How I see Wolves

I've only seen a live Wolf in person once. It was at a rodeo, and the announcer said there was a Wolf being shown out back. I went there, and I saw this happy looking Wolf sitting under a "patio" umbrella, with a tiny little fence around her to keep people from getting too close. No-one else seemed to be interested in seeing the Wolf, there were no other people there to see her, I guess the rodeo was more interesting. She was a pet, and the owners were sitting near her.

She looked so very......undoglike. She truly looked like a Wild animal who had wandered in and sat down, and would disappear forever into the woods at any time. She looked at me, seeming curious, bored, and comfortable all at the same time. Her eyes were very...wild looking. They did not look like a dog's eyes. There was this attitude and presense and intelligence behind them, a wild alienness, but also a creepy almost human look. I think they were yellow-green. It felt like looking into the very wild, back thousands of years, to look deeply in her eyes. Unlike other animals (especially animals one has just met for the first time) she just let me look in her eyes, from about 4 feet away, and kept looking into mine. She seemed very confident and centered.

She looked lean, rangy, slightly shaggy but obviously in her shorter summer coat. She was much larger than a Coyote, and looked different, especially about the face. Her legs seemed almost too long for her body. She was stretched out as if she had poured herself on the ground and was perfectly comfortable, in the same way a cat will pour itself anywhere and look like a furry bundle of liquid, blissful, totally relaxed muscle.

Pretty soon, her owners announced that she had probably had enough excitement and was probably too hot. They took her away on a leash. I noticed that she was smaller than she had looked when she was laying down. She was not led by them, she never went far enough away to get to the end of the leash, but she seemed to be comepletely unaware of the leash. She moved with this VERY catlike (yet wilder-looking than housecats) rippling, liquid, flowing movement. I was surprised at how her walking movements through some long dead grass flowed with the way the grass moved in the wind, making her blend in better than her light grey coat did. I could easily believe that I wouldn't notice her in the same grass if she were just 30 feet farther away and I took my eyes off her for a minute. I noticed that she did not move like wild coyotes I had seen, similar, yet different in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on. She was very alert as she was moving, using a gait that was almost pacing, looking around, smelling, pricking her ears up, she seemed almost to tiptoe through the grass.

After reading many books on wolves, I have been disturbed by how distorted most biologists' views of wolves are, by the way they see the wolf as such a "mindless biological machine" and largely ignore wolf behaviors that make wolves seem like intelligent beings who can think things over, make decisions, and love fellow wolves for reasons other than the cold, selfish drives of evolution and survival of the fittest. And too often, biologists cater to the cultural ideas concern wolves as "big nasty dogs" or approach things from a perspective of already having decided what they want too see instead of quietly observing and questioning. And too often, they forget that the true seeker of knowledge must not approach anything from a too-human perspective, especially when investigating non-human beings.

Here is a small list of the most ridiculous things I have read in biology books on wolves, all seriously claimed by biologists who believed they had proved them and argued for them, giving "evidence":

• German shepards look so much like wolves that it is certain that wolves cannot tell the difference between german shepards and wolves.

• Even though wolves scent-mark heavily around the boundary of their territory, and make scent markings in a much smaller density within their territory, and eagerly scent-mark anything that another pack has scent-marked, scent-marking does not mark territory or serve any other function at all, wolves just do it.

• Howling has no function at all, wolves do not howl because they like it, they do not howl because they are lonely, and there is no practical purpose to it at all such as gathering the pack or serving as an "auditory fence" around their territory to warn neighboring packs.

• When one Wolf waits in ambush and another Wolf chases prey towards it and the Wolf in ambush gets the prey, it is always totally done by accident, the Wolf in ambush was just resting there for no reason in particular, and the Wolf chasing the prey was not trying to drive it towards the Wolf in ambush, it just happened to chase it that way, and was surprised that the Wolf in ambush caught it. Also, despite Wolves repeatedly using this technique, they do not realize it exists as a technique, do not plan to do it, and are always surprised when it happens.

Wolf Related Links

• The Fish and Wildlife Service's History and Description of The Gray Wolf
• Desert Moon's Wolf Page THE best Wolf Page on the Web
• Why Wolves are not Dogs
• Why Wolves are not Coyotes
• The Werewolf Pages

Return to The Wolf Shapes page