from flicker
Everything we know about wolves applies to dogs, too,
eventually became a dog because he left the ecological niche his ancestor may have
shared with the wolf ’s ancestors probably some 500,000 years ago. The scientists
aren’t entirely in agreement on the exact time yet, but that’s not so important.
The fact remains that the domestic dog evolved in a totally different environment
than the wolf. Their genetic similarity means about as much (or as little) as our
similarity to various apes means.
But there is more you need to know. Even if we could apply what we know
about wolves to dogs, the fact is that we don’t know very much about wolves.
This may surprise you. Indeed, much has been published about wolves — books,
articles, documentaries on television — and most of it in such an authoritative
tone. Surely we must know all about them? The trouble is that much of what
people pretend to know about wolves has been based either on fantasy and
speculation, or on insufficient data and poorly designed research.
Mankind has been waging a war of annihilation against the wolf
for hundreds of years now, because modern man always viewed the wolf as a
competitor in the hunt and a danger to his cattle. There may have been a time
when the wolf wasn’t scared of humans, but that was long before we developed
writing, let alone science. By the time we decided to study the wolf, this animal
had become so shy of us that it was almost impossible to get a glimpse of him
in his natural habitat. This is, first of all, because by that time there were already
damned few wolves left to study. And second of all, the ones that did survive us
had learned to melt away into the forest the instant they heard or smelled us, and
still do. It has been almost impossible, for more than one hundred years now,
to even see a wild wolf, let alone study his behaviour — except the behaviour of
fleeing from a threat to his life.
in the wild, while science demands that conclusions be based on observations.
Scientists puzzled for a while, then came up with a solution of their own. Once in
a while they manage to shoot a wolf with a tranquilliser dart, after which they put
a radio collar around his neck and release him to rejoin his pack. After that, the
scientists can locate the group of wolves by following the signal the collared wolf
is transmitting. What they generally do is go out in a plane and fly around in the
hope of picking up a signal. Some days they are lucky. They locate the wolves and
try to follow the group, watching the wolves’ behaviour from the air. However,
there is a problem with this. As soon as the plane was invented, people, as usual,
abused this technology. They immediately began to kill wolves from the air. At
this point, the wolf has had almost a hundred years to learn that the sound of a
plane is a signal of death. Wolves who hear a plane do not go hang out on open
terrain and display all kinds of natural behaviour for you. They head for cover
as quickly as they can. Yet again, the only behaviour the scientist sees is flight
behaviour. So Discovery Channel may make it look as if you can just walk into
the woods and film a bunch of wolves from close by, but this isn’t how it works.
The shots you see on TV are often the product of long and careful searching and
tracking, and then filmed with telescopic lenses the size of your arm. They are
pieces of luck and the result of enormous patience. Lots of people who research
wild wolves spend years just finding and analysing scats (wolf poop) without ever
getting a glimpse of a real, live wolf.
Because of this, much of the published research on wolves has been
done on captive wolves. Scientists gather together whatever wolves are, for some
reason, available, and they house the wolves in a pen somewhere. Under the best
of circumstances, the enclosure may be a couple of square miles. The wolves are
then fed daily. Scientists can settle back and observe what the animals do, since the
animals can’t escape them anymore. This is, of course, a highly artificial situation.
First of all, the wolves behave while being watched by their jailer. This means we
watch them under heightened stress and have no idea what they’d do if a human
weren’t around. Secondly, it gives us no idea what the wolves would be doing if
they had to go get their own food instead of hanging about all day with nothing
much to do. Finally, the scientist has in fact taken a bunch of arbitrarily selected
total strangers and shut them up in an unnaturally small amount of space, and is
forcing them to live with each other in this small space for the duration of their
lives whether they like it (and each other) or not.
This is contrary to all natural circumstances. There are a few things we do
know for sure about wolves from the glimpses people have gotten of them living
free in the forests. In the wild, a group of wolves travels a territory far too large
for any human to enclose. Travelling is the main thing they do, filling their days
with finding food. A natural pack is not a collection of strangers. A natural pack
is a family, whose members know each other from birth. These family members
stay together voluntarily, and each and every one of them can leave at will if he
doesn’t like it anymore. They can also leave to seek out a mate and form their
own family. They do not have to stay together no matter what, anymore than you
have to live with your own parents forever.
You won’t learn much about the natural behaviour of wolves by jailing
a group of strangers on a tiny surface area and watching them be bored there,
except maybe that they are so tolerant and social that they still don’t kill each
other. Dr. L. David Mech, just about the greatest living authority on wolves, put
it in a nutshell with these words: ‘Such an approach is analogous to trying to draw
inferences about human family dynamics by studying humans in refugee camps.’
Even where we can get a glimpse of wolf life in the wild, we are now
watching a species whose habitat has been mostly destroyed. Food is now much
more scarce for them than it was one hundred years ago. So is living space. So
even then, we are watching wolves whose behaviour has been influenced by our
presence, which has caused them a lot of problems.
Fact: The dog is not a wolf. If you want to know about dogs, you have to study
dogs. But aside from this, and whether or not you could apply knowledge about
wolves to dogs, the fact is that we don’t have much knowledge about wolves in
the first place. The stories that are told about them are all too often hunters’ tales
and jailers’ anecdotes — basically nonsense, based on myths, fantasy, imagination,
speculation, projection, lies and/or poorly designed research; or by watching
them behave in a habitat that is decaying and disappearing right under their feet.
It is no longer possible to study how wolves behave without some kind of human
influence interfering with the picture.
by Alexandra Semyonova
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