The Company of Wolves

by Peter Steinhart

  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 t
hrough 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.”

  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.