The Company of Wolves (20 page)

If a stare is not enough, a dominant may lunge at a subordinate, growling with bared teeth, erect ears and tail, and bristling hackles. An inferior wolf tucks its tail under its body and curls its lips, showing all its teeth. If the dominance display overpowers it, it may flop on its side or back, head stretched out, hind legs raised, and genitals exposed. Then the superior animal is likely to stand over the supine individual and sniff at its genital area.

Usually, bites within the pack are inhibited and do not draw blood. A dominant wolf may discipline a subordinate wolf merely by placing its mouth around the subordinate’s muzzle. Says Randall Lockwood, who studied wolves at the St. Louis Zoo and in the wilds of Alaska, “They use no more force than is necessary to get what they want out of a situation. I’ve seen hundreds of wolf fights. I’ve seen blood drawn only once, and that was a wolf that bit its own tongue.” Lockwood concludes, “The wolf pack is based on affection, appeasement, and solicitation.”

Konrad Lorenz, who pioneered the study of aggression in animals, observed these bloodless gestures of triumph and submission and read in them a mechanism for maintaining peace. The vanquished offered his neck to the victor, and, wrote Lorenz, “a dog or wolf that offers its neck to its adversary in this way will never be bitten seriously. Should a dog or wolf unrestrainedly and unaccountably bite the neck of his pack-mates and actually execute the movement of shaking them to death, then his species would certainly be exterminated within a short space of time.” Later writers believed that these submission signals were inviolate, and they extolled wolves as models of conduct. Michael Fox, for example, declared, “Severe injuries [from wolf fights] are rare. As soon as a wolf gives a surrender signal and shows submission toward the other contestant, the latter will immediately stop fighting. Wolves do show chivalry.”

But not always. Terry Jenkins, curator of the Folsom City Zoo, recalls a captive pack whose alpha female was very aggressive with all the females in the pack. “Whichever female was on the bottom, she always had bites on her.” At two years of age, one of her daughters fought back, and two of the daughter’s litter mates, a female and a
male, joined in. “They really beat her up. It was obvious they were trying to teach her a lesson,” says Jenkins. The conflict went on for days. “The mother would go into the den for a while, then come out and call them down to her, so they could fight more. She really wanted to get this settled.” Then, for days, they left her alone in the den, and there seemed to be no communication between the mother and her daughters. Finally, the two daughters went into the den, grabbed the mother, dragged her out, and mauled her. Even her mate now joined in the attack. “It was evident from that point that they were going to kill her,” says Jenkins. Zookeepers were able to get the female out, but she died that night. Klinghammer has also seen a captive female kill her own mother. An aggressively domineering female was mobbed and displaced from the top of her pack at the Julian Science Center in California. Paul Kenis, who keeps the wolves at the center, says he separated her to keep her from getting killed, but wolves attacked her through the fence, and she died after a wound suffered in one of these cross-fence battles became infected. In all three examples, the wolves may have been made more murderous by captivity. In the wild, scapegoat wolves that are fiercely attacked by higher-ranking pack members tend to become dispersers. Mech says he has never seen such murder within a wild pack, and knows of no example in the scientific literature.

Wolves are routinely murderous, however, when they encounter each other across territory boundaries. Dispersing wolves trying to join a new pack may be repeatedly attacked, and even killed. In 1974, four Isle Royale wolves broke off from the East Pack and moved into territory occupied by the West Pack. West Pack wolves killed two of them and badly wounded a third. Gordon Haber, who studies wolves in Denali National Park, tells of wolves leaving their territories and going on raids into neighboring territories, to all appearances bent on murdering their neighbors. Says Haber, “They actually go out of their territories looking, searching, for other packs. It’s a primitive form of warfare. One pack will go into the neighboring territory and then go back, and the other pack will follow it, and they will go back and forth a half-dozen times like that.” If they meet and one pack senses a strong advantage, it will attack the other. “It’s an extreme form of aggression,” says Haber. Rolf Peterson reported that a trespassing pack on Isle Royale killed a female pup he supposed
to be a member of the resident pack, and marked the corpse heavily with urine before they returned to their own territory. Tom Meier reports that in Denali National Park between 1985 and 1990, thirty-seven wolves were known to have died, and nineteen of them were killed by other wolves, most of them from neighboring packs.

Terry Jenkins was confounded by an event she observed. The old male in the Folsom City Zoo pack had a degenerating spine and was losing the use of his legs. Zookeepers decided to euthanize him. Because Jenkins wanted the rest of the pack to understand that he had died, she let them come over to investigate the corpse. The big male sniffed at the dead wolf and whined like a puppy, then walked a few steps away and regurgitated as if the dead wolf were a begging pup. Next, the subordinate female went over and sniffed at the corpse, started jabbing at it, and then grabbed it, and dragged it to the center of the pen. She became excited. The other two wolves came over, and all started biting the dead wolf. “I thought they were going to tear him apart,” says Jenkins. “It was touch and go to get him away from them. It was a very emotional situation for all of them.”

Competition and strife are part of pack life. The dominance order is constantly changing as dispersing wolves enter and leave packs and as individual wolf personalities change. Wolves mature, and wolves age. Young subordinates suddenly become bold and strong; older leaders weaken and become yielding. There is constant testing, constant pressing of one’s advantages.

But because we see so little of wild wolves, our explanations for all this complex behavior still rely on guesses. Much of our guessing falls back on comparisons between humans and animals. Are wolves really “generous” when they share food? Are they “mean” when they fight? Part of our problem with wolves is that we are so bewilderingly like them that we can’t always see where one species leaves off and the other begins.

It is almost impossible, even for the most cautious researchers, to separate human qualities from wolf qualities. Mech, in speculating about what some wolves were doing crossing a road, suggested they “thought” something; then the careful researcher and peacemaker within him caught hold of the statement. “It is so natural to express yourself that way,” he says, and he confesses that he is not always able to resist the temptation. “Where it is easiest to fall into the trap of
humanizing the animal is when I’m living with them up in the Arctic. You’re seeing them up close and minute to minute. The pack of wolves I was living with killed a musk ox. I was right next to that musk ox when it was killed, and I never felt sorry for it.” On the other hand, he says, “The pack attacked another wolf and I saw the other wolf just after they had wounded it. For an instant, I felt sorry for it. That’s not a very appropriate feeling [for a scientist]. But that wolf was a very bedraggled wolf; that poor wolf was just so thoroughly chewed. It died right after I left it.”

Who knows what even a careful scientist will freight onto the behavior of wolves? Says Mech, “I even dream about seeing wolves, because they’re such a part of your life. I have dreamed about traveling a road I’ve never been before and seeing them traveling up on the hill, going somewhere.”

Wolves have been more extensively studied than just about any other wild species. The more we know, however, the more we don’t know. We may feel tempted to follow them into the woods. But what are we following: wolves or humans? Sometimes, out on that trail, the likeness we share overtakes us.

It was hard, for example, to escape that sense of likeness at the 1992 International Wolf Symposium in Edmonton, Alberta. As it convened, wolf biologists, state and federal and Canadian wildlife officials, wolf fanciers, graduate students looking for jobs, and animal-rights advocates assembled in the commons room of a University of Alberta dormitory for an opening reception. Mech was there, as were Rolf Peterson from Isle Royale; Tom Bergerud from British Columbia; Bob Ream from Montana; Ludwig Carbyn from Alberta; Robert Hayes from the Yukon; John Theberge from Ontario; Bob Stephenson and Warren Ballard from Alaska; Todd Fuller of the University of Massachusetts; Erich Klinghammer from Wolf Park; Steve Fritts, the Northern Rocky Mountain wolf-recovery coordinator for Fish and Wildlife Service; Luigi Boitani of the University of Rome; Gao Zhong Xin of China; Nikita Ovsyanikov of Russia; Yadvendraved Jhala of India; Julio Carrera of Mexico; plus graduate assistants and recent Ph.D.’s still looking to make a name. It was as complete a gathering of wolf biologists as had ever been assembled.
As they entered and looked about the room and greeted each other, sometimes stiffly, sometimes warmly, it was clear that there were divisions and ranks. Scientists have their own dominance orders: one generation of young aspirants is always seeking to unseat its predecessors. Wayne Brewster, a biologist at Yellowstone National Park, looked around the room and said, “The alphas are all here and their tails are all high.”

Unlike primate biology, which has well-known women at the forefront, wolf biology is essentially a male hierarchy. It got started in an era in which game departments assumed that men were strong and independent and women were not, and department officials wouldn’t have dreamed of sending a woman out into the woods alone. By 1992, there were female field technicians tracking, trapping, and radio-collaring wolves in Algonquin Provincial Park, in northern Minnesota, on Isle Royale, and in northern Montana. But there were few women on the symposium program: only Diane Boyd and Cheryl Asa, who does her research at the St. Louis Zoo, would present papers.

The fact that wolf biology is still largely a man’s field may color the way wolf biologists deal with one another. They argue fiercely about things—fighting about the effects of wolves on prey populations, disagreeing over whether there ought to be programs to shoot wolves in order to increase hunters’ take of deer and moose and caribou, skirmishing over theories, over one another’s publications, over who is the ranking authority. When you get a roomful of wolf biologists together, you are apt to see a lot of behavior that reminds you of a wolf pack. You are apt to hear scathing criticisms. At Edmonton, one heard a lot.

“There are only a half-dozen real wolf biologists,” says one of the biologists, “based on field study and publications.” He goes on to name himself first on the list.

“Bergerud is way out in right field,” says another. “He sees the world through predator-colored glasses.”

Says a third: “Guys study it and love the animal and they don’t want you saying anything contrary to ‘It’s a white, shining wolf.’ Mech, Peterson, Theberge, and Haber just love that animal.”

• • •

Mech’s thirty-five years of wolf study have been guided by his broad and roving curiosity. To him everything about wolves is worth studying, but to many of the younger scholars there is something amateur and Victorian in studying wolves just to get to know them better. To these younger scientists, who have come of age in a time of scarce funding, science should aim at solving immediate problems. In part, their attitude is a measure of the extent to which scientific inquiry is defined by the sources of funding. Most predator research today is aimed at reducing damage to livestock or increasing hunter harvest. Mech had the good fortune to start work when so little was known about wolves that a blank notebook was worth having. Younger researchers envy Mech the freedom of his inquiry. He recalls a younger scientist who visited him in Minnesota. When Mech dropped him off at the Minneapolis Airport, the visitor’s parting words were, “I don’t know how you do it. If I can’t do an experiment in two weeks and get a publication out of it, it bothers me.”

Mech has also had to struggle, through the years, to fund his research. “Wolves live twelve to fifteen years,” he says. “Deer are the same. When you’re looking at population changes in long-lived species that are elusive to begin with, it takes a long-lived study to get results. But budgeting is done on an annual basis in the government. When I started the Minnesota study, it was a one-year project. It’s still going. But even the agency can’t go on a year-to-year basis. Our budget year begins in October. I still don’t know what our budget is going to be this year.” Nevertheless, he has gotten grants from the New York Zoological Society, the World Wildlife Fund, the National Geographic Society, the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and private donors. That kind of success seeds envy in the hearts of younger aspirants. So does Mech’s contact with the media and with public officials. He has amassed prizes that other biologists covet. And all this is clearly part of the reason many of his fellows see him as the alpha. They look for ways to challenge him.

Says one: “There hasn’t been an objective study of wolves in the last ten years. The question of raised-leg urination might be interesting, but no game agency is going to fund it. They want to know what the effects of predation are on an ungulate population. You ask a question you want to get an answer to.”

Says another: “There’s a little bit of Mech’s makeup to try to control things. But when you take it as a whole, what a lifetime of work. He changed people’s thinking about the wolf. He’s a high-energy person, bubbling over with ideas.”

Says a third: “Natural-history studies are not acceptable any more. You have to have some explanation of what is going on.”

Says another: “Dave Mech has made more difference than all the biologists put together. The question is, how many Meches can there be?”

On the second day of the conference, Mech had just completed a talk on the future of wolf research, during which he had referred to a paper by Dr. François Messier, of the University of Saskatchewan, who had been studying wolf-moose dynamics in Canada. In his paper, Messier had contested Mech’s theory about the relationship between winter snow depth and deer populations. Mech said in the talk that he had revised his own paper and that it should overcome the objections Messier had made.