The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  Earl Hurst is a forty-eight-year-old bear hunter who lives in Grants Pass, Oregon. A logging-truck driver, he has worked in the woods all his life. In the fall, he puts two or three of his Walker hounds on a two-foot-high box on top of his Toyota pickup, chains them so they won’t fall off, and drives down skid roads in the woods. When the dogs catch the scent of a bear, they “open up,” or bay. He stops and looses them, and they chase the bear until it goes up a tree. Usually, he then pulls out a video camera to take his trophy in the form of pictures, after which he leashes his dogs, returns to the truck, and lets the badly shaken bear go. “I don’t get behind that program of shooting everything you tree,” he says. “I just like to hear the dogs.”

  Early one September morning, a few weeks into the 1991 bear season, Hurst was out with the dogs driving a new logging road thirty miles northwest of Grants Pass, looking for black bears. The road was covered with dust, and he drove slowly, reading track, through the fir and manzanita. He saw what appeared to be the prints of large dogs. Though he had been down that road several times, he had not seen the tracks of these animals before. Guessing that someone had lost his hunting dogs, Hurst thought, “I’ll drive down and pick them up, and return them to the owner.”

  “I rounded this corner,” he says, “and there were two of them”—large gray animals which he thought were dogs. He stopped and got out, intending to coax the animals into the back of his pickup.

  But as he stepped into the road, a third animal came out of the woods and walked around the back of the truck. By then one of the three hounds on the box on top of the truck was baying. And then the hounds all went quiet and cowered.

  The third animal, the one behind the truck, “was bristling and showing his teeth. And its eyes were staring and yellow. I’ve been around animals all my life, and I can tell an aggressive type of dog almost instantly. I have seen wild dogs that people let roam free. Wild dogs take down deer. And after they kill a deer, they’re not very aggressive. These were not like that at all.

  “They looked like the pictures of wolves I’ve seen, but I’d never seen any being that aggressive. They didn’t growl or make any noise at all. Their lips were turned up, showing their eye teeth, and the hair on the backs of their heads was standing up. They were really stiff-legged. I remember the eyes. They were driving me insane. It was like they were staring right through me. The first thing that entered my mind was, these were wolves and they were going to attack me and my dogs. They were just flat going to eat me up.”

  Fearing for his life, Hurst grabbed his gun from the cab of the truck, turned, and shot the one nearest him. It fell at the edge of the road, and the other two animals fled instantly into the woods. He looked at the dead animal. Larger than a coyote, with long legs and a big muzzle, it looked all over to Hurst like a wolf. He got back into his truck and drove to Grants Pass to summon warden Jack Baker, who drove back to the scene with him.

  Baker had heard reports of wolves in the area. Three years before, there had been repeated claims of wolf sightings on the Rogue River National Forest, near Crater Lake National Park. People said they had sighted a group of as many as six animals, and that they were not afraid of people and seemed to have been hand-reared. Oregon wildlife officials considered trying to live-capture one to X-ray its skull and send the film to a taxonomist. But when they consulted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, they were told that, if they accidentally killed one and it turned out to be a wolf, that would be a violation of the Endangered Species Act, and they’d be liable for a $10,000 fine and five years in jail. No one cared to take that risk.

  While there have been a dozen reports of howls, or of wolves dashing across roads in the Rogue River National Forest, Greg Clevinger, resource staff officer for the Rogue River National Forest in Medford, says he is not getting reports of sightings from the people he would expect to see wolves. “We ask government trappers around here, ‘You ever see any wolf tracks or hear wolves?’ They say no, they haven’t. I’ve talked to Bob Naney, on the wolf-recovery team in Washington. His feeling is, if you’ve got wolves, you know you’ve got them—you get howling, you get tracks.” The evidence has not been sufficient to declare these animals wolves or dogs.

  Still, officials had been trying to ascertain whether they indeed had wolves. The national forest does not have funding to hire its own crews to go out looking for wolves; it must rely on volunteers. A wolf brigade trained in California by Paul Joslin of Wolf Haven went out to look for wolf tracks and listen for howls, but they heard no howls and—in a winter of almost no snow—turned up no tracks.

  When Baker examined the dead animal, he told Hurst, “It sure looks like a wolf. You want me to write you a ticket now, or wait until we find out if it’s a hybrid?” Baker collected the carcass and sent it to the forensics lab in Ashland, which forwarded it to the Smithsonian Institution.

  While they awaited the results of testing at the Smithsonian, there were additional encounters. Hurst believes the two animals that fled from him appeared a month later on the Middle Fork of Cow Creek, where they walked into someone’s campsite and one was shot. The incident was not reported to authorities, because no woodsman wants to risk a fine and imprisonment should someone else decide that what he shot was an endangered species. Says Hurst, “I guess the big male is still running loose. Everybody that hunts that countryside is keeping an eye out, because they don’t want to get their dogs chewed up.”

  Measurements of the skull of the animal Hurst shot led a taxonomist at the Smithsonian to conclude that it was a wolf-dog hybrid. And that is where the question of what’s in the woods grows ticklish. According to Clevinger, there are almost a thousand people raising wolves or wolf hybrids in Oregon. Signs posted on trees advertise wolf-hybrid pups for sale. People sell them from the backs of pickup trucks by the road. Hurst says, “From talking to other people in the area, I do know there is some people at Sunny Valley that were raising wolves, and something came up that they were aggressive, and they got rid of them. Since then, I’ve seen the ads in the paper, usually about once a week, either wanting to buy wolf-dogs or wanting to sell them.”

  Are humans reseeding habitat once occupied by wolves with hybrid wolf-dogs? If so, says Hurst, “From what I’ve seen, I don’t want anything to do with them.”

  Wolf hybrids pose considerable problems. There are, according to Randall Lockwood, vice-president of Field Services for the Humane Society of the United States, between one and three hundred thousand wolf hybrids in the United States. And the number is growing. Wolves are still taken from the wild in Canada and Alaska, where they are not endangered, and bred to dogs. There are perhaps hundreds of wolves born in zoos but sold to private owners because the zoos can’t afford to keep them, and many of these are also bred to dogs. The growing hybrid population complicates the issue of wolf conservation and clouds our perception of wolves.

  People have been breeding dogs to wolves for as long as there have been dogs. Dogs are themselves domesticated wolves, whittled off that wild stock in bits and pieces at various times over the last twenty thousand years. Early speculations suggested that humans took wolves in to help them with hunting. But, says Lockwood, who studied wolves at the St. Louis Zoo and in Alaska, “The idea of humans and wolves running alongside each other, catching prey together, really doesn’t fit well with wolf biology. The way wolves hunt is often to cover miles and miles of terrain in a short time. No human group could keep up.” Lockwood believes, rather, that wolves were adopted because human and wolf societies were so interchangeable that wolves made good company, and because wolves, with their acute senses and aggressive defense of the pack, were excellent sentinels and warned of the approach of human invaders.

  Wolf domestication has gone on more or less continuously. Native Americans repeatedly bred their dogs to wolves. The planter William Byrd observed in 1728 that the Indians of Virginia took wolf pups from dens and kept them as dogs. Botanist Peter Kalm observed in 1750 that Indians in Pennsylvania dome
sticated wolves. In 1801, fur trader Alexander Henry reported that in North Dakota his dogs went out and ran with wolves for weeks at a time. Wolves would come into their camp when their female dogs went into heat. “Some of my men have amused themselves,” he wrote, “by watching their motions in the act of copulating, rushing upon them with an ax or club, when the dog, apprehending no danger, would remain quiet, and the wolf, unable to run off, could be dispatched.” In the 1870s, Joseph Grinnell reported that almost all the dogs among the Assiniboins, Crows, and Gros Ventres “appeared to have more or less wolf blood in their veins.” Similar cross-breeding must have been going on in Europe and Asia for thousands of years.

  The breeders bred for a variety of reasons, and their choices shaped vast differences among dogs. One people might breed their dogs to be shepherds—to be attentive, obedient, and swift. Another might breed watchdogs—large and aggressive creatures that would bark at or attack strangers. Some people bred dogs as toys, others to carry baggage, others to be long-legged hunters. Terriers are aggressive and persistent because they needed such qualities to pursue badgers and foxes into holes. Until the last two hundred years, humans lived in isolated populations, where their dog companions were rigidly selected for local conditions. A handful of mutations added qualities that differentiate dogs from wolves: the upcurved tails, the softer coat, the dark-colored eyes, the wider bodies, the tendency for hind legs to swing alongside rather than directly behind forelegs. But most of the genetic resources that shape the wide range of dog characteristics are present in the wolf. They are simply teased out of the genetic strands and emphasized by generation of artificial selection.

  This same molding of wolf genes goes on today, but now dogs are bred less and less for practical ends and more and more to reflect human vanities. It is not at all clear why people breed wolf hybrids, but it probably has much to do with the symbolism of wolves. Wolves are hard to keep, however, and today special permits from the states and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are required. Breeders conceive that they can keep the form of the wolf but trim the lupine behavior and the legal objections by mixing dog genes into the animals. There is no recognized standard for wolf hybrids, as there is for chihuahuas or golden retrievers, and there is no practical purpose, such as shepherding or hunting, that a standard might be shaped around. Lockwood has observed that hybrids in the United States are typically malamute-wolf crosses. In Europe, they are typically collie-wolf or standard poodle-wolf. In the Netherlands, there is a recognized breed called the Saarloos wolf-dog, the result of crossing wolves with German shepherds between the 1920s and 1960s. Movie animal trainers commonly breed Great Pyrenees or husky dogs to the wolves because they feel that is the only way to get an animal that looks like a wolf but performs as reliably as a dog.

  Appearances count with wolf hybrids. Says Lockwood, “Wolf-dog hybrids look a lot more like what people think wolves look like than wolves do. Wolves tend to look scrawny. If you see them in the summertime or before they are three years old, they tend to look like skinny, bony, lanky dogs. Most wolves weigh seventy to a hundred pounds. I’ve seen hybrids in excess of 150 pounds.”

  If you ask owners what is special about wolf hybrids, they’ll tell you different things. Some say they’re guard dogs, others say they’re extravagantly loyal; some think they have an animal capable of extrasensory perception; some are under the illusion that they’re helping to save the genes of the wolf, which they believe is going extinct in the wild. The most common reason has to do with the wolf’s sociability, its intense loyalty, its concentrated focus on the members of the pack. Hybrid owners want to train that loyalty on themselves. The wolfish nature of this sociability suggests that the loyalty is natural, not engineered, a gift from nature. And the liveliness of wolf perception suggests acquaintance with the deeper mysteries of life, an acquaintance the owners would like to share.

  Lockwood says, “A lot of people mistakenly feel they’re being put in touch with nature, closer to the wolf’s spirit. They see themselves as part of the environmental movement by owning this little piece of wild nature. For a lot of people it is a religion.”

  In fact, hybrids don’t work out to be good guard dogs. Wolves may be good sentinels, but they are not likely to come to an owner’s defense. Twice in one week while Bruce Weide was exercising his captive wolf Koani on a leash in southern California, the wolf was attacked by pit bulls. In both attacks, Weide had to fight the dogs off while the wolf cowered. Weide believed the wolf looked to humans for deliverance, because, in order to keep the wolf, the humans had maintained the roles of dominants. Says Ed Andrews, who has kept captive wolves and wolf hybrids in Washington, “You can’t make a guard dog out of a wolf. One of my wolves protected me from other wolves. I would have been killed one day had not my wolf, Cripple-foot, held the other wolves off. But had a man attacked me, he wouldn’t have known what to do.” Hybrids are no more reliable. The more wolflike a hybrid is, the greater the likelihood that it will either defer to its owner or be so aggressive that it must be kept in a cage.

  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 timb
er 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.”