Call of the wild —
Advice: ‘Never have anyone in your house who can eat you’
Raven, a 13-year-old timber wolf, visited the Mother Whiteside Library in Grants on Wednesday from the Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary. Area children and parents had the opportunity to ask questions and pet the wolf.
— © 2008 Gallup Independent / Brian Leddy RELATED STORY

ACopyright © 2008
Gallup Independent
By Helen Davis
Cibola County Bureau

GRANTS — It must have been the call of the wild that brought exactly 100 adults and children to the Mother Whiteside Memorial Library Wednesday.

Jae Luree King, library director, and her staff arranged for “Raven,” a 13-year old timber wolf and his friend Layton Cougar to visit Grants citizens for two hours . The visitors came from Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary as educators and ambassadors.

Cougar, the human half of the duo, told the captivated audience, about the history of the wolf, kinds of wolves, wolf behavior and plenty of other factual information, but he repeated told everyone for toddlers to grandmothers that wolves do not make good pets.

“How many kinds of animals are there in the world?” he asked the youngsters.

Audience members offers answers including “a lot,” but Cougar surprised everyone when he said, “There are only two kinds of animals in the world: Wild animals and domesticated animals.”

Domesticated animals make good pets or work animals, he said, but wild animals do not.

“People think they can get a wolf and train it. Wolves have no desire to please a human,” he explained.

A wolf might look like a dog but it will act like a wolf. Cougar said that we all know how a dog marks territory, with a small spray on an object he claims as his or as a border. But a wolf will spray a lot and then spray something else, a lot.

“Once he marks your house, it is his,” the educator said.
Females are worse. “In the wild they rule the pack; they will rule your house,” he said.

Male wolves can jump a few feet, but female wolves easily jump 8 feet and often can jump 9 feet straight up. “That is not running then jumping, that is straight up from standing,” Cougar said.

He went on to provide examples of other bad habits wolves have in the house, like digging trenches in carpet, or leaving them soaked with wolf markings, eating the sofa and sometimes injuring other inhabitants of the home, including humans.

As a general rule, Cougar said, “Never have anyone in your house who can eat you.”

In spite of strong warnings that wolves are not pets, with backup stories and examples, the Wolfman, as locals near the Candy Kitchen call him, made a good case for wolves being wonderful animals.

Cougar and Raven have been together most of Raven’s life. They have had their spats, involving high nervousness and some real fear on both parts, but now the two are inseparable friends.

Raven is an old man now and mellow. He gave library visitors a sense of how grand he can be when Cougar set up a “group howl” from the audience to cue to give a classic howl. Raven responded, if a bit quietly.

He also demonstrated his affection — and tolerance — for humans when he let the large group of children approach him and then pet him with many hands all over his shedding summer coat.

“Don’t let your feet touch his feet; it makes him nervous,” Cougar said, teaching as the kids had fun. He also told the children they should leave a gap between them, so Raven could see a way out of the group and not feel closed in.

Raven, being a highly intelligent and inquisitive being, set out on his own friend-making rounds, sniffing non-participating audience members sitting it at the edges of the group and begging for kisses and rubs.

As dog-like as Raven’s old-man overtures were, the ambassador is still a wolf, and a wild animal.

“Wolves can be taught to be social to humans,” Cougar said. But that is not that same as being domesticated.

“Domestication is a thousand year process,” Cougar said, and explained that it involves repeatedly crossing animals that would not be desirable mates in nature because of less “wild” characteristics than others in a litter, until the wild nature is bred out of them.

We have sanctuaries — special safe homes where the habitat and food are the right kinds — mainly because people think a wild wolf or tiger or other exotic animal would make a good pet, then find out how much they eat and what wild behavior is. The owners have to get rid of the animal in the end.

Information: Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary, 378 Candy Kitchen Road, HC 61 Box 28, Ramah, NM 87321. Phone: (505) 775-3304.

On the Web: Sanctuary page — http://www.wildspiritwolfsanctuary.org/contact.htm
Blogs — http://www.voiceofthewild.blogspot.com/
http://wildspiritwolves.blogspot.com/