Getting too close for comfort
WHEN WOLVES NO LONGER FEAR HUMANS, ATTACKS ARE INEVITABLE
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 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 sprang 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 adult men here. All took place in 100 kilometres of one another — within 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.
“If, in fact, it was a wolf attack, it’s way outside what we understand and we know,” he said.
When wolves lose their fear of humans, as is happening in northern Saskatchewan, the standard 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 will attempt what biologists call an “exploratory attack:” try to take down a human.
“If a person gets attacked, it is likely that it is being tested by the wolf, to see if it might serve as prey,” said Dennis Murray, a conservation biologist at Trent University, in an email to the National Post.
This is typical of other wild canids, he says. He described being in Yellowstone National Park several years ago when a “habituated” coyote began stalking a five-yearold before it was chased away by adults.
“I am convinced that the animal would have attacked the kid if we hadn’t intervened.”
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, for instance, face constant pressure from wolves looking to dine at unattended campsites. Parks Canada maintains a roundthe-clock vigil to ensure invading wolves are constantly reminded they are 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.
“Workers are encouraged to report all wildlife sightings to the site safety or environment departments at our operations,” Gord Struthers, a Cameco representative, told the National Post by email.
“Scare cannons” are brought in for persistent wolves and Saskatchewan law allows “lethal means” can be used as a last resort.
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. “We don’t really know everything about them.”