The Company of Wolves (50 page)

When Lois Crisler left Alaska, she took wolves with her. Living in
Colorado, she sought to make her wolves less indifferent to her by breeding them to dogs, in the belief that the resulting animal would be “courageous, untamable, serious, yet gay,” and have “a genius for loving.” But in her act of engineering, she merely took the wildness out of the wolf. The hybrids were more aggressive than the remaining wolves. She felt the hybrids contained an inbred schizophrenia, the wildness of wolves and the tameness of dogs, and each pulled at the soul of the animal until it went crazy. Increasingly, she saw in them “a queer, uneasy equilibrium.” They were, she feared, filled with anxiety and rage.

The messages Jenkins got from her hybrids, however, were conflicting. The hybrids seemed immensely perceptive and intelligent. Many were loving and joyously shared their feelings—one of them chipped Jenkins’ teeth and blackened her eyes just in greeting her effusively. But caring for them was demanding. “Most wolf hybrids have this intense purpose in life, and it doesn’t always coincide with yours,” she says. She tells of a friend’s hybrid that jumped through plate-glass windows to get out. When that animal got older, he also jumped through plate-glass windows to get in. Jenkins had to give her hybrids hours of attention each day, and had to take extra precautions so that they didn’t get out or weren’t made more aggressive or neurotic by the acts of visitors. The tension between affection and concern was draining. And yet it was addictive. Over a period of twenty-two years, Jenkins cared for 130 different wolf hybrids. “It was my whole life,” she says. “That’s how involved I was in it.” She could not bring herself to euthanize her own animals. And she continued to take other people’s hybrids in when they could no longer cope with them, feeling she had the skill and understanding to save them.

Now thirty-eight and a mother, Jenkins has a different view of keeping wild animals. She still has two hybrids, one of which will not allow anyone but Jenkins near her and must be kept in a cage. “She’s not a dog,” says Jenkins. “She’s not a good companion animal.” Jenkins acquired the second hybrid to keep the first one company. She can’t let them be wolves, but she can’t trust them to be dogs. She feels obliged to keep them alive. “I feel a great pain and frustration from this problem,” she says. “I hurt daily from it.”

• • •

There is a place for dogs, and there is a place for wolves. But whether there’s a place for wolf-dog hybrids is an unsettled question. Wolf hybrids are neither house pets nor wild animals. They place different demands on people from those placed by either wolves or dogs.

Where people adjust to those demands, the animals fill their lives. Speaking to a California seminar on wolf hybrids sponsored by the Humane Society of the United States, Lockwood says: “Owning hybrids becomes almost an addiction. I’ve frequently heard people say, ‘Once you’ve owned a wolf or once you’ve had a hybrid, there’s no going back.’ It becomes a kind of codependency—they’ve altered their life-style to fit the wolf or hybrid. They have a community of like-minded people. They have their own circle of friends, and often their other friends get pushed aside, and it becomes almost a substitute family for them.” But when a hybrid tears up their yards, rends their society, divides their families, and weighs them down with guilt and obligation, they want to get rid of it. They look first for wildlife shelters and animal-rescue centers.

The Wildlife Way Station is up a side canyon off Little Tujunga Canyon, in the San Gabriel Mountains, which form the northern rim of the Los Angeles Basin. A narrow road winds up the canyon, through dry hills covered with chamise, scrub oak, manzanita, yucca, and prickly-pear cactus. There are stables everywhere, their corrals framed by groves of eucalyptus, dull gray-green in the intense southern-California sun. The Way Station’s side canyon is deep and shaded with sycamores and oaks. Under a live oak, two very wolflike forms stir. They have the piercing yellow eyes, broad foreheads, big jaws, and oversized feet of wolves. They seem oddly colored; they have a reddish tint to their coats, which seems to bleach out when they step into the bright sunshine. Perhaps it is more diagnostic that they are slow-moving, not pacing around their pen, and that they are not shy of visitors but come confidently up to the fence to sniff at them. It would be difficult to say, if you saw them melting into the forest, whether they were wolves or hybrids.

There are eight hundred animals in the facility—lions, tigers, jaguars, macaques—most of them animals people acquired as pets and then tired of. Martine Colette built this park as a refuge for unwanted exotic animals and supported it with private donations. It is part of the Neverland quality of southern California that people
take in lions and tigers and bears, but, though wildness is what makes such animals attractive, wildness doesn’t thrive in a southern-California yard. If you muster the time and concentration to keep such an animal, you take the wildness out of it. If not, the romance fades, and there is only a nagging responsibility, and you want to get rid of the animal. If ever a refuge for domesticated but unwanted lions and tigers and wolves might take root, it would happen here in southern California, where nature is celebrated and denied with equal fervor.

Wolf hybrids tend to appear in places where people both celebrate and bemoan the loss of nature: there are relatively few in Alaska and Canada, many in California. Colette explains that the Wildlife Way Station takes in wolf hybrids, but does not adopt them out again. “We do send the animals out now and then to a facility. If the hybrids pass for wolves”—that is, if people can feel they are looking at something wild when they view the animal—“they are sometimes taken by zoos or nature-education centers.” Otherwise, they are here for life.

The Wildlife Way Station gets dozens of requests each year to take in wolf hybrids. It has at least thirty already on the premises, but it can take only so many of these rejected pets. The refuge performs a kind of triage, accepting only the most wolflike of the hybrids. “People sometimes call and say they’ve got a hybrid,” says compound foreman Audrey Wineland, “but it turns out to be just a dog. We have them send us a picture and give information on age and so on. When we look at the picture, if it looks like a wolf, we’ll take it. If it looks like a dog, we can’t take it.”

There are only a handful of refuges for unwanted hybrids. Nature centers here and there may take in a few. Wolf Haven in Tenino, Washington, has taken in one or two, and the Charles Avery Park in Minneapolis has some. But there aren’t enough places for all those now seeking refuge. Carlyn Edison, who rescues hybrids in Austin, Texas, gets three thousand calls a year, but can place only about twenty animals. Bill Chamberlain, of the U.S. Wolf Refuge and Adoption Center in Apache Junction, Arizona, says he has a similar number of inquiries. He takes in hybrids, then tries to socialize them and place them in homes with new owners who have the patience, time, and dedication to care for them. Says Chamberlain, “They’re
not going to go away. What we need to do is match that population to the number of homes that are able to deal effectively and humanely with them.”

The Folsom City Zoo serves as a refuge for unwanted pets and orphaned and injured animals. It has four wolves and two wolf hybrids on exhibit, and a mountain lion that was raised in an apartment with a wolf and a chimpanzee. The zoo tends to respond to fashions in such pets. “When I first came there, in 1982,” says Jenkins, “the animal that was most frequently offered to the zoo was raccoons. We literally got hundreds of calls on raccoons. Then we got several calls a week on ferrets. For about the last five years, it’s been wolf hybrids, and it’s increasing. I’m in the position of having to turn down countless desperately in-need animals. There are always more animals out there than anyone has room for. I really hope they get them euthanized.”

Some hybrid owners don’t even try the shelters. Instead, they drop the animals off in the woods, expecting that the wolf genes will orchestrate some kind of Jack London story of survival in the wild. But the odds against their survival are enormous: wolves must be taught to hunt and learn to use the landscape. There is no record of domestic hybrids released into the wild successfully occupying the niche of wild wolves. Nevertheless, people continue to put them out in the woods.

The hybrid Earl Hurst shot in Oregon was probably just such an animal. Near Helena, Montana, several released wolf hybrids have been shot by ranchers after killing sheep or cows. Two different “wolf packs” in Idaho hung around campsites and ate food out of bowls before they were recognized as hybrids. In Glacier National Park in 1992, two Tennessee residents were caught by park officials trying to release their hybrids into the wild. Because the released animals didn’t know how to hunt, they hung around the campgrounds.

Terry Jenkins regularly hears of hybrids turned loose in the mountains of California. There were tales of wolves in the Warner Mountains after a private wolf-hybrid refuge near Susanville shut down. A man crossing the Sierra Nevada with his dog one winter told Jenkins that a wolf walked into his camp to pay them a visit. Repeated reports
of sightings and howlings have come from the vicinity of Ice House, in El Dorado County.

Once a hybrid is turned loose in a setting that might support dispersing wolves, it becomes difficult to say what kind of animal is there. In 1992, an animal thought to be a wolf was hanging around the town of Glacier, Washington. It walked into an empty swimming pool that John Almack of the Washington Department of Game had baited with fish, and Almack went into the pool and darted it. He was reluctant to declare it a hybrid, because wolves were believed to be dispersing into the area, and rarity gave value to even a faint hope. So, after X-raying and measuring it, he put a radio collar on it, drove it into the back country, and released it. Immediately, it homed back to the housing area where it had been caught.

Carter Niemeyer, who traps wolves known to have killed livestock as an Animal Damage Control trapper in Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota, heard about Almack’s wolf. Sent out to look at the animal, he found it so tame that he could take a twenty-minute video of it. “That was about as wolf as a poodle was,” says Niemeyer. “The animal was walking down the street. I was just astonished that anyone would collar an animal like that.” The Fish and Wildlife Service authorized recapture of the hybrid. The service’s agent Jeff Haas persuaded some people to walk their dog into a tennis court, and the hybrid followed it in. Haas simply picked up the animal, put it in his truck, and drove away. Niemeyer traced it back to a woman who claimed she had sold it to another person who let it get away. It now resides in Wolf Haven.

The behavior of the modern hybrids poses questions about what kinds of animals have been responsible for attacks on humans in the past. For example, the most celebrated human-killing wolves of Europe were a pair of wolves collectively called “The Beast of Gévaudan,” which appeared in France in 1764 and began killing women and children. Though King Louis XV put out a reward of 6,000 livres for whoever killed the beast, the animals eluded hunters until 1767. In that time, they were said to have taken the lives of more than sixty women and children. When hunters finally killed them, they proved to be enormous animals. One weighed 130 pounds, nearly twice the weight of a typical French wolf. The colors of their coats—one had a reddish tinge, the other a white patch on its
throat—were characteristic of dogs, rather than wolves. And the beasts attacked people by biting at their faces, a behavior that suggested either rabid wolves or domestic dogs, though none of the victims contracted rabies. The evidence strongly suggests that the beasts were hybrids.

Hybrids might also account for many of the attacks on livestock that have been blamed on wolves. In the American West, ranch dogs run free, and there are many accounts of ranch dogs and wolves mating. The resulting offspring might, like modern hybrids, lack the caution of wolves. The reports of federal wolf trappers early in this century indicate that they frequently caught cattle-killing hybrids on New Mexican ranches. J. Stokley Ligon’s 1924 report on the Predatory Animal and Rodent Control program in New Mexico declared that “in more than 75 per cent of the cases investigation disclosed the fact that dogs or coyotes and in some cases hybrids, wolf dogs, were the offenders.” There were several well-documented cases of hybrids attacking livestock in Montana in the 1980s. And today, Ralph Opp, of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, reports that in a recent six-month period there were six different packs of wolf hybrids attacking livestock in Klamath County.

The possibility that there are hybrids running loose in the West bedevils plans to reintroduce wolves into places from which they have been eradicated. Reintroduction hinges on the premise that there are no wolves remaining in the wild. If people begin seeing hybrids in the woods, reintroduction may be stalled until it is clear what those animals are. If the animals seen are truly wolves, they enjoy the protections of the Endangered Species Act. But if they turn out to be hybrids and they mate with wild wolves, the resulting offspring are not protected, and managers will be unable to tell which wolves are pure and which are not. In southeastern Australia, all the wild dingos appear to be dog-dingo hybrids. Something similar could happen to wolves in North America.

The presence of hybrids in these areas hurts efforts to persuade ranchers and hunters that they have little to fear from wolf-reintroduction efforts. Sheep and cattle killings or attacks on children by hybrids will be blamed on wolves when, in fact, the wolves in the neighborhood may be innocent. Says Lockwood of people who keep or release hybrids, “These people think they somehow
are undoing the Little Red Riding Hood syndrome through the keeping of hybrids, but ultimately it backfires.”

Because there are so many problems with wolf hybrids, there has been a movement to regulate their breeding and keeping. Nine states forbid the ownership of wolves or first-generation wolf hybrids, and a dozen more require permits or licensing for wolf hybrids or animals that might be taken for wolves. On top of that, an increasing number of cities and counties are outlawing or restricting ownership of wolf hybrids.