The Company of Wolves (49 page)

And though hybrids are capable of intense sociability, the ones that turn into rewarding pets generally do so because their owners are willing to commit a great deal of time and patience to them. Wolves that have been reared in a wolf pack do not take readily to the company of humans. Those who have raised wolves to accept them as companions have taken them from a litter at a very young age and spent long hours with them every day. In effect, such owners have had to work within the wolf’s capacity for society, and shape their own lives to the limits of the wolf, one of which is a limited ability to extend itself to strangers. According to Bobbie Holaday, who keeps hybrids in Phoenix, Arizona, “People who take in hybrids are taking up a lifetime commitment. You can’t just feed them once a day and leave them alone. When I leave them in the camper alone, they can get kind of destructive. They’re a wonderful animal as a companion, but they just don’t sit down and play dead.”

Many cannot be housebroken. They defecate and urinate not to empty their digestive tracts, but to scent-mark territory, perhaps even to express ambition. They are apt to follow an owner around the yard, replacing the very deposits the owner is shoveling up. If a strange dog has been allowed in the house, they are apt to scent-mark where it has been.

And they are mischievous. Lockwood once sat on a panel of veterinarians
who, trying to characterize hybrids, came up with the words “sneaky” and “weird.” Lockwood attributes those qualities largely to the fact that wolves are social animals. When a hybrid is left alone all day by a working owner, it gets bored and lonely. It becomes destructive: it chews up furniture to get at the twang of a spring inside, or rips out trees, or digs under fences.

But the appeal of the wild is stronger than the awareness of its drawbacks. The number of wolf hybrids is believed to be increasing. Wolf-hybrid puppies are regularly advertised for sale in the want ads of large city newspapers, and some breeders are making money off the desire for the animals. Says Lockwood, “We are encountering an increasing number of wolf-hybrid puppy mills. In Arkansas, one advertised an April tax special: buy three, get one free. Give them your MasterCard number over the telephone and they’ll put a four-week-old puppy in a box and mail it to you. People breed hybrids and sell them for $500 or $600.” Much fuss is made about the percentage of wolf genes an animal is reputed to carry: there are 50-percent hybrids and 75-percent hybrids. Lockwood says, “Some come with certificates that say things like ‘This animal is 98 percent wolf.’ ” Some dealers at least ask prospective buyers whether they have an enclosure for the animal, and whether they have the time to spend with it. But many breeders ask no questions.

And they ought to. For it is an animal beset with problems.

Ron Maga is a thirty-four-year-old fireman in Quartz Hill, California. His wife, Jennifer, is a massage therapist. They own two wolf hybrids, which are licensed as such with the county. Says Maga, “They are brother and sister, Peso and Kenai. The father was 100 percent timber wolf, and the mother malamute. A friend brought them from Alaska. He couldn’t keep the male because he had two male huskies that would occasionally get in fights and tear each other up, and they were doing this to Peso, too—the dogs wanted to kill the hybrid.” So the friend gave Maga the male but kept the female, hoping to breed her to one of his huskies. That was four years ago. About a year later, he also gave Maga Kenai.

“They are trainable,” says Maga. “They’re very smart. They just look at you like you’re some kind of knucklehead if you throw a ball.
We baby them—we bring ’em in at night, and they’re house-trained. They’re very good.

“But they are not dogs. They are definitely not dogs. They are very family-oriented. They’re sensitive. They’re emotional. They’re almost psychic—they’ll pick up on how I feel when I walk in the house. If I’m upset about something, they’ll back away. I have a friend who’s loud and aggressive and boisterous. They really don’t like him. They prefer people who are calm. Whenever he comes over, before he even knocks on the door, the dogs will react. If they’re near the door, they’ll back off. I’ll know it’s him before I hear him come up the walk.”

They have, says Maga, a special awareness. “I believe our mental status creates a certain frequency that we’ll emit; I just think they pick up on that. I think they’re very psychic-oriented. They’re almost, like, spiritual.” Because of that, he says, “I do not want to pen them up. I do not want to chain them up. So they have the run of the backyard. I have a five-foot cinder-block wall all around the yard. I had to put up two and a half feet more of corral fence on top of that, just to keep them in.

“I’ve been told by the guy I got the dogs from, the worst thing to do is have kids with wolves, because you don’t know when they may turn on them. I would bet my dogs would never do that. Their temperament is fantastic. We’ve had kids in the backyard pulling and scratching and jumping on them, and they don’t bother the kids at all. They lick kids to death. They’re very, very gentle. One day, a strange dog cornered them both in the backyard and they rolled over and submitted.” But since hybrids
have
attacked children, Maga is never perfectly sure that his hybrids’ temperament won’t change. “I try to feed them dry food,” he says. “I’ve heard, if you start feeding them raw meat, they get more aggressive.”

The trouble comes when the Magas go to work: she works full-time, and he is sometimes gone for three or four days straight. “If we’re gone,” Maga explains, “they dig and tear up things, I think out of spite. There’s something about us not being home for a lengthy period of time that aggravates them. They start pushing our buttons. They’ll chew sprinkler valves, tiki lights, valve covers. I’ll look out the window of the back door in the morning and see they’ve pulled up a tree. They’ll look at me and, if I’m angry, as soon as I think,
‘God!,’ they’ll hide under the deck. I have to admit, they’re smarter than I am.”

And they get out. “Any type of hybrid wolf is a runner. They love to get out and run. When Kenai was in heat, she would jump the fence. She got out one evening and came back about five in the morning, and I found a rabbit in my front yard. I thought she had killed it and brought it back as a gift for me because she knows she’s not supposed to get out.”

They had the female spayed, and that seemed to calm her down a little. But if he does not exercise great care, says Maga, “when the sun goes down, they’re gone.” One day, “my wife put Peso in the garage. He tried chewing through the door and got nails stuck in his mouth.” The construction worker who gave Maga the hybrids had another wolf-husky cross which, says Maga, “accidentally got locked in the bathroom of the house they were working on. It chewed through drywall, two-by-fours, lath, and plaster, and got out and ran home that night. It came home all bloody.”

Maga is more worried about what people may do to the animals than what they may do to themselves. One night, at dusk, his neighbor stopped a sheriff’s deputy who was standing in a nearby field with his gun drawn on the escaped hybrids. The officer thought they were coyotes and was about to shoot them.

“I went through a period when I would come home and say, ‘That’s it! I gotta get rid of ’em!’ I would put an ad in the paper for them, and I would get fifty calls, and the homes were all small. Even though I wanted to get rid of them, I just didn’t have the heart to give them to someone else who didn’t have a home for them.”

The Magas found a home for the male with a woman who had dogs that she worked in films and who planned to use him in television commercials. But Peso got sick, and the woman tried to force the Magas to pay the veterinarian bills. When she found he didn’t train as easily as her dogs, she neutered him. That didn’t change things. Within a month, she was ready to take him to the pound, so the Magas took Peso back.

“We still have them, and we’ll probably keep them,” says Maga. “I’ve never had a dog love me like those wolves have. They’re very loyal, but they’re a challenge to keep. They need a lot of attention.

“I feel responsible. It’s not their fault that the things they do aggravate
me—it’s just their nature. It has got to be frustrating for them, because somewhere in their genes is a yearning to get out and hunt and run and do the things a wolf does, and I’ve suppressed that, keeping them in the environment they’re in.”

Says Maga, “They’re not dogs. There’s a space between a wolf and a dog, and that’s these animals.”

As a teenager, Terry Jenkins, now curator at the Folsom City Zoo in California, decided she wanted a wild pet. She bought a wolf from the Folsom Zoo and got a permit to keep it. Like others who acquire exotic pets, Jenkins knew little about it. She found it fascinating, but headstrong and hard to keep. When she looked at other captive wolves, she concluded, “Most of them were scared of everyone and were in little cages in a backyard, and it really seemed to be a tragedy.” She thought she might solve the problem by breeding her wolf to a dog, “to produce an animal that looked like a wolf, so it would satisfy that urge to have an exotic pet, but would have the personality and temperament of a dog, so that it would make a good pet.” The cross-breeding, she also hoped, would save wolves from having to live in captivity. “It took me a number of years to realize that the wolf hybrid wasn’t an answer to that.”

Some of the hybrids she produced were intensely loyal and expressive, but others were not good companions. Jenkins had one animal that was very affectionate and appeared to love babies and women, but he tried to kill her. One day she tried to establish herself as his superior and failed: the hybrid lunged at her and bit her repeatedly in the chest, going for her throat. “I shoved my hands down his throat and let him chew on those, and backed out the gate,” she says. She never trusted the animal again. “I was quite certain that if I had fallen he would have killed me. He didn’t really react like a wolf. A wolf will go through a whole range of body postures and silent expressions before it attacks. Even if they bite you, they’ll still back off and give you a chance.” At that point, she didn’t know what to do with the hybrid. “I called the original owner and she said, ‘Shoot him.’ ” Rather than do that, Jenkins sent the hybrid to a friend in Iowa. But there the animal became extremely aggressive toward
women and children. “It was an intense, scary, and obviously very dangerous situation,” says Jenkins. When the hybrid got into dominance fights with another male, the lady in Iowa euthanized him.

One of Jenkins’ hybrids was a lap wolf: “She loved to be in your lap being scratched.” Jenkins would take her into school classes, and she would go around a circle of seated children, licking every face. As she grew older, however, she became shy around strange adults. One day, Jenkins took her out on a leash to show to some people who had come to her house to see the wolf-dog. One couple had an infant, which they placed on the ground. “She had always been gentle with babies. She kissed the baby, but kept looking up at the parents. Then she very carefully reached over the baby’s shoulder with her jaws and tried to pick the baby up and move him. The parents moved quickly to save the baby, and the hybrid jumped back and dropped the baby, who was knocked over and started crying. I never let her around a baby or even a little child again. By the time I had children of my own, she was very aggressive to children.”

Jenkins’ caution was well advised. In 1984, a woman visiting her mother in Reno put her own baby on the floor and left the room. The grandmother’s hybrid came in, picked up the unattended baby by the head, and killed it instantly. A wolf hybrid took off a child’s arm in New Jersey, and another did the same thing in Montana. In 1988, the Panhandle Animal Welfare Society in Walton, Florida, advertised for adoption a five-year-old neutered male wolf-husky that had been through several owners, and which the shelter believed was such a gentle animal they made it Pet of the Week. A family took him home, but within an hour he jumped a four-foot fence. A neighbor woman found him and put him in her yard. Since he still had the shelter identification tag on, she went inside to call the shelter. While she was on the phone, she heard the animal attack her four-year-old son. She got the hybrid off her child, but he was critically injured. The emergency team had to fight the wolf-dog off with a flashlight while they tried to save the boy. The boy died. In 1993, a child was killed by a hybrid in Vermont.

There are fifty-four million dogs and from one to three million reported dog bites a year in the United States, according to statistics kept by the Humane Society of the United States. There are an average
of twenty fatalities inflicted by dogs a year. Between 1986 and 1992, eight wolf-hybrid attacks took human lives.

The hybrid attacks, says Lockwood, “are not slavering, savage attacks. These are not for the most part vicious animals. These were not animals that said, ‘Mmmm, I’m going to eat him.’ These were animals that were curious, that were inquisitive, that were defensive, or that regarded these children as an interesting inanimate object or as prey. We know a lot of the malamutes are cat killers. In 1991, we had six or seven malamutes and huskies kill children under circumstances that were essentially inquisitive predatory attacks. They regarded a child as they would a rabbit.

“There is this mythology, particularly among the owners of the dogs who bit somebody, that the victim did something to provoke it. The vast majority of dog bites involve people who are not doing something inappropriate at the time. A child puts his arm through a fence: that is stupid, but it’s not provocation. Most bites are owned animals injuring the kid next door or a family member.”

Lockwood thinks part of the problem is that we have been breeding dogs for aggressive traits for centuries. He shows a picture of a tile from a floor at Pompeii, dated A.D. 79, which says “
cave canem
,” meaning “beware of the dog”: “Two thousand years ago, people were taking mean dogs and chaining them to their front doors. This has been going on for generations and generations. To me, this has been one of the major differences between wolf and dog. We have selected our dogs to be far more aggressive, and far less in control of their aggression, than their wild counterparts.” Lockwood has watched wolves encounter bears in Alaska and retreat from the danger. By contrast, he says, humans have trained dogs to be so excessively aggressive that they will fight to the death. He has investigated pit-bull attacks and dogfight promoters. “When dogfighters tell me these dogs love to fight or they’re just doing what God intended, that’s nonsense.” He recalls that English breeders enclosed rat terriers with hordes of rats, and a good dog would kill a hundred of them in less than five minutes, and that was the animal they would breed. “A wild canid normally won’t kill more than he can eat, but we can breed animals to keep going and going and going. We have bred out the off-button that controlled aggression.”