The Company of Wolves (51 page)

In California, ownership of wolves or first-generation crosses requires permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and from the California Department of Fish and Game; hybrids other than first-generation crosses with wolves are considered dogs. The law requires every dog owner to vaccinate for rabies and license the animal before it is four months old. However, though the U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved specific vaccines for use with dogs, cats, horses, and ferrets, it has no approved vaccine for wolves: the USDA regards dogs and wolves as different creatures and will not assume that a vaccine effective in dogs will also be effective in wolves. Before approving rabies vaccine for an animal, the USDA requires tests in which at least thirty subject animals are injected with live rabies virus, tested for at least a three-year period, then challenged with the disease for another three-year period. No such testing has been completed on wolves—a test was undertaken at Auburn University but was discontinued when funding ran out. Wolf hybrids fall through the cracks in the law: hybrids must, as dogs, be licensed, and rabies vaccination is part of the licensing process; but, technically, they cannot be licensed, because they cannot be vaccinated for rabies.

Many are vaccinated and licensed anyway. But if a wolf hybrid bites a human, the bite may not be treated as a dog bite. If a cat or dog bites a human, California law requires the animal to undergo a ten-day quarantine, during which a rabies-infected dog or cat will usually shed rabies virus in its saliva or otherwise show symptoms of infection. But no one knows whether a wolf will demonstrate infection in the same short time; bats and skunks, for instance, have been known to take more than ten days to shed the virus. So wild animals
that bite humans are generally euthanized and their brains dissected and tested for rabies. Exceptions are made for exhibited and rare wild animals, which may undergo a thirty-day quarantine, but in such cases the human victim will have to undergo treatment for rabies. Unvaccinated dogs or cats exposed to rabid wild animals undergo six-month quarantines at the owner’s expense. If a wolf hybrid bites a human, whether or not it has been vaccinated, the animal-control authorities can require either a six-month quarantine at the owner’s expense or sacrifice of the animal for testing. In most other states, if a hybrid bites somebody, the animal must be sacrificed and the head presented to the state diagnostic lab for rabies testing.

The American Veterinary Medical Association does not recommend that wolf hybrids be vaccinated, fearing that vaccination will give owners a false sense of security. Many veterinarians won’t immunize a hybrid without having the owner sign a release stating he won’t hold the vet responsible should the vaccine not work. Companies manufacturing the vaccine say they have no liability if a veterinarian uses the vaccine in ways other than described in their product literature, and the literature does not recommend vaccination of wolves. The AVMA warns that a veterinarian who immunizes a wolf hybrid may have no insurance coverage in the event that the animal contracts rabies.

California requires the owner of a first-generation hybrid to have a permit and to build adequate fencing to keep the animal confined. Increasingly, however, counties and municipalities, seeing that the state has been unable to check whether permit holders have the required fencing, are moving to restrict or outlaw the ownership of hybrids.

Enforcing all these laws poses difficult problems. Once a hybrid owner finds that his pet may be killed or subjected to a six-month quarantine, he may suddenly decide to identify the animal as a dog. A Stanislaus County animal-control officer says that, twice when he has picked up animals identified as hybrids by owners, he told the owners he was going to quarantine their pets for fourteen days, and suddenly “the animals were no longer wolf hybrids.” The animal-control officer fears being sued by an owner if he sacrifices an animal that has been represented as a hybrid and the owner changes his
story—or by a bite victim if the owner registers a pet as a malamute and after the bite says he told the registering officer it was a wolf-malamute hybrid.

Few health-department officials or animal-control officers can distinguish wolf hybrids from dogs. It takes a trained taxonomist to judge from skull measurements, and a first-generation hybrid’s skull may fit in either category. Eye color is no indication, since wolves, malamutes, red Siberian huskies, and weimeraners all have yellow eyes. There is as yet no test of DNA to distinguish definitively between wolves and dogs. When there was great concern over pit-bull attacks, a private company tried to develop a genetic test with which to identify pit bulls and failed.

Dr. Robert Wayne is trying to develop such a test for wolves, but it is a tricky business. Since dogs were bred out of wolf blood lines less than twenty thousand years ago, the genes of dogs and wolves have not diverged much. Dogs were domesticated several times in history, and each domestication presents its own lineage, so a marker present in one dog may not be present in all dogs. Wayne will have to find the DNA sequences that are shared by dogs but not by wolves. Geneticist John Paul Scott believes all the differences we see between dogs and wolves could be accounted for by about twelve mutations. Finding pieces of those twelve fragments of DNA in the immense genome of the dog may be like finding a bottle drifting on the Pacific Ocean. At best, Wayne hopes to come up with combinations that give statistical likelihoods. He will look at the frequency of various gene sequences. “If this one is in 95 percent of dogs and 5 percent of wolves, it gives us a good indication. In the end, what we want to make is a probabilistic statement. We can say an individual, if it has this distribution, is a wolf, say, all but one in a million chances.”

Without such a test, identifying hybrids is more an art than a science. One of the leading artists is Monty Sloan, a wolf-behavior specialist at Wolf Park in Indiana. Young, slightly built, and bearded, Sloan started working with wolves at the San Francisco Zoo in 1984, and has worked at Wolf Park since 1988. He does not look anyone straight in the eye. “I think it’s something I derived from working with wolves,” he explains. “If the wolf doesn’t know you, eye contact
will result in aggression or fear. I get much more novel responses from dogs and hybrids because I don’t look at them until they come over. With wolves and wolf hybrids, you often have to kneel down to get them to come over to you.”

Sloan has made a study of differences between wolves and hybrids and has often been called in to judge whether an animal is a wolf or a dog. He says the judgment is seldom simple. “I can’t say this animal has wolf in it or this animal doesn’t have wolf in it. Anything less than 25 percent wolf will not look wolflike. Very high wolf-content hybrids will tend to be so wolflike in characteristics that you can’t tell any dog content. I look at general body build, behavioral characteristics, how they act to a novel person, how they carry themselves. Wolves are very narrow-chested. Hybrids have shorter legs. The back won’t be straight across.” Microscopic examination usually reveals four bands of color on an individual wolf hair, but only three on a dog’s. A hybrid will have pointed ears, whereas a wolf’s are more rounded, and the hybrid’s ears will be thinner: when the light is behind them, a little pink shows through. Sloan looks also at the animal’s behavior. For example, an adult wolf, he says, will roll over in playful submission in front of a pup, but a dog will not necessarily do that.

He seldom finds one distinctive quality. “It’s a blend—you can’t point to any single characteristic. A lot of the things I see are subtleties. I can’t even say what I’m seeing.”

Other students of the art look for different qualities. Terry Jenkins sees fur inside the ears, cheek tufts, or dense underfur on the legs in winter as wolf traits. The claws of wolves and wolf hybrids are bigger in diameter than dog claws; Jenkins looks especially at the way an animal moves. “Wolves have fluid movements. Often I’ve been struck, when seeing a high-percentage wolf walking on a leash, that it was a big cat. The movement is classically smooth.” But none of these traits, she concedes, is definitive.

While we argue over the nature of individual animals, the hybrid population continues to grow. Hybrids pose enormous challenges, but few of us have the resources to cope with them. When we release them into the wild, we confound the nature of wolves and challenge our own understanding of nature. We threaten the integrity of ecosystems. We even confound the nature of the dog.

Says Randall Lockwood: “I think we have spent fifteen to twenty thousand years transforming the wolf, through the process of domestication, into an animal that for the most part can live safely, happily, and humanely in human homes. In producing and proliferating wolf hybrids, we take a big step backwards. We are undoing what we have worked twenty thousand years to do.”

Our interest in wolves expresses the hunger of our imaginations. For many, science is too narrow a view, and wolves are as much spiritual as biological. They say that, to understand wolves, we must go beyond what we can see into realms of spirit. Much of the literature of wolves urges us to hark back to what native Americans said about the animals. A number of people suggest that, if we could but regard the wolf as native Americans did, we would take it to our hearts, see it clearly, and recognize higher powers that stitch us to the cosmos.

Ethnographic studies suggest that native North Americans held wolves in high regard. Plains Indians, particularly, acknowledged a high degree of similarity between humans and wolves, and they celebrated the likenesses in wolf-clan totems, wolf-warrior societies, and hunting techniques that consciously imitated wolf behavior. Modern Eskimos express deep respect for the wolves they see. Might we find new spiritual realms by talking with other cultures about how they live with wolves?

Fort Chipewyan is an Indian village notched into the spruce-forested southwest shore of Lake Athabaska, in northern Alberta. To the west of town is the Peace-Athabaska Delta, a broad, marshy, river-braided plain that stretches for hundreds of miles. The delta forms where the Peace and Athabaska rivers back up against the granitic mass of the Canadian shield. When spring snowmelt comes to the Rocky Mountains, the rivers flood over this plain, producing a watery environment that is home to beaver, muskrat, millions of ducks and geese, the northernmost subspecies of bison, and the largest documented packs of gray wolves in North America.

Today, Fort Chipewyan is a miscellany of low trailers and aluminum-sided houses with steeply pitched roofs. On a knoll at the east end of town is the new Fort Chipewyan Lodge, a prominent, two-story cedar-sided structure overlooking the lake. Those who can afford it, and many who can’t, drive up there on weekends to drink in its bar. On the west end of town, also on a knoll, is the 150-year-old Catholic mission, a rambling, red-roofed, wood-frame structure with gables and steeples. The main street is paved from the mission to the lodge, and midway between them a Canadian flag flutters in the stiff breeze out in front of the offices of Wood Buffalo National Park. Unnamed dirt streets run off the paved road, but there is hardly anyone on the streets. Boats and snowmobiles sit glumly in the weeds. Ravens croak from perches in spruce and birch trees. Dogs bark and howl, sometimes in packs, picking up a low moan and passing it along from one end of the silent town to the other.

This town is sixty miles away from the next pavement, unconnected by road to anything, except when winter freezes the Slave River and one can drive on the ice to Fort Smith. The population of nine hundred is almost all native: Crees, Chipewyans, and Métis Indians. It is a mix, not just of native cultures, but of old and new. Traditional Indian music chants from a speaker inside the old folks’ home, and at a window an old man stands listening pensively to it. Native trappers sell their furs at the Northern Store, a low, yellow, windowless building on the main street. They are apt to walk out of the store with Green Giant frozen peas, Eggo frozen waffles, Skippy peanut butter, Aunt Jemima syrup, El Molino tortilla chips, Mamma Mia frozen pizza, Shake ’n Bake, and Tang.

In front of the store is a blue wooden bench, coated with dust
from the clouds raised by passing trucks and vans, that is the heart of the town. It is here that the old men gather to tell stories, to fish for stories, to wait for stories. Stories thread their lives, tie them to the earth and its creatures and to other human beings. Stories carry the wisdom of elders and give a sense of one’s place in the life of the people. I have come here to hear stories about wolves, and to see how wolves live in the spirit of these people.

On the bench, two old men are talking about the unusual August weather. The temperature last night went down to minus two, and tonight it will drop again. For the last three weeks, the clouds have been not the clouds of summer but the clouds of autumn—higher, more anvil-shaped, with rain in them. There is an undercurrent that this is just another one of the changes.