San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
HIKING WITH WOLVES
Nestled in a quiet valley on the west end of the San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles, four women stood in a small circle, joined hands, closed their eyes and eased into several long, deep breaths. One after another, they issued brief consecrations of the day to come.
“This council is dedicated to giving and receiving,” said Cate Salansky.
“Host council” is an initiation ritual the women go through before they get to work, Salansky says, “so the team aligns its intentions and presences, to function as a pack would.”
As in, a wolf pack. Salansky is the director of development at Wolf Connection, a nonprofit sanctuary housing 34 wolves and wolfdogs on a 165acre swath of scrub in Angeles National Forest. Beyond providing a soft landing pad for abandoned canines to live out their twilight years, the organization pairs wolves with troubled teens, recovering addicts and wounded veterans to help them practice social bonding and step outside of their afflictions. Visitors learn about the stories of individual wolves — all of which suffered mistreatment before being brought to the sanctuary — interact with wolves in large outdoor enclosures, and go on guided hikes with the animals through the surrounding valley as well.
Engaging face to face with semiwild predators stirs people at their cores, says Wolf Connection founder Teo Alfero. A trained shamanic practitioner and author, Alfero says his program is designed to tap into the primal memory of our evolutionary link to wolves as a way of triggering psychological breakthrough or spiritual transformation. He calls the process “wolf therapy.”
“The theory I’m proposing here is that when these youths come in contact with the wolves, that memory gets activated,” Alfero says. “And that memory resides at a primal level that is beneath — underneath — all this socialized learned behavior. So all the hurt and pain and resentments and closedness ceases to be for a moment — just for a split second — and that allows us to begin a new conversation.”
Contemporary psychology draws from all manner of wildlife for therapeutic value. Equine therapy offers healing through horseback riding; otter therapy is meant to help children with terminal illnesses; an aquarium in Tacoma, Wash., even offers shark therapy to veterans with emotional disorders (the program is called Operation Shark Dive).
But Alfero contends that the tenets of wolf therapy set it apart from the pack. Wolves and humans, he says, share an evolutionary path based on mutual benefit that may be hardcoded into our DNA. “It’s not only to teens, it appeals to humans,” Alfero says. “And it is not any wild animals, it is the wolf.” As an indicator of Alfero’s resolve, he refers to instances of interspecies interactions at his sanctuary as “receiving the medicine.”
The idea to create a therapeutic wolf sanctuary hit Alfero like an epiphany 10 years ago. At the time, he was working with teens as an interventionist and life coach. While searching online for a playmate for his wolfdog puppy (which he acquired from a backyard breeder in the San Fernando Valley) in 2009, he found an adoption center housing 16 wolfdogs and began volunteering there a few days a week.
“Then one day, I’m speaking with the woman who runs the rescue center and these words come out of my mouth: I said, ‘All my life, I wanted to start a wolf sanctuary,’ ” Alfero recalls. “Today, I still don’t know where those words came from. It was not something that I had in the forefront of my interest or awareness, and yet they were honest words.”
So he bought a rugged 20acre piece of land in the San Gabriel Mountains, adopted all 16 of the center’s animals, and got to work. In 2015, he moved the operation to the current site outside Palmdale in Los Angeles County and expanded it to house approximately 30 wolves at a given time. The sanctuary regularly hosts students from the nearby school district for eightweek immersion courses that include lessons on biology, coevolutionary history and
“Then one day, I’m speaking with the woman who runs the rescue center and these words come out of my mouth: I said, ‘All my life, I wanted to start a wolf sanctuary.’ ” Teo Alfero, founder, Wolf Connection
behavioral sciences.
“I never realized that the two things I was looking for ... were going to merge so beautifully,” Alfero says.
A decade later, Alfero is spreading the gospel to a broader audience via private fullmoon hikes ($1,000 per ticket), community hikes of 60plus guests ($65) and smaller group hikes through a partnership with Airbnb ($165). Early reviews on Yelp have been wildly positive. Alfero also offers packmentality teambuilding and leadership training for tech companies. Across ancient mythologies of the Northern Hemisphere, wolves were venerated as teachers and representative of altruism and integrity, Alfero says. “We have imitated, over the millennia, migrating patterns and hunting techniques and social structure and even communication techniques or methods” from wolves.
Hollywood royals and L.A. elites have taken note. Star Wars’ Daisy Ridley indulged in a moonlight walk at Wolf Connection three years ago. After visiting the sanctuary to prepare for a film role, actor Jason Momoa (of “Aquaman”) was moved to adopt a wolf as a home pet. Actress Helen Hunt visited earlier this year and wrote about her experience on Instagram.
“These beautiful people work with atrisk kids and adults while honoring rescued wolves for the purpose of healing and empowering the next generation to become leaders and stewards of the earth,” she wrote. “Amen.”
After host council, Salansky leads a small group of visitors down an incline to a campfire circle and lays out the proposition of wolves as healers for humans. It’s a warm morning in May, and waisthigh scrub brush on the slopes around the sanctuary is bright with moisture from a long winter.
Wolves are misunderstood by the mainstream and misconstrued in pop culture, Salansky says.
After centuries of coexistence with humans, wolves have become an embattled icon of humanity’s complicated relationship to wilderness and wild things. Fearful Americans nearly hunted gray wolves to extinction in
the early 20th century, and notions of the ubiquitous “Big Bad Wolf ” persist in modern fables, leaving children with a grim impression of a creature on the precipice of total annihilation, Salansky says.
More recently, the animals have become symbolic of the growing cultural and political disconnect between rural and urban America; ranchers across the West demonize the animals for feeding on livestock while environmentalists advocate for their federal protection. (After being driven out of California completely, gray wolves are making a slow return; however, the only pack in the state has all but disappeared after several of its pups were shot and killed by ranchers this year.)
“It’s difficult to get a good, rational discussion about wolves because people are so polarized,” wolf photographer Tom Murphy told the San Francisco nonprofit advocacy group Earth Justice.
Politics aside, Salansky believes Wolf Connection provides an opportunity for selfawareness and selfimprovement. She notes a 2017 evaluation from Claremont Graduate University, which found that high school students who participated in Wolf Connection’s eightweek immersion program showed positive developments in academic performance and prosocial behavior. (The evaluation report notes, however, that the results are not conclusive.)
Our small group crosses a thin creek and approaches a sliding chainlink gate leading to the sanctuary’s main habitat. Salansky turns to face us. “In the next two hours, you’re going to get a little taste of that medicine,” Salansky says. “Check your ego, open your heart and shake yourself off. Any negative stuff you brought with you, let it go.”
Inside is a row of enclosures, most housing two canines. Purebred wolves and wolfdog mutts share a resemblance, but the fullblood animals stand out immediately with their spindly legs, large heads, yellow eyes and heavy paws. Some lope around their pens as we approach, some laze atop plywood kennels. They seem well adjusted — none bark even when they see us. One wolf howls when it spots Ree Merrill, one of the trainers, then rubs its flank on its pen until Merrill goes over and scratches its back.
Each pen is fit with name plates and brief profile statements about individual animals. The plate of a wolfdog called Leo reads: “I present myself to others as bold and calm . ... What do you see in me?”
“They each have their own pasts that shape who they are and can help us understand who we are,” Salansky says. “Hearing about the animals’ stories helps us work through our own issues.”
Koda was rescued from a roadside attraction in Alaska. Rafa arrived from a fur farm in the Midwest. Ryder was found tethered to a tree. Mikey was donated by an owner who lost interest when the puppy he purchased didn’t develop a wolfy enough appearance.
There’s been a reported rise in the breeding and selling — and ensuing abandonment — of wolfdogs and wolfylooking dogs in the U.S. in the past decade, which some attribute to the popularity of the HBO show “Game of Thrones” (which prominently features mythical representations of longextinct dire wolves). Casualties of that ebb and flow sometimes wind up at a small number of wolf sanctuaries across the U.S.
“Wolfdogs are wildly popular in the U.S. right now,” Salansky says. “Typically they come into rescue at about a year, year and a half, when their behavior starts to change” — that is, when they start to become sexually active and more exploratory and independent — “and they become full grown.”
The sanctuary has had to turn down dozens of potential rescues over the years for lack of space. But Alfero plans to expand the capacity and concept of Wolf Connection. He’d like to build out a fullfledged retreat center, habitats for 100 wolves, and an organic farm sustained by solar power and groundwater. “Ultimately, Wolf Connection is intended to become a destination for human growth and human enlightenment and a prototype for sustainable living,” Alfero says.
Salansky leads us into the pen of a mediumcontent wolfdog named Malo, a browneyed, 90pound animal with shaggy fur. We’re instructed to sit or kneel calmly with our hands turned up until Malo chooses to examine us. He seems disinterested at first, but soon pads over to us, sniffs our faces, licks our hands and nudges us for scratches — typical doglike behavior, but it feels special coming from a creature rooted to the wild.
After a brief hike into the hills above the pens with Koda and a darkhaired, yelloweyed, highcontent wolfdog named Luna, we return to the campfire for a debrief. Group members report being calmer and more present. “It’s a great combination — get some quiet and stillness, get some wolves — and come away feeling amazing,” one person says.
While we didn’t experience spiritual enlightenment, there was one moment during the day when we found ourselves mesmerized in the style that Wolf Connection espouses. We were in Malo’s pen when, on the far end of the enclosures, a few wolves began howling. Then more joined in. The howl rippled across the pens until every wolf lifted its nose and bellowed in chorus. We were surrounded by a noise none of us had ever heard before. It was loud and exhilarating and bewildering. For about 60 seconds, we were spellbound.
What’s going on? We asked Salansky. Two trainers had just removed one of the wolves from her pen in preparation for our guided hike, Salansky told us. “They’re checking in with each other to see who’s missing from the pack.” While the rescues at Wolf Connection aren’t technically a pack, they exhibit certain inherent packlike behaviors, Salansky explained.
It didn’t trigger a spiritual transformation, but we certainly felt a rush. It opened each of us to the possibility that being in the presence of wild wolves — at once familiar and mysterious — could leave a lasting positive impact on a person. That moment is one none of us will likely ever experience again.