The Company of Wolves (22 page)

In the middle of the twentieth century, our views of animal intelligence began to change. In 1948, Rudolph Schenkel published a study of wolf body language and expressive postures he had conducted at the Basel Zoo. He concluded that, because the wolf could change the intensity, direction, and quality of its personal behavior patterns, it had a higher level of intelligence than the more stereotypically behaving birds, reptiles, and fishes.

By the 1960s, scientists were seeing in wolves complicated purposive behavior. Norma Ames, who kept wolves in New Mexico, tells a story that suggests insight and purposeful action. “I had two female wolves that didn’t get along and kept them apart with their families in different enclosures,” separated by a chainlink wire fence. One day a friend brought her some bones from an elk he had shot and cleaned, and she gave a bone to one of the females. “The wolf who had the bone,” says Ames, “took it and put it a few inches away from and parallel to the fence. And she stepped back and waited and waited. And, sure enough, the other wolf put her nose through the fence, and the waiting wolf attacked her. That took deliberate thought to do.” Biologist John Weaver saw similar evidence of planning among wolves as they hunted in Jasper National Park. In one hunt, a deer was bedded in a blowdown. Four wolves came upon it before it sensed them, and they split up and surrounded it. “It was like they had this deer in a corral,” says Weaver. Another pack caught scent of a bedded fawn. Three of the five climbed the back side of a ridge, while the other two came along the base and cut off the deer’s escape. “You can see where the deer got up out of its bed and made two jumps and
pow
!” Dr. Michael Fox, who had been observing wolves in the St. Louis Zoo, felt compelled to report to the
Journal of Mammology
something he observed in 1969. Wolves at the St. Louis
Zoo were kept in a double pen with a sliding door between the two enclosures. The sliding door was closed by pulling a rope inside the inner pen. When a keeper came in to hose down the outer pen, the male wolf would herd all the pups into the inner pen, jump up, grab the pulley rope, and close the door. When the hose was turned off, the wolf would open the sliding door with its paw and muzzle, and let the young out. Fox considered this to be an example of “high order behavior in wolves.”

That same year, Harry Frank, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan—Flint acquired a female wolf pup from a Chicago zoo. Frank already owned a three-quarter wolf-dog hybrid and a malamute. With all three animals in his household, Frank began to see that “there was some fundamental difference in the way they processed information. The hybrid was intermediate in some ways. The first time we brought a wolf home, the wolf went into submission, and the hybrid knew exactly what it was. The dog didn’t. When the malamute didn’t respond, the wolf snapped at him. He grabbed her by the back of the neck and threw her against the side of the house. She could not understand an animal that was not communicating his status, and she had no use for an animal that was going through all these shenanigans.”

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 powers 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.