame structure with gables and steeples. The main street is paved from the mission to the lodge, and midway between them a Canadian flag flutters in the stiff breeze out in front of the offices of Wood Buffalo National Park. Unnamed dirt streets run off the paved road, but there is hardly anyone on the streets. Boats and snowmobiles sit glumly in the weeds. Ravens croak from perches in spruce and birch trees. Dogs bark and howl, sometimes in packs, picking up a low moan and passing it along from one end of the silent town to the other.

  This town is sixty miles away from the next pavement, unconnected by road to anything, except when winter freezes the Slave River and one can drive on the ice to Fort Smith. The population of nine hundred is almost all native: Crees, Chipewyans, and Métis Indians. It is a mix, not just of native cultures, but of old and new. Traditional Indian music chants from a speaker inside the old folks’ home, and at a window an old man stands listening pensively to it. Native trappers sell their furs at the Northern Store, a low, yellow, windowless building on the main street. They are apt to walk out of the store with Green Giant frozen peas, Eggo frozen waffles, Skippy peanut butter, Aunt Jemima syrup, El Molino tortilla chips, Mamma Mia frozen pizza, Shake ’n Bake, and Tang.

  In front of the store is a blue wooden bench, coated with dust from the clouds raised by passing trucks and vans, that is the heart of the town. It is here that the old men gather to tell stories, to fish for stories, to wait for stories. Stories thread their lives, tie them to the earth and its creatures and to other human beings. Stories carry the wisdom of elders and give a sense of one’s place in the life of the people. I have come here to hear stories about wolves, and to see how wolves live in the spirit of these people.