Of dogs and wolves
02/06/14 05:26
The bond between humans and dogs is ancient and deep. My mother is from Fort Benton, Montana, so I grew up with the stories of Shep. Back in 1936, a sheepherder became ill and was brought to the hospital in Fort Benton. His sheepdog followed him to town and the hospital staff noticed that he had set up vigil by the hospital door. He couldn’t be persuaded to leave, so the staff of the hospital kitchen fed him a few scraps. Alas, the sheepherder died and when relatives were notified, it was decided to ship the body back East to be buried by his family. As the undertaker took the casket to the railway station, the dog followed and he whined as they loaded the casket into the baggage car and shut the door. For the next five-and-a-half years until his death, the dog met every train that stopped in Fort Benton. He would go through the departing passengers looking for his owner. The weather didn’t matter. Shep met every train. And there are some cold days in a Montana winter. It was an icy winter day when the old dog failed to hear the train whistle. He was on the tracks as the engine began to brake for the stop. Too late he noticed the danger and he slipped on the rails as he tried to get out of the way. The station master was heartbroken. The town decided to create a memorial. These days the statue of Shep is in Shepherd’s Court in the park across from the Grand Union Hotel on Front Street.
Our daughter lives in Warrensburg, Missouri, where there is another statue of a famous dog. Old Drum was a farm dog who was shot and killed. The farmer sued for damages and was represented by the lawyer George Vest. Vest’s closing speech became famous. The ending sentence was, “The one absolutely unselfish friend that a man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him and the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous is his dog.” The quote became famous and so did the dog. The people of Warrensburg erected a statue of Old Drum on the courthouse lawn along with that summation speech, “A man’s best friend is his dog.”
The line about a man’s best friend being his dog is a lot older than the statue in Warrensburg. Voltaire’s Dictionary philosophique of 1764 ends its entry on dog with: chest le meilleur ami que puisse avoid l’homme. (“it is the best friend a man can have.”) Chances are Voltaire heard the phrase from someone else.
The first domesticated dogs are lost in antiquity. People and dogs have lived in close relationships for so many centuries that no one is sure how the relationship began. Historians and researchers have speculated that ancient tribes learned to work with wolves in hunting big game. Wolves have incredible skills at tracking game and locating game. They have signals of howls and yelps that communicate with one another the location of the large animals that they hunt. Humans had superior skills at making tools and with weapons became more effective at killing the animals. Exactly how that became the practice of taking dogs as pets is unclear. It is possible that humans took wolf pups and raised them to be domesticated. It is also possible that wolves that worked best with human hunters passed down their genes in such a manner that after many generations those who worked most closely with humans evolved along a different path than the wildest of their cousins.
These days, dogs are among the most valued pets of humans. Alongside the intense love that we humans have for dogs, there is an intense anger and fear of wolves. For generations wolves were hunted to near extinction. There are places where wolves are being reintroduced into the wild where the opposition is so passionate and the anger so intense that rational conversation about wolves is impossible. During the recent government shutdown, when Yellowstone National Park was temporarily closed, those who oppose the reintroduction of wolves to the park hunted and killed several wolves, leaving their bodies behind. You can get into a good argument in a southern Montana bar by bringing up the topic of wolves.
On the one hand, the actual diets of wolves include many small animals whose populations humans would like to see controlled such as mice and gophers and prairie dogs. They are extremely efficient predators, but they have a symbiotic relationship with the large animals that they hunt. Wolves that hunt buffalo or elk kill and eat the oldest and most vulnerable animals and their effect on the herd is to strengthen the overall health of the herd. They also help to keep populations in check to prevent over grazing and other threats to the herd.
It is a different matter with domesticated animals. Wolves are efficient hunters and there are documented cases of them killing calves and lambs. They can easily catch and kill a fully grown sheep. Because wolves tend to kill and cache, it looks to untrained eyes as if they kill ruthlessly and kill more than they eat. It is true that wolves will gorge and then return to the pups, where they regurgitate to feed the pups before returning to eat more. They also create caches to which they return for later feeding. To a rancher who has just lost a calf it looks like they killed just for the sport of killing. In the natural world, wolves don’t eat all of the food they kill. Scavengers also are fed by the actions of wolves.
For centuries, humans have killed and consumed far more meat-producing animals than wolves, but wolves are irrationally blamed for herd loss and the destruction of game animals. There are billboards across Montana warning that there will be no hunting if wolves are allowed to remain. It isn’t true, it isn’t rational, but it is a widely held belief. In the 1940’s and 1950’s when humans killed about 10,000 caribou for each one killed by a wolf, the official policy in Canada was that wolves were the cause of the decimation of the caribou herds.
We aren’t rational when it comes to our fears. And we aren’t rational when it comes to our relationship with canines. Passion clouds our judgment.
Some dogs, however, do become beloved and they do become the most loyal of friends. Whatever you think about wild wolves, it seems like a good thing that their domesticated cousins share our lives with us.