The Man Who Lives with Wolves by Shaun Ellis & Shaun Ellis

Author:Shaun Ellis & Shaun Ellis [Ellis, Shaun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307464545
Publisher: Crown

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Proof of the Pudding…

The Native Americans say that if you think of a captive animal as being in a cage, then so will the animal, but if you give that animal the impression that the cage is a means of keeping it safe and secure, and you enrich its life within it, then the animal will regard its cage as a haven, not a prison. It seemed to me that most wolves in captivity felt they were in cages. Those I had known bore little resemblance to their wild counterparts; they had had their spirits broken and most of them wouldn’t have taken freedom even if you had left the gate to the enclosure wide open.

I was convinced that I could improve their lives by making it resemble life in the wild, but I needed credibility. I had had experience with wolves that went way beyond what most biologists could claim, but I had no initials after my name, so I set up an organization I called Wolf Pack Management. It was just me at that time but I thought it sounded impressive. I desperately needed to put my theories to the test. I enjoyed my work with dogs but my real mission was wolves, and as luck would have it, Wilton was very close to Longleat Safari Park, which still had a thriving pack of timber wolves.

Longleat was, and still is, one of the most highly regarded wildlife parks in the country, and I knew I couldn’t find a better pack to study. The park is set on the grounds of a magnificent, stately home belonging to the 7th Marquess of Bath. The house is Elizabethan, completed toward the end of the sixteenth century, and is an amazing attraction in itself, but it’s surrounded by the most fabulous parkland, designed by the great eighteenth-century landscape gardener Capability Brown. The parkland extends for nine hundred acres, with a further eight thousand acres of woodland, lakes, and farmland—unspoiled countryside as far as the eye can see—and that’s where the animals live. The wolf enclosure couldn’t compete with the space the wolves were living in in Idaho, but it bore no resemblance to the cramped enclosure at Spark-well, and it was refreshing to see captive wolves—along with lions, tigers, and every sort of wild animal you can think of—living in such good conditions in England.

I went to see the head warden, Keith Harris, whom I hadn’t met before, and I told him what I had been doing and asked whether I could put some of my theories to the test with his wolves. Despite the quality of the conditions in which they were kept and the health of the animals, Longleat had a problem: the wolves were not breeding. There was little understanding in the early days about pack management and the need to create four-year gaps between generations to ensure a successful breeding pattern. Like many other wildlife parks, Longleat had brought together a number of wolves at the

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