Wolf Puppies Are Adorable. Then Comes the Call of the Wild.
They are very cute, but they are not dogs. They are never to be fully trusted
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 more than half a metre from nose to tail and must weigh 7 or 8 pounds. They growl and snap over possession of a muchchewed piece of deer skin. They lick my face like I’m a long-lost friend, or a new-found 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. Every experienced wolf caretaker will stay alert. 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.
As close as wolf and dog are — some scientists classify them as the same species — there are differences. Physically, wolves’ jaws are more powerful. They breed only once a year, not twice, as dogs do. And behaviourally, wolf handlers say, their predatory instincts are easily triggered compared with those of dogs. They are more independent and possessive of food or other items. Much research suggests they take more care of their young. And they never get close to that Labrador retriever “I-love-all-humans” level of friendliness. As much as popular dog trainers and pet-food makers promote the inner wolf in our dogs, they are not the same. There are clues. Some recent research has suggested that dog friendliness may be the result of something similar to Williams syn- drome, 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 travelled to Quebec to monitor the development of six wolf pups, do behaviour tests and take genetic samples. I followed them.
I visited other captive wolves as well, young and adult, to get a glimpse of how a research project begins — and, I confess, to get a chance to play with wolf puppies.
I wanted to have some firsthand experience of the animals I write about, to look wolves in the eye, so to speak. But only metaphorically. As I was emphatically told in a training session before going into an enclosure with adult wolves, the one thing you definitely do not do is look them in the eye.
Zoo Académie is a combination zoo and training facility here on the southern bank of the St. Lawrence River, about two hours northeast of Montreal near Trois-Rivières. Jacinthe Bouchard, the owner, has trained domestic and wild animals, including wolves, all over the world.
In the 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 behaviour and genetic studies of wolf and dog pups.
An evolutionary biologist, Lord is an old hand at wolf mothering. She has hand-raised 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.
That is very important, because both wolves and dogs go through a critical period as puppies when they explore the world and learn who their friends and family are.
With wolves, that time is thought to start at about two weeks, when the wolves are deaf and blind. Scent is everything.
In dogs, it starts at about four weeks, when they can see, smell and hear. Lord thinks this shift in development, allowing dogs to use all their senses, might be key to their greater ability to connect with human beings.
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 behaviours 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 bird-scare 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.
At three weeks, the pups had been barely able to get around and were still sleeping almost every minute they were not nursing. By eight weeks, when I returned to have them gambol all over me, they were rambunctious and fully capable of exploration.
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-week-old wolf puppies past the critical period. They were so friendly to me and others because they had been successfully socialized.
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 26-hectare 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, even intrusive ones like veterinarians.
I saw how powerfully a visit with wolves could affect how you feel about the animals. I wanted to come back and help raise pups, and keep visiting so that I could say an adult wolf knew me in some way.
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.
But was I simply indulging a fantasy of getting close to nature? Was this in the same category as wanting a selfie with a captive tiger? What was best for the wolves themselves?
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.
And she noted that Wolf Park operates as a combination zoo and research station. Students and others from around the world compete to work as interns, helping with everything from raising puppies to emptying the fly traps.
This is the rationale for all zoos, and it was a strong argument. Then she made it stronger. She pointed out that one of the interns, Doug Smith, worked on the reintroduction of wild wolves to Yellowstone National Park.
Smith has had a major role in the Wolf Restoration Project from the very beginning in 1995 and has been project leader since 1997. I reached him one morning at his office at park headquarters and asked him about his time as an intern at Wolf 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.”
In today’s environment, “with conservation on the run, nature on the run, you need them,” he added.
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.
‘You have to be with them 24-7.’ KATHRYN LORD BIOLOGIST