Wolf puppies are adorable, but they’re definitely not dogs
NICOLET, Quebec — I’m sitting in an outdoor pen with four puppies chewing my fingers, biting my hat and hair, peeing all over me in their excitement.
At 8 weeks old, they are 2 feet from nose to tail and must weigh 7 or 8 pounds. They growl and snap over possession of a much-chewed piece of deer skin. They lick my face like I’m a long-lost friend or a newfound toy. They are just like dogs, but not quite. They are wolves.
When they are full-grown, at around 100 pounds, their jaws will be strong enough to crack moose bones. But because these wolves have been around humans since they were blind, deaf and unable to stand, they will still allow people to be near them, to do veterinary exams, to scratch them behind the ears — if all goes well.
Yet even the humans who raised them must take precautions. If one of the people who has bottle-fed and mothered the wolves practically since birth is injured or feels sick, she won’t enter their pen to prevent a predatory reaction. No one will run to make one of these wolves chase him for fun. No one will pretend to chase the wolf. Because if there’s one thing all wolf and dog specialists I’ve talked to over the years agree on, it is this: No matter how you raise a wolf, you can’t turn it into a dog.
Despite all the similarities, something is deeply different in dog genes, or in how and when those genes become active, and scientists are trying to determine exactly what it is.
There are clues.
Some recent research has suggested that dog friendliness might be the result of something similar to Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder in humans that causes hypersociability, among other symptoms. People with the syndrome seem friendly to everyone, without the usual limits.
Another idea being studied is whether a delay in development during a critical socializing period in a dog’s early life could make the difference. That delay might be discovered in the DNA, more likely in the sections that control when and how strongly genes become active, rather than in the genes themselves.
This is research at its very beginning, a long shot in some ways. But this past spring and summer, two scientists traveled to Quebec to monitor the development of six wolf pups, do behavior tests and take genetic samples.
Sleeping with wolves
Zoo Académie is a combination zoo and training facility on the southern bank of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, about two hours from Montreal. Jacinthe Bouchard, the owner, has trained domestic and wild animals, including wolves, all over the world.
This past spring she bred two litters of wolf pups from two female wolves and one male she had at the zoo. Both mothers gave birth in the same den around the same time at the beginning of June. Then unusually bad flooding of the St. Lawrence threatened the den, so Bouchard had to remove them at about 7 days old instead of the usual 2 weeks.
Then began the arduous process of socializing the pups. Bouchard and her assistant stayed day and night with the animals for the first few weeks, gradually decreasing the time spent with them after that.
On June 30, Kathryn Lord and Elinor Karlsson showed up with several colleagues, including Diane Genereux, a research scientist in Karlsson’s lab who would do most of the hands- on genetics work.
Lord is part of Karlsson’s team, which splits time between the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester and the Broad Institute in Cambridge. Their work combines behavior and genetic studies of wolf and dog pups.
An evolutionary biologist, Lord is an old hand at wolf mothering. She has handraised five litters.
“You have to be with them 24/7. That means sleeping with them, feeding them every four hours on the bottle, “Lord said.
Also, as Bouchard noted, “we don’t shower” in the early days, to let the pups get a clear sense of who they are smelling.
There are two questions the scientists want to explore. One, said Karlsson: “How did a wolf that was living in the forest become a dog that was living in our homes?”
The other is whether fear and sociability in dogs are related to the same emotions and behaviors in humans. If so, learning about dogs could provide insights to some human conditions in which social interaction is affected, like autism, or Williams syndrome or schizophrenia.
The pups at Zoo Académie were only 3 weeks old when the group of researchers arrived. I showed up the next morning and walked into a room strewn with mattresses, researchers and puppies.
The first part of Lord’s testing was to confirm her observations that the critical period for wolves starts and ends earlier than that for dogs.
She set up a procedure for testing the pups by exposing them to something they could not possibly have encountered before — a jiggly buzzing contraption of birdscare rods, a tripod and a baby’s mobile.
Each week she tested one pup, so no pup got used to it. She would put the puppy in a small arena, with low barriers for walls and with the mobile turned on. She would hide, to avoid distracting the puppy. Video cameras recorded the action, showing how the pups stumbled and later walked around the strange object, or shied away from it, or went right up to sniff it.
The researchers will not publicize the results until observers who never saw the puppies view and analyze the videos. But Lord said wolf experts considered 8-weekold wolf puppies past the critical period. They were so friendly to me and others because they had been successfully socialized.
When they grow up
And what are socialized wolves like when they grow up, once the mysterious genetic machinery of the dog and wolf direct them on their separate ways?
I also visited Wolf Park, in Battle Ground, Indiana, a 65-acre zoo and research facility where Dana Drenzek, the manager, and Pat Goodmann, the senior animal curator, took me around and introduced me not only to puppies they were socializing, but to some adult wolves.
In the 1970s, Goodmann worked with Erich Klinghammer, the founder of Wolf Park, to develop the 24/7 model for socializing wolf puppies, exposing them to humans and then also to other wolves, so they could relate to their own kind but accept the presence and attentions of humans.
But I also wondered whether it was right to keep wolves in this setting. In the wild, they travel large distances and kill their food. These wolves were all bred in captivity and that was never a possibility for them.
I asked Goodmann about it. She said the park operated on the idea that getting to know the park’s wolves, which had never been deprived of an earlier life in the wild, would make visitors care more for wild wolves, for conservation, for preserving a life for wild carnivores that they could never be part of.
This is the rationale for all zoos, and it was a strong argument. She pointed out that one of the interns, Doug Smith, worked on the reintroduction of wild wolves to Yellowstone National Park.
He said ethical questions about keeping wild animals in captivity are difficult, even when every effort is made to enrich their lives. But places like Wolf Park provide great value, he said, if they can get people “to think about the plight of wolves across the world, and do something about it.”
Then he said what all wolf specialists say: That even though wolf pups look like dogs, they are not, that keeping a wolf or a wolf-dog hybrid as a pet is a terrible idea.
“If you want a wolf,” he said, “get a dog.”