Living with wolves alters opinions
For six years in the 1990s, documentary filmmaker Jim Dutcher lived among a pack of wolves in Idaho. His wife, Jamie, joined him in 1993, and together they witnessed acts of wolf devotion, compassion and rivalry.
The Dutchers have documented the sights and sounds of their pack mates, producing six books and three television documentaries.
Writing in alternate chapters in “The Wisdom of Wolves,” the Dutchers reflect on their experiences and make a plea for kinder treatment of the animals.
“Caring for the young ones — and for each other — was the central mission in their lives,” the Dutchers explain. The alpha leader, whom they named Kamots, grasped the perspective of other wolves in the pack and often sought to reassure them.
When he let his low-ranking brother, Lakota, win a game of tag, he demonstrated an understanding that “it would be rewarding for Lakota to enjoy a moment of victory.”
Such anecdotes suggest that this capacity for a theory of mind — seeing the world from another’s perspective — is found in wolves generally.
Occasionally, the Dutchers’ interpretation of wolf behavior oversteps the bounds of science. How could they know, for instance, that the wolves had “anticipated” the birth of pups to a pregnant female? And wolves can’t correctly be said to “organize themselves similarly to the way early human societies did: as nuclear families within extended families,” because no solid evidence of the family arrangements of our early ancestors exists.
But these are minor objections to a work that is illuminating in its mission to tell the story of the wolf mind and of individual wolf personalities.
In an irony they are the • “The Wisdom of Wolves: Lessons From the Sawtooth Pack” (National Geographic, 224 pages, $26) by Jim Dutcher and Jamie Dutcher
first to acknowledge, the Dutchers never lived with wild wolves. In 1990, Jim constructed a 25-acre enclosure on Forest Service land. He then set about creating a wolf pack by hand-rearing pups and introducing different generations. Jim and Jamie lived in an enclave within the enclosure.
As the Dutchers see it, these wolves — the Sawtooth Pack — became their “social partners.” When the first wolf pups in 50 years in the entire Sawtooth, Idaho, region were born to a female in the Dutchers’ pack, she allowed Jamie to enter the birthing den.
After six years, the permits to keep the wolves on the Forest Service land were denied. In 1996, the wolves were sedated then relocated to Nez Perce tribal lands in northern Idaho.
Yet it’s an inescapable and sorrowful fact that these wolves would almost certainly have been under greater duress had they lived fully wild. In Idaho, no region is protected for wolves. In 2014, the Dutchers report, the state’s department of fish and game sold 43,300 hunting tags, though only 650 wolves were living in the state.
Jim and Jamie Dutcher provide a beautiful portrait of these highly misunderstood animals. Wolves, they tell us, live with “an openness and a sincerity that are beyond most humans.”