by Gordon Grice
The second dog to score a bite, usually on the rump, tail, or hind leg, pulls away from the first to stretch and bend the prey’s spine. Both dogs shake their heads, which makes them appear to be wrestling each other for the prey; maybe they really are. But they’re also cooperating to break the spine. If the first biter has a grip on the throat, the dogs’ pulling away from each other strangles the prey.
Another advantage of the dogs’ tug-of-war is defensive. When stretched, a prey animal has less chance of clawing or biting the dogs. As the dogs continue to pull, their tug-of-war makes their teeth tear the flesh. Other pack members try to get in a good bite. Sometimes you can see the struggling dogs working their jaws around on the prey, finding a grip that will drive deep into soft flesh. The prey bleeds until it falls into shock. It is defenseless and ready for death.
In India, the dog of the streets belongs to no particular breed. It is a tan, short-haired, generic-looking creature, and is generally held in contempt. Where the human population thins a bit, the dogs (they are called dholes) run in wild packs. They snip the sides of fleeing deer until the guts are exposed, then latch onto a bite of intestine and change direction. The bowels come raveling out; like the human body, the deer’s contains a startling yardage of gut in a small space.
It is a painful way to die, as Elizabethan annals of crime and punishment testify. Traitors were hanged for a few minutes of kicking strangulation, then cut down, still alive, to watch themselves castrated. Finally, the torturer (it was a profession of sorts) sliced into the traitor’s belly to reveal the intestines, which he grasped with tongs and drew out. This invariably proved fatal, though usually not quickly. The purpose of this regimen was maximum pain.
It is often the way of death for victims of the dhole— not just the drawing, but also the castration, which the dhole’s jaws may accomplish during the chase or after. If events fall mercifully, the jaws may strangle the prey to death early on. Or the animal may be brought down by the drawing, to watch as the pack eats him alive.
The dog of the Middle East also is a pariah, a wild scavenger usually not attached to particular humans. It is regarded with revulsion at least as ancient as the Old Testament, which declares the dog an unclean animal, not fit for eating. (If you’re surprised the question even came up, consider the Aztecs, who fattened dogs as livestock before eating them.) It serves humans in a detested, but useful, role, as a roving garbage disposal. Meat unfit for human consumption is tossed to the dogs, as are table scraps.
The Bible persistently uses the dog as a metaphor for contempt. The starving beggar Lazarus is so low even the dogs lick him. Goliath thinks David shows him the disrespect owed a dog by coming armed only with a sling and stones. Even when doing some useful job, like guarding a flock, the dog is held in contempt, its name consistently linked with dung or vomit. It is also feared as a pack-hunter not averse to taking human prey.
The dog’s poor reputation in the Middle East stems from the same source as the pig’s: both animals scavenged human corpses. The Hebrew God’s punishment for rulers who defy Him is that after they and their families are killed, their corpses lie unburied. The Old Testament describes dogs and birds eating such corpses. The Bible repeatedly refers to dogs licking up human blood.
The biblical Jezebel is thrown from a high window to shatter on the flagstones below, and when the men go to dispose of her corpse, they find the stray dogs have left only her skull, her feet, the palms of her hands.
When I was a child, the predatory tactics of our dogs made me think about the differences between wild animals and domestic ones. So did the long, bloody leg bones of cattle we sometimes found in our yard, the dogs snapping at each other briefly to establish the right of gnawing out the marrow.
But I really got interested in the wild and the tame at bedtime, when the howling began.
It would start somewhere out on the plains, a sound like the otherworldly cry of the owl compounded with unspeakable loneliness. It would double, as if the same coyote suddenly stood in two places; choruses would join in; voices would compete to scramble over each other, then suddenly fall into harmony. Then, close to the house, the dogs would howl, each dog’s voice recognizable and distinct.
I’d seen a few coyotes by day. The dogs would suddenly stop whatever they were doing and stand gazing toward something unseen in the prairie grass. The bloodhound would bark—low, inquisitive, with a touch of menace. All three dogs would burst into a run. The coyote would appear far away, bounding in and out of the grass as he ran, the dogs pursuing. The coyotes were fast. Their appearance was only a second ahead of their disappearance. Sometimes a coyote came for the chickens in the night. My father would rush out with a rifle, warned by the dogs.
So coyote and dog were enemies. Yet I had seen a dog in town that my grandmother pointed out as part coyote. My uncle had shot a raiding coyote once, and when we saw the carcass up close it had long reddish hair like a collie: further evidence of crossbreeding. And when coyote and dog howled together in the night, it didn’t sound like an exchange of threats. It sounded like a shared song.
The coyote can live where people can’t, and even where wolves can’t. He inhabits the desert, but also survives in snow. He dwells in the banks of rivers unseen by human eyes, but also walks into cities in daylight to scavenge human garbage. The coyote flees from our gaze, but never leaves our lands. He comes back when we sleep to take a lamb or a calf. He raises his cubs within our hearing. He knows us, and fears us only within reason. He knows our guns kill only along the lines of sight.
In Spanish his name has come to mean “crafty.” He knows how to kill rattlesnakes without getting hurt. He knows how to catch rabbits by driving them until they hit their territorial boundaries—a male rabbit will not intrude on the territory of another male, even to save himself from being eaten. The coyote tracks wolves to scavenge their kills. He doesn’t eat the kills of cougars unless he’s desperate, because cougars are more likely to track him down and take revenge.
Coming from a country graveyard one cool Memorial Day, I saw a coyote on a mudflat near a streaming ditch. The face and legs seemed delicate, as if they might prove smooth and ceramic to the touch. The body looked too thick for those slim extremities, encased in too large a coat, and the tail hung back and down, thick as a haunch. The coyote did not break into undulant bounds, or jet out, but walked away, the slender legs working in rapid, perfect coordination, like an insect’s, the furred body gliding forward. A second coyote I hadn’t noticed followed the first one into the grass; a third turned to look at the car before he joined them.
The coyote’s equivalent in the Old World is the jackal—some jackals are indistinguishable from coyotes by sight, and they may really be the same animal. The biblical abhorrence of the dog extends to the jackal. In the Old Testament, he wanders the streets of ruined cities, a metaphor of desolation strangely echoed in the Egyptian god of the underworld, a man’s body with the head of a jackal. Job evokes his desolation by claiming brotherhood with the jackal. (Some translations confusingly call the jackal “dragon,” a term also used for some great reptile.) In Revelations, the jackal is the mother of the Antichrist, the root of apocalyptic evil.
I came to Philip and Alberta Hart’s house to see captive wolves. As I reached the front door, I glimpsed them in the yard: three white wolf-dog hybrids and a pure white wolf, blizzarding around each other behind the fence. Their tongues lolled and their tails wagged before they whirled out of sight.
Philip Hart took me into the yard to see them up close. The pure wolf, a waist-high male, ran at me. He was a lithe seventy-five pounds, not especially large for a wolf, but bigger than most dogs. I offered him a smell of my closed hand, as I would a strange dog. His perfect teeth were white, not even slightly yellow, and his coat was an unbroken white too. He took my hand in his mouth and held it there. The point of one long canine tooth rested on the knuckle of my forefinger, and further back another tooth clicked against my wedding band. I told him ho
w handsome he was. His mouth had no trouble accommodating my fist. I took a good look at the carnassial teeth on the side of his jaw, the specialized ones with which a wolf shears meat from a carcass. I didn’t think he would have much trouble removing my hand.
“He’s being friendly,” Hart said. “If he wanted to hurt you, he would have come at you with his mouth closed.” The wolf released my hand and put his fore-paws on my chest, standing on his hind legs to look me in the eye. I thought I should have been terrified, but I wasn’t. I could read the wolf’s body language. It was the same language dogs use, a language people read without thinking about it. Posture, tail, ears, and hackles had told me I was never in danger.
Eventually I got around to asking my host about the danger of wolf-dog hybrids. He raised and sold hybrid pups. Hybrids had been in the news because a few had killed human children. States were passing laws to limit the percentage of wolf blood allowed in a pet.
“That’s the wrong idea,” he said. “People think the hybrid goes crazy and kills because the wild wolf genes eventually express themselves. But wolves don’t kill people; dogs do.” He was right. In the United States, domestic dogs kill more people than rattlesnakes, venomous spiders, stinging insects, bears, or sharks. Dogs, in fact, are second only to humans as killers of humans. Pure wolves, wild or captive, kill people so rarely it’s hard to find authentic cases. Of all the dangerous animals that are supposed to fear humans innately, the wolf is the one whose fear has been documented. Scientists tracking the movements of wolves find they sometimes abandon great tracts of land so they’ll never have to cross a human scent trail.
“The hybrid has the wolf’s instinct for establishing its dominance, plus the dog’s lack of fear for man,” Hart continued. “The more wolf you put into a hybrid, the safer he is. The closer he is to fifty percent, the more likely he is to kill somebody. I don’t even do many fifty-fifty crosses anymore. My crosses are wolf father, hybrid mother, so you get a high percent wolf.”
More than a century ago, Native American and European American were spilling blood for the Great Plains, a country whose plant eaters were culled by wolf and cougar, black bear and coyote, eagle and owl and rattlesnake. The land was pocked with the vast cities of the prairie dog, cities whose population could run into the billions. But the animal that dominated any traveler’s sense of the Plains was the bison. It moved in uncountable herds whose wallowing and walking and pawing shaped geography, whose thirsts controlled the surface water as much as storm and stone did, whose carcasses sustained predator and scavenger.
A bull bison is massive, providing enough meat to feed a tribe for days. It’s powerful enough to pulverize an intruding human. Back then, people would occasionally see, among the bison herd, one male far larger than all the others. This monster, when brought down for his hide or his meat, would prove to be a eunuch. Castrating a male bovine makes him grow bigger. That’s why beef sold in stores comes from steers, which are castrated males.
The giant bison were survivors of wolf attacks. A single nip during a chase was enough to sheer the testicles off.
When a wolf pack tackles a large herbivore, there is a pause before the chase, a moment when potential killer and potential prey eye each other, as if making a pact to play their roles. The herbivore that buckles and runs has signed a contract.
Wolves can run for miles. They take turns resting while pack mates harry the prey. This tactic multiplies the wolf’s individual stamina, so that few herbivores escape a wolf pack by tiring it out. The pack can take down a moose or a bison when it’s exhausted and some of the wolves are fresh.
A favorite killing move for wolves is to tear at the windpipe. Another is to spill a lot of blood. As the herbivore runs from the pack, he leaves his vulnerable sides and rear open to quick bites. The bite of a wolf, even on the run, does heavy damage, and an accumulation of bite injuries drops the prey: shock, caused by loss of blood.
The house had been expanded down the mountain. I descended sets of steps between rooms. There seemed to be a lot of rooms. Finally I reached a sliding glass door, and out the door I saw two wolves standing in the dark. I had come to visit Bud and Nancy Saunders, who kept the wolves. Moments before I arrived, the couple said, a small herd of deer had crossed the pasture, and the wolves had howled. Nancy handed me a tape recorder cued up to an old recording of the wolves’ own howls. Play it to them, Bud said; maybe they’ll talk back. I pressed PLAY.
The sound from the recorder was thin, mechanical. The echo that broke from the wolves’ throats to envelop the smaller sound was fluid, beautiful. It woke in me something close to fear, but quieter. It was like the coyote song I remembered, though fuller and deeper. It seemed to have a current of meaning flowing just beyond my grasp.
When they let the wolves in, I sat on the floor before the fire, which brought auburn highlights out of their gray-brown overcoats. I scratched each wolf on the chest. Their coats were deep. I would lose my hands in them and bring them out slick with the oil and smell of wolf. When I got involved listening to Bud and Nancy, I stopped scratching one of the wolves. She wrapped her huge paw around my wrist and pulled. I resumed scratching. Their paws are more prehensile than a dog’s, Nancy confirmed. They clamp their front legs around the necks of big herbivores and score the flesh like cats.
I looked at a wolf and saw something I’d never seen in a dog’s eye: my reflection. “That’s because she’s looking you in the eye,” Nancy said. “Dogs don’t. They’re submissive to humans. Wolves aren’t, not permanently.”
“These aren’t pets,” Bud added. “Dogs are pets. They think you’re the master. Wolves think you’re a pack mate. Leadership in a pack is always open to challenge.”
I asked them if they’d ever been challenged. Nancy told about a time she’d fallen in the presence of the wolves. One of them came for her. Nancy came up slugging. The skirmish was over in a second, with no one really hurt. Nancy said if she had hesitated to hit the wolf, things could have been very different. Some wolf owners make a policy of thrashing the animal thoroughly the first day he comes to live with them, just so the hierarchy is clear.
There’s a pattern in the attacks of captive wolf-dog hybrids: they go after children who fear them, or adults who show weakness—a limp, a stumble, anything to tell them their time to rise in the pack hierarchy is at hand.
We have always forced the other inhabitants of our planet into roles of our own scripting. The scripted roles come in obvious packaging, like the biblical portrayal of the snake or the moral-laden animals of Aesop’s fables. They also come in subtler forms: every encounter with an animal holds shades of meaning cast not by the immediate circumstances, but by books, folklore, even the tired metaphors of our language. In fact, we interpret most of our interactions with animals symbolically, inflecting them with anthropocentric emotion. I know men who pursue the killing of snakes as if each one embodied satanic evil. When I trap a mouse in my house, I feel as if I’ve triumphed over a burglar. Surely my pleasure in watching a hawk has something to do with the freedom I half-consciously allow it to symbolize.
The wolf is embedded in human history so deeply his truth may never come clear. In Western perception he has been demon, devourer of human flesh, and raider of stock. He has also been an alter ego: the werewolf as emblem of human pleasure in sin, the berserker as emblem of human prowess in war. Americans conflate the wolf with wilderness and Native peoples to symbolize noble savagery, a myth that has antecedents in the wolf-suckled builders of Rome, in the stories of feral children nurtured in lupine dens. For some people, saving him from extinction is a step toward redemption for our ecological and genocidal sins. I often notice such people disparaging the coyote in favor of the wolf, as if the smaller canid’s continued success, his talent for exploiting human proximity, were a sellout—to whom or what is never clear.
The wolf’s power to make us imagine is a function of taboo and danger. Our ancestors saw him among the corpses after battles, eating human flesh. He le
arned from that our darkest secret: that we are good to eat. But that was only a rediscovery of a fact he knew before we learned to write things down.
Species distinctions among wolves, coyotes, and jackals are often based on size—the coyote is smaller than the red wolf, which is smaller than the timber wolf. The standard species divider for animals in general is interbreeding: if two animals can copulate and thereby produce fertile offspring, they are of the same species. Horses and asses are different species because, although they can produce offspring together, the offspring, mules, are usually sterile. With the canids, this test yields confusing results. Wolves, dogs, jackals, and coyotes can interbreed into many different hybrids. Some breeds of dog are even said to cross with foxes.
The canids challenge our concept of species. Intuitively we perceive them as different from each other, but their frequent interbreedings mark them as identical species. Meanwhile, the dog, which we accept as a single species, shows more range of body style and behavior than can be found between, for example, wolves and coyotes. There are tiny dogs bred to sit in idle laps; there are huge ones bred for killing lions, boars, tigers, and wolves. There are swift ones bred for hunting coyote: they stretch and savage the quarry as other dogs would a rabbit, but they don’t eat him. He’s too much like a dog, and even his butchered and disguised flesh seems to invoke a canine taboo.
We used to breed great mastiffs to carry harnessed lances and pots of burning tar among enemy armies. Caesar’s spirit will “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war,” Shakespeare’s Mark Antony says, not altogether figuratively. Dogs are bred for everything from hauling to scenting to herding to burrowing after badgers. Their bodies have taken diverse shapes to mirror their jobs.