Be very afraid of the big bad wolf
FEARLESS: Hungry predators now associate humans with food and they’re sizing us up as prey
From the dining hall, it sounded like a fight — a midnight scuffle between feuding workers at the Cigar Lake uranium mine.
A security guard hopped into her vehicle and headed out to break it up — and for a split second, her headlights illuminated a scene that was anything but a fist fight: a wolf with its jaws around the neck of a 26-year-old kitchen worker.
The truck’s arrival spooked the wolf away and the security guard jumped out to provide first aid.
“A single wolf basically pounced on him,” a mine representative said of the Aug. 29 incident.
Wolf attacks aren’t supposed to happen this way, but wolves don’t act as expected in Northern Saskatchewan.
On the rare occasion a human is bitten by a North American wolf, the animal is usually rabid or surprised. But this wolf had apparently ambushed the worker.
“The whole incident is unusual, very unusual,” said Paul Paquet, a renowned mammalian biologist who works with the Raincoast Conservation Foundation and consults on wolves for Cameco, owner of the Cigar Lake mine.
At Cigar Lake, Facebook posts document wolves following hikers or making themselves “visible.” Several workers say the animals tail work crews and watch from distant ridges.
“They are absolutely huge … they have no fear of man and come into the job sites often at night,” S.J. Rowe, a former Cigar Lake worker, said in a message to the National Post. He recalled having a wolf follow him across a frozen lake.
The pattern is similar across the uranium-mining region of Northern Saskatchewan, one of the world’s richest sources of uranium.
In the past 12 years, there have been three suspected wolf attacks on men here. All took place within 100 kilometres of one another — the range of a single wolf pack.
On New Year’s Eve 2005, Cameco worker Fred Desjarlais was walking home when a wolf lunged at him from a ditch. The burly man grabbed it around the neck and held on until fellow workers came to his aid.
Ten months later, Kenton Carnegie, 22, a university student at a mining exploration camp, was killed in what a coroner’s jury later determined was a wolf attack. Cigar Lake is roughly halfway between the two attacks.
But Paquet, who was hired to research Carnegie’s death, disputes the jury’s findings. Given the unreliability of witness statements and the trampling of evidence around the body, he says he can’t rule out a black bear.
When wolves lose their fear of humans, as is happening in Northern Saskatchewan, the explanation is habituation. They start by learning to associate humans with easy snacks of garbage and food.
Then, as they get used to roaming around in sight of human settlements, they’ll attempt what biologists call an “exploratory attack.” They try to take down a human.
“If a person gets attacked, it’s likely that it’s being tested by the wolf, to see if it might serve as prey,” said Dennis Murray, a conservation biologist at Trent University.
In extreme cases, wolves become so bold, they may challenge humans for territory — a scenario virtually unknown since the Middle Ages. In the 15th century, for instance, residents of Paris had to cope with invasions of wolf packs “accustomed to eating human flesh,” as contemporary accounts put it.
In the modern era, wolf-human interactions are never allowed to progress that far.
Banff and Jasper national parks face constant pressure from wolves looking to dine at unattended campsites. Parks Canada maintains a round-the-clock vigil to ensure invading wolves are constantly reminded they’re unwelcome.
Nor has Cameco ignored the problem. After the 2005 attacks, it installed fencing around its garbage dump, provided wolf training for employees and buckled down on hazing persistent wolves.
“Scare cannons” are brought in for persistent wolves and Saskatchewan law says “lethal means” can be used as a last resort.
It’s troubling that human habituation can be “passed down through wolf generations,” said Murray.
Wolves may be growing up in a world in which they have never feared humans, and where square structures and bipeds indicate an easy meal.
“Wolves rewrite the book on how they behave all the time,” said Paquet.