The Company of Wolves (33 page)

Fifteen sites have been studied in Arizona, and others have been proposed in New Mexico and Texas, for possible reintroduction of wolves. Ranchers in all of these areas fear that, once wolves are released, the Fish and Wildlife Service will ask that nearby lands be considered critical habitat, and that uses of both publicly owned grazing
lands and privately owned ranches will be restricted. Even if they don’t lose the use of the land, they fear the wolves will get into their herds, and they will be unable to prove their losses sufficiently to receive compensation. They fear having to spend hours or days or weeks in town satisfying federal regulatory requirements, chasing down federal officials, filing papers, waiting for bureaucratic decisions.

Some hunters also fear that reintroduction of wolves will mean fewer elk and deer to hunt. Trappers fear they will no longer be allowed to put out traps. Ranching families fear for their children. Says a rancher from Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains, “I’m afraid for my grandkids. We live in this little place out there. In the cities, they have these gangs and things that are very detrimental to society; you can’t go outside at night. So now, with the reintroduction of this wolf, it’s very highly possible that will mean I’m in that situation. What’s going to happen in a drought, when all these wolves come down into my area?”

To make the controversy even more complex, some people oppose reintroduction because it promises to be cruel to wolves. Says an Arizona woman, “If wolves are reintroduced, they will be persecuted, slaughtered, and tortured to death exactly as they always were. Man’s nature has not improved; he is still the same cruel killer that he has always been.”

But if there are wolves in the wild, they must be considered in the reintroduction plan, and so far the plan assumes wolves have been absent in the Southwest for two decades. Reports of wolf sightings raise essential questions: Are the wolves that leave tracks and pose for photographs real wolves or hybrid wolf-dogs? If they are wolves, are they actually Mexican wolves that walked in from Mexico? Or are they captives brought from Canada and released for the purposes of taking photographs or leaving tracks? Who would release such an animal? Wolf proponents who want to see it back? Or ranchers who want to forestall a Fish and Wildlife Service plan to reintroduce Mexican wolves into the wild, and who believe that, if there are wolves out there in the wild and the wolves in captivity may be described as inbred or tainted with foreign genes, then the reintroduction will not take place? So far, most of the reports of sightings come from opponents of reintroduction.

Reports of sightings are apt to raise more questions than they answer. The plaster casts taken from Vanelli’s reported wolf were not conclusive. Because wolves walk in such a way that their hind legs swing in line with their forelegs, the back paws step into the prints of the forepaws. Dog hind legs swing inside the forelegs, and the hind paw print appears next to and inside the forepaw. But only individual paw prints were cast at Vanelli’s find, so the pattern of the tracks in the dirt wasn’t recorded. Some of the plaster casts were sent to Roy McBride, who for many years trapped wolves on Mexican ranches. McBride looked at the casts and replied, “I didn’t think they were wild-wolf tracks. Wolves and coyotes get their toenails real worn down, and this one had real long toenails. So, if it was a wolf, it was someone’s pet. The heel was more like a dog’s. The toes weren’t parallel. The outside toes pointed out, like a dog. Probably it was her own dog got out.”

McBride’s is only one opinion among many contending voices in the land of the Mexican wolf. Deciding what is out there in the hills of southern Arizona is just part of the problem. The nature of the wolves being bred for possible reintroduction into the wild is also an issue.

In 1971, Norma Ames was assistant chief of game management for the New Mexico Game and Fish Department, drafting laws and regulations that would go to the legislature or the Game and Fish Commission. It was largely a desk job. She had a degree in biology from Smith College and had done graduate work. Energetic, talented, and intelligent, she wanted to be a field biologist, but going out to count deer or quail was a job reserved for men in the department. “I came into the kind of work I was doing too early for opportunities to be much for females,” she says. “I was confined to being a paper biologist and indoors.” One of Ames’ duties was to issue permits to scientific collectors. As she talked with biologists collecting specimens along the border, she became interested in wolves.

In the early 1970s, the realization was just dawning that the Mexican wolf was on the verge of extinction. There were very few in zoos. The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum had acquired a male taken from Tumacacori, Arizona, in 1959 and a female from Yécora,
Sonora, in 1961. It had successfully bred them, and as the fate of the Mexican wolf in the wild grew grimmer, the museum made the young from its successful breeding program available to other zoos. A number went to the Ghost Ranch, a Department of Game and Fish facility in Abiquiu, New Mexico, which bred the offspring and, as was common practice at the time, sold or gave surplus animals away.

In 1971, Ames mentioned her interest in wolves to a colleague in the department, who knew that the Ghost Ranch wolves were about to have a litter. Seven pups were born, but they were confined to a cage with a concrete floor, in full view of visitors, and the mother, in panic while trying to move them out of view, killed four of them. Ames’ colleague called her one day and told her that, if she wanted some wolf pups, she had better get out to Ghost Ranch fast. Ames was then a fifty-year-old divorcée living alone, her daughter off in college. She had 240 acres of land in a mountain valley ten miles outside of Santa Fe, behind locked gates at the end of a road and surrounded by national forest—“a lovely place for raising wolves,” she felt. She had often kept wild animals that other people had found injured or orphaned. It was still five years before Mexican wolves would be listed by the federal or state governments as endangered, and there was no legal bar to possessing them. Ames went out to Ghost Ranch and returned with two pups; she later acquired a second pair from Ghost Ranch.

She built an eight-foot-high chainlink enclosure adjoining her house, and set about raising wolves. One door of her house opened directly into the wolf enclosure, and the living-room window looked out into it. She socialized the wolves so that they would regard her as an intimate friend.

She found the wolves lively and full of surprises. “One winter day, I heard this banging against the wall. The eldest female was running the length of the enclosure, leaping and bounding off the wall. She was hitting the wall seven feet off the ground. She was having a ball.”

Before 1971, Ames had been interested in wolves because she felt they represented wildness and freedom and beauty, and seemed to link the worlds of biology and spirit. But once she had them, other motives came into play. She had read Joy Adamson’s books about reintroducing zoo-bred lions into the wilds of Kenya and saw that, as Mexican wolves vanished from the wild, her wolves had increasing
value as stock from which the wild population might be replenished. She wondered whether her wolves might be returned to the wild. The main question, she thought, was, would they hunt?

One moonlit night, she thought she might have the answer. She had left the door open to the wolf enclosure outside. “I woke up and thought, ‘What is going on?’ Hovering over me, standing on the bed, was one of the wolves. It was offering me a much-chewed-up ground squirrel it had caught out there.” She found that anything that wandered into the wolf cages—squirrels, ravens, or mice—would be caught. “People said wolves raised in captivity can’t cope in the wild,” she says. “I think they can.”

Until then, she had treated her wolves as pets. But “after that, I was into serious wolf breeding, to save the Mexican wolf, and from that point I didn’t socialize with them.”

She found that raising wolves was demanding work. Each wolf had to be understood as an individual. “There were a couple I wouldn’t turn my back on. The first female had a litter in a concrete structure in the enclosure; she dug a den and moved the pups into it. One day, I had to shoot through the enclosure back into the house and without thinking I turned my back. In an instant, she knocked me down with a bite to my leg. If she’d wanted to attack, she could have, because she had me down. But she didn’t.”

Only that one time was she bitten. Sometimes males would challenge her, staring hard with hackles up, and she would back down. The wolves would fight with one another. “It’s the sort of thing, if I had had lots of money, I would never have let happen: you detect the first signs of long-lasting enmity and take steps. In the wild, I’m sure it wouldn’t have continued, because the wolf that was getting the worst of it would leave. But here they couldn’t leave. If there were fights, I did not want to treat injured animals, so I’d separate them. I’d have to go out to prevent further damage, and, as angry as they were with each other, they’d look up and smile, as if to say, ‘You here, too?’ ” She would distract the wolves, open a gate, haze the wolf through it, and slam the gate when the wolf had gone through.

The wolves quickly took up all her time and money. “It was all personally supported. Each time I allowed the female to reproduce, that meant building more enclosures. My pay was awful low, but it was something I had to do.” She couldn’t leave the wolves in the
hands of a caretaker, because no one else knew them well enough to read their needs, and no one else could safely enter the pens to doctor or clean up after them. Even her veterinarian was afraid of the animals. “To gather up the wolves and take them in to him was a nightmare. It reached the point where he said, ‘You come in and I’ll give you the medications you need.’ ” She had to do everything herself.

So she fed and doctored, mended fences, and buried the dead. The wolves filled her life. She had to give up her position on the Western Region Environmental Education Council; she had previously published two romance novels, but when her publishers called to ask her for another, she told them she just didn’t have any time. When the department finally offered her fieldwork, she said, “I wouldn’t give up what I’m doing to go count deer for the Game and Fish Department.”

“It changed my life in many ways,” says Ames. She felt as if she was slipping away from humankind and deeper into wolfdom. When her veterinarian asked her how the wolves were, “I’d say, ‘They’re getting easier. They’re getting humanized.’ ” But he would reply, “You’re getting wolfized.” And she thinks today he was right. “I tend to be, as a whole, a loner. And living with those wolves made me more so.” She found that when people drove up her driveway she would think, “Here comes another human being you’re going to have to cope with.”

Her work with wolves remained separate from her work in the New Mexico Game and Fish Department, but because she knew so much about wolves, in 1979, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service formed a team to write a recovery plan for the Mexican wolf, she was selected to represent New Mexico’s department.

The first problem faced by the team was deciding whether to try to save the wolf where it still seemed to exist, in Mexico. Says Ames, “We used to say, The first priority was to save the wolf in Mexico and all the recovery will be done there.” But, she says, “it became clear they weren’t going to be protected in the wild. The land was being broken up into farms. Cattlemen were putting out poison. The man who was the Mexican game warden in the area where the wolf existed covered three states. The last Mexican wolf we caught in the wild in Mexico was caught because he came in to breed with
a ranch dog. There was little hope of protecting the wolves or setting aside habitat for them. We came to the conclusion that protecting them where they still existed wasn’t feasible.”

The recovery team concluded that wolves would have to be reintroduced somewhere in the United States. When the recovery plan was approved in 1982, it called for maintenance of a captive-breeding population and reestablishment of a self-sustaining population of a hundred wolves in the wild. But where would the wolves come from? Zoos had not been active in breeding Mexican wolves. By the time the recovery team approached the American Association of Zoological Parks to ask that a species survival plan be written for the Mexican wolf, a step aimed at getting zoos interested in their propagation, they were faced with a serious problem: there were few captives, and all posed questions of genetic health or integrity.

There were questions particularly about the purity of the founding Ghost Ranch wolves, which had originally been bred at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. The female had been purchased from a family in Magdalena, Sonora, by a Canadian tourist who brought her into the United States on the back of a motorcycle. No one could say where that wolf had really come from. Had she been bred of wolves and dogs on a Mexican ranch? Had she been taken from a den in the wild? The male had been trapped by a cowboy on an Arizona ranch. Some observers said these founder wolves looked to them like dogs. Dan Gish, the former wolf trapper, said the male caught in Arizona had been hanging around ranch buildings and howling during the daytime—both, in Gish’s mind, indications that it wasn’t a wild wolf. Surviving photographs of the male show a stressed or drugged animal on a veterinarian’s examining table. In 1964, the male escaped from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, and it is presumed that someone shot him. No tissue sample remains from him, so there is no way ever to tell whether he was a hybrid.

Gish never actually saw the male, but he saw several of its offspring and concluded, “They’d been mixed with dogs. I don’t remember any of them that looked like a Mexican wolf.” He thought they had “smallish front paws,” wide chests, and “less ranginess to the overall profile.” The ears of the single female born into a 1978 litter became semi-erect at about eighteen months of age, and both hybridization and inbreeding were suggested as reasons.

A study of the skulls of Ghost Ranch wolves by Michael Bogen and Patricia Melhop in 1980 concluded that they “show tendencies toward dogs, but whether these result from dog genes or the effects of captivity is unknown.” The single doglike characteristic the researchers found was one wolf’s shorter muzzle. But shortened muzzles may merely be features of domestication, not of hybridization. Bone is trained by muscle, and muscle by the exigencies of life. Just as an old man’s jaw may recede if he loses his teeth, or an athlete adds bone mass by lifting weights, a pup raised on soft foods in captivity might have a shorter muzzle because it develops less muscle—and therefore less bone to anchor the muscle—than its wild relatives. Even wild–born lion cubs taken into captivity show shorter, broader skulls than wild lions. Similar changes have been observed in purebred wolves in zoos. A 1941 study concluded that “skulls of wolves reared in captivity are shorter, broader and higher than those of wild wolves” and “nearer to those of domestic dogs.”