The Order of Wolves!

Our book today is Richard Fiennes' wonderfully informative 1976 volume The Order of Wolves, a kind of follow-up to his equally-authoritative 1968 book The Natural History of Dogs, which I read with keen interest while surrounded by sleeping dogs. Even though I currently only have two dogs, it's still easy to feel surrounded when one of them is an, um, rubenesque basset hound, and so it was that I read The Order of Wolves also surrounded by sleeping dogs.

Fiennes covers every aspect of wolves in the world, from the emergence of their most distant ancestor the creodonts, somewhere around 60 million years ago (the creodonts also gave rise to a whole slew of other furry critters, from raccoons and bears to ... echh ... cats) to their establishment in roughly the form we know them today, around 30 million years ago, from their hunting methods to the methods used to hunt them, from their interactions with other members of their species (Fiennes stops short of calling this a culture, but then, most people do) to the vast literature of their interaction with mankind. He admits that few other animals have such a rich history of false impressions (when it comes to humans) than the wolf, and his book calmly and methodically sets out to correct that.

The task necessarily requires a certain amount of big-picture thinking, and Fiennes tries to make this as painless as possible:

At the border of any habitat favourable to a particular life form, there is always a 'tension zone' where different habitats merge. These form the outer limits, where the 'ecotypes' change, but there is inevitably some overlap where the species from the one habitat compete with those from the other... In such areas, species tend to change their ways of life to compete with the demands of the shifting habitat boundaries. Wolves are so resilient, and can survive on such a wide variety of foods, that when their way of life has been threatened they adapt themselves to altered conditions with an unusual degree of success. At the end of the Ice Age wolves survived in forested and mountainous areas in the face of persecution by man. The forests replaced the tundra with such great rapidity - a matter of a few hundred years - that no other large predator emerged to challenge his dominance.

The slight but appreciable tone of advocacy you might detect in that passage runs through the whole of this book. In Fiennes view, wolves have always been far more sinned against than sinning when it comes to their dealings with man. This may not seem so revelatory a stance in 2011, but forty years ago Barry Lopez's Of Wolves and Men and Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf had barely begun the work of changing the public's mind. Fiction is always stronger, and well into the 1980s the wolf was still being portrayed in novels as a harbinger of destruction. If even ten percent of the millions of people who read Anne Rice's rip-snorting The Vampire Lestat (in which young, headstrong, and still-living Lestat fights off a ravening wolf-pack in one of the book's arresting opening scenes), you can see the size of the job conservationists had in front of them.

At many points throughout his book, Fiennes takes pains to point out that the wolf is not what its press releases would have wary hikers believe:

What we have learned for certain is what the wolf is not: he is not a voracious, ravening predator, who roams the plains and snowscapes in great packs, licking blood-stained lips, tearing down every living thing he can get hold of, and devouring innocent travellers.

Quite coincidentally, Fiennes' book is yet another of those oversized heavily illustrated hardcovers I seem to be mentioning quite often so far this year. There are fascinating black-and-white and color photos on every page - shots of wolves moving through the snowy forests and tundra that are their new favorite hunting-grounds, shots of wolves playing (something they crucially do not only in puppyhood but all through their lives - I've seen adult wolves in the wild play dog-stupid games for an hour at a stretch), and shots of all the wide array of facial and body posture expressions that underscore the main characteristic wolves share in common with humans: they are inveterate and consummate communicators with each other - it's one of the key secrets of their success as a species, and it couldn't be achieved without considerable intelligence:

The brain of the wolf is small by human standards, but nevertheless, if it is compared to the brains of herbivorous animals, it will be seen that the cerebral hemispheres are prolonged at the back so as to cover most of the cerebellum. Wolves are undoubtedly extremely intelligent, and this is probably correlated with the large cerebrum.

The Order of Wolves tries its best to take us inside the world of its subject - not an easy thing to do when that subject orients itself to the world utilizing enormously different primary senses from those of humans. We are so familiar with the fact of these animals' existence that we tend to forget the gap between their senses and our own (the same thing is true in spades about dogs, the full range of whose senses would flat-out astonish even most of the humans who live with them every day). Wolves share with dogs a millennia-old propensity to encourage that forgetting - they require comparatively very little conditioning to become entirely friendly with humans, and that friendliness is always based on accommodation. No cat has ever accommodated a human owner in the history of the world, so it's easier for cats to retain an aura of the mysterious. Dogs - and wolves - are every bit as strange and different from the humans who for good or ill define their existence, but since they're happy to fawn and goof around, the strangeness isn't stressed.

Fiennes revels in it; to him, the magnificent other-ness of wolves is their quintessential charm. Even when he's describing the mechanics of their hunting techniques, he's an obviously avid fan:

Prey animals are followed against the wind, not because the scent carries better but because they are heard better. This may, at first, surprise us from our knowledge of our own hunting dogs, one group of which hunts by sight (in the greyhound group), the other hunting by scent like foxhounds. Yet, fancy a dog lying by the fireside apparently asleep. Suddenly he stirs and cocks his ears. The family has head nothing, but the faithful dog has heard the sounds of his master's car. More, he has distinguished that one care from all the other traffic on the road. So with wolves ...

Despite passages like this one, the ultimate message you take from The Order of Wolves is how different they are from their dog cousins. These are the dogs who didn't come in from the cold, who refused to be changed by human fire and will. Fiennes knows his subject backwards and forwards, and he's too much the scientist to indulge in more than the occasional touch of poetic insight. But nevertheless, he clearly shares the same opinion that so many wolf-experts can't help but have: that in trading their wildness for security, does somehow debased their common heritage with wolves.

No matter where you stand on such an opinion, it seems pretty clear that some are more debased than others ...

Wolf Empire

Our book today is "Wolf Empire" by Scott Ian Barry, a big, luxuriously-produced coffee table book full of the author's black-and-white photographs of the wolves he's followed and studied for years. There's a heartfelt introduction, lots of heartfelt prose to accompany every photo, and heartfelt testimonials from Tom Brokaw and Robert Redford.

Just about the only way this book could be any more harmful to wolf welfare would be if each copy came with a complimentary steel trap.

Barry is an emotional writer; his prose is to natural history what Windham Hill is to jazz. He deplores the way wolves have been demonized by the folk stories of every ancient and medieval culture in the world. But his good intentions seem to blind him to the fact that angelizing wolves is equally deplorable and equally dangerous. Both take a complex living species and abstract it into the realm of metaphor. And as any student of the Holocaust will attest, exterminating a metaphor is a whole lot easier than exterminating a people.

We can't fault Barry's intentions - his love of wolves, his desire to protect them by educating the public about them, these things are clear throughout "Wolf Empire."

But you can do a world of harm with the best of intentions, and Barry does several continents' worth. He claims that he wants more than anything for wolves to be seen as independent, glorious beings in their own right - but in his introduction, where he talks about wonderful, transforming experiences he's had lecturing audiences (including an enormous one in Madison Square Garden) he's had showcasing wolves to high schools, nature advocacy groups, and general audiences. But in the black and white pictures he so helpfully supplies from these transformative events, we see two things: first, Barry himself, looking dreamy and hipsterish, and second, and very, very much worse, in the pictures Barry is holding a leash. The animal on the other end of the leash has black fur and glowing eyes, but it isn't a wolf anymore. That bears repeating, as sad as it is: a creature that can be led on a leash and induced to howl in front of an audience is not a wolf anymore.
And so, what point are you making by parading around such a spectacle? You can go on all you like about your 'packmates,' but this creature you're leading from auditorium to auditorium by leash and chain? She doesn't want to be there and would bolt if you gave her the chance. Parading her around - even for the laudatory purpose of showing people she's not the bogeyman - removes the very thing you most want her to keep: her individuality, her status as a member of an equal nation. If William Lloyd Garrison had accompanied his abolition lectures with a Negro on a chain ... well, it's hardly necessary to finish that sentence, is it? The heart of all equal rights considerations - Negro, Sioux, female, gay (these have been mankind's challenges in recent quasi-enlightened times) - is dignity. In a future we can only hope for (one Barry obviously hopes for), the self-evident next steps will be taken, and nobody will think about treating wolves (and tigers, and elephants, and oxen, and dolphins, and eagles, and whales and so on and so on) with anything less than the same dignity that the inventors of the word 'dignity' so spottily bestow on members of their own kind.

If establishing the basic, separate, individual dignity is central battle for wolf welfare, Barry is quite unintentionally hurting the cause. His black and white photos are astonishing in their intimacy; they aren't always perfectly composed, but their sheer access is something the photographic record will turn to for years to come (especially once the last wild wolf is eradicated from the world). But the shots he's chosen, and especially the text he's written to accompany them, counterbalance their worth.

He's constantly warning himself out loud about the dangers of anthropomorphizing his subjects - and that's just as well, since he's constantly doing it too. One beautiful female wolf is named Kim Basinger. Another is called Cary Grant. In neither case is there the faintest resemblance (aesthetically speaking, the canines win paws-down), but the mere act of making the comparisons, of impulsively talking about wolves as though they were furry, quadrupedal humans, opens a hole in the floor - and through it goes every drop of dignity. The worst such example in "Wolf Empire" is surely the shot of a young female in full diurnal shed, her thick, luxurious fur temporarily splotchy and largely missing. The caption? "Don't Look at Me - I'm Naked!" It's enough to make you throw your feces at somebody.

Although it hardly needs saying, the problem with this kind of anthropomorphizing, the problem with characterizing wolves as furry humans, comes not from watching them while they play or frolic or resemble Kim Basinger - the problem is when, after you've accepted them on those grounds, they do something according to their nature. So when Flora the circus elephant, harrassed finally beyond enduring by the daily beatings, whippings, and starvings of her handlers, snaps during her 'housewife' routine at a show in Alabama, throws her vacuum cleaner through the torso of her trainer, crushes two other handlers to death, and rampages down Main Street in her apron and house slippers, humans feel not only frightened but betrayed - the police on Main Street shoot her down with just that much added feeling of justification.

That's not the way, and "Wolf Empire" isn't the way (even the title suggests a political entity, a rival state - when, after all, has history ever been kind to empires, from Rome's to the Reichmarshal's to Darth Vader's?).

What we need is a radically different approach, a radically different idealogy, an idealogy in which wolves (and all the other great races, but we'll focus for now) aren't intrusively photographed, led into auditoriums on chains, or equated with movie stars but simply LEFT ALONE, to be themselves in their own world.

Humans don't need to be extra-perceptive to determine which species want their friendship. It's such a rare thing that it's easy to spot. Dogs, of course, made that choice thousands of years ago, unique in its intimacy. Cats (typically) remain undecided, and horses' involvement has never been anything but involuntary. Ravens and dolphins seem interested in seeking out the company of man - company, not domestication. And that's more or less it - the rest of what Kipling would call the free peoples of the Earth want nothing from mankind other than to be left alone.

Left completely alone, which includes no photographer's shutter whirring in the distance.