Wolves still howl at night in parts of Europe. Sarah Marshall-Pescini listens to them from her house in rural Emilia-Romagna, Italy. “I love hearing them,” she says, “It is one of the most beautiful sounds on the planet. But it puts me on alert.”
She adds: “Wolves are top predators and can be very dangerous.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, hearing this. No such involuntary reaction occurs when I am grilling contacts about accounting standards. Wolves are fierce, free and mysterious, characteristics that accountants generally lack. Wolves stalk the wild wood of the psyche in the northern hemisphere, even in countries where they are scarce or absent.
What we do have in the UK is a lot of dogs, the domesticated cousin of the wolf. The frisson evoked by wolves inspires one popular interpretation of how dogs behave. Evidence includes articles with such headlines as “Ten ways Fido resembles the Big, Bad Wolf”. These underpin a traditional, low-tolerance school of dog ownership that lingers on in many countries.
This model of canine behaviour insists that dogs seek alpha status within the wolf pack represented by a human family. The owner must make clear the puppy is at the bottom of the pecking order, the claim goes. When I was a kid, training manuals recommended yelling at animals that “did not know their place” or whacking them with a rolled-up magazine.
Cruelty to animals is intolerable. Moreover, old-school dog ownership is based on a misunderstanding of dogs and wolves. My own belief that they are separated only by a thin varnish of domestication crumbled recently. I have Seamus to thank for that.
Seamus is a young, mixed-breed dog belonging to a friend. He is loveable but loopy. Our friend cannot let Seamus off the lead when he visits our house. He would bowl children over, jump on tables and disembowel the sofa with the vigour of a hyena eviscerating a dead hippopotamus.
There is not a mean-spirited thought in Seamus’s affectionate, excitable and generally empty head — unless you are a chicken. He is an accomplished killer of these. As prey, he favours fancy hens with pet names ranging freely in the cottage gardens of teleworking professionals. These owners are just the type with the contacts and finances to pursue expensive legal actions.
Our friend has made valiant efforts to train Seamus, assisted by a string of bewildered dog therapists. My hunch is that there is no point trying to instil discipline into an animal with little capacity to connect cause and effect.
The idea that Seamus is a wolf in a curly wig is equally ridiculous. No self-respecting wolf pack would admit him. “We are a well-co-ordinated group of apex predators with high innate curiosity and well-developed cognition,” they would say. “We are not social workers.”
The wolf in dog’s clothing theory underplays how far wolves and dogs have diverged. The popular hypothesis is that cave people adopted orphaned wolf pups, as the Stark brats did in Game of Thrones. A variation on the theme envisages a lone wolf approaching a Stone Age campfire 30,000 years ago seeking a handout. The next day, it went hunter-gathering with its new bipedal friends. The day after, the humans left the wolf behind in the cave to babysit. It put up curtains, presumably.
A more realistic scenario emerges from research by Marshall-Pescini and colleagues at the Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology at the Veterinary Medicine University of Vienna. This suggests a strand of the wolf clan adapted to a life scavenging on the periphery of human society before slowly integrating into it. The proto-dog depended on food obtained without collaborative pack hunting. It became polygamous, more aggressive to peers and less fearful of humans.
Later, I might add, breeders selected animals able to form strong, life-long bonds with humans. This characteristic is a key difference. Hand-reared wolves appear to recognise human foster parents in later life. That is as far as assimilation generally goes.
Moreover, we may have misunderstood wolf society in the first place, says Jane Williams, secretary of the UK’s Animal and Behaviour Training Council. First, a lot of the research is on North American timber wolves rather than the Eurasian grey wolves whose ancestry dogs more closely share. Second, “wolves in captivity are more aggressive because they may be unrelated and competition is higher”.
Williams describes the notion of owners as surrogate pack leaders and pet dogs as omega animals as “discredited”.
Nor are there any verified accounts of predatory wolves disguising themselves as grandmothers.
As for Seamus, he adores his owner and is adored in return. But he will have to stay on a tight lead around chickens. Hopefully, maturity will quieten his spirit. It is a good job he does not reside in the wilds of Italy, where he might misinterpret the howling of the local wolf pack as an invitation to a play date.
Marshall-Pescini found wolf droppings in her back garden recently.
She loves wolves. She loves her dog too. She plans to put up a fence.
Jonathan Guthrie is head of Lex
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