Editorial 9.12, December 2007, by Deirdre Helfferich Big Predators and Tasty Little Snacks The recent fuss about wolves getting their Doggy Instant Dinners here in the Fairbanks and Anchorage areas has a lot of people reminiscing about their experiences with Canis lupus, and a lot of others saying silly things like wolves are just “big, wild dogs.” Nuh-uh. Wolves are canines, but there’s a world of difference between a dog and a wolf. Ask any Labrador retriever who’s recently had a close encounter of the culinary kind with those wolves out in Two Rivers and North Pole. Wolves pack a lot of symbolic weight with human beings. They serve as emblems of our own aggressive instincts, of the dangers we face in ourselves and in the world. “The wolf at the door” is a vivid metaphor for a dire threat come home to us in our most intimate and once-secure retreat, psychological or physical. Wolves remind us that we are vulnerable. And many people don’t want to think about that. When I was a child, back in the 1960s, I roamed around the top of Ester Dome for hours, unsupervised, unwatched, and unattended. I’d get hungry, or have something exciting to show my parents, or find myself with some other reason to go home periodically, but I ended up spending a lot of time in the summer outdoors and alone, sometimes miles away. In the winter, the limiting factors were lack of light, cold, and all that pesky school time, so I’d spend shorter periods out on my own. My parents gave me some sensible precautionary guidelines to abide by while I was out on my own: first, of course, was Don’t Mess With A Predator. They made it very clear that wild toothy animals are not in the least like pets or stuffed animals or cartoon characters, and that I might easily be assessed as Lunch. I was a kid, and predators make a point of going after the young, the old, and the sick, so I was to act like none of these. The second rule was: Make A Lot of Noise. A surprised bear or wolf might feel cornered, and that wouldn’t be good—neither for the one who surprised them, nor, eventually, for the animal. Human beings, I was informed, are the biggest, most organized, most efficient hunters out there, and other predators know it and generally do their best to avoid us. (Our soft skins, stubby-to-the-point-of-useless claws, and dull teeth notwithstanding, we are nasty in a fight, mostly because we use tools and we come back after those who eat members of our pack. We bear grudges.) Singing or talking to myself was the recommended way to keep from startling the other predator species on the hill. Taking the dogs with me when I went rambling was not a reliable way to keep the wolves and bears away, because the dogs would usually end up rambling off on their own (and they could do it a lot faster than I could keep up.) Although generally the wolves stayed away from houses and people, sometimes they went after dogs: we lost a very nice mutt named Mort, who’d moved in with the neighbors a couple of years prior. One day in midwinter he went missing; all the neighbors ever found was a collar and some tufts of black Mort fur. Still, the rules my parents gave me must have worked, because I never saw a bear or a wolf. (I heard the wolves howling on the north side of the hill in the winter, or down in Goldstream, and I frequently smelled bear and found plenty of fresh blueberry-stained bear scat. But see ’em? Never.) One time we went to visit my grandparents, in Connecticut, and as I was heading outside to play, my grandma asked me if I remembered what I was supposed to do when I was outside. “Sing,” I answered promptly. “Well, that’s nice, dear,” said my grandma, who had been expecting something on the order of “Look both ways when I cross the street.” She was a little nonplussed, so she asked me, “but why are you supposed to sing?” “So I don’t surprise the bears,” I answered. My mother was proud of me, as I’d answered correctly. My grandmother was horrified. Mom got in trouble, but I didn’t get eaten by any bears or wolves, or sprayed by a skunk, either, while I was in New England. Now we’re having a winter that’s warm and dry, with not much snow, and the moose are able to get away from the wolves. So the wolves are doing what they usually do when they can’t catch the big game—they go after smaller game, and they take risks by coming down out of the hills and closer into the towns. And they’ve eaten a few dogs. And perhaps followed a few people. There’s nothing new in any of that. They’re hungry, they’re carnivores, and they’re looking for meat. And suddenly, people are in a tizzy. Well, prey always gets in a tizzy when the predators come to town. | ||
 | | |
